Monica

We're finalizing "Days of Awe - Mi Yodeya?", a book of selected questions and answers about the high holy days from Mi Yodeya. I've read the drafts and this is going to be great! We will be placing a printing order next week. I've talked with a few of my readers about this but I'll open it up: do you want a stack of books to distribute at your synagogue this Rosh Hashana? And do you have (or can you get) permission to do so?

If so, please fill out this form by Tuesday, August 11. The information you provide (which, of necessity, includes your shipping address) will only be seen by me and by the person who'll be doing the packing and shipping, who also happens to be the founder of Mi Yodeya. I think highly of him and consider him to be completely trustworthy with that information.

How many copies we print depends on where the crowdfunding project ends up, so you might not get as many as you request, but we'll do our best. Our goal from the beginning has been to spread knowledge, and there are major cities where we don't yet have distribution, so please let us know if you'd like to help us in this.

We probably have to limit this to North America because of postage costs, but let us know anyway if you're interested and we'll see what we can do. Our Israeli distributor is going to print locally instead of us shipping a box. If you're in Israel please let us know where; maybe we can hook you up with that.

Dear Jewish LJ brain trust,

For a while I've been hearing leaders of the Reform movement talk about how we have to "innovate" and "rethink congregations" in order to build for the long-term. Young families and millennials, we're told, aren't really into joining congregations, so we need to be more appealing, a mix of actual changes and marketing. Most visibly (in my congregation) this means more Shabbat services targeted to specific subsets of the community (young families, youth group, others), though it also affects the school, program overall, and finances.

Tonight I came across this article on this theme, and it got me wondering:

Is this just a Reform thing? Or maybe just an American Reform thing? I'm not aware of Orthodox congregations changing what they do -- nor perceiving a need to, because (it appears to me) community is already a core value there. So, sure, people come and go, but I don't perceive that they're as worried about "losing the young". On the other hand, I don't frequent an Orthodox synagogue and these sorts of things would be more visible to insiders. So I haven't picked up on it on my visits to Orthodox synagogues, but would I?

Any insights and/or "reports from the field" would be most welcome.

This weekend I attended a celebration of Mi Yodeya's fifth birthday, hosted by the site's patriarch and his family, who had the decency to move this summer to within driving distance of my house. So I got to go. I had a great time!

Isaac and his family (names and details elided because he hasn't shared those online AFAIK) are wonderful people and kind hosts. I felt welcome from the moment I walked through their door on Friday afternoon. Friday night after Shabbat dinner we visited another Yodeyan family -- they'd just had a baby girl a few days earlier so they invited folks over to celebrate. I was a little disappointed, but ultimately relieved, that he did not give his daughter a polysyllabic Klingon name after all (and I'll just leave the ambiguity in that sentence hanging :-) ).

Saturday afternoon was the main event. We were joined by about half a dozen other Yodeyans and their families, all local (or approximately so) except for me. Some demurred about sharing their user names, so I still don't know who everybody is "on site", but that's fine. One printed out his "gravatar", the default, uniquely-generated image that's assigned to a user who doesn't upload something else. Another also found a way to display his user icon. I wish I'd thought of that -- but people knew who I was anyway, because (a) I use the image I'm posting this entry under and they could match it up, and (b) I was probably the only person none of them knew otherwise (so clearly I wasn't local).

Lunch was festive and included divrei torah (words of torah) from, I think, all the Yodeyans. Mine went ok -- several others were clearly more erudite, but some of those people are rabbis so I don't feel bad about that. :-) I've been woefully negligent about posting my divrei torah here lately, but I'll try to get this one (and the one I gave in my minyan the week before) posted here.

Shabbat morning at services we heard an excellent d'var torah on the themes of Chanukah and education. One key take-away for me was that in Jewish education we repeat topics all the time; we read the torah in an annual cycle, there's a seven-year cycle of studying the talmud, and students will visit some topics over and over. In secular education, on the other hand, this doesn't happen -- why would you ever repeat algebra or chemistry or freshman English, unless you'd had trouble getting it the first time around? (Sure, you may go more in-depth later, but that's different.) And while it might not make sense to revisit secular topics such as these over and over, there is much to be gained in revisiting torah and talmud and halacha and ethics and the rest. (This was part of a much longer discussion of educational values, not the whole talk.)

This matches my experience on Mi Yodeya, too. Any question that I could ask has been asked before, probably many times, by people way more learned than I -- yet there is value in me asking it anew, and value in others engaging with it instead of just saying "go read this textbook". And similarly, any answer that I could give to someone else's question would pale in comparison to what others have said on that topic in the past, yet I and others get something out of my offering those answers anyway. (Most of the time, anyway -- I've had some clunkers, as have we all.) Jewish topics are not just things to be learned, or looked up once, in books; that we engage with questions, turning the torah and turning it again and again to reveal its 70 faces, is important. And I get to be part of it.

Isaac had a really thoughtful gift¹ for each of us: for each of us he found an answer (or question in some cases, I think) of ours that stood out, and that also fit the format, and printed it in a nice "certificate" format suitable for framing. I love that! And I like the answer of mine that he picked, which I'd kind of forgotten about (but now that I'm reminded of it, it was well-received). Very cool idea!

¹ Technically not, as it was on Shabbat. It, um, involved a kinyan and, I think, his wife acting as agent for all of us. I don't quite know how that works, but I know a place I could ask. :-)

Those of you who enjoy the religion-related posts here might be interested in this new blog (see intro post) for questions and answers about the bible, particularly the Hebrew bible (Tanakh). There's a link there for question submissions, and there are a bunch of posts there so you can get a sense of what to expect.

And while I'm plugging sites, I'd be remiss in not mentioning Mi Yodeya for all your Jewish Q&A needs. And I'd say that even if I weren't a moderator there; I'm a moderator there in part because it was already an excellent site when I found it, so I stuck around and tried to help.

Many years ago, when I was starting to become religious, I asked Micha Berger (who would later become a rabbi) how one made sense of the mitzvot -- why were we doing these particular things, how should we understand the purpose of individual mitzvot? He said something to the effect that understanding is over-rated and that if you do something enough, you may come to understand -- but it doesn't work so well the other way around.¹

Yesterday I was the torah reader, meaning I also led the torah service, read the haftarah (in English), and gave a d'var torah (a commentary). I do that fairly often; that's all normal. (I am woefully behind on actually posting my divrei torah, in part because, more and more, I'm speaking from detailed outlines so there's still work to do to properly write them up.)

Yesterday's haftarah reading was from Isaiah 66, which has some evocative imagery in it about Israel's redemption and restoration. After the service a congregant, one who also started caring about religion later in life, came to me. That was beautiful, she said, but how are we supposed to relate to it when that can't possibly happen? I asked her if there was anything that God couldn't do. She looked unconvinced, and I -- I, who have real trouble with the idea of yearning for the moshiach -- said that I thought it was talking about messianic times and when we get there it'll be through God's action, not ours. Human nature being what it is we may never earn such a thing, but our job is to move in the right direction, in our small way to help bring it about, and that would have to be enough.

Blink. Where did that come from?

The oddest things can serve as prompts for conversations sometimes. I don't really spend much time thinking about messianic times; I figure it'll happen or it won't, but there's not much I can do about it anyway and as I said, I don't actively yearn for it (which is my own failing, I suppose). And yet, it's obviously not something I'm completely distant from either, because I don't think I was just spouting comforting nonsense either. How...odd. Usually when people talk to me after services on one of "my" days it's to talk about something I said in my d'var.


¹ I'm trying to strike a balance between giving due credit and not mis-stating something I remember incompletely and don't have in writing. R' Berger, if you're out there and feel I'm misrepresenting you, please let me know so I can correct matters.

The tulips are starting to appear in my yard. We sure went from snow to spring-verging-on-summer in a hurry. But it's supposed to be in the 30s over the weekend.

The (expiration? best-by?) date on a frozen-food package is "Jul 19 2014". This raises two question: (a) such precision -- would July 20 really be different, and is July 18 better in that case? And (b) why isn't frozen food that's good for more than a few months immortal? What exactly is going to happen to my vegetarian corn dogs in a year and a quarter? (The question is academic; I'll have eaten them by next week.)

Someone on Mi Yodeya passed along these really nifty photos of a "teapot" that is so much more. He found it on Reddit, where the claim was that this was used by crypto-Jews during the inquisition. I'm not sure about that, but even if not... wow, cool. Like Russian nesting dolls on steroids. Take a look.

My rabbi blogs now, and I was particularly struck by this recent post about inter-faith relations and more. The part (attributed to someone else) about being neither jerks nor jellyfish when it comes to faith stood out for me.

I saw a job post recently for a (very) technical writer, principal-level, to do programming (API) documentation. That's pretty rare, so when something like that crosses my desk I always look even if it's neither local nor telecommute, to keep tabs on the state of the art if nothing else. On this one, as I was reading down the list of desired skills, past specified programming languages and technologies, past XML markup standards for documentation, I came to... MS Office. This is really not the tool for that particular task. It was then followed by DITA (an XML doc specification that makes DocBook look like child's play), Javadoc, and Arbortext Epic (a tool for editing XML-based documents). I guess somebody decided that throwing in more desired skills was better, or something. Either that or they're not actually doing any of this yet but they aspire to. Which is fine (I've done that), but not clear in the job description.

I've been accumulating browser tabs for a while, so here's a "misc" dump. (Aside: this new LJ "choose your icon by browsing pictures, and by the way we won't put them in alphabetical order or anything nice like that" interface really stinks. Grr.)

siderea posted The Music Theory Song: Intervals (YouTube). For anyone who's trying to work on ear training to hear intervals, and for those of you who already grok that, this video's for you. Really.

12 letters that didn't make the (English) alphabet. I forget where this link came from.

thnidu over on Dreamwidth posted a link to "Earth as Art", which looks to be a nifty photo collection. The link isn't currently working for me, so I'm linking his entry instead of there for now.

More beautiful photography, from a locked post. Warning: gravity alert -- it wouldn't be hard to get sucked in.

Some time back I noticed that one of the regulars in the Mi Yodeya weekly parsha chat drew a lot on Abarbanel and that it sounded interesting. I asked him if he knew of an English translation and at the time he didn't, but more recently someone else who remembered my question pointed me at this adaptation (not translation). This sounds like something I should check out. (And it's kind of cool that, months later, somebody remembered my asking and followed up.)

When atheism is good: a chassidic story, linked by thnidu on DW again.

From XKCD: an exploration of wise men, stars, and paths. What would the trip look like, depending on what star you were following when? I can't confirm the math, but I found it an interesting read. (I don't know why he has the journey starting in Jerusalem, though.)

A map of every grocery store ever. Interestingly, my regular "big shopping trip" store (as opposed to the "grab a few things on the way home from work" store) recently remodelled and deviated from the norms. Now I can't find anything without effort.

And a funny cartoon from gnomi:( Read more... )

Rabbi Donniel Hartman gave a fascinating talk called "Faith and Reason". This is not a full description of that talk (too much). It's not really even a complete summary, as I'm skipping past a bunch of stage-setting. This is more of a partial summary plus reaction all rolled into one. (I'll try to be clear when he's talking and when I am.)

R. Hartman argues that in a world in which we have many choices, where we can choose to associate with "people like us" (whatever that means), we are free to choose how to respond to religion. In a previous talk he suggested that many choose atheism, usually negative atheism (I don't know that God exists) or practical atheism (whether God exists doesn't affect what I do) rather than positive atheism (I know that God doesn't exist). In this talk he suggested that a barrier to faith is the baggage you think you'll have to accept. Many, he thinks, make assumptions about that baggage -- the things we will have to believe or at least accept -- based on pediatric perceptions of religion. He asks: If I choose the presumption of faith do I have to leave my brain at the door?

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Some professions require a certain amount of ongoing education every year, usually in the form of several-hour seminars. At least for the legal field, it seems like the subjects do not have to be all that closely related to American law. I routinely see advertisements for these in the Jewish press covering topics in halacha or Jewish ethics. But even so, I was surprised to see that Law and the Multiverse was offering one on superheroes, comic books, and constitutional law. If I were a lawyer I would totally go to things like that. :-) (The blog is fun too.)

Language Log recently wrote about an unusual keep-off-the-grass sign: tiny grass is dreaming. That's a neat image.

shewhomust recently posted a picture of a neat woodland "sculpture".

Everybody's probably seen is Facebook making us lonely? from the Atlantic, but I wanted to stash a link somewhere anyway so I may as well share.

And finally, Mi Yodeya (formerly known as Jewish Life and Learning) recently launched as a full-blown Stack Exchange site after a year in beta. I've enjoyed participating there -- lots of good questions and answers and discussion, but in a useful format that isn't "just another forum where you have to wade through the junk to get to the good stuff". There's going to be an online launch party on Sunday. More info:

The Shabbat before last there was a beit midrash (study session) after morning services, but I had to be somewhere so I couldn't stay. But I always take study materials if they're available, so I picked up a packet. The topic was one line from the passage about Moshe at the burning bush. The materials included a page of commentary -- a few lines of the Hebrew torah passage near the top center, translation beside that, and passages from several of the "big names" filling the page (Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Abarbanel, Ramban, etc).

Seasoned torah students will recognize this: it's called Miqra'ot Gedolot, a standard compilation of Hebrew-language commentaries. It's an established tool of the trade, and I have been hoping that someday I would maybe build up enough fluency in Hebrew to be able to start using it. Which will take a while, but such is my linguistic lot in life.

This was in English (aside from the torah passage itself). It was this, published by JPS.

I have never seen a Miqra'ot Gedolot in English. I had no idea such a thing existed. Today when studying with one of our rabbis I asked "was that what I think it was?", wondering if it were just excerpts, and he said it's real. (I see that one of the Amazon reviewers says it's abridged, though.)

This is fairly new as these things go and so far only three of the five volumes have been published (2005, 2009, 2011). But hey, three is better than zero! Even if abridged -- by the time I can understand the original the investment in abridged translations will have long since been paid off.

Our torah-study group has been talking about the akeidah (binding of Yitzchak) for a few months (just finished). One opinion that some people expressed is that, in addition to the individual and family tragedy that would result if Avraham had not been stopped, this was a national threat: if Yitzchak died then that would end the whole Jewish enterprise. So (the reasoning goes) Avraham would be killing his own legacy and the Jewish people along with Yitzchak.

I find this position problematic because, really, is anything too great for God? Not only could Avraham have more sons (the promise to Avraham didn't mention Sarah), but after Sarah died he did. If Yitzchak had died, that would not automatically mean the end of the Jewish proposition as spelled out in God's promises to Avraham. It would, of course, have been a terrible thing for the people involved, but we're talking about a proto-national issue here, not a personal one.

After the study I remembered another case where this kind of reasoning comes up, and this time it's embedded in our liturgy. I've always been a little bothered by the part of the Pesach seder that says that if God hadn't taken us out of Egypt we would still be slaves there today. Really? God couldn't have decided that the next generation was worthy if the time wasn't yet right? Doesn't this claim show something of a lack of faith?

I decided to ask this seder question on Judaism.StackExchange to see what the folks there have to say. There are some interesting answers so far. Take a look if this interests you.

Disclosure and plug: the site is currently trying to increase traffic and is running a contest with a nominal prize (small gift certificate to a Jewish bookstore). If you click on that link you'll help me a little. That's not why I posted this entry (it started out as just the akeidah and morphed), but as long as I was talking about it anyway...

And on the subject of this contest, here is an interesting question about the use of e-readers that is somewhat related to a question about the use of a Kindle on Shabbat. There's good discussion here about the nature of e-ink and writing and kindling light. I'd like to see answers to all the questions I've linked here; maybe you can help. (Contest page with links to all entries is here.)

Yesterday was Shavuot, the holiday that commemorates the giving of the torah. (Also agricultural stuff; all the festivals are dual-purpose that way.) There is a tradition to stay up all night studying torah; most people don't manage all night (I didn't), but for the third year in a row we had a community-wide study (tikkun leil shavuot) from 10PM to 1AM, and people who wanted more could go to their choice of a few congregations that were continuing.

I do regret the loss of my congregation's tikkun, which was a coordinated program led by my rabbi and usually going until about 2. But I'm glad to have the community-wide one, where rabbis from all over come and teach classes. It gives me a chance to study with people I would never encounter otherwise, and I strive to go to classes taught by people who are new to me. Sure, it's unpredictable, but it's an adventure. :-)

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There has been some discussion in the Reform movement lately about social networking, affiliation levels, and the melding of the online and physical worlds. People in these conversations usually have a mental model of today's internet user -- 20-something, lives on Facebook and Twitter, considers email too slow, etc. I don't fit that profile, but I've been around and engaged online for a while (cough). So all this got me thinking about how the net and the physical world interacted on my religious path in particular.

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