Entries tagged with hebrew

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hebrew,
internet

in search of Hebrew etymology

Dani and I were discussing sha'atnez, the torah-forbidden mixture of linen and wool, over lunch. (No, I don't remember how we got there. These things happen.) I said that word has too many letters in it and what's the root? (Almost all Hebrew words have, at their core, a three-letter word. This word has five letters, only one of which I could tentative parse as a prefix -- incorrectly, as it turned out.)

That led us to Wikipedia, which says it's not of Hebrew origin and also says that the mishna understands it as an acrostic of three other words. Wikipedia doesn't say where it says that, so I tried Google, which told me that sha'atnez is discussed in Kelayim 9:1. It is, but the Hebrew there doesn't use that word. So that led me to start to ask the question on Mi Yodeya, where just about all Jewish questions get good answers, but after typing the title I saw a suggested match here, which points to a little farther down the page to Kelayim 9:8, where I found my explanation. Excellent; my question was already answered before I asked it.

So today I made my first-ever Wikipedia edit, to add that citation. (It was an anonymous edit because it seems like my usual account name is already in use but the "lost password" email hasn't come back yet. So maybe it's somebody else or maybe their server is slow, but I'd kind of like to find out if I already have an account there before I use a non-standard name that I may not remember. Demonstrably, I don't log in there often.)

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Braille + Hebrew?

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

A member of our minyan has a degenerative vision problem and can no longer use even a very-large-print prayer book. (She was absent for a while and returned this week with a guide dog.) She realized that she didn't know as many of the prayers by heart as she thought she did, so I'm spending some time with her to teach her by ear and we'll scare up some recordings for her, but memorization isn't really the ideal solution. Sure, people can and do memorize the core, common prayers, but it's hard to memorize everything, and sometimes there are seasonal changes, so you really want to be able to read the prayer book.

I once saw somebody who used a Braille prayer book, but at the time I didn't ask him how that worked and he's since passed away. Braille is, as I understand it, a letter-by-letter notation system with an extra layer (called "condensed", I've heard) where common words have their own symbols instead of being spelled out. (Like American Sign Language, except I have the impression that the balance between spelled-out and condensed is different. I may be wrong about that.) But -- all of that kind of assumes a particular alphabet, right? So how would Hebrew be rendered in Braille -- do they transliterate it and then Braille-encode that, or does the reader have to learn a different Braille language to match the different alphabet, or what?

I'd like to be able to help her get a prayer book she can read. I don't think she's ready to learn a second Braille language (she's still working on the first).

And a related question: she has an iPad; are there Braille peripherals for that like (I understand) there are for desktop computers? Is "digital copy of the book + iPad + peripheral" a practical alternative to the massive paper tome? (She would use technology on Shabbat for that purpose.)

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keeping the enslaved down

Recently some local congregations have been banding together for yom tov services. Friday's service for the last day of Pesach was pretty unsatisfactory in a lot of ways, but in this post I'm going to write about just one practice, something I have seen in other congregations too and that needs to end.

Most blessings begin with a six-word formula, followed by the text that varies. The morning service contains a bunch of these, thanking God for making us free, lifting up the fallen, giving strength to the weary, and more. (There are 15 of these in a row.) The congregation says these together. In Friday's service, the leader decreed that the congregation would chant these in "Hebrish" -- first six words in Hebrew, then chanting the varying part in English.

I previously wrote about the horror that is chanted English prayer. This isn't that. This "Hebrish" practice, I've been told when I've asked, is motivated by a desire for inclusion: people don't know the Hebrew, the reasoning goes, so this makes prayer more accessible. Sounds admirable, right? But it's misguided and, dare I say, harmful. First off, the transliteration is right there in the siddur next to the Hebrew, precisely to make the Hebrew more accessible. But, more fundamentally, this practice serves to keep people down. How are they ever to learn the Hebrew if we never do it? Are we supposed to settle for the current state and never move past it? How would I have become proficient in the Hebrew prayers if, when I was trying to grow, my congregation had kept me on the English?

The Rambam (Maimonides) famously taught that the highest level of tzedakah (charity, loosely) is to help a poor person to get a job, rather than to give him money. Giving him money sustains him for a time; getting him a job helps him break out of the clutches of poverty (we hope). The Reform movement holds this up as a key value, even placing it in the section of the siddur where we study torah in the morning. Why, then, do we refuse to apply that same principle to those who are poor in knowledge? Why is it better to give them the handout of English prayer instead of helping them to pray in Hebrew?

In the past I have remained silent to avoid the appearance of challenging our leaders. I have tried and failed to persuade leaders who do this to reconsider. Friday, when they announced this and started into those prayers, I said to myself quietly "no more" and proceeded to chant the prayers in Hebrew. The long-time member of my congregation sitting next to me said "good for you!" and joined me. We were not disruptive, but I have high hopes that maybe, next time, he'll be sitting next to someone else and he too will say "no more" and forge ahead, and maybe someone sitting next to him will follow. And maybe, eventually, we'll be able to help people break out of the bonds of illiteracy, instead of continuing to keep them down by catering to their current weaknesses. We've just celebrated z'man cheruteinu, the season of our freedom, and it is time to apply that to our people now and not just looking back at Mitzrayim.

If reading the Hebrew text directly is too challenging for some, the transliteration is readily available. Or they could quietly read the English the way I quietly read the Hebrew. (I do that when I'm at services that are above my level, like last week at Village Shul.) But let's stop telling our congregants that they're too uneducated to handle the Hebrew; that only serves to reinforce the idea until they no longer want to try.

Entry tags:

hebrew,
midrash

midrash session 3.5

The last of the burning-bush midrash:

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hebrew,
midrash

midrash session 3.4

More midrash at the burning bush:

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hebrew,
midrash

midrash session 3.3

More midrash (with some commentary) about God talking to Moshe at the bush. Why this sign? How did God speak? And was Moshe's reaction good or bad?

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hebrew,
midrash

midrash session 3.2

More about burning thornbushes:

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midrash session 3.1

Rabbi Symons and I have continued to study midrash, but I fell off the wagon when it came to posting translations. When I was only a little behind I had some notion that I would catch up. But no, those things never get better with time. :-) We just started our third series, so I'm going to just start here. (The first was the akeidah and the second was the crossing of the sea of reeds. Now we're doing the beginning of Moshe's leadership.)

As before, I'm generally trying to translate pretty closely, rather than finding the phrasing that flows most smoothly in English, because part of the point is to improve my language skills. Well, except for the parts where I waved my hands more broadly because I got the gist just fine but fell down on some individual words. As always, comments, corrections, and improvements are most welcome.

And let me just praise Rabbi Symons here: not only did he make me nice large photocopies of this text (the original lines were maybe 3" wide -- tiny font), but he cut out and taped together all the resulting pieces to make nice continuous columns for me! That's kindness!

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Entry tags:

hebrew,
humor

yes we talk like this (Hebrew edition)

Scene: I have turned one of Dani's tapes of Israeli dances into MP3s and am typing (well, pasting) in song titles.

Me: Does "Haman" mean something other than the villain in the book of Ester?
Dani: Desert food.
Me: Oh good. "Ta'am Haman" had the potential to be highly disturbing...
Dani: Nothing good could come from the direction you were going.
Me: I know. Maybe next time you could help me out with capitalization or punctuation or something?

That said, I'm not sure there is a consistent way to transliterate definite articles that get pasted onto the front of the noun. Sometimes you see something like "ha-man" or (in a title) "HaMan", but not always.

(If you've read this far and don't know what I'm talking about, "man" is the manna that the Israelites ate in the desert for 40 years, and "ta'am" means "taste" or "flavor".)

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hebrew

yup, conversational skills are still minimal

The guy at the deli counter was complaining that "tongue" is spelled weirdly, and I said something to the effect that borrowings from other languages are often a little counter-intuitive. The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Him: What other languages do you know?
Me: None well, alas.
Him: (fast Hebrew)
Me: Dabeir lei'at, b'vakashah?
Him: At mevinah Ivrit? (This was definitely also a simplification of the prior utterance.)
Me: Ivrit shel torah (shrug gesture) kein yacholet l'kria, aval Ivrit l'omeir, ktzat. (I am certain that this utterance demonstrated the truth of the latter clause. :-) )
Him: kein, kein.

And then we switched back to English and I said I read better than I speak/hear but no, I wouldn't say I know Hebrew...

For future reference, how would I refer to the modern language (as opposed to biblical)? The best I can think of is "Ivrit shel ha-yom", which is probably, at best, "quaint". :-)

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random bits

I have book lust that I can't immediately satisfy. Imrei Madrich is a copy of the torah text that shows the root of every word. Because it's not always obvious, and it would be a big help. Google found me someone who wrote about it on a mailing list, but I haven't found anyone who's selling it yet. I guess I'll call the local Jewish bookstore and see what they can do for me. (Do any of you know this book? Should I be looking for it under a different name?)

Apropos of that, I love studying with both of my rabbis. It is so cool that I get to do this. With one (known as "my rabbi") I'm studying talmud (and occasional other stuff), and with the other I'm reading midrash in Hebrew and not completely sucking at translation. :-) (Though I still have a long way to go.)

Speaking of my congregation (sort of), we are having a talent show in January, and the song I'm writing/arranging for it seems to be going well. kayre rocks for giving me some really great feedback on the piano part. I was also trying to get a quartet together for a Salamone Rossi piece (the organizer encouraged me even though I'm doing the other thing), but altos (among congregants) seem to be particularly elusive at the moment, so that might not work out.

Also speaking of my congregation, we sell Giant Eagle gift cards at face value and get a cut. (I know other congregations do this too.) If you're local and inclined to help us out in this, and we see each other frequently enough for it to work out, I would be happy to turn your check made out to the congregation into gift cards. Just ask.

Speaking not at all about my congregation now, a question for the "Stargate: SG-1" fans out there: do we eventually get an explanation for why almost everyone on various distant worlds speaks English, or am I supposed to just ignore that? The conceit is that many of these folks are humans who were taken from Earth, but that was thousands of years ago. Just wondering, since this show doesn't bother with the conceit of a universal translator. (Which is fine, since the show that did didn't always use it correctly. :-) )

Entry tags:

hebrew,
midrash

midrash session 13

(If you're reading the series and wonder what happened to session 12, it was fully consumed in preparing for a beit-midrash session we taught jointly on the stuff covered in session 11. I knew that the beit midrash that day would have three segments, with one rabbi involved in each; I did not know in advance that mine was the only team-taught one. So yeah, three rabbis and me... no pressure. :-) )

Anyway, we are now going to talk about the ram that's caught in the thicket.

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Entry tags:

hebrew,
midrash

midrash session 11

More Akeidah midrash translation behind the cut. This time: more about the intervention of the angel, and Avraham finally speaks up.

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hebrew,
midrash

midrash sessions 9 and 10

The last two sessions were shorter than usual so I'm combining them here. As usual, I'm choosing literal translation over the best (English) phrasing, since the main point is for me to improve my Hebrew.

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midrash session 8 (and a hardware update)

This session was actually a few weeks ago (things have been hectic).

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Mac update: I can't connect the printer to one machine and print from the other (either direction), but at least they're close enough together that I can move the USB cable as needed. There's also a weird, loud chirping noise when it's in sleep mode; word on the net is that this happens sometimes when peripherals are plugged in, which seems weird. I normally have USB connections for keyboard, mouse, external hard drive, and printer, and am not really interested in changing any of that. A couple nights ago I left my iPod plugged in to charge and it didn't chirp; weird. I'm not sure plugging in the iPod every night is really good for its battery, though. But pulling the speaker cable and plugging it back in when using the machine is also a hassle.

Oh, and if anybody can get me Windows-style file sorting in Finder (directories then files, but alphabetically within those two groups), I'll be in your debt. "Sort by kind" violates the second part of that. The common motif on the net seems to be "this isn't Windows", which is true but unhelpful. My legacy file structure evolved the way it did in large part because of how it sorted.