Shorts

[magid]

Best sight while riding yesterday: another bicyclist carrying a wooden crutch sticking out the back.

I was invited to a bat mitzvah (that I can't attend; previous engagement). The invitation had many editing faux pas, but the thing that really got to me was "H-shem". I know that Jews avoid using the name of the Diety casually, and some go so far as to put a hyphen or @ in the English three-letter word that starts with g and ends with d, but the whole point of "Hashem" (lit. "The Name") is that it is in no way considered to be an actual Name.

Fruit flies annoy me. The homemade cider-vinegar-plus-dish-soap trap is working well, but not fast enough!

Best people time yesterday: seeing my neice and nephew interacting.

I have floors in every room of my apartment! Who knew? :-)

Must to find breakfast. Cleaning is useful, but food is necessary.

Comments

H-shem is r-diculous, but an interesting lesson

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Rabbi Wolgemuth of blessed memory used to say that even G-d was "ostentatious piety." He felt offended that people tried to expand the list of actual divine names to English.

This is even more absurd. But it provides a useful lesson. You know how people mock the Talmud for establishing gezeras about how "if we allow people to do X, they will assume Y is also permissible." "Gosh," people say. "Why do those frummie Rabbis think we are so stupid."

Now let us contemplate the delightful combination of ignorance, arrogance, and stupid logic that has allowed the general preference to avoid writing the Divine name to become a community standard to write G-d, to treat vowels generally as sacred.

Next time anyone laughs at how someone could go from permitting milk and fowl to assuming milk and meat is OK, consider this example.

Re: H-shem is r-diculous, but an interesting lesson

[magid.livejournal.com]

I remember learning to hyphen G-d when I was little, so though I know it's not necessary, it still feels vaguely right to do. (And as for vowels being vaguely sacred, why not Hash-m? Or H-sh-m?)

And while I see your logic, I don't see it as a trend towards permissibility, but towards greater chumrah, an especially potent thing when mixed with ignorance of halacha.

Case in point: after a year in Israel that included a weekly class on kashrut, I was visiting $Friend. Said person had become religious in zie's practices without gaining knowledge outside what was found in a few English Artscroll books. Zie was cooking pareve food in a fleishig pot, and there was some discussion of the consumption of ice cream (or some other dairy food) afterward. I said that I had learned that while one should not eat dairy food with the pareve, it was perfectly acceptable to eat it afterward; the pareve food cooked in the fleishig pot did not make one fleishig. I could have pulled out the sources, had zie the appropriate source books. However, zie said that zie'd wait 3 hours (the usual until-milchig time for zie) after eating said pareve food, "to be on the safe side."
(And while this may not be everyone.... it happens to be the person who wrote the invitation.)

From my left-ish perspective, it seems that as a community, we are shifting towards more stringent interpretations. And not as a unified group, either, in ways that lead towards factionalism rather than a concern for klal Yisrael. It saddens me.

Re: H-shem is r-diculous, but an interesting lesson

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

That's the psychology today. But these things come and go in waves. In a previous generation, folks looked for ways to make things permissible. Now they go in the other direction. Ignorance is not only universal, it is flexible.

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

I know that Jews avoid using the name of the Diety casually

Is the Diety the qabbalistic emanation that governs kosher laws?

[magid.livejournal.com]

*facepalm*
I am so embarrassed...

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

Sorry. I figured a punstress such as yourself wouldn't mind. :)

By the way, sorry for the sacrilege. My post should have read "Is the D--ty the qabbalistic emanation that governs kosher laws?"

(There's a vigorous halachic debate at present over whether the "y" at the end of "D--ty" should also be replaced by a hyphen, since even though it isn't technically a vowel, it's functioning as one. Not since the bloody and bitter fourteenth-century Sephardim/Ashkenazim diphthong wars has the Jewish community been so riven by matters of orthography.

But you knew that already.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

Totally didn't mind. I know why I got it wrong, too: was thinking about pronunciation rather than (Latin) derivation, and not thinking too clearly that that.

(And while the fourteenth-century Sephardi/Ashkenazi diphthong wars were extremely violent, the attrition through the similarly split opinions on glottal stops may well rival them in actual casualties.)

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

(And while the fourteenth-century Sephardi/Ashkenazi diphthong wars were extremely violent, the attrition through the similarly split opinions on glottal stops may well rival them in actual casualties.)

Sadly, all too true. And probably the best hypothesis for the surprisingly low number of Gaelic Jews remaining in the Scottish Highlands today. It's hard to believe that John O'Groats was once considered the Jerusalem of the North. Of course, in those days it was better known by its Hebrew name, Yôḥānnāno shel Kasha.

[tapuz.livejournal.com]

snarf!

[magid.livejournal.com]

*bows to the master*