[NHC] Short classes
Aug. 10th, 2009 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidUsually about an hour, rather than the four-day-long classes that met for an hour and a half (or more) each day. As always, if there are terms that are unclear, I'm happy to explicate.
Tuesday morning I went to Linda Motzkin's class on the Community Torah Project: Checking Panels. Which is pretty much what it sounds like: she brought parchment she'd written columns of the Torah on, and we were to check it. First, though, she gave an intro to the project, discussing how she got started, and how she makes the parchment from deer hides, and so on (more background here, from the class I took with her two years ago). I was amused to see myself in some of the photos :-). What I hadn't realized before: that one can leave a space for names of the Divine, to be filled in later, because they require extra focus (and, for those who have that minhag, an immersion (and where she lives, the mikvah is far, so she doesn't write names of God in the winter or spring, until the water in the nearby lake warms up)).
After the background, she described how to proof a sefer Torah: there is one person reading from the parchment, while another checks from an already-printed, approved text (I learned that there are tikkunai sofrim that are not at all the same as a tikkun korim; I've only run into the latter before.). After a statement of correct intent, the reader reads each letter aloud, checking that it looks like the required letter, and the checker confirms each letter. Spaces are read out as well. It reminded me of reading certain kinds of text aloud for proofing, including all punctuation. The text is checked this way three times before it is declared kosher. If a mistake is found, it may or may not be fixable: for most words, the ink can be scraped off if necessary to fix a letter, but for names of the Deity, fixes that involve adding ink can be ok, while those requiring scraping render that panel unusable.
The editorial part of me was pleased that I found two things that could be made more perfect, neither of them being problematic to fix: one was the single crown on a hey looking too much like the top of its top stroke, and the other was the bottom stroke of a hey that didn't have the vertical start to the stroke. While the latter was a Name, it's fixable by adding, so it's ok.
The panel I checked the second and third lines of, which was about Isaac's circumcision:
Tuesday afternoon, I went to a henna class by Rebakah Emanuel, which was really more of a "hang around and doodle on each other" session than a class per se (though some people drew beautiful designs based on some pictures she'd brought). I discovered that it is very challenging to draw with henna on skin that has noticeable amount of hair, and using twists of paper for the henna often led to irregular quantities coming out, which was frustrating. As it turned out, the batch dried very light, so the designs on my ankles are barely noticeable. I did learn that the liquid is made from some kind of crushed leaves' tannins, which was cool.
Wednesday morning, Benj Kamm was leading a session that sounded like a short version of his workshop class, an introduction to piyutim. He talked about how there's a group in Jerusalem that gets together every other month to teach each other piyutim from their different traditions, which sounded fascinating. It was also interesting that this was the most diverse group of Jews he got together with in Jerusalem, with a range of ages and socio-economic classes all coming together. There was time to learn one, Yaala yaala bo-ee l'gan-ee (ok, transliteration really falls down here...), written by R. Israel Najara (1550–1625, in Tsfat), who was a well-known author of such songs (early filk: books were published of the liturgical poetry, setting it to popular music). He managed to include his first name in acrostic in all his works (easier in Hebrew than English, but still not easy).
The Hebrew is at the link; Benj's rough translation is below. This was used as a wedding song, and sung for the birth of a girl, and describes a dialogue between God and Israel (that, plus the imagery, hearkens back to Song of Songs, definitely).
Graceful woman, come into my garden
The pomegranate has blossomed, my vine is in bloom
My Lover will come, his pace will quicken
And he will eat the fruit of his sweet delicacy
If my Dear One has drawn out his travels
How shall I sit on my nest alone?
Return to me, you, beloved daughter
If you return to me, then I will also return
Lo, it is written as a commitment
That I will make my dwelling-place with you.
My Shepherd, my Love, you redeemed me
You betrothed me as your beloved
But now you have scattered me among the nations
So how is that you said, Love, that you loved me?
My splendid, it is for good that I sent you away
That I could raise you even higher in splendor and repute
For I have loved you with eternal love
Be joyous, for I am your redemption.
May your words be true, my Dear
Now, quickly gather in my wandering
Bring my brigade to rest in Zion
And there shall I offer you my offering.
Be strong, beloved, your palate is like fine wine
The bud of your redemption is refreshed and refreshing
I will cut off and hew down your enemies
And speedily send you my deputy.
Benj sang the refrain, then taught us those phrases. He then sang a verse or two, and we ran through each first line, then each second line. And in the end, we put it together. I couldn't for the life of me describe it, but one of the other people in the class recorded it, and I hope to have a link or a file to upload sometime soon.
Wednesday afternoon I went to what turned out to be a group discussion on Jews and food led by Amanda Melpolder, editor of The Jew and the Carrot. In the schedule, it was called "Eating Our Way Towards Judaism," I think mostly because Amanda found her way to appreciate Judaism first through food. We all talked about what "Jewish food" is, and since we were all Ashkenazi, it was pretty much about eastern European usuals, though as our diets change, what the next generation will think of as Jewish food will likely be more about the traditional holiday foods rather than grandma foods.
Thursday morning, I went to another class on food, this one titled "Eating for Success: Seven Ingredients for a Healthy Life," given by Sharon Goldner, which was mostly a recap of certain healthy eating habits such as eating breakfast, eating a rainbow of foods while minimizing white foods (especially sugar), drinking enough water, and so on. Useful, but not particularly Jewish.
Thursday afternoon I skipped all the 'official' classes, but went to a Midrash Rabbah study session later on. There wasn't an official leader, just people coming together to look at some of the midrash on the week's parsha. Alas, for I didn't find them particularly compelling, but it was still good to learn in that kind of group.
Friday morning I went to "She Sets Her Hands to the Distaff," a spinning class given by Sarah Hartman. She had some drop spindles, and made some rather disposable ones using dowels, a rubber grommet, and a used CD. I used one of these, and the balance really wasn't there for getting a good spin that wouldn't undo immediately. I managed to spin some rather irregular yarn, slubs and all, and have more I can work on later.
The basic process is to figure out the length of the fibers, pulling the roving (or top) so it's looser, then start teasing out a regular strand that is twisted to a leader bit of yarn. Once there's a length of new yarn, it's looped around the base of the spindle, and more is spun. I doubt I'll get particularly good at this, but I might make enough yarn for a small project.
Shabbat afternoon I went to a class by Aaron Kachuck: "Almost Famous: Books that Didn't Make the Biblical Cut," which was a very short taste of his week-long class. He managed to lead a very large group of people through a text with aplomb; I hope I'll have a chance to take another class from him some day. He's fascinated with the Apocrypha, and kept recommending reading different books of it as we talked about the one short one he'd chosen for class, the Book of Susannah. First, we started with a discussion of the books in canon that were known to be iffy (in the sense that it wasn't so clear that they'd make the cut), including Song of Songs, Kohelet, and more. Then we moved to the things that didn't make the cut, with the focus on Susannah, the shortest of these. After he'd read it to us, we discussed the story, and why it might not have made the cut. Fascinating discussion (and a much more explicit sort of story than I'd anticipated).
Later Shabbat afternoon I went to a class by Jonah Steinberg, which he called "World Making 101: Ancient Steps Toward a Torah of Environment." I was late, so missed the beginning, but the handout started by citing part of Proverbs, Chapter 8, verses 1-3 and 22-30, with an especial look at verse 30, which discusses how wisdom was with God, "amon" (which he left untranslated; it's a Googlewhack in Tanach), in the beginning. The next text was Breishit Rabbah 1:1, which talks about "amon," linking it (in one explanation) to "uman," the word for artisan. He discussed the idea of wisdom personified, of it being a blueprint for the world, and the making of the world (I am so not doing this justice; it was much more beautiful and flowing a conversation than this is).
And then we looked at some mishnayot from Bava Batra (chapter 2), which is, essentially, building codes and zoning law, which is part of Torah too; the whole of creation is encompassed in Torah, and there is a Torah of buildings and gutters as well as plants and animals. He took this idea further, saying that there could also be a Torah of nuclear physics, of carbon emissions, and so on, were we to look for it.
(There were a few other sources we looked at, but that was the main point. Those sources: some excerpts from the first book of Enoch (about angels marrying human women and teaching them technologies they couldn't handle), Breishit Raba (Vilna) parsha 3 siman 9 (about the numbering of the days of Creation), and Leviticus Rabbah 36 (about Jacob being a creator, and, by extension, one could see people as creators of the world, which is becoming more and more the truth of our days.))
More on other aspects of the week to come separately.
Tuesday morning I went to Linda Motzkin's class on the Community Torah Project: Checking Panels. Which is pretty much what it sounds like: she brought parchment she'd written columns of the Torah on, and we were to check it. First, though, she gave an intro to the project, discussing how she got started, and how she makes the parchment from deer hides, and so on (more background here, from the class I took with her two years ago). I was amused to see myself in some of the photos :-). What I hadn't realized before: that one can leave a space for names of the Divine, to be filled in later, because they require extra focus (and, for those who have that minhag, an immersion (and where she lives, the mikvah is far, so she doesn't write names of God in the winter or spring, until the water in the nearby lake warms up)).
After the background, she described how to proof a sefer Torah: there is one person reading from the parchment, while another checks from an already-printed, approved text (I learned that there are tikkunai sofrim that are not at all the same as a tikkun korim; I've only run into the latter before.). After a statement of correct intent, the reader reads each letter aloud, checking that it looks like the required letter, and the checker confirms each letter. Spaces are read out as well. It reminded me of reading certain kinds of text aloud for proofing, including all punctuation. The text is checked this way three times before it is declared kosher. If a mistake is found, it may or may not be fixable: for most words, the ink can be scraped off if necessary to fix a letter, but for names of the Deity, fixes that involve adding ink can be ok, while those requiring scraping render that panel unusable.
The editorial part of me was pleased that I found two things that could be made more perfect, neither of them being problematic to fix: one was the single crown on a hey looking too much like the top of its top stroke, and the other was the bottom stroke of a hey that didn't have the vertical start to the stroke. While the latter was a Name, it's fixable by adding, so it's ok.
The panel I checked the second and third lines of, which was about Isaac's circumcision:
 |
Tuesday afternoon, I went to a henna class by Rebakah Emanuel, which was really more of a "hang around and doodle on each other" session than a class per se (though some people drew beautiful designs based on some pictures she'd brought). I discovered that it is very challenging to draw with henna on skin that has noticeable amount of hair, and using twists of paper for the henna often led to irregular quantities coming out, which was frustrating. As it turned out, the batch dried very light, so the designs on my ankles are barely noticeable. I did learn that the liquid is made from some kind of crushed leaves' tannins, which was cool.
Wednesday morning, Benj Kamm was leading a session that sounded like a short version of his workshop class, an introduction to piyutim. He talked about how there's a group in Jerusalem that gets together every other month to teach each other piyutim from their different traditions, which sounded fascinating. It was also interesting that this was the most diverse group of Jews he got together with in Jerusalem, with a range of ages and socio-economic classes all coming together. There was time to learn one, Yaala yaala bo-ee l'gan-ee (ok, transliteration really falls down here...), written by R. Israel Najara (1550–1625, in Tsfat), who was a well-known author of such songs (early filk: books were published of the liturgical poetry, setting it to popular music). He managed to include his first name in acrostic in all his works (easier in Hebrew than English, but still not easy).
The Hebrew is at the link; Benj's rough translation is below. This was used as a wedding song, and sung for the birth of a girl, and describes a dialogue between God and Israel (that, plus the imagery, hearkens back to Song of Songs, definitely).
Graceful woman, come into my garden
The pomegranate has blossomed, my vine is in bloom
My Lover will come, his pace will quicken
And he will eat the fruit of his sweet delicacy
If my Dear One has drawn out his travels
How shall I sit on my nest alone?
Return to me, you, beloved daughter
If you return to me, then I will also return
Lo, it is written as a commitment
That I will make my dwelling-place with you.
My Shepherd, my Love, you redeemed me
You betrothed me as your beloved
But now you have scattered me among the nations
So how is that you said, Love, that you loved me?
My splendid, it is for good that I sent you away
That I could raise you even higher in splendor and repute
For I have loved you with eternal love
Be joyous, for I am your redemption.
May your words be true, my Dear
Now, quickly gather in my wandering
Bring my brigade to rest in Zion
And there shall I offer you my offering.
Be strong, beloved, your palate is like fine wine
The bud of your redemption is refreshed and refreshing
I will cut off and hew down your enemies
And speedily send you my deputy.
Benj sang the refrain, then taught us those phrases. He then sang a verse or two, and we ran through each first line, then each second line. And in the end, we put it together. I couldn't for the life of me describe it, but one of the other people in the class recorded it, and I hope to have a link or a file to upload sometime soon.
Wednesday afternoon I went to what turned out to be a group discussion on Jews and food led by Amanda Melpolder, editor of The Jew and the Carrot. In the schedule, it was called "Eating Our Way Towards Judaism," I think mostly because Amanda found her way to appreciate Judaism first through food. We all talked about what "Jewish food" is, and since we were all Ashkenazi, it was pretty much about eastern European usuals, though as our diets change, what the next generation will think of as Jewish food will likely be more about the traditional holiday foods rather than grandma foods.
Thursday morning, I went to another class on food, this one titled "Eating for Success: Seven Ingredients for a Healthy Life," given by Sharon Goldner, which was mostly a recap of certain healthy eating habits such as eating breakfast, eating a rainbow of foods while minimizing white foods (especially sugar), drinking enough water, and so on. Useful, but not particularly Jewish.
Thursday afternoon I skipped all the 'official' classes, but went to a Midrash Rabbah study session later on. There wasn't an official leader, just people coming together to look at some of the midrash on the week's parsha. Alas, for I didn't find them particularly compelling, but it was still good to learn in that kind of group.
Friday morning I went to "She Sets Her Hands to the Distaff," a spinning class given by Sarah Hartman. She had some drop spindles, and made some rather disposable ones using dowels, a rubber grommet, and a used CD. I used one of these, and the balance really wasn't there for getting a good spin that wouldn't undo immediately. I managed to spin some rather irregular yarn, slubs and all, and have more I can work on later.
The basic process is to figure out the length of the fibers, pulling the roving (or top) so it's looser, then start teasing out a regular strand that is twisted to a leader bit of yarn. Once there's a length of new yarn, it's looped around the base of the spindle, and more is spun. I doubt I'll get particularly good at this, but I might make enough yarn for a small project.
Shabbat afternoon I went to a class by Aaron Kachuck: "Almost Famous: Books that Didn't Make the Biblical Cut," which was a very short taste of his week-long class. He managed to lead a very large group of people through a text with aplomb; I hope I'll have a chance to take another class from him some day. He's fascinated with the Apocrypha, and kept recommending reading different books of it as we talked about the one short one he'd chosen for class, the Book of Susannah. First, we started with a discussion of the books in canon that were known to be iffy (in the sense that it wasn't so clear that they'd make the cut), including Song of Songs, Kohelet, and more. Then we moved to the things that didn't make the cut, with the focus on Susannah, the shortest of these. After he'd read it to us, we discussed the story, and why it might not have made the cut. Fascinating discussion (and a much more explicit sort of story than I'd anticipated).
Later Shabbat afternoon I went to a class by Jonah Steinberg, which he called "World Making 101: Ancient Steps Toward a Torah of Environment." I was late, so missed the beginning, but the handout started by citing part of Proverbs, Chapter 8, verses 1-3 and 22-30, with an especial look at verse 30, which discusses how wisdom was with God, "amon" (which he left untranslated; it's a Googlewhack in Tanach), in the beginning. The next text was Breishit Rabbah 1:1, which talks about "amon," linking it (in one explanation) to "uman," the word for artisan. He discussed the idea of wisdom personified, of it being a blueprint for the world, and the making of the world (I am so not doing this justice; it was much more beautiful and flowing a conversation than this is).
And then we looked at some mishnayot from Bava Batra (chapter 2), which is, essentially, building codes and zoning law, which is part of Torah too; the whole of creation is encompassed in Torah, and there is a Torah of buildings and gutters as well as plants and animals. He took this idea further, saying that there could also be a Torah of nuclear physics, of carbon emissions, and so on, were we to look for it.
(There were a few other sources we looked at, but that was the main point. Those sources: some excerpts from the first book of Enoch (about angels marrying human women and teaching them technologies they couldn't handle), Breishit Raba (Vilna) parsha 3 siman 9 (about the numbering of the days of Creation), and Leviticus Rabbah 36 (about Jacob being a creator, and, by extension, one could see people as creators of the world, which is becoming more and more the truth of our days.))
More on other aspects of the week to come separately.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-16 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-17 01:35 pm (UTC)And I remembered you enjoyed Jonah's classes. My morning class included a guy who graduated in Hebrew College's first class of rabbis, and he also was a fan :-).
no subject
Date: 2009-08-20 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-20 12:01 pm (UTC)