Hatam Soferet

overheard in beit midrash

2010-07-06T18:47:12Z

Israeli to Angli: What's 'mosaic'?
Angli to Israeli: It's when you have lots of little pieces of tile, glued together to make a design
Israeli: *looks VERY CONFUSED*
Second Israeli, learning same material: No, it means Moses wrote it.

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sheesh

2009-08-14T16:31:39Z

Wow, what terrible journalism. Reads like the sort of comprehension exercise one does for GCSE English, where they give you three pieces of real journalism and require you to produce a precis. In lower tiers, this means that you winnow out some tangentially-related facts and string them together in arbitrary order, with no apparent awareness of useful things like paragraphs or article structure, and you get marks for things like copying the spelling correctly. Presumably the BBC's staff writers' journalistic training stopped there.

A group of rabbis and Jewish mystics has taken to the skies over Israel, praying and blowing ceremonial horns in a plane to ward off swine flu.

About 50 religious leaders circled over the country on Monday, chanting prayers and blowing horns, called shofars.

The flight's aim was "to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it", Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

The flu is often called simply "H1N1" in Israel, as pigs are seen as unclean.

Eating pork is banned under Jewish dietary laws.

According to Israel's health ministry, there have been more than 2,000 cases of swine flu in the country, with five fatalities so far.

"We are certain that, thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us," added Mr Batzri was quoted as saying.

Television footage showed rabbis in black hats rocking backwards and forwards as they read prayers from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism which counts the singer Madonna among its devotees.

The shofar is the horn of a ram, and is used to mark major religious occasions in Judaism.

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Why blogging = rampant spirituality

2009-07-27T18:02:02Z

At a Yeshivat Hadar class the other day which quoted some rebbe suggesting that learning ought to engender "spiritual growth," and accordingly after having engaged in Judaic learning, one ought to do "a sort of spiritual check-in," in order to ascertain whether said growth has occurred.

This kind of talk isn't my cup of tea at all.

However, after some thought, I conclude that what he is saying is, if you come away from a class thinking "Hm, there's a blog post in this," you have probably grown in the way he is talking about, and you can talk about it without having to use cringily cheesy vocabulary.

All about language.

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hy my

2009-07-23T19:10:40Z

Shai Held on how the first liturgical breath of the morning is Modah Ani, "Thanks I offer" rather than Ani Modah, "I thank you" - putting the thanks before the ego. Cute and nice, but even Ani Modah is better than when your alarm didn't go off and your first word of the day is SHIT.

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