Wuh!

30K!

This blog has been running less than 4 years and you've viewed it 30K times!

I am both humbled and flattered.

Especially as so much of what I posted has been special interest stuff.

And your views have come from around the world.

There's more to come: the 4th part of the Fact-Checking blog is a couple of months ahead; the rest of the 21st century Bible Hebrew; more knitting; new garden stuff as I find it.

THANK YOU EVERYBODY!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- immersion

Have you ever been involved in a great conversation and somebody comes into the room and asks, “What are you talking about?”  An extreme case is you are sharing a great joke and laughing hysterically, and the third person comes in and asks, “What’s so funny?”

You can never explain something like that to the satisfaction of the third party.  At some point you wind up saying “you had to be there.”

Or if it’s a tweet-fest, you have to tell them, “go back and read all the tweets.”  And even then, they won’t get it. 

They weren’t immersed in the situation and they will never understand all the nuances of what happened.

It’s the same thing with learning a language.  Immersion works better and faster than any class with discrete sessions and isolated lab work.  Language is often spontaneous, and programmatic learning sessions will never teach you some things that a native speaker will teach almost without thinking about it in an immersion course – body movements, voice tones, and so on.

The same is true with Torah and Talmud.  They are more comprehensible to people who live in the culture that now transmits them, than by external solitary study.  They are easier to learn and easier to retain through immersion than in bits and pieces among the moments of getting a living and running a household.

The issue isn’t the capability to learn, AKA intelligence.  The issue is mental and physical experience, not just with the information, but also with its practical consequences, AKA education.  (There’s a rant in there but I’ll let it go and move on.)

The rabbis say that study has to lead to practice, lilmod ulelamed, lishmor ve-laasot ul’qayem kol divrey Talmud toratekha be-ahavah.  But at one time fewer and fewer people were even doing the first part, studying.  That was one of the motivating forces in 1923 when R. Shapiro created the Daf Yomi program.  It asks that people set aside half an hour to an hour every day to study Talmud.  There are programs for both Talmuds.

My experience shows that if you jump straight into Daf Yomi you won’t make much progress.  You have to start with Torah the way you have to start with the alphabet when learning to read.  Then you have to learn Mishnah so that the Gemara doesn’t distract you from the basic principles.  Only after you understand the basic principles behind Jewish law and culture will you understand what Talmud is trying to teach you.  That means starting with the beginning of Jewish law and culture in Torah.  As a primary source, not in translation and not in commentary.

There is a sort of Cliffnotes version of Talmud on a website that has helped me out a lot.  But it’s only an outline, it’s not the real deal.  For that, you need to study the primary document.

You can’t say you know Talmud without that primary document, any more than you can honestly say you read War and Peace if you only read the plot description on Wikipedia.  The English Wikipedia site. 

And if you don’t know Talmud, you can’t produce a good argument for the claim that Talmud talks about Jesus. 

On to the fallacies!

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- narrative past

Genesis 1:3

 

ג וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי־אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר:

 

Transliteration: Va-yomer elohim y’hi or va-y’hi or.

Translation:     Gd said Let light exist and light existed.

Letters in this lesson:

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

יֹּאמֶר	he said
יְהִי	Let X exist
אוֹר	light

 

I only have three items to discuss for this verse. You can breathe now.

 

The first one is probably the most important because it is all over Torah, and it has do both with that vav prefix, and what it is prefixed to.

 

OK I lied, four things. Maybe five.

 

Vav at the start of this verse does not mean “and”. It is a verbal prefix for a specific grammatical structure that Dr. Cook identified.

 

The structure is vav plus the imperfect aspect. You know that this is the third of the three aspects, and you might remember that it is for uncompleted action.

 

This story is set at the beginning of the universe. Does this imply that the universe is not finished yet?

 

Not at all. (There’s a midrash for that, or rather, a mishnah with aggadic overtones.)

 

What it means is that this is the inside of the narrative. Nothing is over until the narrative is over. The narrative itself is incomplete.

 

Dr. Cook calls this the narrative past but with the explanation I just gave, you could call it “the narrative imperfect.” You could potentially use this if you were, say, Walter Cronkite doing a live news report on, say, the battle with the Amalekites at the time it occurred.

 

Now if the perfect uses only suffixes for the verb root, do you suspect that the imperfect uses prefixes? DING DING DING, you’re right, and some books call imperfect the prefix aspect. Which isn’t strictly true because you saw that the piel progressive had a prefix so let’s call it imperfect aspect from here on out.  That will be utterly critical in a couple of lessons.

There is an essential verb in this verse and when you learn it, you will have conquered one of about 30 essential conjugations in Torah.

 

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Garden -- JUST SAY NO

I read the newsletter of my co-op for April and went into a serious depression.

There on the front page it gave bad information that would tempt lots of my neighbors to waste money on grass seed, by saying that April was a good month for re-seeding.

JUST SAY NO.

And run an experiment.

Pick a tiny corner of your yard where you can claim you are growing ornamental grasses.

Let your grass go wild there.

You will find that it seeds out in July or August.

Let that be a clue to you.

Grass is a WARM WEATHER PLANT.  It seeds in WARM WEATHER.

SOWING GRASS BEFORE JULY OR AUGUST IS A WASTE OF MONEY.

Mike McGrath, my garden guru, has to counsel people more than once a year who ignore this basic fact about grass and then wonder why they get NOTHING.

Or they get gypped by Scott's into buying something with a growth accelerant, which produces spindly grass that quickly dies.

BUY A CLUE, NOT GRASS SEED.

Or buy the seed, but don't sow until it's RIGHT FOR THE GRASS.

GENERATIONS have made this mistake before you, and they lost a lot of money and used a lot of swear words because of it.

If you're REALLY SMARTER than your parents or grandparents, learn from nature.

JUST SAY NO.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Only if it's Oral

The final issue in oral communications has to do with its transmission person to person.

It’s easy to demonstrate from the Internet. Why did those little emojis come into being that you can attach to tweets and blogs and emails and that kind of thing?

Because there are things that don’t come through in writing.

Have you ever noticed how many blazing arguments consume Twitter or Facebook until at some point one person writes “I WAS BEING SARCASTIC.”

There are things that text cannot transmit. They require a performance. It can be as simple as the tone of a voice over the phone. It can be silent, as in a facial expression or other body language. It can be as complicated and stylized as Kabuki or a European opera or an anime.

You cannot perform on paper without special words describing an expression, a tone of voice. That is one of the things that makes writing characteristically lengthy: the need to describe. Such things are absent or minimalized in oral communications, something that will come up again, in the last part of this blog.

When you read Torah and Talmud, you are reading records of oral communication. It’s associational and allusive, and it avoids description because it didn’t need to describe things. The people who were communicating the information had each other’s performance to go by, a performance shaped by the culture they lived in.

A characteristic feature of oral transmission of Torah today is the chant, coded as marks called trop. Torah chant is complicated and not easily learned; immersion is better than isolated lessons, the same as for learning to speak a language. Using chant with Torah and Mishnah is noted in Talmud; one rabbi even says you really aren’t doing it right if you don’t chant it.

Talmud has its own characteristic chant. You can hear it in recordings of the Daf Yomi daily Talmud lesson by R. Dovid Grossman of LA, posted at Harvard.

This performance issue also exists for Quran and the Vedas of Hinduism, for both of which there is a characteristic chant. (There are at least 6 styles of Quran chant; there are 5 styles of Torah chant.) Reading the Iliad results in a kind of chant – although the Greek of the Iliad was a tonal language so that, automatically, it presented a performance and not just a text. Some Classics scholars believe the Iliad originated orally, and having read my archaeological posts, you may agree.

If Torah did not originate in oral transmission, then the chanting has to be ascribed to unique behavior compared to other cultures with oral traditions that are chanted; it requires a mountain of evidence about why Jews would behave in a unique way.

So the final clue, that Torah and Talmud are oral transmissions, has developed and survived into modern times, and that is the performance styles of trop and Talmudic chant.

One more little tweak and I’m ready to move on and discuss fallacies I’ve come across in academic papers about language.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

21st Century Bible Hebrew -- piel binyan pt 1

Genesis 1:2.

 

ב וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם:

 

Translation:     The earth was empty and chaotic and dark above the depths and a spirit of Gd was wafting back and forth above the water.

 

All right, m’rachefet is in the piel binyan and the progressive aspect, and the combination almost creates a cognitive dissonance.

 

First, let me explain piel because it’s crucial to Torah. If you look at other material on BH, it probably calls piel “intensive”.

 

That’s old-think, and I come not to use old-think but to bury it.

 

The main thing about piel that you care about right now it that sometimes it means repeating an action. But it always means a punctuated repetition, not a continuous one. (There’s another binyan that has the continuous connotation.)  Because repetition leads to skill, piel can mean being skilled at a given action. There are other meanings which I will get to when it’s important.

 

You can’t really speak of being “skilled” at wafting, so something else is going on here.

 

Because piel means interrupted repetition and progressive means continuous action, we have a cognitive dissonance. That is where I get the “back and forth”. While wafting, Gd’s spirit passed over the same place more than once.

 

Which created a cognitive dissonance for a rabbi about 2000 years ago. Gd’s spirit is infinite, but the idea of back and forth suggests a non-infinite body, like a cloud, moving over a surface such that it doesn’t cover some parts. So right there he started blowing his mind.

 

Then he realized that at this point, there’s no “above” the waters. It’s waters, then it’s heavens, the way there’s no distance between ocean water and atmosphere.  Yet Gd’s infinite spirit is somehow between them. That’s when he really blew his mind. “In a few days, he was taken from the world.” Another rabbi met him in the interim period and noticed that his behavior was abnormal. There’s more to the story and I’ll tell it later.

 

So remember this first part of the definition of piel and then remember one thing more.

 

The reason I translated the progressive aspect with an “ing” ending has to do with another important way it is used in Torah. It’s close to being a pure verb form that ignores timing and relates to another almost pure verb form.

 

BUT since this narrative took place in the past, I have to translate “was wafting”. Because it no longer does this. Or does it? That’s the puzzle of progressive.

 

Actually, that’s the problem of translating. No two languages have all the same concepts. English is a language that uses tenses, and tenses are always very concerned with establishing the relationship in time between what is being said and what is being talked about.

 

Semitic languages are different. There are ways of expressing time relationships, but they aren’t inherent in the verb. Even though perfect aspect reflects completed action, it’s not necessarily tied to the past.  This particularly comes out in the commandments all through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

New verse next time, I promise.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved

Knitting -- LOLLAPALOOZA

Men, pay attention. It's time to take back your invention.

That's right. Guys invented knitting and crochet.

When they were out pasturing sheep, they would pick the hair and wool that got pulled out by thorn bushes. They would roll it up and eventually it got spun out into woolen yarn.

Men would figure out things to do with the chunky or bulky or worsted yarn, and that includes knitting.

German sock peddlers were famous for working on their wares as they tramped the country; their rapid knitting is legendary.  Scotsmen knitted sweaters. Knitting guilds only accepted men. Injured soldiers were encouraged to knit for therapy in the world wars. Knitting is sometimes prescribed for people with high BP.

Check out this site.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4P7tVwBNJvcijWA3r6EPGg

Johnnie Vasquez has scores of videos showing separate stitches. In one, you watch him knit a Shetland eyelet lace edging using tiny needles and delicate yarn. He has knitting motifs from all over the world, shows multi-color work and cabling, and ways to use up leftover yarn.

LEFTIES RISE UP.  Johnnie shows left-handed versions of stitches too.

Go like him and then save the link.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights  Reserved