DIY

I racked some hard apple cider yesterday.  Hard cider made at home, even from the best apple juice, is about half the price of a jug of wine.  No sulfites, either; if you have problems with sulfites, you might want to try this.

There are several recipes for hard cider on line and I'm not sure which I like best yet.  It takes up to a month for cider to age properly.

The first time I used bread yeast and the product was OK.  I used barely 1/4 teaspoon of the bread yeast.  This time I used a package of lager yeast.

I used Lucky Leaf Premium not-from-concentrate apple juice the first two times.  I couldn't find any the last time I was in the store so I got a gallon of Apple & Eve even though it was from concentrate.

You can use old wine jugs but they have to be glass jugs and you have to clean them and rinse with boiling water before you put in your juice, sugar and yeast.

Then you use a rubber band to fasten a double layer of plastic wrap across the top, and you punch a hole the whole way through with a nut pick or skewer.

Then you put it somewhere cool in temperature for a week.  You pour off the immature cider into another jug that you've cleaned and sterilized, and put the plastic wrap on top of that.

Then you sterilize the first jug because you'll use it in another week for a second racking.

You can put a pinch of sugar in the second or third setting; the remaining yeast will eat it up and produce carbonation.

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- Water

I read postings by a garden guru whose advice has helped me a lot with my gardening and as far as I can see, the biggest problem is water. 

You have to water in the morning.  Watering at night will bring slugs onto your plants.

You have to water a lot.  Once you do, you can skip the next day, even the next two days if it's going to rain.

You have to put the water on the roots.  Putting the water on the leaves will make your zucchini and cucumbers break out in ugly white spots and die.

You either need a nozzle on your hose that will get between the plants and put the water on the roots where it belongs, or you need a watering can.

My personal rule of thumb is 2 gallons of water per 2 x 2 foot patch every 2 days, more days if it rains.

If you live with water restrictions (which have happened where I live too) have a large bucket that you put in your shower.  While the water is warming up, let it run into the bucket and use that on your garden.  Also catch the water after you release it from the shower pipe.  If you're doing dishes in the sink, like pots and pans, catch that water while it warms up.  You'll have a smaller garden, but if you water right you'll still get some veggies or flowers.

You could also put out a rain barrel.  Check with your city or your home owners' association before you do it, and then do it right. 

Gardening should be relaxing and soul-satisfying, not a bone of contention.

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking

This thread is going to be iffy for the next month.  Wednesday night begins the Jewish New Year and I won't be posting on the High Holy Days.  If the calendar allows, I'll post earlier in the week.

Fact-checking Torah, like fact-checking any other urban legend, means going back to the source.  Besides finding the source, you have to read the source.

You thought I was going to ask the question this time but I want to explain one more part of the process to you before we get into any discussions.

Remember I said that the things I learn or experience contribute to my understanding of things that I read, so that when I re-read them, they mean more to me.

They also mean something different.

I predict that if you keep reading this thread on the blog, what Torah means to you may be different from what it means now.

I’m trying to manage your expectations.

I am not going to show that your urban legends have some truth in them because I already said, I don’t care what those urban legends say.  They aren’t the source.  The source is Torah.

I am going to tell you things that you didn’t know before.

When you decide to QUESTION ME!! Part of the time you will be upset because I’m telling you something you didn’t know before.  And that’s when you’re going to tell me one of the urban legends that you already were sure of.  Since it’s an urban legend, you won’t be able to tell me the source.

And I’m going to tell you that it’s an urban legend and since you can’t give me the source, I won’t take your question into account.

If you have absolutely no intention of learning anything that says something different from the urban legends you were sure of, then this thread is going to constantly upset you and you will be constantly frustrated because I won’t pay attention to your objections based on your urban legends.

Then you will try to make me feel guilty by saying that I am trying to brainwash you or convert you.  It won’t work. 

It won’t work because I am telling you now, that you have the right to believe what you want.

That means you don’t have to read this thread at all.  I never intended to come around and hold a pistol to people’s heads to make them read this.

It’s up to you.  If you’re happy with your urban legends, you don’t need to read this thread. 

If you read this thread, you may learn things that will make you re-think your urban legends.

You may decide you don’t agree with your urban legends any more.

You may decide you don’t agree any more with the people who told you those urban legends.

Don’t tell them that.  They have the same right you do to keep believing those urban legends.

I’m not here to interfere with your right to believe what you want. 

I’m here to tell you that if you already have started not to believe the urban legends, you may have the same questions as dozens of other people who posted those questions to the discussion group.  I’m here to tell you what the answers to their questions were. 

And then it will be up to you to learn how I got those answers, and try to use those methods to answer the questions I don’t answer.

So while you are meditating on Exodus 21:24-25, you have time to think what you really want from reading this thread, and if you realize you want to hear confirmation of your urban legends, you have another choice to make.

You can change what you want.  Or you can decide not to read the rest of the thread.

I know how much information is ahead because I’ve drafted the rest of the thread, and at one post a week, it will take about 3 years to post all the information.  I’ll say more about that next week.

If you don't have a Bible and don't read Hebrew, you can go here and get a copy in English.

www.sacred-texts.com

You can learn about fallacies and how to find them here.

www.fallacyfiles.org

Hebrew language: (two parts)

            http://www.archive.org/details/hebrewgrammarwi01kaligoog

            http://www.archive.org/details/hebrewgrammarwi00kaligoog

Aramaic language (for Talmud):

http://www.archive.org/details/AramaicLanguagehebrewDialectOfTheBabylonianTalmudByMargolis

Jewish Bible read out loud (mostly in Hebrew):

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/ptmp3prq.htm

Babylonian Talmud audio and text

             http://www.dafyomi.org/       

Jerusalem Talmud audio

             http://www.yerushalmionline.org/    

Texts:  

Tannakh, Talmuds, Midrash Halakhah    http://www.mechon-mamre.org/index.htm 

Midrash Aggadah                                      http://www.tsel.org/torah/midrashraba/index.html  

Talmud in PDF                                          http://www.hebrewbooks.com/                    

There are audio lectures at the following sites which use a medieval commentary, famous among Jews, by Rabbi Shelomo ben Yitschaq, AKA Rashi.

Beta.chabad.org – find Rabbi Yehoshua Gordon’s Torah video lessons

www.dafyomi.org – find R. David Grossman’s Torah audio lessons

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Mendel Beilis -- Stage 2 investigation

The investigation in the Mendel Beilis case began with what the government viewed as a failure that directed attention toward Andrey’s relatives, but eventually showed that they were not guilty.  The next stage began with a fresh broom.

Chaplinsky, with the agreement of the Black Hundreds, brought in a Kievite detective with a good reputation based on work done in another city.  This was Nikolay Krasovsky.  He struck sparks initially with Chief Mishchuk, who was relieved of responsibility for the case in Krasovsky’s favor.  Upon receiving the case files, Krasovsky decided the initial investigation had been botched, and he was right.  At trial it came out that on March 20, 1911, after the body was found, the police who reported to the scene not only did not preserve it in its then state, they altered it and they failed to document the physical evidence adequately before the scene was disturbed.  Also, on orders from their superiors, the police not only swept snow away from the entrance to the grotto, they dug away at the grotto entrance.  The bailiff who was supposed to write the initial police report was too fat to get inside the grotto, and his subordinates made things easy on him rather than preserve the crime scene.

Krasovsky went to work by the middle of May, 1911, first repeating the prior work and interviewing the same people in Lukyanovka where Vera Cheberyak lived.  It is not clear that he interviewed people in Plossky, where Andrey’s body was found, except for people living on the Zaitsev factory grounds like Mendel Beilis and a man named Yukhrikov.  Vera and her son Zhenya, Andrey’s best friend, gave depositions, on the basis of which Krasovsky went after Andrey’s relatives.  Krasovsky staged the “masquerade” with Andrey’s stepfather.

When it didn’t pan out, he followed up on suggestions from Golubev and another Black Hundreds member, Rozmitalsky, looking at the factory and the Jews who owned it and lived there.  He quickly crossed them off his list; the only two pieces of physical evidence in that connection also didn’t pan out.

There was one other alternative.  About June, a woman named Malitskaya came to the police with a vague story about Vera Cheberyak.  Krasovsky put this together with the fact that Vera had directed attention away from herself, and hauled her and her family in for new depositions.  Vera and her husband were caught telling their son Zhenya to commit perjury to Lt. Col. Ivanov.  The bailiff who brought them to the interrogation made them shut up, but Zhenya’s deposition not only was false, it repudiated information in his two previous depositions that Andrey had been at his house on March 12.  Krasovsky followed where the clues led and by the end of July, 1911, was convinced that Vera and her gang of thieves had something to do with the murder.

At this point the government stepped in again.  Whether Vera was in tight with the Black Hundreds was irrelevant.  None of this was going to get the government its Jew for trial, let alone support Golubev’s claim that the Jew was Mendel Beilis.  The government went looking for witnesses, and they found Kazimir Shakhovsky and his wife Ulyana.

Andrey’s mother had played matchmaker between these two before she and her family moved from Lukyanovka to Nikolskaya Slobodka on the east bank of the Dnepr River.  The Shakhovskys were lamplighters in Lukyanovka.  Beilis had caught Kazimir stealing wood from the Zaitsev factory.  Kazimir carried a grudge.  Vera’s neighbor Mikhail Nakonechny knew about it, and told the police that Kazimir’s grudge was his own fault for stealing.

In July 1911, Krasovsky’s hand-picked assistants, Adam Polishchuk and A.V. Vygranov, started visiting the Shakhovskys.  They got them drunk and got them to sign depositions.  The depositions were forged and accused Beilis of Andrey’s murder.  They cited to information on the same point by Anna “Volkivna” Zakharova, a friend of Ulyana’s.  The depositions were quoted from in both of the indictments used to arraign Beilis in 1912 and 1913. At trial, all three recanted these depositions.

This forgery coincided with the last two times Vera was arrested under the auspices of prosecutor Nikolay Brandorf, who did not support the ritual murder charge.  Chaplinsky ordered the police to release Vera and not to touch her again without his express permission.

Chaplinsky ordered the local chief of the security division, Kolyabko, to put Beilis under arrest.  In fact, both Beilis and his 10-year-old son David were taken into custody, although David was released relatively soon after.  Then Chaplinsky went to work on Fenenko to write up the charges against Beilis.  Fenenko stood out for four days and only caved when Chaplinsky put the order into writing.  Fenenko knew as well as Krasovsky and Brandorf that Beilis was not involved in the murder, and agreed with the other two that Vera probably was involved if not personally a participant in the death.

Now the government had its Jew.

On August 16, 1911, Vera’s husband Vasily deposed to a story that said “Beilis and his two sons” dragged Andrey away after catching him on the factory grounds, but what happened to Andrey then, Vasily didn’t know.  The two sons who would be tried for this would have to be Pinchas and David, the latter of whom was 10 in 1911; the third son, Tevye, was younger than David.

On August 18, 1911, Krasovsky performed a search on the grounds of the Zaitsev factory during which a bloody knife turned up near the hut of Yukhrikov and a bloody rag in the “upper” kiln, so-called because it was on the high ground of the factory.  He also confiscated tools left in a structure near the stables, which included stabbing or punching tools called shvaiki.  These tools had been left by a harness maker named Berko Gulko who had been at the factory at the end of April, left for a few days, and never came back.  At trial, Gulko said he had worked after leaving the factory, but had not needed his own tools.  A temporary worker, he abandoned tools worth a day’s rental of a hotel room.  Nobody at the trial believed this, but his new boss had not been summonsed to appear in the case and there was no way to discredit his story.

On August 25, 1911, a stool pigeon convinced Chief Mishchuk to go to Yurkovsky Hill and check out some items in a hole in the ground.  These included Gulko’s shvaiki, which were identified at trial by a co-worker, pieces of a pair of pants that had been burned, and suspenders.  Mishchuk was cashiered and tried for planting this evidence.  Krasovsky and others agree that it was planted.  Krasovsky and Arnold Margolin agree that Mishchuk didn’t plant it.  They agree this was done by a thief named Kushnir who, providentially, testified to that at Mishchuk’s trial.  Kushnir was assisted by police agents in planting the items.  One of the police agents who was present when this find was made was Adam Polishchuk, and he informed Krasovsky about the find after Mishchuk made him leave the scene.

Another was Evgeny Kirichenko.  Krasovsky could see the writing on the wall.  He quit and named Kirichenko as his replacement.  That didn’t happen; Lukyanovka Bailiff Vyshinsky was named to the job and Kirichenko worked for him.  In 1912, Kirichenko was still an officer in good standing with the Kiev police and worked for Lt. Col. Ivanov.

Records in the Tsarist archives show that Polishchuk was in the pay of the Black Hundreds leader, Opanasenko, who wrote a letter on this subject to Chaplinsky in 1912.

In November, 1911, Beilis was still in jail.  The investigation was considered to be on-going so he had not been able to see an attorney yet; Arnold Margolin, an attorney admitted to practice at the bar, explained to Mendel’s brother and Mrs. Beilis that this was impossible until an actual indictment was handed down.  On November 23, a cellmate named Kozachenko came back from a court hearing with the news that he was going to be released.  Beilis asked him to take a note to Mrs. Beilis and he agreed.  The police had taken Beilis’ glasses, so another cellmate did the actual writing.  Kozachenko insisted Beilis sign the note.  It was read at trial on day 7, a brief and affectionate letter which also complained that “nobody is stirring themselves in the case.”

This followed the reading of another letter which said two people had testified against Beilis and deserved revenge.  The letter named an attorney who was a friend of Margolin’s and gave his address.  The complaint "nobody is trying to help" was repeated three times, although the letter also said "allies" would help Kozachenko with the poisoning.  Kozachenko’s deposition claimed he had been promised 500 rubles for using strychnine from the hospital founded by the Zaitsevs, against Shakhovsky and Mikhail Nakonechny.  The letter had what purported to be Beilis’ signature.  Kozachenko testified only by deposition, which the law permitted in Tsarist times.  The cellmate whose handwriting was on the real letter also testified only by deposition; the handwriting on the letters was never authenticated.

At trial, on day 19, Lt. Col. Ivanov testified that Kozachenko was a police agent, and this same information turned up when Kozachenko was later tried on a separate slander charge.

On December 20, 1911, Vasily Cheberyak signed an accusation against Beilis in the murder of Andrey Yushchinsky.  This paperwork allowed the government to file an indictment, and it meant that Vasily would testify at trial in support of the government case.  Now the government had its Jew, and the evidence to indict him, and could probably put him in jail for the attempt on Shakhovsky and Nakonechny, even if the murder charge for Andrey's death failed to stand up in court.

Investigation -- stage 3

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Hearing Another Message

We are still hearing the message of 50 years ago, while all about us people are trying to deny that it means anything any more.

They still try to tell us we can only have what they will allow us to have, and they are trying to prevent us from having anything. 

They believe they have talked us into defining "anything" and "having" by the toys in our closets or the technology in our hands.

We're listening to a different message that says we will not be limited by their selfish, power-tripping illusions. 

"Anything" also means what is in our hearts and in our minds.  They think they can cut funding to libraries and cripple our brains, but they can't stop us from learning from the great works posted on the Internet or from SNOPES or other busters of urban legends and they can't stop us from learning about the fallacies in their arguments, the falsehoods in their pronouncements, and the failures in their morality which comes from the weakness of their hearts and minds.

"Having" means our relationships with family and friends.  They think they can isolate us in fear or envy of each other by pretending that what they refuse to give us is going to somebody else with a fatter wallet or bigger voting block.  They can't stop us from looking at our families and friends and seeing the colors of the rainbow and all kinds of love.  They can't stop us from understanding that they falsely believe we all dream their own delirious dreams of hatreds and envies and fears.

We will listen to a bigger, better message that helps us grow and love and live.

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

DIY

This week's DIY projects are three.  Four if you count the pastrami.

Say what?

I had 6 or 7 Roma tomatoes.  Cut them in half, put them cut side down in a pan in a 150 degree oven for 10 hours.  It really should be longer, like overnight.  At $1.79 a pound for the tomatoes, this is still half price compared to what you buy in the foil pouch or plastic box or whatever.  You don't have to skin or seed Roma tomatoes and besides, they're the ones you really should use in cooking.  You spend money on a slicing tomato, you should slice it on a sandwich or in a salad.

I bought 3 pieces of deckel at the kosher butcher's, about 2.5 lbs each.  One I cut in half.  Half is in the freezer for the next time I make cholent.

The other half I rubbed with a mixture of kosher salt, sugar, and potassium nitrate (not sodium nitrate, have to watch my BP) and it's curing in a glass baking dish.  In a week I'll soak out some of the salt and smoke it with hickory shavings in my hot smoker, just for flavor.  (Hot smoking does NOT preserve meat, you need a cold smoker for that)  It will be about half the price of the kosher smoked cured thin-sliced beef that the store also sells.  The recipe for the curing mix is on-line.

The other two pieces are pickling in the fridge.  In 2 weeks, when they're done, I'll boil them both to tenderness.  Then I'll cut one into packages for the freezer.  The other I'll rub with a mix of coriander and pepper and smoke with alder shavings for pastrami, and package for the freezer.

This will save me $5 a pound over the deli counter corned beef and pastrami, so about $25.

Good food for less money, that's what DYI is about!

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

The World is Coming to a Beginning!

In ten days the world will begin all over again!!!  Are YOU ready?

Actually, every single day the world begins all over again as soon as we open our eyes.  If you're reading this, you've been through it thousands of times.

What about doing it just a little differently?  What about wiping away everything you've done in the past, every negative thing everybody said to you, and just starting over.

It's not just forgiving yourself.  You can forgive yourself for anything without starting over.  The news stories are full of people who forgave themselves for something, and then did it again, or did something worse.  What's that word?  For doing something, getting a bad result, and doing it again expecting different results?

Not you.  Not this time.  The world is beginning, and you're going to begin with it!