Fact-Checking the Torah -- Ribit

We’re still working on Exodus 22:24, Leviticus 25:36-37 and Deuteronomy 23:20.

When you loan silver to my people, to the poor with you, you shall not be urgent with him and you shall not place neshekh on him.

Do not take neshekh from him or ribit, you shall fear your Gd and your brother shall live with you.

You shall not give your money to him by neshekh or your food by ribit.

You shall not impose neshekh on your brother of silver or food or anything that can be the subject of neshekh.

We now know that neshekh is a lender’s fee, not necessarily the sort of interest we pay on our cars or houses.

I said at the end of the last discussion that a person might bond himself out for a day here and there if he needed spending money, and I said this fed into today’s topic.

It’s ribit.

The translation of ribit should be “unequal deals.”

This means two people agree to a deal but one gets more out of it than the other.

The classic situation is two people agree to help each other with field work on their farms.  It is only an equal deal if they are working on the same crop, at the same stage of growth, requiring the same sort of care, and the two crops are of equal quantity.

If farmer A gets help on barley but farmer B doesn’t ask for payback until it’s time to work on wheat, they need different amounts of energy to work on them.  If A and B exchange services on barley, A may have a more scanty crop requiring less work than B’s crop. 

The rabbis say what they should do is pay each other at the going rate for that day.  Then if there turns out to be a glut of workers on the market, the farmer getting help that day pays less, but it’s no different from what the other farmer would get if he hired himself out that day to some third farmer.

The phrase “food by ribit” means you can’t exchange barley for wheat or good wine for bad.  The classic situation is that if a man agrees with a baker to give wheat in exchange for prepared bread, but the wheat isn’t grown yet, that is potentially ribit.  When the time comes that the baker would normally get the wheat, if the crop has been destroyed, the man on the other end of the agreement might try to get the baker to accept barley.  But bread made from barley doesn’t sell for as much as bread made from wheat, so the baker comes out on the short end.  All the more so as the man might try to substitute wine, which the baker can’t use at all.

In short, bartering of services or products has to be done very carefully to make sure everybody comes out the same.  For next week read Leviticus 25:17 and we’ll discuss the last form of financial bad behavior.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a time Bible Hebrew -- Vocabulary review III

Make sure to memorize the words above the line.  You will see them many times as you read the Bible in Hebrew..

 

 

עֵץ	tree
אֶל	to
עֹשֶׂה	make (v)
שָׁנִים	years
וַיִּתֵּן	He put
אֹתָם	them (direct object)
יִקָּווּ	gather (3rd s.)
תֵרָאֶה	appear (3rd f.s.)
יַּבָּשָׁה	dry land
מִקְוֵה	gathering, collection
יַמִּים	Seas
עֵשֶׂב	grass, plant, herb
מַזְרִיעַ	making seed
זֶרַע	seed (n)
פְּרִי	fruit
מִין	kind, sort, type
דֶּשֶׁא	sprout (n)
תַּדְשֵׁא	sprout (v)
מְאֹרֹת	lights
תּוֹצֵא	brought forth (v)
אֹתֹת	signs
מוֹעֲדִים	warnings
לְהָאִיר	to shed light
וַיִּתֵּן	He put
אֹתָם	them (direct object)
לִמְשֹׁל	To control

 

 © Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Knitting -- pullover/jumper

This is for when you finish the body.
Go back to the tag end of yarn at the start of the sweater.
Thread a "darning" or tapestry needle with a contrasting color of yarn and run that yarn up through to find where the middle of the armhole should be.
Now count around the bottom of the sweater, 140 stitches.
Run another piece of yarn up at that point to mark the middle of the other armhole.
Now, where you finished the 140th round of knitting, back off six (6) stitches.
Unknit them onto the left needle point.
Now knit two stitches, and pull the one stitch over the other.  Remember, this is "binding off".
Bind off six (6) stitches on both sides of the middle of the armhole.
Knit around to the other side except for the last six (6) stitches before the middle.
Bind off six stitches there.
From here it gets complicated so I'll wait until next week because as busy as you are, you might not have finished the body yet.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors -- EXTRA EXTRA CHICK ABOUT TO FLY

My veggies are going to have to wait for a watering and the bird bath is going to have to wait to get filled.
The mockingbird chick is sitting on my fence getting fed and I don't want to scare it or its parents.
OK I scored some brownie points with them by helping chase squirrels away.
Don't want to ruin that now.
Soon the baby will be ready to take care of itself and the parents will send it off.
Then they'll start all over again, at least once this season.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Garden -- almost there!

I'm putting the yardwork to bed for the summer, except for mowing the grass.
But only until our normal summer drought.
No sense running a mower over dormant grass.
Anyway I evened up the hedge that I just shortened by about 2 feet.
I was supposed to do this in January but I couldn't get to it because of the snow and cold.
I did as little as I could and still get close to my goal, which is to shorten it by another foot.
I'll give it a year to recover and meanwhile there are other hedges that are way too high.
I also managed to pull out some poison ivy without getting infected.  See next week's post.
I also had to cut out a baby honey locust, child of a tree that was cut down some years ago because it regularly pulled on the power wires and took the electricity down when we had hurricanes and other serious storms.
Honey locust smell nice but they put out tons of pollen and they are really a weed tree around here, in May everywhere you drive you can see their white flowers.
My wild iris ("blue-eyed grass") has finished its first bloom.  I don't know if I'll get more; maybe these will drop seed that will bloom in a couple of months.
It's summer!
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors -- he drives me crazy

So I came home from the grocery store and the mockingbirds are rasping and flying around.
Aha, I thought, somebody decided to move in on the turf.
Then I noticed the cardinal hanging nervously off a bush.
Ohh, must be a cat.
The robin was also sounding off.
Half an hour later all the groceries are put away and I have made a cup of tea for lunch with croissant, and the mockers are still at it.
Must be serious, I thought.  So I went out. 
They were sitting on some bamboo my neighbor put up, staring at his house.
So I looked up.  There was his cat looking out of the window on that side.
Mockingbirds don't understand the concept of the cat being locked up so they kept at it, screaming "Cat! Cat!"
The other birds couldn't see no stinking cat so they all went home.
The mockers kept it up.  I went out again.  This time it was on the other side, where a cat was sitting in the window enjoying the show.  (Yes, both my neighbors have cats, more than one apiece.)
Finally both cats disappeared into the house. 
It wasn't bad enough the cats showed up.  Now, like the Cheshire Cat, they had disappeared.
Normally, when a cat is outside, the mockingbirds will work off their anger chasing it away, diving on it and pecking it until it's off their turf.
This time, the damn things just weren't there any more.  The mockers couldn't understand it.
For an hour, the mockers flew from the fence on one side of my yard, looking up at one neighbor's windows, to the fence on the other side of my yard, looking up at the other set of windows, screaming "Cat" the whole time.
Finally, the Mrs. got hungry and remembered she had kids to feed, so she left.
The Mr. kept it up for another half hour before he went to lunch.  Then he was right back at it.
About 4 p.m. Mrs. Mocker came back and chased her husband all over the roof of a gardening shed on one side, screaming at him, "I can't take care of these kids all alone.  You drop this nonsense and come help me!"
Didn't make any difference.
The robin came by and told Mr. Mocker, "You're crazy, man.  Ain't no cat here."
Mr. Mocker kept screaming "Cat!"
The house sparrows in the cedar tree started up, loudly gossiping so everybody could hear: "Cat's crazy, I mean, the man's crazy, no cat around, why's he so upset."
He ignored them.
About 5:30 his wife brought him a nice tempting orange berry to eat.  He wouldn't take it.  She flew off in despair.
He kept it up until about 6:10 when a brief thunderstorm seemed to cool him off. 
Mockingbirds don't mind rain, in fact they are as likely to come out and shower off in it as to hide from it, but this time was different.
When the rain ended, the robins came out.  They like rainbaths, too, and then they usually do some singing.
And here came the mockingbird back for another go-round.  By 6:45 they were both back at it.
Not until almost 8 p.m. did my poor friend Flicker Jee the catbird get a word in edgewise.
With the dark, things got quiet.  Mr. Mocker went home.  His wife probably gave him a good scolding because things were back to normal -- QUIET -- the next morning.
Turns out it was the famous "new parents" situation.  This is the first year of mating for this pair, and their first chick was just out of the nest.  I have been hearing it peep from the bushes and seeing leaves flutter when it moves or the parents show up with bugs for it. 
I've known lots of mockingbirds over the years but I've never seen one, let alone a pair, this crazed, not even with a chick newly out of the nest.  So it never occurred to me that I might want to kill a mockingbird, apologies to the shades of Gregory Peck.  Until this happened.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved.

DIY -- beets fermented and beet kvass

Ukrainians swear by the health benefits of beet kvass, a fermented beet juice.
Actually the history of beets is that in Roman times, the thin yellow roots were used for a medicinal tonic.
Beet kvass continues this tradition.
Ukrainian Jews call the fermented beets and juice "russell" and I just finished my first batch.
As you  can see from this site, almost everybody got mold on theirs while it fermented.
http://thenourishingcook.com/how-to-make-fermented-beet-kvass/#comment-40811

So did I.  You just skim it off.  I went the extra step of boiling the beet juice before pouring it into the jars and putting lids on.

Notice that the recipe at the site uses whey.  This is not kosher to use with meat to make russel fleisch, a Jewish recipe.  My recipe uses just beets and water, and ferments for 3 weeks not one.

If you "don't like beets" you probably won't like russel or kvass or pickled beets, another great recipe.  But I didn't like beets either until we grew them for ourselves and I got to eat them within 24 hours of picking, before all the sugar turned into starch.
Remember, it was beet sugar that made millions for Lazar Brodsky and Yona Zaitsev.  Sholem Aleichem writes about Brodsky who built what is now the Kiev, Ukraine, Chabad (Chassidic) building.  Yona Zaitsev founded the brick factory where Mendel Beilis worked.

So if you have a small garden, try growing beets in it.  Eat the thinnings in salads or soup, and then try cooking the beets fresh out of the ground after scrubbing and peeling.  You might find out that the beets "you don't like" add a robust, earthy flavor to soup and stew.
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved