Garden -- stop mowing

I'm hoping to mow my lawn today although there's rain in the forecast.
This should be the last time I mow this season.
Murphy's Law says that it will continue to be rainy,
and that the grass will keep growing
but I will try not to get crazed because
if there's a freeze (and temps have been in the 40s at night)
it will kill the roots of the newly short grass.
Then I'll have bare spots and there's no use planting grass after next week.
Grass is a warm-weather seed -- just watch when it is that the weed grass,
like Bermuda Grass, seeds out.  July and August and September, right?
I'm not going to spend money on turf.
BTW, you should also be taking out your warm weather veggies,
especially tomatoes.  Columbus day is the deadline.


© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Outdoors -- the promise

I was so busy with the Mendel Beilis translation last year that I missed autumn.
I have a promise to keep to myself this year: go out and see autumn.
It's just beginning.
Usually our leaves start changing before the end of September
because July and August have been dry and it continued up to autumn.
This year the trees have gotten lots of rain and they're still green.
Although I've seen a few starting to change.
The prediction is beautiful color this year.
So I'm going to put my walking shoes on later and do some tripping
on warm sun, cool air, and the first changing leaves.
© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Knitting -- the full pattern

Remember, this is sized for ME, 40 inches around and with slender wrists.  You have to increase the cuff size on the sleeves if you have large wrists or want to push the sleeves up out of the way sometimes.  There are also instructions in here for short sleeves.  You need 6 skeins of Cotton Fine or to make a short-sleeved pullover; 8 skeins for long sleeves.  Cotton Fine also comes in cones, which is equivalent to 5 skeins, but if you have to buy skeins separately, there is no way your yarn-seller can guarantee that the dyelots will be the same and that will produce an uneven result that won't look right.

BODY

Cable on 288 stitches to a #1 circular needle with at least a 24 inch tether.

Work 10 rows of k2/p2 rib.
Switch to #3 circular needle and knit 140 rows, inserting a marker yarn on each of the opposite sides and working it up to the armholes.

 Armhole

Cast off 6 stitches in each side of the marker yarn and remove.

Decrease 3 stitches at beginning of next 2 rows then purl a row.
Decrease 1 stitch at each end of next 6 knitted rows.
Stop decreasing and do stockinette for a total of 70 rows.

SHOULDERS

Cast off 5 stitches at the beginning of the next 10 rows, 5 sets of 5 on each side.

Keep remaining stitches on the tether of the needle.  This is the back of the blouse.

FRONT

Do stockinette, working the armholes the same as the back, until you have 70 rows from the start of the armhole.

Turn inside out.  Use a third needle to knit together the stitches on the end twice.

Pull the inside stitch over the outside stitch so there is one stitch left on the needle.

Repeat this for 30 stitches.

Knit around to the other armhole and repeat knitting off the shoulder.

Pick up a circular needle with 16-12 inch tether, size 1, and knit 10 rows of k2/p2 rib.

Bind off in rib.

SLEEVES

For long sleeves, cable 52 stitches onto #1 needles to fit my wrists.

Work 10 rows of k2/p2 rib as for the bottom of the body.
Do stockinette stitch, increasing a stitch at each end of the 4^th row until there are 100 stitches, then stop shaping until there are 145 rows.

For short sleeves, cable 100 stitches onto a #2 needle and do 10 rows of k2/p2 rib.

Then do stockinette stitch for 45 rows.

Bind off 6 stitches at the start of the next 2 rows.

Bind off 3 stitches at beginning of next 2 rows.
Decrease 1 stitch at each end of next and every alternate row 6 times.
Bind off 2 stitches at beginning of next 8 rows,
Bind off 3 stitches at beginning of next 2 rows,
Bind off 4 stitches at beginning of next 2 rows.
Bind off remaining stitches.

Sew sleeves into body.

I am not putting a copyright on this because I started with a pattern in my ancient, out of print Bantam Encyclopedia of Needlework.  Then I made changes for my size, and to use circular needles, and to work the neck as part of the sweater instead of separately.

Schedule

If you are looking for this week's Fact-Checking post, it's right below this.
Next week is Sukkot.
The week after that is Shemini Atseret and Simchat Torah.
The next Fact-Checking post will be the week after Simchat Torah.
If you need something to do until the Fact-Checking blog comes back,
and you're frustrated by all the times I say, you ought to read the Hebrew,
NOW is your chance.
You have three whole weeks until the next Fact-Checking post.
Go to the Bit at a Time Bible Hebrew page
and start chugging through the lessons.
By the time you catch up, you will have read the entire first aliyah of Torah.
By the end of the year, you will probably finish the first Parshah of Torah.
The day after Simchat Torah is Shabbat and the one-year Torah reading cycle will begin again.
You could follow it for the first time --
or not for the first time but as something you haven't done in a long time.
You'll depend on the translation a lot and I've given you links for finding translations.
There are a lot of Fact-Checking posts left and you'll understand them better if you know Hebrew.
As if I haven't said that a few times already.
Anyway, hoping you have an easy fast if you're fasting starting tonight,
and I hope you'll seriously consider getting deeper by learning Hebrew.


© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Telekh rachil

We’re discussing Exodus 22:27 and 23:1-3, Exodus 23:6-10 and Leviticus 19:15-16.  I said there was another take on this for which there is some basis in Talmud.

Talmud takes Leviticus 19:16 and defines telekh rachil as follows:  This is a judge who voted to acquit but the accused was convicted, or the opposite, and the judge leaves the court and when news about the verdict gets out, he says, I didn’t agree with the court but it didn’t go my way.

We’re used to this kind of thing nowadays: judges often can get a leg up in politics from the bench.  Some of them do it by picking their target voter group and publicizing what they would do in opposition to what the court did.

This helps call courts into disrepute and breeds and feeds political dissatisfaction on which some politicians have preyed, time out of mind.  Creating divisiveness is a well-known tactic for political power and Jews know about it all too well because of events in the 20^th century that started this way.

This gets people to curse leaders and judges, which is prohibited by the first Exodus verse referred to above.

The anger generated to gain political power gets people to herd together and once you get a herd of people, you get rumors, which always get out of hand as far as facts are concerned, becoming “empty” in the wording of the second verse.

This causes demonstrations and every demonstration, no matter how peaceful its start, becomes a screen for people who want violence.  They will commit violence on the edges of the group and when the police move in to stop the violence, the peaceful demonstrators get in the way because they are too naïve to understand what is going on.  Then they get arrested for obstructing the police and they get angry and you get news stories.  If you remember the demonstrations in Ferguson Missouri, you have a perfect example of what I’m talking about.  Out of 50 people arrested on one of the nights of rioting, only one lived in Ferguson and was part of the original peaceful demonstration.  People came from as far away as New York to get in on the violence.

Jewish law, in the verses listed above, rejects mob rule.  Courts are not run by elected judges or by juries.  They are run by experts in the law.  Talmud specifies that people in the audience can be allowed to render opinions in court during the trial, and the previously selected judges have to listen to them to determine if they have relevant, probative information to give or understand the law better than the judges previously did, and then “they seat him among them.”

But if he’s just mouthing off or can’t prove that he understands the facts, and then he leaves court and complains about it, he’s violating Jewish law.

You can complain all you want about people not being tried by their peers, but we all know of cases where the jurors felt compelled by law to render a verdict that the public didn’t agree with.  Sometimes the jurors also don’t agree with it, as in the Zimmerman trial of 2013.  We wouldn’t know about it except that the jurors yelkhu rachil, talked negatively about it out of court.  So this is a law limiting speech.  There isn’t free speech in Jewish law?

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Bit at a time Bible Hebrew -- how does it sound?

Now for a culture capsule. 

 

Shabbat always always always comes every seven days.  That means the first Shabbat as well as all the ones after it.  So there had to be six days – six and only six – days and not weeks or months – of creation before the first Shabbat.  That is why the Bible counts six days when things were created before Shabbat – which was also created.  If Shabbat occurred every seven months, I believe the Bible would have listed things as being created in the six months before that.  Remember, the Bible comes from the Jewish culture.

 

There are seven days of creation, the seventh being Shabbat which, like everything else, had to be created.

 

The chapter divisions were created by a Christian in the 1200s CE.  The Bible existed for centuries before that and the Jews divided it into books, which were divided into large sections for reading on Shabbat.  The large sections, the Parshot, were divided into 8 small sections called aliyot because of the accompanying ritual.

 

So the natural Jewish way of dividing Genesis has an aliyah that ends with chapter 2 verse 3, which is the last verse about the creation of Shabbat.  With verse 4, it starts a new aliyah.

 

To hear how the aliyah sounds, listen to the First Reading at this website.  Find the boldface word Bereshit at the top of the page and click the little speaker symbol on the right of it.

http://bible.ort.org/books/torahd5.asp

 

There is an English translation.  You can also listen to each verse individually.  When the audio ends, you have heard the first aliyah.

 

This website gives the sing-song chant used in synagogue services to read the Pentateuch.  The text in Hebrew will look different from the lessons on this blog; there are extra little symbols you haven’t seen before.  They are called trop and they record how to chant the words.

 

Now I’ll blow your mind.  When Jews read Pentateuch on Shabbat in synagogue, they do it from a scroll and the scroll doesn’t have these little symbols.  It doesn’t even have the vowel signs.  The person reading aloud has to memorize how to pronounce the words and how to chant them.  The audience listens carefully and may have a copy with all the symbols to refer to.  They are expected to shout out corrections when the reader goes wrong.  So synagogue readings can be noisy if the reader doesn’t know what he’s doing but if he does, the audience still sometimes chants along with him.

 

© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved

Knitting -- jumper/pullover blocking

Yes, I know it's early but I had a cricket in the house and I got up to ruin its night like it ruined mine.  Remember, Charles Dickens was an idiot.
Anyway, when working with Cotton Fine and Cotton Fleece, I never block the garments.
But if you talk to knitters, they will say you ought to.
This is especially true if you are using real Shetland wool to make Fair Isle sweaters.
The women in the Fair Isles always block their finished sweaters.
One thing blocking does for a Fair Isle made with real Shetland wool is the slight felting that keeps the steeking from unraveling.
Here is a page about blocking.  I would use spray blocking if you are going to do it.
The author says it's best for delicates, but if you get in the habit you won't ever make a mistake.
Here's a video on steam blocking.
There are lots of videos but this one seems to use a real garment, not just a swatch.
Anyway it's up to you whether you block or not.
© Patricia Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved