Goosey Sukkos

One of the best parts of Sukkos in this particular (chilly) corner of the Diaspora is sitting in the sukkah, looking up through the schach, watching all the Canadian geese fly south.

#SilenceYourEgo

A worthwhile project, brought to you by NCSY:

http://silenceyourego.tumblr.com/

Dark Mink

Some Israeli friends of mine were once invited to a wedding at which the color scheme for family members was Champagne. They thought that was hilarious: "Champagne? That's a color?"

I have lived among New Yorkers long enough that it no longer strikes me as hilarious that a wedding would have a color scheme, or that the color would be called Champagne... but I did get the giggles recently when my friend was busy calling bridal shops searching for a garment in Dark Mink.
"Dark Mink? That's a color? What color is a mink, anyway?" -- but all the shops knew exactly what she was talking about.
Giggle.

...whereupon we here in the Rain made a list of colors that we'd like to set as the color scheme for a party.
We tried to come up with colors that you can almost visualize... you're sure you know what color that is... except that, on second thought, you'd be hard-pressed to specify exactly what it is...

Faded Venezuela
Burnt Horizon
Blase
Arctic Grape

Then we got silly...
Pepper
Yellow Cup (as opposed to plain yellow)
Off-Orange

...and sillier...
Postmodernist Aster
 Antidisestablishmentarian Pink
Yesterday's Backgammon
 Mutual Fish

I wish I could take credit for coining the name Mutual Fish, but that is the name of a real fish store in Seattle.

 Then we listed all the shades of yeshivish suits that the men might wear to this wedding...
Raven
Coal
Tar
Pupil
Times New Roman
Flat Tire
Black Licorice
Vivid Bat

Plus ca change

Scrambling to find primary sources for a course on medieval Jewish history, I came across a piece of Karaite poetry.

It sounds exactly like a disgruntled blogger, but in rhyme.

Pretty funny.

The more I read about it, the more I suspect people in the days of the Gaonim became Karaites for the same reasons that people today become bloggers: the desire to air imagined or unexamined grievances by innovating in public.

Defining Gothic

I just discovered this definition of the Gothic in print; then someone asked me to "share the link" -- so here it is.

John Ruskin was a Victorian champion of Gothic architecture. His list of its defining characteristics tickled my fancy, not only because I like metaphor but because it seems an apt description of Gothic subculture.
Any Goths reading this will kindly bear in mind that Ruskin was a great admirer of the Gothic:

I believe, then, that the characteristics or moral elements of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their importance:
1. Savageness.
2. Changefulness.
3. Naturalism.
4. Grotesqueness.
5. Rigidity.
6. Redundance.
These characters are here expressed as belonging to the building; as belonging to the builder, they would be expressed thus: -- 1. Savageness or Rudeness. 2. Love of Change. 3. Love of Nature. 4. Disturbed Imagination. 5. Obstinacy. 6. Generosity.
...I shall proceed to examine them in their order.

The entire chapter is entitled The Nature of Gothic. I am sure it is all over the Internet.
I don't agree with everything he says, but it makes for highly entertaining reading.

Quote of the Day: on Rome

"Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven."

--a character in Russian fiction

Book Review: The Dressmaker's Guide

The Dressmaker's Guide, 1840-1865, Second Edition, by Elizabeth Stewart Clark, has not received many online reviews, so I thought I'd describe it a bit. I have not been asked to do this by the author.

This is a ladies-only post: any gentlemen are invited to excuse themselves.

The book is self-published, intended for the Civil War reenacting (“living history”) crowd. It doesn’t feel self-published: it is well laid-out and the font is appropriate. The drawings are clear.

A publisher would have given the text one more edit, to clear up minor annoyances like typos, then/than, and superfluous adverbs.

The book is not fluff: it is 300 pages of solid information. The first 70 are relevant only to reenactors, addressing matters like textile accuracy and class-specificity. The next 20 pages cover basic hand-sewing techniques in detail, with some suggestions of materials that sound intriguing (so that's what twist is!). And then comes the fun stuff: how to make 19th-century piping, how to make period-correct gathers and half a dozen different kinds of pleats, and finally how to draft (or rather drape) 19th-century garments, including nine kinds of sleeves and about as many bodices. I believe the selection of shapes is, with a few exceptions listed below, comprehensive.

The book does not elaborate on the many styles into which these shapes can be developed without further instruction (e.g., where you might put trim): it assumes that you have at your disposal a large collection of period images from which to derive inspiration.* It concerns only women’s clothing, though I assume the techniques for children’s clothes are similar.

What I love about the book is the level of detail: e.g., the author not only tells you how to make box pleats, she explains how to position them so that they look nice, and which parts of the pleat need to be precise and where you can fudge; and how to size and space the stitches that hold them together; and how many pleats “look well” per skirt.

Missing from the book (or at least I couldn't find them) are:

-pagoda sleeves

-ruched (etc.) trim

-blouses, as opposed to bodices: how to finish the bottoms, put in tucks, and make the high, ruffled collars of c. 1850

-where to insert the supports in – the gentlemen did clear out, right?

-maternity

-internal cross-references

-a list of resources, and

-an index.

The book is costly, probably because it is a combination (and expansion) of two books that the author had previously published separately. But I do not know of another book that explains clearly how to draft, say, a 19th-century armscye or a fiddleback; and the technique for narrow hems made me very, very happy.

The author’s website is http://www.thesewingacademy.com/

*such as a public library, or the Internet; or, there are whole books of nothing but daguerreotypes, published expressly for this purpose.

Brainwashing

Babyloops saw a man eating soup, and asked for some.
"No, Babyloops," I said, "It's not kosher."
She kept admiring the soup.
"Should we go find you something kosher?" I suggested.
"Find you something kosher!" she agreed, and off we went.
"Do you want a banana?"
"No! I want kosher!"
"Do you want chips?"
"No! I want kosher!"
"A banana is kosher. So are chips."
"No, I want kosher!"
So I gave her a carton of Haagen-Dazs and a spoon.
"I like kosher," she said.


[**the word "please" has since entered her vocabulary.]

Funny mistranslation

‎"But for a burst of pizzas, throw little somethings all over."


- advice on how to host a party, from the Jerusalem phone book

Occupy Entropy II

There is no such thing as the present. (This is reflected in the way the present tense works in Hebrew.) Time swishes from the past to the future; you can reference the past, and you can reference the future, but you cannot point to any part of Time and say, "This is the present," because by the time you do, it is already in the past.

However, we have the ability to stop time from swishing by us. To make a free-will choice to do something good, is to do something eternal, as the Source of all good is eternal: to remove those moments from the passage of time.

Occupy entropy!

In the Wee Hours of the Morning in a Kitchen Full of Spray Bottles This Seemed Extremely Funny

For the full effect, you have to stop singing abruptly the moment you run out of syllables.

On the evening before Pesach, my husband kashered for me
Five steel pots,
Four electric burners,
Three countertops,
Two kitchen sinks,
And a blech!

What We Wore in Egypt

This is not based on serious research, only the Internet; but from what I can make out, it seems that...

The Egyptians went round chiefly in white linen. The more wealthy you were, the finer your linen -- which is why garments in Egyptian art are sometimes depicted as transparent.

The Jews wore wool -- shelo shinu es malbusham, we did not switch over to traditional Egyptian dress. And, at least when we had time, we dyed it. Woolen garments, like shepherding, were anathema to the sheep-worshipping Egyptians.

Wool in summer is not as crazy as it sounds -- a light wool is more comfortable than, say, a light cotton.
But I did find this amusing, because even today certain Jews are the ones wearing black wool suits in the summer...

On Being a Giving Person

My neighbor, Mrs. Monsoon:

"If someone tells me that her son is sick, and I don't say, 'Can I take the rest of your children? Can I cook you a meal?' that makes me a small-minded person, doesn't it?"

Food for thought.

VIDEO: Appointment with Infinity

Search Terms Leading to This Blog

Some of them tickle my fancy.

orthodox jewish teddy bear
I, too, would like to meet a teddy bear that expresses an interest in mitzvah observance.

why do orthodox jews not like green
For the same reasons anyone else does or doesn't, I'm afraid.

name of jewish spoons
??

freezer sounds like bagpipes
Anyone who types a simile into a search engine is someone I wish I knew better.

Thanks, folks, for the entertainment. I hope you all found what you wanted.

The Push-Button Umbrella

Here's one I hadn't heard before, reprinted with the kind permission of Project Genesis -- torah.org.
Retold by one R' Becker, who elaborates on it here.

A well-known story is told wherein Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, (of blessed memory, known affectionately by the Torah world as the "Alter [Lit. elder]" of Slabodka) was diagnosed as having a condition requiring medical treatment at one of the larger medical centers in the area. After listening carefully to the pros and cons of each medical facility, the Alter elected to go to St. Petersburg for treatment. A student escorted the Alter throughout the extended period of his recovery. Upon his return to Slabodka the Alter was approached by a community member who inquired regarding the Alter's absence. The Alter indicated that he had been in St. Petersburg. When asked what occasioned his visit there, the Alter responded that he had gone there to see the push-button umbrella. The astonished student, who had accompanied the Alter throughout the difficult medical ordeal, asked the Alter for an explanation.  

The Alter explained that he had, indeed, chosen St. Petersburg after carefully weighing the pros and cons of each facility. However, a short while earlier, the Alter had been traveling on behalf of his yeshiva and had passed through the train depot at St. Petersburg and was intrigued by the sight of the new invention, the push-button umbrella, being opened by a resident of that cosmopolitan city. The Alter, ever vigilant for traces of bias within himself, wondered whether, on some level, his decision to have the procedure done in St. Petersburg was not adulterated by a trace of interest in seeing the novel inventions which premiered there. At the moment that the gentleman asked him why he had traveled to St. Petersburg, the Alter took the opportunity to reflect on his motives rather than to glibly respond with an answer which was too obvious to be useful.

Life upon the Wicked Stage

We're famous! We're famous!
A modified version of the post Back to the Wilderness! was published in Oregon Humanities Magazine, here:
On Not Moving from Israel

Their editor made two changes to the draft I sent: altered the line breaks, and de-capitalized the word "Boss," thereby removing all reference to the Divine. Probably thought it was a typo.

On Not Moving House

The main reason that there have been so few posts lately is because the Chief Nudge of the blog has been moving house.

House?

The logistics of moving are such that we've been staying in our friends' basement while they are out of town, waiting for our belongings to arrive. Thoreau would have a field day with this, I am sure.

It is a very unsettling thing to cook in someone else's kitchen, serve on someone else's ceramic dishes, and work in someone else's living room, and I have repeated once too often that I rawther hope we can move soon.

And then we were told that the truck would arrive the next day -- joy! rapture! and then this thought:

I lived in a certain country until I had learnt to shed the hesitation of being an alien there; and then I moved to another another stage of life and another neighborhood and stayed until I had learnt to live responsibly there; so, based on precedent, it is pretty clear that the moving truck is not going to arrive until I have learnt to deal with living in someone else's house -- that is, to stop treating it as a temporary fix, mentally living out of a suitcase, putting off all important and complicated plans until I have a house to make them in... yes, it will be easier to take down notes when I have notebooks and a table not covered with someone else's papers to take them down on; and yes, it will be easier to feed my daughter pomegranates when I do not have to hover over her to keep the juice off someone else's white satin tablecloth; and so on; but to live in a perpetual state of "we shall do nothing of complexity until we have our own house to do it in" is illogical.

I have not yet learned to live properly in someone else's house -- thought I -- so it is quite impossible that the truck should come tomorrow, assurances of the moving company notwithstanding.

And then the moving company called. "Sorry, there's been a snag. The truck will not arrive until next week."

Wet

Multnomah Falls

Silver Falls

Chanukah

by Mendel Hirsch.

Looking across the street as we light our Chanukah candles in our window, I always feel outdone by the glow of colored seasonal lights illuminating the house directly across our road. 

But that is the great significance of the Chanukah Light.  Let me explain.

The common custom is that we light an additional candle every night of Chanukah.  However, Halacha (Jewish law and custom) has three levels for the candle lighting.  The minimum is one candle each night.  The second level is to light a candle for each member of the household.  Our custom is the highest level.  The same goes for where to light.  The preferred place is at the door (the common custom in Israel).  Second best is in the window facing the public (our common custom).  If neither can be done then it suffices to light on the table in middle of the room.

This tiered level mitzvah is unique to Chanukah.  Why was it established this way? 

If we look back at the story of Chanukah, we find Matityahu, a single individual, who was inspired to remain faithful to Jewish values.  He imparted this to his children, who took it to battle and inspired the nation to follow them.  All seemed lost; the majorities had already assimilated.  Matityahu could have given up, and accepted the facts of the times, but he knew, as long as one person would stand for our Truth, all is not lost.  It is upon this concept that the lighting was established.  The first and foremost level must be the single candle.  Like Matitiyahu, even if you are the only candle burning, you must let that light go forth.  The next level would be to inspire each member of your household, like Matityahu did, and light a candle for each one.  Our custom follows an even greater aspiration.  The hope that not only can we light for ourselves and our households, but also assure that our light continue to increase. 

Sometimes, this inspiration is something contained in a household, but cannot permeate the outside world.  In such a case, all we do is light on our table.  At least we can inspire ourselves.  In better times, we can let this light shine into the world, but from the inside, insulated by our home’s boundaries. So we light at our window to the outside world.  In times of spiritual strength and courage, we can open our door allowing our light to directly interact with the world.   At such times, we light at the door.

As I light the menorah, I realize that our Chanukah lights may not be the brightest lights on the block, but it doesn’t have to be.  The Chanukah lesson is well learned.  Like Matityahu, as long as this single light shines, our light will shine on.