Ruskin on tsnius

...or something.

 Not Torah, just interesting.

“...I said of that great and pure society of the dead, that it would allow 'no vain or vulgar person to enter there.' What do you think I meant by a 'vulgar' person? What do you yourselves mean by 'vulgarity'? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy, ---of quick understanding, ---of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called the “tact” or “touch-faculty” of body and soul; that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures; ---fineness and fulness of sensation beyond reason...”

Sesame and Lilies, para. 28.

Can't Help Lovin' that Carpet...?

The Port of Portland has announced that it will replace the turquoise airport carpet we all grew up with with a new, green one.

Chaos!

Pandemonium!

How can you do this to us!

Exclaimed an entire generation of Oregonians – each of whom realized only in that moment that there are others who feel an attachment to the carpet.

The secret is out. It's a social revolution. We are all gathered round this carpet like a Dead Poets Society; only, the dead poet is a carpet.

We express our love for the carpet through art: people have begun making murals, cross-stitch samplers, yarn colorways. There is this crackling new unity among Portlandians and I'm enjoying every minute of it. But I keep asking myself why I, and the rest of us, get so emotional thinking about a carpet.

I suspect it's because we all grew up traversing that carpet en route to adventure and again to home. When you see the carpet, you know you are about to embark on a great expedition. And airport walls all look alike but when you see that carpet again, you know you are about to come back to people who know and like you.

When you return to PDX after years of wandering in places where you are known as the Portlander because there are no others, the carpet is the first thing you see with which you have Portlanderness in common.

When I got older, the whole idea of carpet became really arresting, coming from Israel's holy white stone floors back to this land of complications where a person treads on fabric loops. It's so complicated. It's so extravagant. It's so American.

You can go and travel and see the world and change in a hundred ways, but the carpet remains constant.

So it is rather a shock to the system that they are replacing it with something hunter-green and trendy.

Ah, I guess the world is changing that fast, after all. Everyone stick near the boat.

I love that the first instinct of Portlandians, upon receiving this jolt, is to make art about it. I admire that the Port of Portland's response is to give away the carpet for free to the distributors who will make sure that as many sentimental people as possible get a slice of it. ...And I love that Portland is such a total original that we are all bonding over a carpet.

Megillas Esther with a Different Voice for Each Character

http://www.torahanytime.com/listen-legacy-audio/?file=12213

The Book of Esther read aloud by the one and only Rabbi O.

HSF February Challenge: Blue.

This is another clothes-sewing post.

Scattered Thoughts on the Footage from the Knessiah Gedolah

I.

Last night I lamented in writing that (at least in my limited experience – I could be totally wrong about this) while it is possible to seek out stories about the talmidim of, say, the mussar yeshivos, it is a little harder to find stories about the talmidim of the Aruch laNer, to give a real tzura of what a gadol from Frankfurt was like.

This was the last thing I wrote before I went to sleep.

Then I woke up and pretty much the first thing I saw in the morning was this (thank you Prof. Weingrad):

http://rygb.blogspot.ca/2015/02/the-fuller-first-knessia-gedola-video.html

(I'm linking to Rabbi Bechhofer's because he posted the list of who's who)

Hazorim bdima brina yiktzoru, it is the footage from the first Knessia Gedola (I guess – it says Vienna, not Katowice); it is footage of Moreinu Rosenheim, and one R' Ehrmann (but he can't be the one I'm thinking of, right?), and some others whose names are not as familiar to me; and – R' Chaim Ozer, and – R' Elchanan - Wasserman, and – the Chofetz Chaim.

For this video the Internet was created.

(Let me just translate that a minute:

I had been lamenting that I don't know how to get a clear idea of what the great Torah scholars of Germany were like; but this film has a few of them in it, along with some from eastern Europe who have been a household name for the past 70 years but whom nobody has ever seen on film.)

II.

Nevertheless, thank G-d there was no movie camera at Sinai, or in the sukkah of Pachad Yitzchak, or at any other event in between.

I say this because in watching a film it is hard not to confuse the event itself with the film of it.

Still, it is hard not to be disappointed when a man in the film puts his hand over the camera.

III.

The Torah world gets its learning from texts and conversation. This is the only time I have seen it converge around a film.

IV.

I hope that teachers and parents will continue to allow their children many years of Chofetz Chaim stories before they show this film. I want my daughter to know the Chofetz Chaim as the Chofetz Chaim of the sefarim he authored and of the stories before she ever sees the Chofetz Chaim as a figure on a screen.

Lehavdil elef alfei havdalos, my mother did not let me see Fantasia until I was twelve. Once you have seen Fantasia, whenever you hear one of the pieces in it you have to try hard to think of the music as music, rather than as an accompaniment to the film you are not watching.

V.

It is an immense gift to the generation that this film has come to its attention.

To be able to see how a person carries himself – is a most extraordinary thing.

VI.

I imagine the good folks at the University of South Carolina trying to fathom what just happened.

How would I explain what it means to us to see the Chofetz Chaim on film – or what the Chofetz Chaim means to us?

I cast about for analogies – analogies fail me.

VII.

If the Chofetz Chaim is on Youtube, then anything is possible.

Excuse me a moment while I go fill up my oil lamp with vinegar.

I feel like this changes the nature of the Internet entirely.

35 by 35 no. 16, Chartreuse

Not much to say about this one; I used Butterick 4054 again, this time without a collar.

Loops requested a bright chartreuse cotton broadcloth.

When it was done, I thought it looked too plain: this pattern is very simple design and looks better in a print. So we poured the button-box out on the floor and stitched colored buttons round the edges. Much better.

The Complete and Total Beginner's Introduction to Sewing: How Clothing Works.

This post is about clothes.

First Historical Sew Fortnightly challenge: a Paean to Flat-Felled Seams; or, What It's Like to Sew Fettuccine, and a Possible Pshat in a Little Poem by Sarah Schenirer

This year the HSF is the Historical Sew Monthly, which is a speed I can actually keep up with.

The motivation fits in nicely with my own sewing plans. So I'm in, way at the beginners' end of the HSFers.

The rest of this post is about clothes.

35 by 35: A Bog Coat and Eustace Tilley

13, Bog Coat.

For Purim, my husband dressed as a Newspaper.

I made him a bog coat of tulle. Patterns don’t get much more basic than a bog coat. The tulle, to my surprise, behaved nicely.

Is it a good project for a beginner? The pattern is great. Tulle is hard to hold in place, but it hides mistakes nicely.

14, Eustace Tilley.

I went as a New Yorker. Loops decided to be the Princess of Lemons again.

I wasn't planning to make Persimmon a costume – time was at a premium. Too bad, I said, because it would be too perfect if the child of a newspaper and a New Yorker went as The New Yorker. But I simply do not have time to make her a Eustace Tilley costume.

And then it occurred to me that we could even put the pacifier on a string instead of a monocle – and suddenly it was just too too perfect and I had to make it.

Image forthcoming if I ever get the camera to behave.

Color – maroon for the coat, turquoise for the vest, white for the collar: all cotton or polycotton scraps left over from former projects. As much as I loathe artifice in dress, I sewed them all together and it was a one-piece garment.

Pattern – I slapped a pair of her pajamas on the dining room table and traced them. I am chuffed that it looks and functions like a garment, though it pulls in the wrong places when the occupant wiggles.

I did not plan the construction at all – just worked blindly. 'Oh, I need a collar this shape – I guess I'll cut here and see if that works. Oh, it didn't, so what if I cut here?' I topstitched everything to save time and occasionally resorted to ladder-stitching (what you use to close up a stuffed animal after it's been stuffed, since you can't get to the wrong side anymore) because, not having the mind of an engineer, I see ladder-stitching as the answer to all problems.

Is it a good project for a beginner? No. I should really learn to drape and draft. But a baby costume is a great project for a beginner, because no one, least of all the intended victim, will ever notice the craftsmanship.

Experiments in Teaching Medieval Jewish History, Part III: Islamic Spain and North Africa

The Chosen Path is an ideal textbook. But our school doesn't have it, so I made my own.

Some sources I liked, some of which I shared with the girls:

-Pictures of Islamic architecture from this place and time. Walking through one of those buildings with all the arches is like turning a kaleidoscope. I have seen the architecture of the Alhambra occasionally attributed to Shmuel haNaggid; at any rate, he seems to have been responsible for the building or restoration of much of it.

-There is a nice painting which imagines the court of Abd ar-Rahman III.

-Correspondence between Chisdai ibn Shaprut and the King of Kuzar. I made a mini-unit on Jews in out-of-the-way places – Yemen, India, China, Kurdistan, Kuzar – which I'm not sure I would do again. Most people just stick Kuzar into the unit on Spain, although Chisdai ibn Shaprut accomplished a great many more important things than this correspondence.

-Picture of Kuzari coin found in Viking plunder. (If you search for "Khazar coin" you can find a clearer picture.) I saw this in the Viking museum in Stockholm. Coins from Islamic lands have printed on them, in Arabic, the Islamic declaration of faith; this one, which was minted or re-minted in the kingdom of Kuzar, has one word different, so it says, “There is no god but G-d, and Moses is His prophet.”

-Shemuel HaNaggid by R' Asher Lehmann is a fun introduction to this era. I used the chapter entitled Cordoba.

-There is a wonderful handout floating around Neve that shows the seven “binyanim” of Hebrew grammar as seven multi-story buildings on a street, with good examples.

-Zemiros – Dror Yikra is by Dunash ibn Labrat; Ki Eshmera Shabbos, Tzam'a l'cha Nafshi, and that one with all the “kor”s in it for Shabbos Chanuka are by R' Avraham Ibn Ezra; Yom Shabbason (yona matza) is by R' Yehuda haLevi.

-Other poems by R' Shmuel HaNaggid, R' Yehuda haLevi, R' Shlomo ibn Gvirol, R' Moshe ibn Ezra (Nafshi ivisicha balaila). They can't go through life without having read Tzion halo tishali, which is kinna #36 on Tisha b'Av. (They said one of their previous teachers had them recite it every day.) The general favorite of the piyutim I gave them was Shachar avakeshcha by R' Shlomo ibn Gvirol. They also liked Elokai mishknosecha and Shalom l'cha yom hashevi'i by R' Yehuda haLevi. I had them pick some to write pastiches. I thought they would appreciate a piece of R' Shlomo ibn Gvirol's Ani ha'ish, which I remember liking as a high schooler; but it didn't grab them as it did me.

-Abu Ishaq's poetic attack on R' Shmuel haNaggid. Do I want to link to this? It's extremely nasty and does not deserve to be linked to. Here it is.

-Doubles: Poem in praise of R' Shmuel haNaggid by R' Yehuda haLevi. Part of a poem to R' Moshe ibn Ezra by R' Yehuda haLevi. Poetic correspondence between R' Avraham ibn Ezra and Rabbeinu Tam.

-The Ibn Ezra also has a poem about chess.

-The Kuzari, by R' Yehuda haLevi – paragraphs 11-43 in the first section. Before I gave it to them I asked them to answer, in writing, “What is Judaism?” – the Chaver's answer is very interesting (he comes from a completely different angle than the Emunos veDeos).

-Rif and Rabbeinu Chananel – I couldn't find what I really wanted, but there are lots of mussary Rabbeinu Chananels. (Also, somewhere he discusses a recent invention called a table fork.)

-Ri Migash – according to Rabbi Geometry, the most famous Ri Migash is on Bava Basra 45a.

-Chovos HaLevavos – I couldn't pick just one piece to give them :) Rabbi Geometry says that the most famous perek is Shaar HaBechina, and that people don't learn the first one.

If I had a different sort of class I would have taped arches all over the walls and had them come in costume one day and recline around* eating oranges and reciting piyutim, both original and from the sourcebook. I didn't think it would fly with this group.

*actually, I am not sure what people, let alone the Jews, sat on in Islamic Spain.

Florence Nightingale

What follows is based on a single biographer's account, not serious research.

Florence Nightingale was a fascinating lady: intensely depressed; she heard voices; she hallucinated; she determined that she had a calling in life but it took her a number of years to decide that that was nursing (which at the time was unheard of for an aristocratic lady, and for good reasons) and every time she determined to leave home to attend the nursing school in Germany, members of her family said, “Oh, how can you leave us! Bring me my smelling salts – I shall faint!” and she relented and stayed.

Meanwhile, she wrote to hospitals around Europe requesting information on medical care, and stored the papers in her room in her parents' house, taking particular delight in the statistics.

The man she wanted to marry proposed to her; but she turned him down in the idea that he would interfere with her nursing work. This at a time when she had neither received training in nursing nor done any.

She was miserable and kept hallucinating because she felt that she ought to be nursing but could not bring herself to do it.

Finally, when she was thirty, she took the initiative to leave home and go to nursing school.

When she came home from the school, she took charge of a London hospital; then the government heard about her expertise and sent her to the Crimea organize the military hospitals there.

When the Crimean War ended she came back to England and spent the rest of her life organizing British, Canadian, and American hospitals. She is evidently responsible for modern medical care as we know it.

Cecil Woodham-Smith says (in a different biography) that the Crimean War produced two geniuses: the engineer who designed the Russian defenses at Sebastopol, and Florence Nightingale.

I thought that was a very impressive story.

I think it's fascinating that she carried her life in a box for thirty years before finally taking the lid off, and then turned out to be a genius.

The moral I take out of the story of Florence Nightingale is: if you know what you should be doing, do it; don't wait thirty years...!

Jewish scouting program!

Moriya!

It's not Girl Scouts... it is a Scouting-style program for girls with Torah & middos content as well as hands-on skills.

It's open to grown-ups also.

Check it out:

Moriya groups!