avakesh

Longing for Moschiach b'nusach Teiman

"...this is ancient Arabic,there are 2 type of yemenite songs...holy singing and secular singing (also called the women singing).
the women singing is only arabic (simple arabic)
the holy singing is hebrew and ancient Arabic.
this song was writen by rabi yehuda halewi (born before 1075) yes this song is ancient, almost 1000 years old.
it's very hard to translate but i'll try
the words are :
assalak ya 7ur algnani (i'll ask for you oh you the handsome from the garden of eden)
lima lima 3adabtni (oh why oh why you torture me)
wa ana a3hdak daim zmani (and i believed in you,oh you who loved in my times)
takrim liman hu haini (cheer the one who is depressed)
aftantni fi da al mkani (you charmed me in this place)
kam 3ad tkun r'ayib mini (until when you'll be far from me)
ya muftiya algawl wal m3ani (oh you who solves any problem)
galbi bi7ubak mum7ani (my hart is tortured by your love)
this song is about the Messiah the singer is asking for him to come"

R. Yisroel Odesser

18 Cheshvan is the Yohrzeit of Rav Yisrael Odesser, leader of Breslover Chassidim . R. Odesser is known for having received a letter from R. Nachman, a petek with words of chizuk and the famous Na Nach Nachman Nachman Me'Uman. This facinating story, rich in reigous and psychological overtones had been published as "Letter from Heaven", with an approbation of R. Moshe Feinstein.

Here is more on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yisroel_Ber_Odesser  and http://www.moharan.com/pages_angl/page_rabbi_israel_angl.htm

In praise of superstition

There are people who don't like superstitions. As they see it, beliefs in amulets, demons, angels, segulos, saints and the power of spoken word to affect reality detracts from God's omnipotence. After all, He is the Almighty, and allowing other beings or phenomena to share in his power partakes of idolatry. Yet superstitions are hard to extricate from religion. In every religious system, such beliefs are closely associated with piety and with true and persistent  religious spirit. Maimonidean-like philosophical frameworks that set a transcendent Being in opposition to a lowly world, do not only not succeed in conveying a living religion to the masses, they often have an unintended effect of impoverishing the spirit and vitiating the commitment of the elite. It is of course an over-generalization to say that Maimonideans tend to be over-cerebral, dismissive of expressions of religiosity, and unaware of the great stores of religious feeling and sensibility that others possess. However, at least sometimes (and I know that I will get flack for it), they are cynical, distant and secretly racked by doubts... at the same time as they espouse a religious vision of grandeur and beauty. Why is it so? What can we learn from it?

I think that  it is important to realize that superstition and its relatives present a vision of a world suffused with spirituality. It is not just God and the universe oout there, it is a world filled with unending gradations of supernatural.  The spiritual is just at hand, ready for taking. In a world like this, the spiritual is very, very close, part and parcel of existence. In fact, in such a world leading a purely physical existence is distinctly abnormal. For the affordable price of credulity, folk religion acquires an abiding closeness to God in all His manifestations, right here, all around us. The difference between popular sensibility and Maimonidean rationality is like that of a luscious rain forest and the driest of deserts. The former surrounds its dwellers with life-giving moisture from all ends. The latter deprives them of life-sustaining water, leaving them to be nourished by trust that it exists somewhere else and with measured, limited, barely sufficient cupfuls in their canteens.

The Gad Elbaz penomena

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=625436

Farbrengen

Black Fire on White Fire

There is an exquisite saying of Chazal, to which I would like to suggest an interpretation that underscores once again the value of careful study and detailed application of the science of language to the art of interpretation. Before I do so, however, I can resist sharing another interpretation with you.

The statement is: "R. Simeon ben Lakish said: The Torah given to Moses was written with black fire upon white fire, sealed with fire, and swathed with bands of fire. While writing it, Moses wiped off the reed on his hair -- thus he received the radiance that was to emanate from his countenance (JT, Shel. 6:1, 49d)

Some have approached this statement as referring to the actual writing as black fire and the spaces in between the letters as white fire. Thus R. Soloveitchik is reported to say that one must know how to read between the lines for some things are written in black fire but others are found between the lines, as white fire. For another such approach, see http://www.geocities.com/m_yericho/ravkook/VAYIK64.htm

Moshe Idel collected some of statements from the early Kabbalists in an excellent discussion of this saying in his Absorbing Reflections, an erudite, overlong and tedious work on interpretation methods in Kabbola (ch.1). Of particular interest is the following quote from R. Yosef Ergas, the noted contemporary of Ramchal.

"On the parchment... there is a likeness of an image...because under the YOD of ink there is one white YOD of the parchment which sustains the Yod of ink....if the letters will fly and disappear from (the parchment). it will remain white without any likeness at all".

What I think he is saying is that once you put a letter down on paper, you define the space under it, so that even if the letter is erased, that white under-letter remains, visible or not. Thus also, the letters of the Torah brought into being white fire, the space upon which they were imposed, and which was also eternal and pre-existent by the virtue of its suitability for the black fire that will eventually crown it.

Now to my suggestion.

What I might propose is that Torah employs a way of presenting information that relies heavily on omissions, in a way that makes what is not said communicate in tandem with what is said. Eric Auerbach in the first chapter of Mimesis pointed out that gaps, shadows, lack of description and reliance on the reader supplying the background is an integral feature of Biblical writing. It is these features that make Biblical writing so unique and pwerful. Perhaps then, this implied background is the white fire that outlines and complements the black fire of what Torah actually writes.

Here is a quote that expresses the concept beautifully, writing about poetry.

"Another  way of saying the same thing is to suggest that that the white space between stanzas means something. If nothing is conceived to be taking place within it, if no kind of silent pressure or advance or reconsideration or illumination or perception seems to be going on in that white space, the reader has a legitimate question to ask," why is that white space there, and what am I supposed to do with it " (P. Fussel,  Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, MCGraw-Hill, 1979, p.155)

Nach Yomi

The 4th cycle of Nach Yomi is ending and the next cycle will begin on Thursday, 20th of Cheshvan. By learning a perek a day one completes Nach in two years.

To get a calendar please fax: 02-538-0574, or email: [email protected]

Torah spoke in the language of men

The statement that Torah spoke in the language of men (Brochos 31b) bears many interpretation. I offer a novel one that draws upon a well-known observation.

Linguists know that spoke and written language differ substantially. Whereas the latter employs a complicated sentence structure and varied syntax, the former is composed of short sentences, direct appeals, and not as many prepositions. So, for an example, spoken speech might string a series of short sentences together and connect them with "and". This is because spoken speech employs intonation and emphasis to connect clauses in a way impossible in writing.

Compare this example of my own choosing.

Written:

When in the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, the Earth was desolate and empty, while the spirit of God fluttered over the waters.

That's written language.

Here is spoken language.

In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. And the Earth was empty and desolate. And the spirit of God fluttered over the waters, And God say - Light. And , was Light!

It is now recognized that when cultures transit from spoken to written style of communication, they tend to transcribe speech exactly as they hear it used. In the beginning of printing, written speech was nigh incomprehensible, for it's own essential style was not yet widely understood or appreciated. Early English prose, for example, is monotonous, run-on, and without a sense of style or form that later writing possesses. I do not imply that Torah was written down after being oral (chas vashalom)d; only that it was a sole written work at a time that there were few other written materials and it was, therefore, written in the language that men spoke. Thus, the language of the Torah was a spoken language, whereas the language of Isaiah etc was a written language.

The Rabbis knew how to write. They wrote legal documents, legal decisions, midrashic aggada. They realized the difference in styles, and so they enunciated the principle that Torah spoke in the language of men.

How the Torah tells a story.

The account of how the servant of Avaraham met Rivka is repeated twice in our week's Parsha, when it is first narrated and then when he re-tells it to Lavan and Besuel. Chazal took note of this fact. Said R. Acha: Better is light talk of the slaves of patriarchs' families than the Torah of descendents. The section of Eliezer is two, three pages - he says it and repeats. The defilement of insects is one of the main categories of the Torah and it is derived only from an extra verse expression (Genesis Rabbah 60, 11). The fact, however, remains that repetitions abound both in Torah narratives and legal section. Laws of Kashrus are found in 2 places (Shemini and R'eh), the story of dedication of the Mishkan in three, of the giving of the Torah twice in Shemos and once in Devarim, the laws of Hebrew Slave in two disparate versions etc. In fact, one might say that this kind of repetition is more of a rule than an exception. This general feature of Chumash structure has been seized upon by Bible critics who saw in it strong evidence for activity of a supposed Redactor who spliced together different sources into a unified narrative. Sometimes he elected to combine different versions and at other times he simply incorporated them in different places verbatim as he found them (R"L). Needless to say, Chazal have already dealt with this narrative feature and bequeathed us a simple and sensible solution. As they saw it, the general principle in these cases appears to be: Any parsha that was said and repeated, was repeated only for a detail that is new (Sotah 3a). How is one to understand this? A parallel source suggests that the explanation of this statement goes something like this. The Torah could have certainly sufficed with telling us the story or teaching us the Halacha all in one time. It chose, however, to purposely leave out an important detail so that it not be overlooked or lost among other details; in other words, in order to highlight it in repetition as it repeats the entire section again. Every section that was said in one place and a detail (or matter) was omitted and it came back and repeated it in another place - it only repeated it because one detail was omitted (Sifri Bamidbar 5,5). This statement represents a conscious compositional technique. What is the purpose of such literary device? Perhpas this: To put it into modern language, we can invoke the cinematographic device of "split screen" action, first used by Ilya Erenburg some 80 years ago. This quite simple consists of viewing two different representations of the same scene or event at the same time, running side by side at the same time. The advantage of this method is stereoscopic vision, superior perception of depth and better grasp of specific relationships between details and particulars of the scene s portrayed. By enabling us to experience the two narratives or legal sections at once, specific details come into sharper view. Viewed in this fashion, the repetitions, far from being the result of inept editing, become an intentional literary and exegetical technique employed by a unique work of Divine literature that anticipated contemporary developments in storytelling and science of composition by some three thousand years. It is precisely its Divine origin that enabled the Chumash to utilize literary techniques unknown by the Ancient world and only discovered (or re-discovered) with the flowering of knowledge and creativity in the modern era.[1] 1 The approach taken here is quite different from that taken by Mordechai Breuer in his Pirkei Bareishis. There he argues that the kind of storytelling that we are familiar with in the Chumash is the way people used to tell stories or teach legal precedent. He applies the talmudic statement "dibra Torah k'lshon bnei adom", originally used narrowly regarding repetitions of words to the entire narrative structure of Chumash. I find the entire approach unconvincing for many reasons, both those advanced by others (see Modern scholarship in the study of Torah, ed. S. Carmy, Jason Aronson, 1996) and because of my own objections. The latter center largely on the uniqueness of the Biblical narrative technique among ancient literature, a point made by E. Auerbach in his classic Mimesis more than 50 years ago (for a short review see here)

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