Today's daf includes the following famous, challenging midrash:

Rav Yehudah said in the name of Rav: when Moshe ascended Sinai to receive torah he found God affixing crowns to certain of the letters. (If you look in a sefer torah you'll see ornaments on the tops of some letters. That's what this is referring to.) Moshe asked: Master of the universe, is there anything wanting in torah that these crowns are necessary? God replied: after many generations a scholar named Akiva ben Yosef will expound upon each one of these crowns. Moshe replied: Master of the universe, please let me see this man! God said: turn around.

Moshe sat down behind eight rows of students and listened to Rabbi Akiva teach, but Moshe couldn't follow the arguments, which disturbed him. Then on one subject a disciple asked: how do we know it? Rabbi Akiva said: it is a law given to Moshe at Sinai. Comforted, Moshe returned to God and said: you have such a man as he and yet you give torah through me instead? God replied: be silent, for this is my decree. (Many tellings of this midrash end here.)

Moshe then said: Master of the universe, you have shown me his torah -- now please show me his reward. Turn around, said God, and Moshe saw them weighing out his flesh in the marketplace. Moshe protested: such torah, and such a reward?! God replied: be silent, for this is my decree. (29b)

(Akiva is one of the ten martyrs we read about on Yom Kippur. He famously died with the Sh'ma on his lips.)

Neat visualization #1: the scale of the universe, showing how big (and small) things are. Link from filkerdave.

Ooh, pretty: when Planet Earth looks like art. Link from browngirl.

Overheard at work: "Every time a developer cries, a tester gets his horns".

Neat visualization #2, from a coworker: 200 counteries, 200 years, 4 minutes.

I had sometimes wondered what the point of bots was -- what does somebody get out of creating bogus LJ accounts just to add and remove friends? (At least when they post nonsense comments they might be testing security for when the spam comes later.) Bots on Livejournal explored helps answer that question. Link from alienor.

Graph paper on demand (other types too). Thanks, loosecanon; I can never find the right size graph paper lying around when I need it.

A handy tool: bandwidth meter, because the router reports theoretical, not actual, connection speed.

And a request for links (or other input): does anybody have midrash or torah commentary on the light of creation (meaning the light of that first day)? I have the couple passasges from B'reishit Rabbah quoted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah and I have the Rashi; any other biggies? I was asked to teach a segment of a class in a few days.

The last of the burning-bush midrash:

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More midrash at the burning bush:

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More midrash (with some commentary) about God talking to Moshe at the bush. Why this sign? How did God speak? And was Moshe's reaction good or bad?

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More about burning thornbushes:

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Rabbi Symons and I have continued to study midrash, but I fell off the wagon when it came to posting translations. When I was only a little behind I had some notion that I would catch up. But no, those things never get better with time. :-) We just started our third series, so I'm going to just start here. (The first was the akeidah and the second was the crossing of the sea of reeds. Now we're doing the beginning of Moshe's leadership.)

As before, I'm generally trying to translate pretty closely, rather than finding the phrasing that flows most smoothly in English, because part of the point is to improve my language skills. Well, except for the parts where I waved my hands more broadly because I got the gist just fine but fell down on some individual words. As always, comments, corrections, and improvements are most welcome.

And let me just praise Rabbi Symons here: not only did he make me nice large photocopies of this text (the original lines were maybe 3" wide -- tiny font), but he cut out and taped together all the resulting pieces to make nice continuous columns for me! That's kindness!

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Our torah-study group has been in the fourth chapter of Genesis for a few weeks, studying the rivalry between Kayin and Hevel and the first recorded manslaughter (or murder, depending on whom you ask).

The torah text tells us that Kayin brought an offering of grain and Hevel brought an offering of the best of his flock, and God accepted the latter but not the former. (How this acceptance was communicated is left unstated.) Kayin gets pouty, God says "be careful about that", and then the text says "and Kayin said to Hevel... they were in the field (etc)". What did Kayin say? There are various takes on that, most of them leading to an argument that leads to the killing. Whether the killing is intentional or accidental is unclear (no one has yet seen a human die, so how much do they understand?). A common view seems to be that they got into an argument and Kayin acted hastily.

A midrash I saw on Shabbat gives a different spin on this:

Kayin said: God is playing favorites, and that's why he liked yours better. Hevel replied: heaven forbid! Mine was superior to yours, and that's why he liked it better. (Ah, the snotty younger sibling. :-) ) This started as a dispute but then they came to blows.

Hevel was stronger than Kayin and pinned him. Kayin said: if you kill me, who are you going to blame? There's no one else you can pin this on. Hevel let him up, at which point Kayin smacked him down and killed him. How did he kill him? He had seen Adam sacrifice an animal, so he took a knife and slit his brother's throat.

Well, that sure casts Kayin as more cunning and nasty than I'm used to seeing. The book I was reading (at shul, so can't easily check now) cited something like "tanchuma Yonatan", which I've been unable to find via Google so that's probably not exactly it. I found part of this midrash in B'reishit Rabbah 22:8 (thank you, Soncino Classics) -- that has the part about "who are you going to blame?" and the killing (with alternate opinions, including R. Yonatan saying the knife), but doesn't include the first part. (It records a different argument.) I don't yet know where that part comes from.

Interesting stuff. Maybe this week I'll be able to find the book again and remember what it is.

(If you're reading the series and wonder what happened to session 12, it was fully consumed in preparing for a beit-midrash session we taught jointly on the stuff covered in session 11. I knew that the beit midrash that day would have three segments, with one rabbi involved in each; I did not know in advance that mine was the only team-taught one. So yeah, three rabbis and me... no pressure. :-) )

Anyway, we are now going to talk about the ram that's caught in the thicket.

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More Akeidah midrash translation behind the cut. This time: more about the intervention of the angel, and Avraham finally speaks up.

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The last two sessions were shorter than usual so I'm combining them here. As usual, I'm choosing literal translation over the best (English) phrasing, since the main point is for me to improve my Hebrew.

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This session was actually a few weeks ago (things have been hectic).

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Mac update: I can't connect the printer to one machine and print from the other (either direction), but at least they're close enough together that I can move the USB cable as needed. There's also a weird, loud chirping noise when it's in sleep mode; word on the net is that this happens sometimes when peripherals are plugged in, which seems weird. I normally have USB connections for keyboard, mouse, external hard drive, and printer, and am not really interested in changing any of that. A couple nights ago I left my iPod plugged in to charge and it didn't chirp; weird. I'm not sure plugging in the iPod every night is really good for its battery, though. But pulling the speaker cable and plugging it back in when using the machine is also a hassle.

Oh, and if anybody can get me Windows-style file sorting in Finder (directories then files, but alphabetically within those two groups), I'll be in your debt. "Sort by kind" violates the second part of that. The common motif on the net seems to be "this isn't Windows", which is true but unhelpful. My legacy file structure evolved the way it did in large part because of how it sorted.

More midrash from Sefer Aggadah and my attempts to translate.

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When last we left our heroes, Avraham and Yitzchak were on their way to the sacrifice and the satan was stirring up trouble between them. Continuing:

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More midrash on the Akeidah, including what Avraham told Sarah about his plans.

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This is the second midrash we looked at in this session. (I previously knew this one, but reading it in Hebrew was still educational.)

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Rabbi Symons (he says I may use his name here) and I continued our one-on-one midrash study this week, continuing with the Akeidah (binding of Yitzchak). In addition, I learned some new grammar and have some new questions.

This entry covers one of the two midrashim we studied (why does God say "please"?).

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Last week I wrote about my first study session with our newest rabbi, but I didn't cover everything. After the midrash I previously wrote about we started a longer one.

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A while ago our newest rabbi said that he was agreeable to some one-on-one study. (Hey, he implied it; I didn't just ambush him out of nowhere with the question.) I said I'd like to improve my text-reading skills; he pulled out a (Hebrew) copy of Sefer Aggadah and asked if I recognized it. Sure do, I said; I have that vast collection of midrash in English. He likes midrash too, so he proposed that we study that.

We had our first session this week. This is going to be nifty! (And now I've just had to slightly rename my "study with my rabbi" tag. :-) )

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LJ tags are spiffy but not as fully-featured as I'd like, and I probably haven't figured out the best way to use them yet. So this entry is something of a cross-reference; if you got here via one of the tags on this entry you might also be interested in some of the others. I'll try to update this entry over time, and eventually will create similar entries for other tag families.

Judaism: education is a catch-all bucket. Sometimes things start here and then spin off into their own tags.

Sh'liach K'hilah (LJ swallows the first apostrophe for some reason) is (was) the Reform movement's para-rabbinic program. I attended in 2004 and 2005.

Open Beit Midrash (obm) at Hebrew College. I attended in 2007. I also have a more-general Hebrew College tag that includes entries about a program called Ta Sh'ma that I attended in 2006. One of these days I might give those their own tag.

Melton = Florence Melton Program, an international two-year program of which I completed the first year in 2006-2007. (My class session got cancelled the following year. Someday I will probably return, if the scheduling works.)

Study with my rabbi is for entries related to my one-on-one study. Midrash overlaps that, covering my midrash study in particular.

NHC is a tag for the chavurah program I attended in August 2008.

Kallah is a tag for the ALEPH kallah that I'm attending in 2009.

Shalom Hartman is a tag for the Shalom Hartman Institute, a program I considered in 2008 and 2009. I'll get there some year, I expect...