Many of you have probably seen the Israeli news story about eight year old Na’ama Margolese being called a “whore” and spat on walking past a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) synagogue on her way to school. In case you haven’t, it’s on YouTube with subtitles. (I’d also recommend reading how “they messed with the wrong crowd” for some interesting background.)

Two images are stuck in my mind from the video. The first is of a woman covered up almost Taliban style.

And the second is of Na’ama’s mother, Hadassah, dressed attractively in a sweater, boots, and skirt that meet her own standards of tzniut (modesty). She looks like she could fit in among the women I pass walking home from their Modern Orthodox synagogue down the street from my Conservative one. And here’s the honesty part: I can see how she would be a little bit distracting.

But what I think is totally messed up is to think there is anything at all wrong with that. Certainly that doesn’t make her deserve to be called a “whore.”

Caring about how one looks and noticing how other people look is a hard-wired part of being human. The value of Judaism is that it provides a way to sanctify the human experience. The rabbis long ago recognized that the yetzer ha-ra–the temptation to do bad–was not something that can be just covered up but a part of life that we can try to turn to good.

In secular culture the message sometimes seems that only a woman who can look like a supermodel is attractive, and only a guy who sleeps with a lot of supermodels in accomplished. But Jews believe every individual deserves respect: “If you have saved one life, you have saved the world.” And so, in my community, as in many other non-Haredi communities, we have norms where every woman gets to be beautiful, every bar mitzvah boy funny, every grandfather wise, and every child give his parents something to kvell over (be proud of). For example, Mayim Bialik, who is both an Orthodox Jew and TV star, recently blogged about finding a dress for an important Hollywood party that looked good and was still respectful. Doing Jewish stuff means there are ways for men and women to interact that don’t require cheating or hurting anyone or acting irresponsibly. Not that every Jewish community is perfect (we’re still only human after all!) but on the whole, I think Judaism has survived because it has a lot of wisdom about how to cope with human nature.

Maybe some men really can’t deal with seeing a woman on the street. But then it’s them who should be staying off the sidewalk.

It’s a mistake to conflate size with evilness and blame everything on “corporations.”

When people complain that mandated health care is bad for small business, no one points out that what they’re really saying is “I’d rather keep my profits than give my employees health care like a larger business would.” No one is complaining about small independent mortgage brokers who pushed through bad deals while flying under the radar of any attempt at corporate responsibility. No one complains about nonprofits who think their good works are an excuse for exploiting employees and cheating vendors.

Not that all (or even most) people and organizations in the above categories are to blame. But the ones that are, are certainly happy to see you blame “corporations.”

I think the problem is the way things like government debt or “socialized medicine” get talked about public debate now as if they’re axiomatically bad, instead of inherently bad things like intolerance, sickness, or war, that government policy is after all a tool to prevent.

In a nation of 300 million people, you can’t simply blame the fact that there are institutions large enough to feed, employ, and serve lots of us. It is going to take some really big farms, and really big banks. Something is wrong with the state of the social contract, if we ever had one, I’ll admit: you should be able to go to school, play by the rules, and not get tossed aside. But while some big organizations and their leaders are part of the problem, we also shouldn’t toss aside people and organizations that can be part of the solution. And we need big solutions.

For the Family Service Siddur I wanted a translation for “Adonai Tzeva’ot” that people wouldn’t need an English dictionary to understand like the venerable yet archaic “Lord of Hosts.” Siddur Sim Shalom actually leaves it untranslated, so I posted a question for the creative people in the OpenSiddur Facebook Group:

Anyone have a favorite translation for “Adonai Tzevaot” in the Kedushah? “Hosts” always makes me think of the person who takes you to a table at a restaurant.

After getting responses from Aharon Varady and Shmueli Gonzales as well as posing a few alternatives to my daughter, Hannah, as a representative of the target age the latest draft has:

Holy, holy, holy is the God of heavenly forces.

This made me really think about this peak moment of the service, and how it represents the fullness of God in three ways: as a force throughout the universe, as something not here but “up there” (mim’komo=”His place”), and specifically as God of Israeli (Elohayich tziyon).

I think perhaps the important thing you are saying is that while צְבָאוֹת (tz’va’ot, tzevaot) literally means “armies,” the reference is to forces of the universe being imagined as armies, as opposed to the human armies of nations.

Indeed I would say that imagining God as the master of gravity, black holes, quantum physics, and other mysteries of the physical universe very much fits in with my own theology and seem analogous to how it was formerly used by people who looked at starts but didn’t have the Hubble Space Telescope. (Or NOVA on PBS.)

Which brings me back for “forces” as translation which could mean physical forces like gravity, as well as being a direct modern PC translation for army as in “Israeli Defense Forces.”

Note: The image above was drawn by Hannah and illustrates the page across from this passage in the Siddur.

For the Family Service Siddur I’m editing, we set the Hebrew text in Times New Roman¹ using Microsoft Word, because this was a volunteer project and we all had that software available, and because that font is actually quite nice at rendering Hebrew with vowels as needed for liturgy.

A reviewer noticed an error in Mah Tovu:

The quamats² that should be under the resh is under the kaf. It’s not a typo; I had typed the letters correctly: kaf , shva , resh , qamats , meteg .

I realized the issue was with the meteg. (In liturgy, meteg is used to indicate the stressed syllable, particularly when it’s not the last syllable, which is usually stressed in Hebrew.) Without the meteg, the vowel is centered below the “point” of the resh, not the center of the letter:

So far, so good; this contributes to the readability of the letters. The problem is that Times New Roman shifts vowels to the right when followed by meteg. This is okay if the vowel starts off below the center of the letter:

But when the vowel is centered under right edge of the letter to start with, it ends up appearing under the previous letter, incorrectly. For example, the font Cardo doesn’t shift the vowel when a meteg is added, which I think is better:

It’s worth noting that not all Hebrew fonts even include meteg, which is not used in modern Hebrew.
I solved the problem using the overstrike feature of Word’s equation editor:

To reproduce this:

1. Press ctrl-F9 to insert the special equation editor brackets.
2. Paste in the following: eq \o(רָ,ˌ)

Note that the character used here is actually the Unicode MODIFIER LETTER LOW VERTICAL LINE character (hex 02CC), because Hebrew points without a consonant are rendered with a dotted circle by the software. I think this character is used as a phonetic symbol to indicate stress anyway, so it’s not inappropriate. However, I consider this a work-around; in a perfect world, I’d like to have an accurate digital text that renders into print without pretending it’s an equation.

Hope someone finds this helpful or at least interesting!

Two of the top news stories of the past few weeks have been about the earthquake and subsequent nuclear accident in Japan, and the murder of a family in Itamar, Israel. Both are a tragic human loss. I’m not sure which is more challenging to understand.

I can’t begin to comprehend having your home and family washed out to sea, to be left on the shore without food, medicine, or electricity. Or, to live with the danger of invisible radioactive fallout. But this doesn’t shatter my worldview. We live in a universe formed by supernovas and plate tectonics, awash with cosmic radiation, where the basic laws of physics mean that we need to use energy sources that can sometimes be deadly. To me, the miracle is not that the universe was created with Man at the center in Copernican style, but that we so improbably thrive when it wasn’t.

On the scale of universe, tragedy in a single household in Itamar shouldn’t seem like much, but I find it even harder to understand. Bad stuff happens, and people get angry, but ultimately, we find a way to share a small planet. Or so I like to think, which is why breaking into a house just to murder an unknown family with children is something I just can’t comprehend.

Then again, just this week, we heard helicopters and learned the State Police were searching for the perpetrator of shooting at a store here in Newton. No one was hurt, but it was bizarre that it wasn’t attempted armed robbery as much as pure intentional violence.

Yet we survive.

There are a lot of cool gifts here but this suggestion for a free gift has to be one of the most thoughtful ever (for someone like me who starts a bunch of things that take him off on tangents!):

Free: ask them what they want to achieve over the next month/3 months/year, and ask if a daily/weekly/monthly call would help them out – if it would, call/visit them at regular intervals and ask them to show you what they have done. Some extra encouragement and motivation is often far more valuable than any product could be, if they are trying to turn a side project into a business.

via Some quick and easy gift ideas for geeks or my Christmas wishlist – Disorganized thoughts.

Here’s the recipe for the rolls I brought to Thanksgiving dinner.

I came up with this recipe while searching for a way to make egg-free challah and while this isn’t quite challah (although it can be braided if you like) found it to be a great rich, vegan homemade bread recipe. Whole spelt flour has the heartiness of whole wheat flour without the roughness.

My own experience is that while bread machines were a gimmick, a good stand mixer is essential to making homemade bread. This lets you keep the dough rather sticky, which is impossible to knead by by hand, and gives better results. (An extreme version of this principle is the New York Times’ No-Knead Bread Recipe.) There is no virtue in hard work of kneading by hand–do you really think any commercial bread you enjoy is completely hand-kneaded? (My wife bought me a mint-green KitchenAid Artisan a few years ago, so there are probably other brands that work, but I haven’t researched them.)

Put in mixer:

3 cups King Arthur unbleached white flour

2 cups whole spelt flour

¼ cup wheat gluten

1 packet instant yeast

1 ½ tsp salt

Mix for a minute to combine these ingredients. Then mix in gradually:

¼ cup honey (I like clover honey from a single source if I can find it)

6 tbsp Crisco (I said this was egg-less, not good for you! )

1-2 cups water

Add water gradually so that puddles do not form in the mixer, until it is slightly sticker than you could knead by hand, but still doughy, then knead for at least 2 minutes (depending on your mixer, the time may vary) so it cleans the sides of the bowl and looks like bread dough.

Place in a bowl sprayed with cooking spray, cover loosely, and leave it to rise. If you want it to rise slowly (all day/overnight), you can put in the fridge.

(Alternatively, I find that a way to make it rise quickly–in an hour or two–is to put on the stove [turned off!], with the hot halogen floodlights of my range hood above, to give it just a tiny amount of heat, taking advantage of the greenhouse effect by covering loosely with clear plastic wrap. Which really just proves that halogen lights are inefficient and, when the prices come down, we should all switch to more environmentally-friendly LED’s…but that’s another topic.)

When it has risen, punch down, knead a bit on a floured board, shape, and place on a nonstick (maybe greased or parchment-lined if you don’t have nonstick) dark baking sheet. If making a challah, you can sprinkle with some sugar to give it a bit of a glaze (thought it won’t be like the traditional egg wash). Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 30-45 minutes. Enjoy fresh from the oven, or freeze and reheat.

Tip: The wheat gluten is very sticky. I recommend washing the mixer parts with hot water and a paper towel you can throw away as it will get stuck in the holes of a sponge or scrubbing pad.

Crossposted to JHacker.org.

I tend to buy this argument…

What should other artists do? Well, I’m not really bothered. The sad truth is that almost everything almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. This has nothing to do with the internet, of course. Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette’s attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal. Almost every artist who sets out to earn a living from art won’t get there (for me, it took 19 years before I could afford to quit my day job), whether or not they give away their work, sign to a label, or stick it through every letterbox

via The real cost of free | Cory Doctorow | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Tomorrow is my 36th birthday. It’s also the 5771th birthday of the world, Rosh HaShanah, according to the Hebrew calendar. A bit of numerology: the Hebrew numerals for 18 spell the word chai, “life.” 18 x 2 = 36. Ergo, Marc 2.0.

It’s not so unreasonable to think of this if I imagine one version of myself that became an adult at age 18, and while I made some mistakes and twists and turns (service packs, bug fixes, and enhancements to continue the software-version metaphor) I was just upgrading the same version. But as with software, sometimes you need to write a new version – compatible with the old, and performing the same functions, but with a new architecture that can keep performing into the future.

In practical terms, Marc 1.0 was about establishing myself; the fundamental design was about building a career and family; buying cars and homes. It wasn’t ever about material things, but about really growing up. The good news is: mission accomplished! I can no longer think in terms of, “when we have kids,” “when I get a better a job,” “when I get a bigger house or car” – I’ve done those things. It’s time for a new design.

I don’t know what that will be. I won’t entirely rule out a major career change, going back to school, starting a business, or anything else–indeed, those are the things I dream about. But I’ve also learned, as a software guy, the value of backward-compatibility, which means most things stay pretty much the same, while I continue to try some things that are new. Often, evolution is better than revolution.

It means a renewed focus on taking care of myself, mentally and physically; taking time for myself, and for the people who I depend on and who depend on me; and going forward unencumbered by anxiety.