{"id":11572,"date":"2008-10-25T13:26:51","date_gmt":"2008-10-25T17:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/10\/25\/11572.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:49:45","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:49:45","slug":"in-the-beginning-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/10\/25\/in-the-beginning-again\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Beginning, again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Well. Another year has gone around again. That seems to happen a lot, actually; I have annual-cycle moments in October, January, February, June and August. At least. But this time it&#8217;s the liturgical cycle that&#8217;s come around again. This week&#8217;s reading is B&#8217;reishit, and we start again.<br \/>\n<p>Last year, when I did Scripture notes on the week&#8217;s reading, I wrote about the haftorah portion. I did about half the weeks of the year or so, not very impressive, but there it is. A fair amount of the time, I was reading stuff I had never closely read before, so the project was a Good Thing. I suppose I&#8217;d like to set up some sort of project for this cycle, which if nothing else would get me to spend a portion of my Shabbat thinking about the Scripture. I don&#8217;t have any ideas, though.<br \/>\n<p>I had an idea to take text from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org\/jsource\/Talmud\/avottoc.html\">Pirke Avot<\/a>, instead of looking at the weekly portion. I love <I>Avot<\/i>; I read it again and again, and I think I would enjoy discussing it here in the Tohu Bohu. On the other hand, there are good arguments against it. For one thing, it&#8217;s not the weekly portion, and so I would not be looking at the weekly portion, so that would be bad for me. Also, with the weekly portion, if I skip a week, the week is gone and I don&#8217;t get it back, which gives a little foot-to-behind motivation. If I am just taking the next verse of <I>Avot<\/i>, I could do it anytime. Also, Gentle Readers, for reasons that I&#8217;m sure seem good and sufficient to y&#8217;all, don&#8217;t spend your Saturdays on-line writing comments on this Tohu-Bohu, so the idea of having Saturday discussions is not really clever. Yes, y&#8217;all may come around on Monday and post, but that isn&#8217;t actually all that likely. And, in truth, as much as some GRs enjoy my little Scripture notes, I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s a critical mass interested in such a discussion.<br \/>\n<p>So what shall I do? I could just go through the reading and pick out something that catches my eye, looking for something I haven&#8217;t written about before. There&#8217;s still plenty there. Or I could come up with a theme (the environment, prayer, violence, goyim, siblings, whatever) and look at each week&#8217;s portion with that theme in mind. Or I could just let it go, and instead of writing about Scripture most weeks (well, many weeks) just write about it when it crosses my mind. What do you think?<br \/>\n<p>See, this week is <i>B&#8217;reishit<\/i>, in the beginning. We begin again, like we do every year. Everything, in fact, begins again: the Divine creates the world again every day, we are told. But at this time of year, at the beginning, it seems like I should come up with some sort of a plan, a plan that will take me to the end of the year, when it will be the beginning again. Right? Of course, right.<br \/>\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger doesn&#8217;t know what to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18554,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11572\/revisions\/18554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}