Editorial notes: This essay was not made available (published) in the original blog and is visibly incomplete. It is published here in its original state. It was last updated on 12/12/2016. This essay appears in two versions, the first documented here, and the second, For the Complexed (v2), recovered from Shai’s Google Drive as a set of a four-part series. The two versions have a similar...
My motivation to express and communicate my thoughts on these things is curtailed on one side by an awareness of the immensity of my ignorance, and on the other side by my fear that I have no right to promote such substantial claims given my absent credentials. What follows is successful if it convinces the following: I have a unique perspective, which forms an expertise on the basis of its...
Read a biography of Descartes and re-read his Discourse[I] (I’d already read his Methods and excerpts from his scientific slog – optics and harmonics, ergh). So how do I feel about this famous Frenchman, the so-called father of modern philosophy? Philosophy-wise, not that much. His real contribution was to abandon the scholastic philosophy that had been the sole academic curriculum for the...
Rashi hints that we should no longer justify our ownership of the land of Israel[I]. A person might have thought, “The land has not been given to us back“. But the verse says that there were disagreements between the shepherds, due (Rashi explains) to some of them being thieves by presuming that the land was there’s on the basis that one day it would be. And that is why...
I see your shadow in the mirror, in the shapes between a flock of birds, in the space between my eyes, my thoughts.
All that I know is that I can’t see you. I see your beauty but not your hand. Your elegance but not your feet.
How could I not love you, who crafts the smudges of clouds, at every hour, every vista, every biography, history, event horizon.
Editorial notes: This post was found in ‘Draft’ mode in the original blog and may be incomplete. It is published here in its original state. It was last updated on 11/11/2016. These are my thoughts. It is my intention and hope that they not contradict what has already been established. In only a few places will I include methods. This is also an exercise in communication (i.e. in...
Just for a few minutes. Not literally. The way things look is undeniable. The more we look, the more we see. And it’s still undeniable. But behind it all. Between shadows and flickers of distraction, is some other thing, a gossamer lighthouse, impossible and tall. I don’t know what other shapes it has; only the ones I’ve seen: It’s the desperate hope that the way something...
This is an expression of how I’ve been thinking about the first Mishna. It goes into more detail than my previous post. It does not propose to explain what the Mishna is about. Instead, I propose to explain what I have been thinking about. 1. From when are we to perform the Shema recital in the evening? 2. “From the hour that the Kohanim move to eat their Teruma; until the end of the...
This is an allegory. It distorts a lot what it intends to allude. There was an article the other day about new documents uncovered in King’s College. The papers are by Newton and describe a dream he had. In this dream he discovered the key to the alchemist’s stone and used the stone to gaze back in time, to see who had built the stone hedges near his house. He saw primitive sapiens...
The following have coalesced in my mind: The first module of the Mishna; the study of Mishna vs Torah; the temporal track-marks of Judaism. First I’ll introduce these, and then unpack them as a whole. First The first Mishna teaches the times for the recitation of Shema in the evening[I]. The Torah (i.e. as we have it) was created alongside and in parallel to the world, whereas the Mishna (i...
