As you may (or may not) know, a new Hebrew year has begun and with it comes a fresh cycle of reading through the Torah, also known as the Five Books of Moses. (If you weren’t raised Jewish, you may know these books as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.) For the last several years I have chosen different ways to read through these texts — sometimes with one translation, sometimes with all the translations I have at hand. This year I decided to do something different.
“Big plan” seems to translate to tachnat gadolah in Google Translate, which doesn’t tell me which vowels I should be using. So I’ll just stick with English for now.
Anyway, this year’s big plan is to study Hebrew using the first phrase or sentence of each weekly reading. Last week this looked like a really good idea, when the phrase was In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This week’s selection is…a bit longer.
So, you may ask, how do I propose to overdo this task? Well, I look up the first phrase/sentence and then I hand-write it in a special notebook, complete with the vowel and cantillation marks. Those marks tell me not only how to pronounce the words, but how to chant the phrase in case I were called to do so during a service. (If I were asked to chant Torah I would be given more lead time, but this part of the effort will allow me to become more familiar with the phrasing so that it wouldn’t be as much work to learn another portion of the text.)
This part was originally supposed to be a copy-and-paste from the text in Sefaria.org, until I found out that I’m not able to copy and paste it. Okay, fine, I will handwrite the Hebrew. I need practice doing that anyway. That brings me to the next step: practicing my Hebrew letters. I purchased a particular handwriting book for this, which allows me to trace over the shapes. I’m trying to do that with a calligraphy pen so that I can make the letters look more like typography.
Another thing I’m doing in my special notebook, after writing out the whole phrase, is writing each Hebrew word on a separate line. Then I write the transliteration, then the translation as I work it out. At this point I have to learn to look up words in a Hebrew dictionary, which is considerably harder to do when you don’t know the order of the Hebrew alphabet. (Ask me how I know.)
After I have done this step (which may also involve looking into a particular verb tense to see what it means and how the prefixes and suffixes work), I practice writing a key word from the sentence — over and over until my lettering improves.
And, of course, I am looking at the cantillation marks to figure out how to chant the sentence, and then I am practicing my chanting until I’m confident with it.
When I was not doing these things for the first week’s lesson I was reading some books to support my effort. This weekend I finished reading Hebrew for Life: Strategies for Learning, Retaining, and Reviving Hebrew by Adam Howell, Benjamin Merkle, and Robert Plummer. I’m also reading Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary: Learning Words by Frequency and Cognate by George Landes. Before he gets to the section with the vocabulary lists, he has a 39-page section called “How Hebrew Words are Formed.” I’m now on page 9, having read each paragraph over and over until something, anything, sticks long enough to let me feel that it’s safe to go forward. Page 9 out of 39 may sound pretty good, but this section actually starts on page 7.
I’ve actually been doing a lot of things to keep from purchasing more books. Over the weekend I reorganized my Hebrew-related books to bring the dictionaries, grammars, and language-learning volumes closer together. And while I was sick in bed (thank you, semi-annual sinus infection), I looked up the suggested references in Hebrew for Life, read the reviews of them that I could find via the university library, and decided that I didn’t need to expand that particular part of my library at this time. (In fact, I discovered that I already own some of the recommended resources for learning Aramaic. So there’s that.)
All of this really takes more time to describe than it does to do, and it helps me to have multiple approaches to becoming familiar with the letters, the words, the meanings, and the tunes. The only other aspect I’d like would be to have a study partner who’s doing the same thing, but that seems unlikely. In their absence, I’ll walk my own path.
Knitwise, I have made theoretical progress on the next project. Having discovered a rewound ball of Noro in one of my yarn bins, I decided to turn it into something just to use it up. There isn’t very much of it (just over 50 grams), so I didn’t want to play the guessing game of using a pattern and wondering if I had enough yarn to finish it. On the other hand, I have been knitting the same two “one-row wonder” patterns over and over, and wanted to try something slightly different.
If I knew where I had put the pattern sketch I made, I would show it to you. But for now you’ll have to make do with a verbal description. I plan to knit a narrow triangle, with the increases on one side only, and eyelets/yarnovers on every other right side row.
This pattern (algorithm, really) might look like:
Cast on n stitches.
1. Kf&b, k to end
2. Sl 1, p to end
3. K1, YO, k to end
4. Sl 1, p to end
…but we will just have to try it out and see how it goes. After I have knitted for a few inches it should be an easy piece to “read,” which means that I will be able to tell what I should do next just by looking at it instead of consulting a formal pattern.
I ran the logistics of this pattern past a couple of more experienced knitters (the kind who remember which way the increases lean, for example) and they nodded their heads and said it should work as I imagined. (I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, like How many stitches should I cast on to start, or Should I slip the first stitch on the wrong side? I didn’t want to take up too much of their time, and how will I ever learn if I don’t spend enough time bumbling around?)
I did take the yarn back home and rewind the ball so that the current working end was on the inside and the old inside became the new working end. Evidently I had tried to make something with this yarn many moons ago — probably many dozens of moons — and then ripped the project back and wound the yarn around the outside of the ball.
One reason that I rewound the ball was just to redistribute the tension in the yarn. This is probably nothing more than BethScience,™ but it felt like I was doing something useful. I also wanted to “turn the yarn around” to rearrange the color sequence. Now that I am able to start from the other end, I’ll be able to make a long and narrow section with a pale green that doesn’t last long in the skein; I’ll be able to end with a very rich and bright green that should last for a few rows and look like a deliberate color choice for that end of the piece.
There isn’t any other yarning going on right now; the Leroy Cowl is still waiting patiently on the dining room table while I find time and the wool-wash. While it’s waiting I will move the US8 needles closer and closer to the Noro so they’ll be handy when I’m finally ready to cast on for my triangle.
Chocolate Sheep 