First of all, thank you to The Godol HaDor and Mis-nagid, from whom more and more of my hits are coming, and whose conversation I enjoy.
Thanks also to the Godol HaDor for giving his Haskamah to one of my posts, which also happens to be controversial (in that it asks questions and doesn't provide answers, and that it encourages serious religious thought). I sincerely hope that now that the Godol HaDor has given me his approbation, unsolicited, mind you, and even has actually read the post, that he will continue to support me even if I come under fire from some lesser lights than he. Please, please, please don't retract.
It was an exchange with the Godol that inspired this post. He reported of a group that sang an enchanting rendition of "Kah Ribbon" but didn't understand what the words meant. In fact, the Godol himself didn't understand what the words meant.
[either he was being an anav, or his sincerity is his true gadlus, or we can't expect our Gedolim to be familiar with the Aramaic of Sefer Daniel - from which the phrases of Kah Ribbon are taken, which is much earlier than the Aramaic of the Talmuds, the Targumim, and The Passion of the Christ. How many dialects can our Gedolim reasonably master?]
As for me, I am now compelled to explain the by-line of my blog's title, "Atar Di Bei Yechdun Ruchin Ve-nafshin". As many people recognize, it's a line from Kah Ribbon which refers to the Temple in Jerusalem as "The place in which spirits and souls will rejoice". The Aramaic word for 'place', 'atar', has been adopted into modern Hebrew as the term for 'site', as in an archaeological site, a historical site, and, more recently a Website. Thus, "The Website in which spirits and souls will rejoice". I thought that was very clever, but nobody gets my jokes. Especially when they require some rudimentary understanding of both Modern Hebrew and Ancient Aramaic. Story of my life, already lamented in my first post.
I'll call this yesterday's post and get to the meat of my musings in the next post.
1 comment:
I think Dror Yikra is tougher; the style is more dense, the references more oblique and scattered, and the terminology more obscure (i.e., a native Hebrew speaker would have a tougher time w/ Dror Yikra than a native Aramaic speaker would w/ Kah Ribbon)and intentionally ambiguous.
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