Tachlis Forum

i do not have much commentary to add on this text. mostly that the historical perspectives in the last sections were new to me (though not too surprising in their existence).
מחיית זכר עמלק - הכיצד? | מאיר שבתי
https://www.rosamedia.org//episodes/articles/70

to me, this year’s Seder is going to be… interesting. i’m celebrating with my parents (potential complication one) at the local Chabad (potential complication two).
i have a complicated relationship with the Seder. part of it is due to specific family issues around Passover that i’m not gonna get into, but a lot of it is that my dad’s side of the family usually does the Seder with the entire extended family totaling over 30 people, which is way beyond my tolerance. combine that with Cochi singing traditions that involve tunes at very slow rhythms and passing the torch between about half the people on the table, and you get an event that easily lasts hours on end. it’ll get to a point where at years where we’re doing a Seder on my mum’s side we’d get back and the Dad’s side will still be in the middle of theirs.
i do however absolutely love the Hagadah. and last year i’ve got a reminder as to just how much i love it when the stars unexpectedly aligned and instead of doing the Seder with the entirety of my dad’s side or most of my mum’s side, we were just us, the parents, my three younger brothers, and two aunts. 8 people instead of 30. and with all honesty, that was probably the best Seder of my life so far. the older of the brothers and i took over the evening and read the Hagadah with the passion and excitement i wish were present at the larger gatherings, doing the Cochi songs, yes, but only to the point of improving the experience.
i honestly long for another such experience. heck, even better, a similar experience with my friends and chosen family rather than with my parents. but with Passover being the most important holiday in my family by not a small distance, with me now living in a different country to most of my friends and with the new friends here either being non-Jewish or actually just friends of my wife, or simply considering the fact my house can’t really hold a dinner for more than four people, it’s not gonna happen in the near term. but i still hope for that Seder of my dreams. one day.

so with the oversharing done, i really do want to hear your plans for the Seder and for the Passover week as a whole! do share!

Purim is this holiday that i feel like i celebrate less and less over time (from school-organised Purim-themed week as a kid to a work event and a small party as an adult to “i’ll sign up to this student party because otherwise i’m not doing anything this year” adult-living-abroad). so i want to inject some more Purim into my life by asking - how did you celebrate it this year?

i, as mentioned, have this student party, which actually hasn’t happened yet (it’s tomorrow at the time of writing). my fiancee and i already got a cheap matching costume (you can see me wearing mine here), that i actually brought with me to language class as part of my ongoing effort to teach all the goyim in my class (and the teachers!) about Jewish culture.

on the one hand, you are probably correct. on the other, it is exactly those sources whose articles i read most deeply (Erin In The Morning, שיחה מקומית) that are the most depressing.

coming back to this thread a few weeks later though, i say that one new insight i got is that i realised i was essentially experiencing news burnout, with very similar effects to classical burnout. disengaging for a time definitely made the “oh no am i disengaging forever now?” thoughts way more quiet, and i’m actually quite happy in my state of still be over 300 articles behind in my RSS feed. i do still think i need to change my media diet, but i also think just pulling back for like as little as three weeks made it way better.

just got this in my Masto feed
https://mastodon.world/@davidho/114000926819112091
‍

i’ve been considering fully disengaging from the news cycle lately. it’s giving me quite a lot of anxiety at a time i otherwise have all the reasons to enjoy.
the thing is, i also value staying informed. i know this could be taken to the extreme with instant push updates of partial information, but that wasn’t actually the case for me - i read my news on rss with usually at least a day’s delay.
but with the double-pronged attack that is the state of things both in the US and in Israel, both places i have people near and dear to me affected by the news, this may have become too much.

another big question for me is if i cut back, by how much. do i just cut back Haaretz? do i also cut back Local Call and Erin in the Morning (both of which i financially support because i appreciate their coverage)? what about the comedically-depressing news podcasts i listen to? or the overviews over at TLDR? and what about local news here in Czechia? the more i think about it, the less i can find a clear line of what should go, which makes me thing everything should go. is that too much?

i’ve changed the dosage of news in my life over the years, but never disengaged completely. but with the world being so anxiety inducing right now, maybe it’s time to fully block out all the things i can’t change, and focus only on the (few) things i can.

it’s clear to me that nothing rivals a course with a proper teacher. i haven’t yet had the chance to compare course over video talk to in-person, but i suspect it’s similar to the difference between an in-person therapy and video-conference therapy - i’d do it when i need to, but i’ll do in-person when i can.
as for how to do it - i think it’s best to have as many varied learning opportunities as you can at the same time. right now for Czech i do in-person courses and Anki spaced repetition and Duolingo and listening to podcasts and chatting to friends over IM and proper talking. language learning has four fronts - comprehension in text (aka reading), production in text (aka writing), comprehension in spoken (aka listening) and production in spoken (aka speaking), and i don’t think you can really feel confident in a language unless you tackle all four. production especially.

so essentially my tips would be:

1. find as many instances as possible to practice your target language and have them be as varied as possible. online apps and chatting with people and posting memes online in your target language.
2. watch Language Jones videos because he’s got some amazing additional tips that are universally true. (for real though, a similar conversation recently came up on Hebrewverse and like three people independently recommended his stuff. he’s really good.)

@raf this is quickly becoming off-topic, but are you familiar with toki pona? that one is taking the idea of “easy to learn, no culture above another” to a whole other level. though that one doesn’t aspire to be an interlang, and rightly so lol

@nadja said in Ohai:

Awfully bothersome, those things.

there’s two types of computer people, those who love computers the more they work with them and those who hate computers the more they work with them and i tend to distrust the first kind

hi, i’m Talya, she/her! there’s a good chance a bunch of you know me already from Fedi, my (many, so many) accounts all have either the old handle @yuvalne or the new handle @talya.

i’m trans and very proudly queer, sorta-engaged-sorta-legally-married to my girlfriend of 4 years. stuff get weird when you move to another country while queer.

oh yeah, i’m also an expat/immigrant/whatever you want to call it. i grew up in Israel but moved to Czechia last September. i grew up in a Mizrahi household that belonged to the orthodox tradition but that also swung between being quite a bog-standard dati to being fully secular throughout different parts of my life.

i like to think of myself as a musician even though i haven’t been doing music even close to full time for like five years now. that fact almost changed last year, but then i moved to another country, so uh, we’ll see. i am classically educated, can play the clarinet, bass clarinet, and the piano (or at least, those are the ones i play well) and can sing, though i’m more interested in composition.
i’m also reasonably techie, i worked in IT for ~5 years and am an open-source nerd, though i absolutely do not code.
i’m also many other kinds of nerd. i like sci-fi and fantasy, am firmly committed to Doctor Who, am a TTRPG player and GM, a decent chess player, and a language and linguistics nerd. in addition to speaking Hebrew, English and now learning Czech, i also took Latin in highschool, a beginners’ Palestinian Arabic course in adulthood, and learned Yiddish and a tad of French online.

also i have ADHD if it wasn’t obvious from this very long and very messy post. which also means there’s probably other stuff i forgot but oh well. if i remember them later i’ll add them to this post.

edit: here’s one thing i forgot - i’m almost certainly younger than you think. i know what you’re thinking, no, even younger than that.

this isn’t kashrut, but it obviously raises the question a bit - what do we think about vegan/non-vegan? it’s almost solved by meat, dairy, parve, but parve can still be non-vegan.

@niamh it’s possible, and considering the fact we do have this data point of Lecha Dodi i’d say it’s probably the explanation, but it is very much an outlier - my dad’s family otherwise kept a whole lot of their original tunes, even when much more common ones are available. as a comparison, the only Passover tune that we don’t sing in the traditional tune is Echad Mi Yodea and that’s because that one to my knowledge had the common tune overtake virtually everywhere and i don’t know of a single person who doesn’t traditionally sing the common tune.
and also, even for Lecha Dodi - the tune we sing is an Ashkenazi tune, but not the common one. The common one (at least in Israel) is actually the one written by Zeira in 1952.

so Lecha Dodi has approximately way-too-many-to-count tunes, so it’s not too surprising each family has its own tune of choice.

my dad’s family is Kochi, and we love singing, so for “the lyrics are the least interesting part of a song” young Talya it was pretty easy to notice our tune for Lecha Dodi was a bit out of place - we usually don’t have tunes that are this fast and syncopated (compare with the Kochi tune for Shalom Leven Dodi, which is actually on the higher end of rhythmicality in Kochi tunes).
i always just assumed it might have been a Yemenite tune we adopted - the Kochis were always very close to the Yemenites, our traditional pronounciation of Hebrew is almost the same and the great rabbi Nehemia Muta came to India from Yemen, so i’m pretty sure we do actually have a few tunes borrowed from the Yemenite Jews. i didn’t investigate this though.

that was until Shvesters, two singers i follow on YouTube who are very much Ashkenazi, published their adaptation to the very same tune, saying it’s the usual one they sing at home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWacGlIpbSI

so i did some digging and it turns out this tune isn’t Yemenite, oh no. it’s Polish-Litvener. (in hindsight now knowing a tad more about the various traditions of Jewish music one could notice this doesn’t actually sound very Yemenite, but i didn’t know that as a 13-year-old.)

so now one question remains. how on earth did the Polish-Litvener tune become the one my dad, his siblings and all of their cousins sing??