İ am still big, it's the posts that got small @maimonidiva - Tumblr Blog

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basically İ'm like if auntie mame was a character in the footnotes of maimonides' writing, you know his four great epistolary works: the epistle on martyrdom, the epistle to yemen, the treatise on resurrection, and the postcard to my dear aunt lea

#rambamblr

adnanerk

umm kulthum

xywzl

Bibi Xonim Mosque, Samarkand

Hi, if i may, could i ask about your usage of that "tall i" as a personal pronoun? I've found a wikipedia article for a letter used in the latin script alphabets of languages such as Azerbaijani and Kazakh, but I'm not sure it's the same one. Other search results didn't seem to be relevant. Just curious about what it is exactly and, if you want to say, why you use it

it's the capitalised i in the turkish alphabet, İ switched my keyboard to turkish when İ started learning the language, didn't get very far with it but İ'm so used to typing on a turkish keyboard by now it would take me too long to adjust back to a german one. also İ find it aesthetically more compelling, it just wouldn't look right if İ stopped using it. and İ don't (just) use it as a personal pronoun, İ use it whenever İ capitalise the letter i, in english that just happens to be most frequently the case with the first person singular pronoun

one really underestimates how much more filling tortellini are when a sauce is added

hey, as the Torah person on my feed, do you know where I might find achronim on a machloket rashbam rabbeinu Gershom in bava batra? I am going rabid over this machloket and I need other people talking about it

hi, unfortunately İ don't, but if İ come across something İ'll let you know

the real crazy thing with the like button pride animation not showing the trans colours is that it actually does show them on my phone. so did they really just make one animation without the trans flag for the US & one with for the rest of the world....

bobemajses

Jewish school in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, 1870s. From the Turkestan Album.

maimonidiva

A sage's constant fear is that he will be unable to answer attacks upon his position and suffer public humiliation. This is a grave danger, for the sages experience shame as a type of social death, and the failure to perform may also jeopardize their positions within the hierarchy. Yet, inasmuch as the victim suffers from being shamed, so the perpetrator risks divine punishment for shaming a fellow sage. To achieve academic success is therefore an extremely delicate task. Sages try to demonstrate their prowess in debate through brilliant arguments while simultaniously neither opening themselves to refutation nor offending their colleagues. Their new emphasis on dialectical argumentation was critical to the process of redaction of earlier traditions and creation of the Babylonian Talmud as we know it.

Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud

maimonidiva

As Rubenstein noted in his monograph, one cannot simply assume dynamics in the yeshivot of talmudic times to have remained unchanged until our days, yet nonetheless we may be able to retrace some similar patterns, as Shaul Stampfer cites in his monograph on Lithuanian yeshivot an incident that seems to match the above one, as well as the dynamic cited in Rubenstein, perfectly:

The use of questions as weapons and the representation of the shiur as a bettlefield is clear from the story [of the visiting R. Lapidote]. The students made sure that they taught their guest a lesson about Volozhin and its standards. The rabbi for his part saw the delivery of a shiur as a mark of honour, which indeed it was. The fact that people wanted to come and listen to him was sufficient to confer honour – but he had to earn that honour. Quick answers would have earned the students' admiration, but the rabbi was unable to cope with the sort of onslaught he faced. The rosh yeshivah, who was present, did not interfere. To do so would have caused his guest greater damage, since it would have emphasized his weakness. As it was, the students were able to express their loyalty to theor institution without any open display of personal hostility to the visiting rabbi.

The story also suggests that there was an additional function to this event. Although there is no hard evidence about the facts, it does indicate how the students regarded the situation. Zalman Epstein has this to say about the background to the 'attack' on R. Alexander Lapidote: "A rumour was circulating among various groups of students that the 'top brass' – the rosh yeshivah and those close to him – had hinted to the best students, obviously unofficially, that it would be good to build a 'rampart and siege wall' around the shiur given by the rabbi of Raseiniai. They said that it was a special political strategy for scoring one over [the yeshivah of] Kovno.

Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning

We can see the asking of questions and ones own expertise used to fight out disputes between institutions, but also as a student tactic to challenge the power dynamic between teacher and student when the student feels that the teacher used his power inappropriately:

Individual students also had ways of expressing opposition to yeshiva policy, although their abilities were more limited. The simplest method was to ask questions designed to embarrass rather than to enlighten. Thus, for example, when R. Berlin prevented a student from taking a walk outside on Shavuot, the student prepared a particularly difficult question and posed it to the rabbi at the shiur the next day. He derived great satisfaction from the fact that R. Berlin had to make a great effort and think for ten minutes before coming up with an answer. As already mentioned, one student tried to contradict everything that R. Berlin's father-in-law (by his second marriage) said in a shiur, with the express aim of hurting him. Questions were also used as a weapon in the campaign against the appointment of R. Hayim Berlin as rosh yeshivah[.]

ibid.

#talmud #tractate nazir #shaul stampfer #lithuanian yeshivas of the nineteenth century

mothmiso

Marocco - Agadir Medina (2) (3) (4) (5) by Jakub Janusz

archivistcookbook

Carven Haute Couture Fall 1999

maimonidiva

standardised language testing is truly so incredibly stupid. CEFR my beloathed

maimonidiva

like İ'm sorry but surely if İ have to take 2-4 weeks out of the course where İ could teach practical real life german to instead do training for how to most efficiently do the test bc all the questions are so artificial and contrived you wouldn't necessarily be able to do them just by speaking the language on a level that can get you through everyday life, then one might come to the conclusion that something is amiss here. "you formed your sentence in the complaint about your malfunctioning washing machine with 'but' instead of 'even though' so you wouldn't possibly be able to work a job other than cleaning"