The Mumbai Massacres: still digesting this horrible tragedy (would love to regurgitate all over the perpetrators). I keep adding more links to this post called Modulate.
Photography memes I did this week:
Sky Watch
Sepia Scenes
Watery Wednesday
Ruby Tuesday
Today’s Flowers
To view my parsha posts, click https://www.leoraw.com/blog/category/jewish/parsha/.
Food posts:
Stuffed Squash Revisited
Ginger
One technical help post: Google Reader
My neighbor’s tall maple tree left an avalanche of leaves in our driveway a month ago.
This pretty bare tree with red berries is around the corner from my home. I’ve seen others like it here in Highland Park. (Ideas were: crab apple or American Ash; no, it’s been identified as a hawthorn! More pics coming soon.)
For more Skywatch participants, please visit:
Poor Leah. She cried, because she thought she would get stuck with Esav (Rashi says weak eyes meant they were weak from tears). Instead, she married Yaakov, but she knew that he really loved her sister, Rachel, best.
On Wednesday I asked how Rachel helped out Leah, and how Leah helped out Rachel. Here’s Rashi’s explanation:
Leah helped Rachel out by praying for a girl when she was pregnant with her 7th child. She knew that Yaakov would only have 12 sons, and Bilhah and Zilpah already had 2 each. She wanted Rachel to have at least two sons.
As Lion of Zion pointed out, there are also interpretations that say Leah and Rachel were not so nice to each other. But that’s a subject for another post. Maybe next year.
(One more thought: as I tend to prefer a commentary that is sympathetic to the matriarchs, especially to their sadness, as opposed to one that might highlight cattiness, I’m not sure I’m gonna like these other views).
More on this week’s parsha of Vayetze:
Ilana-Davita writes about how human the personalities of this parsha are; strong emotions are part of our lives.
Special thanks to Winslow Homer for his help with the watercolor painting.
Inspired by some emails from Robin, I decided to play with a photo of my daughter. I selected the background of the original with the magic wand in Photoshop (I also used clone stamp, which mimics one part of the image in another section). Then I duplicated the layer, so I wouldn’t be changing the original. I desaturated the background and slid the color scale, increasing the magenta and yellow, same as I usually do to create sepia. I also decided to add a slight gradient to the background.
In this version I duplicated the above layer. I then desaturated that layer and changed its opacity to 55%. That way, one could still see some of layer below and the color still appears, but it is not as vivid as in the original.
I decided the previous version was too gray. I slid the magenta and yellow color sliders, increasing those two colors, especially the yellow.
Here’s the original photo, minus something on the bottom that I cropped out of the photo. As you can see, the original background was the siding of our house, which I didn’t really care to be a focus of the photo.
For more sepia photos, visit Sepia Scenes.
Do you have a sister? I don’t. I’ve always been a bit jealous of sisters. Someone to whom one could connect in a close way.
Rachel and Leah were extra special sisters. Do you know how they helped each other out? Rashi has the answer, and I’ll post the answer on the blog, soon.
Here’s the stuffed squash I made last week. Using Klara‘s idea of using shitake mushrooms, I sauteed some onions and mushrooms to stuff my squash. I also mixed in some chopped celery and sage from my garden, as well as bits of cooked buttercup squash. I didn’t use any animal products, but I must say I might have found it just a tad tastier if it had either a bit of cheese or some chopped meat. We humans do crave fat. On the other hand, my body felt much better eating it this way, a lighter food.
There is a creek or brook a block away from my home, so I went down there to take some photos for Watery Wednesday.
The creek wiggles its way through the edge of Highland Park and Edison, in between private houses. I do hope people aren’t putting too much pesticides on their lawns that will leach down into the brook, but I’m sure I hope in vain.
For more watery photos, visit Watery Wednesday.
Chabad House at Rutgers will dedicate a new wing to the Mumbai victims.
In an article at MyCentralNewJersey, Rabbi Yosef Carlebach, the director and founder of the Jewish center at Rutgers University says:
“The attack last week was not only an attack on Chabad or the people of Israel but on every living being that believes in life, in humanity and decency.”
And his son, Mendy Carlebach, went to school with Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, who was brutally murdered in Mumbai. The article states:
“Even after he moved to India in 2003, we kept in touch via email,” Mendy said.
He said he last spoke to Holtzberg when they met at the rabbis conference in New York last year.
Mendy said Holtzberg told him of the new Chabad House that he had just purchased in Mumbai. “Gabby described it as an open house for Indians, Jews, everyone who could always come for a meal and a smile.”
Sunday in New Jersey was bleary, gray and rainy. So instead of posting a new photo I went back in the photo files to early July, when we were about to explore the tunnels in the old, old City of David (learn how old by reading my previous post on our tour of the City of David). In this photo, my daughter is seeing how high the water might go up on her body when she travels in the wet part of the tunnel. In the end, my daughter and I went through the dry section of the tour, while my husband and two boys enjoyed fifteen minutes of sploshing around in the water to get to the other side.
Thank you to Mary for this meme where one can post any photo with a lot of red or a little red. Happy Ruby Tuesday!
Benji at What War Zone? is hosting Haveil Havalim 193, Not Your Father’s Edition. If you click on it, you will see a photo that I’m not too crazy about (and some may find offensive?). But earlier this week he was posting about a cat called Humusface. If you click on that one, you will get a much cuter photo, but you won’t get a blog carnival with the best of the Jewish blogosphere, including two of my posts.
Why are there so many stray cats in Israel? My husband told me the British brought them over in the 1920s and 1930s to combat the rodent problem. When I was first in Israel in 1980, my aunt admonished me not to pet the stray cats. They were pretty straggly looking. As the economy has gotten better in Israel over the last thirty years, the stray cats have started to look better, as you can see by the kitten I photographed in the Old City of Jerusalem last July.