Clearly, the Cherubim are Cabbages

Whenever the Ark of the Covenant is depicted, the cherubim are depicted as babies with wings.  (Usually, they don't have diapers on.)  We know that cherubim have wings; the Torah talks about their wings.  But are cherubim really babies?  The Torah gives us almost no details or context about the cherubim, except for the wings.

The Rashbam says that they're birds, and he gives some proof or other.  I remember Rabbi Menachem Liebtag suggesting that cherubs are calves, although I didn't find this suggestion on his website.  I don't remember all his proofs for this, but it was part of an attempt to explain why the Jews in the desert made a golden calf, and especially why Yeravam ben Nevat made two golden calves, one on each end of his kingdom.  Rashi, for some reason, only says that the cherubim have faces of babies, but neglects to comment on their bodies; maybe because it was obvious to him that they have humanoid bodies?

Wikipedia, commenting on the "Jewish view of cherubim", notes the prophecy of Yehezkel describing "the cherubim as a tetrad of living creatures, each having four faces: of a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a man. They are said to have the stature and hands of a man, the feet of a calf, and four wings. Two of the wings extended upward, meeting above and sustaining the throne of God; while the other two stretched downward and covered the creatures themselves".  Wikipedia also notes that the modern academic Near East historians are convinced that cherubim have the body of a lion and the head of a man, like the mythical sphinx.

But let's be honest: we all know that cherubim are cabbages, just like seraphim are snakes and ofanim are chariot wheels.  The "wings" of the cherub are obviously leaves of the cabbage.  And cabbages certainly make fearful guardians of the Garden of Eden, at least when they are wielding a revolving sword.

Oh Sweet Latke

לביבה מתוקה

מתאימה לחנוכה

לביבה מתוקה

בורא פרי האדמה

כמו אוזן של המן

50% שומן

בקיטנה וגם בגן

נס גדול היה כאן

Lyrics: Oren Hatch
Melody: traditional
Note: Some latkes may not be ha'adama.  Ask your rabbi.

Beat It

You can drive to our shul by going east on Oliphant street.  About a block before the shul, the sidewalk ends, and then, a few meters before the shul, the street ends.  The street is continued by a courtyard paved with bricks, kind of like a pedestrian walkway.  On one side is the shul, and on the other side is an apartment building.

Most residents of the apartment building, like most residents of Tel Aviv, are not particularly frum.  The building is usually quiet, but one Friday night, one of the apartments was hosting a loud party.  As I walked past the building on the way to shul, I could hear Beat It blasting from the windows.

A month or so later, Michael Jackson passed away.  I saw a few posters on Shenkin mourning his passing.  (The posters were styled to look like the death notices of prominent rabbis and other Haredim, which one sees posted every so often.)  I was a bit curious as to what he died of.  I looked at Wikipedia, which, curiously, did not say.  So I did a little bit of googling.  I never found the answer to my question, but I did come across an article featuring some lite lit crit of Michael Jackson's songs.  This article referred to "Beat It" as a pacifist song.  This, IMAO, totally misses the point of the song.  I think the song is pretty clear.  "You better run, you better do what you can," Jackson sings.

Why?

Because "they'll kick you and they'll beat you and they'll tell you it's fair."  Not because violence is bad, but because you don't have a chance.  It's kind of like "he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day".  It's like those Gemaras in Gittin which everyone reads on Tisha B'Av: this is why Jerusalem was destroyed, this is why Betar was destroyed, this is why [City I don't remember] was destroyed.  The Jerusalem story is kind of complicated, so many people are distracted from the point of the three stories taken together: we stood up for our pride, ignoring the threat of Roman retaliation; the Romans retaliated; and we got our butts kicked.  If we'd only bitten our lips and submitted to the far superior power of the Roman Empire, the Holy Temple would still be here.  Don't throw rocks at someone holding a gun.

So who was supposed to beat it, that Friday night in Tel Aviv?  The Haredim?  I don't think so.  You don't sing "Beat It" to your enemies.  You sing "Beat It" to your friends.  Sometimes, you sing "Beat It" to yourself.  Times are changing.  It's not the Haredim who need to beat it anymore, not even in Tel Aviv.

Don't Let Them Take Our Spinoza Away

In the introduction to Richard Dawkins' excellent book The God Delusion, Dawkins drops the name of Baruch Spinoza and says something like, "pantheism is sexed-up atheism".  Somewhere in Hume's Treatise, he also refers to Spinonza as an atheist (derisively, by the way).

IMAO, nothing could be further from the truth.  Spinoza had God on his mind 24 hours a day.  True, Spinoza's God was not the traditional, "personal" God, but Spinoza describes an all-consuming love for this Being, kind of an unrequited love.

When I was discussing this with a friend of mine, he said, "OK, but Spinoza was a materialist."  This is also wrong IMAO.  Spinoza asserted that Mind and Matter are but two of an infinite number of dimensions.  This is very similar to what is nowadays called dualism, except with Spinoza's usual mystical twist.

Ironically, I think that Hume is often called an atheist himself, although I can't think of good examples right now.  IMAO, this is technically true, but somewhat misleading.  Hume was a skeptic about everything, not about God in particular.  He didn't believe in God any less than he believed, say, in his mother.

Bug of the Day, or, How I Escaped from the Evil Empire

I saw the bug description and my heart sank.  It was that dreaded two-letter word: IE.

I do not own a Windows computer, which means that I would have to borrow one, and worse, that I'd have to debug remotely. Also, debugging on Internet Explorer is a pain in and of itself.  Only Firefox has historically provided good support for debugging JavaScript.

Before I actually borrowed the Windows, though, I looked at the bug again.  The bug said that the text "null" appeared under the chart image on the examples page in IE.  I thought to myself, "Oh, the image URL string that's supposed to be printed under the chart is coming up null in IE."  To verify this, I went to our QA engineer and asked her about the bug.

"So the image URL is coming up null in IE?" I asked.

"What image URL?" she asked.

Apparently, there was no text at all under the chart image in Firefox, Chrome etc.  This looked fine to the QA engineer, but I knew that that was incorrect as well.  In fact, it probably meant that the bug was really one unified cross-browser bug; the method that was supposed to return the image URL was returning null, and the only difference was that IE printed the URL as the text "null" and Firefox didn't print it at all.  In this case, the behavior of IE was actually more helpful.  Imagine my relief!  In all probability, I wouldn't have to deal with IE after all.

So I went back to good old Firefox and opened the examples page.  As soon as I looked at the page source, it was clear that the example was getting the image URL with the wrong signature -- a signature I'd used previously but had since abandoned.  Apparently, since I'd changed the signature, I hadn't even opened the examples page.  I just ran the tests and submitted the code without looking at what the code actually did.

That was kind of embarrassing, but in terms of present work, it was great!  It meant that the problem was in our private examples page, not in the public API code I'd written.  All I had to do was fix the function signature in the example and the "bug" would be fixed.

However, when I fixed the signature, I was in for another surprise; an unpleasant surprise.  The URL showed up, but the chart was gone!  How could printing a URL string make the chart disappear?  I tried printing "hello world" instead of the URL, which, of course, had no effect on the chart.  After messing around for a few minutes, I realized what was going on.  The code to compute the URL was actually clearing the chart's container!  That means that any call to retrieve the image URL would kill the chart in the process.  The entire image URL feature I'd implemented was worse than worse than useless: it was thoroughly evil!

Once I discovered this, it was very easy to fix: I just had to save the image URL instead of recalculating it.  This was something I'd been planning to do anyway, but I probably wouldn't have gotten around to it before the release.

In conclusion, an evil bug in my production code had been hiding behind a bug in my example code.  And it would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for the vigilant eye of our QA engineer, and a little browser they call Internet Explorer.

The Subtlest Diaper I've Ever Seen

We usually buy Pampers.  Every once in a while we buy a local brand called Titulim.  The design on the Titulim diapers doesn't have any text on it.  It has a pattern of medium-size shapes in subdued blue and purple, like wallpaper.

For a while, I didn't pay much attention to what the different shapes represented.  About a year after moving to Israel, I reflected a little bit on the shapes themselves.  There are six shapes repeated on the diaper: butterflies, balls, bears, baloons, blocks, and stars.

Presumably, the B was chosen because it's the first letter of the word "baby", though of course babies do not appear on the diaper.

The burning question, of course, is what are the stars doing there?  Is the designer going for a higher order of subtlety by including a misfit?  "One of these things is not like the others?"

I cheated by not mentioning something about the stars: they come in pairs (one bigger and one smaller), which suggests that together they form a binary star.

Who designed this thing, an English professor who didn't get tenure?

Who Will Laugh?

Recently I wrote a post on the Bruria story, so I decided to write a post about my favorite example of traditional Jewish humor.  This has been on my toblog list for a while.  Besides, Rosh HaShana is coming.

Where did Yitzhak Avinu (known to some as the Patriarch Isaac) get his name?

This will be no mystery to most of my Dear Readers.  Yitzhak means "he will laugh", and he was called Yitzhak because both his parents laughed at the prophecy of Yitzhak's birth.  Avraham's wife, Sara, was too old to have children, and yet Hashem (known to some as God) told them (individually) that she would have a son.  The reaction of both was laughter.

Avraham and Sara laughed at the prophecy because they couldn't beleive it.  Why do you laugh at something you can't beleive?  You can't believe it, so you assume that the speaker is "pulling your leg", "putting you on" -- that the speaker is joking.

Sara, of course, subsequently had a son, so it was clear to Avraham and Sara that they'd been wrong; Hashem had been serious.  Until, a few years later, a funny thing happened.

"Hey Avraham," Hashem said.  "Remember how I said that Sara was going to have a son?"

"Of course," Avraham said.  "At first I thought You were just joking.  But then she did have a son, and isn't he a sweetheart.  Thanks a million."

"Actually," Hashem said, "I was joking, though maybe not the way you thought at first."

"What do you mean?" Avraham asked.

"Now," Hashem said, "you have to kill him."

If Avraham had been a Shunamite woman, he would have said, "Didn't I tell You not to f*** with me?"  But he was a bit more circumspect, so he did as he was told.  Then, when the knife was at Yitzhak's throat, Hashem said:

"Just kidding!  Ha ha."

And that is how Yitzhak got his name.

Funny, isn't it?