User:Valley2city
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Wikipedia Vitae
 | This user is an administrator on the English Wikipedia. (verify) |
 | This user's time zone is CST. |
 | This administrator will consider reasonable requests to provide copies of deleted articles. |
 | This user runs a bot, Rabbot (contribs). It performs tasks that are extremely tedious to do manually. |
 | This editor is a Veteran Editor and is entitled to display this Iron Editor Star. |
 | This user is a member of the Counter-Vandalism Unit. |
 | This user is a recent changes patroller with Twinkle! |
 | This user believes that only articles need reflect a NPOV, and that displaying political, religious, or other beliefs using userboxes and user categories should not be banned. |
 | This user scored 9732 on the Wikipediholic test (revision 285667092). |
WikiProjects
 | This user participates in WikiProject Judaism. |
 | This user participates in WikiProject Israel. |
 | This user is a member of the Jewish History WikiProject. |
 | This user is a member of the Hebrew languages WikiProject. |
 | This user is a member of the Jewish Culture Wikiproject. |
| C | This user participates in WikiProject Columbia University. |
 | This user participates in WikiProject California. |
| HP | This user is a participant in the Harry Potter Task Force. |
 | This user participates in WikiProject Musical Theatre. |
 | This user participates in WikiProject Council. |
Personal Vitae
| This user is Jewish. |
| This user is of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. |
| This user is of Sephardi Jewish ancestry. |  |
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This user claims to be a descendant of King David. |
 | This user observes Shabbat. |
 | This user observes the dietary laws of Kashrut. |
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This user is left-handed. |
Educational
| AJU | This user attends or attended American Jewish University (formerly University of Judaism). |
 | This user is a teacher. |
| JTS | This user attends or attended Jewish Theological Seminary. The bush was not consumed. |
| C | This user attends or attended Columbia University. |
| BA | This user has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. |
| BA | This user has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Talmud & Rabbinics. |
Geographical
 | This user lives in, or hails from, Los Angeles. |
 | This user lives in, or hails from, New York City. |
World-wide-web...ical
 | This user maintains a Facebook profile. |
 | This user maintains a blog. |
Personal not-so-Vitae
 | This user is skilled in the sacred art of Shofar blowing. |
 | This user has an iPod. |
 | This user is owned by one or more dogs. |
| G | This user is a Gryffindor. |
 | This user reads between the lines. |
Random Mild Accomplishments
| ACADEMIC JOURNAL | This user has had his/her work published in an academic journal. |
| MAGAZINE | This user has had his work published in a magazine. |
| POEM | This user has had one of his poems published. |
| SHORT STORY | This user has had one of his/her short stories published. |
Misc. Interests & Minor Beliefs
 | This user is interested in issues related to religious pluralism. |
| C2H5OH-1 | This user drinks relatively infrequently. he is probably the better for it. |
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This user is opposed to online censorship. |
 | Secondhand smoke is one of this user's pet peeves. |
 | This user believes it is every citizen's duty to vote. |
Entertainment
| d'oh! | This user thinks The Simpsons is simply... excellent. |
 | This user enjoys klezmer. |
| Phantom | This user is past the point of no return. |
| CYE | This user wants you to Curb Your Enthusiasm. |
| ent | This user rolls with Vince. |
 | This user is Jack Bauer however, the preceding was a joke and most of us here on Wikipedia hate spreading false info. |
| J! | This user phrases responses in the form of a question. |
| AD | This user made a huge mistake. |
Diet
 | This user is dieting. |
| Aer | This user does aerobics. |
 | This user eats salad. |
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This user eats sushi. |
 | This user loves to eat cucumbers. |
| BAM! | This user believes that gaaahhhlic is a beautiful thing! |
Languages
| en | This user is a native speaker of the English language. |
| yi-2 | דער באַניצער רעדט אַ נישקשהדיקן ייִדיש. |
| es-2 | Este usuario puede contribuir con un nivel intermedio de español. |
| tmr-1 | היא מיתהנאה משתעי בארמאה דתלמודא בבלאה בדרגא נחותא. |
 | This user has an understanding of the Phoenician alphabet. |
| ase-1 | This user can communicate at a basic level in American Sign Language. |
| grc-1 | Ὅδε ὁ χρήστης δύναται συμβάλλεσθαι ὀλίγῃ γνώσει τῆς ἀρχαίας ἑλληνικῆς. |
| Java-2 | This user is an intermediate Java programmer. |
| en-us-ca | Dude, this person is totally a California English speaker. |
| ... | This user would like to be able to speak many more languages. |
About Me
[edit]I'm a rabbi and teacher, also involved in the catering industry, from Los Angeles, CA. I consider myself an expert on matters of Judaism, with a dabbling in the subjects, IRL, of the other WikiProjects (see sidebar) of which I am involved.
A Wikipedian Theology
[edit]When Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden they suddenly developed the ability to know things and to be self-aware. This came at the cost of mortality and decay, that humans would have to toil for their natural lives which would be drastically shortened from eternity to much less. Pain, sorrow, and death are introduced into the world, in exchange for the blissful innocent ignorance. I have posed the question to my students, friends, colleagues, and teachers that "if you were in the position of Adam or Eve and given the choice of whether or not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, knowing the ramifications, would you eat"? Nine times out of ten the answer I have received is "yes".
Increasing knowledge is one of the greatest things given to humanity. I do not believe that there is any sin in what Adam and Eve did. Rather, I believe God placed it in front of them so that they would eat of it. "The sum of human knowledge is the fear of God", writes Ben Sira. It is this for reason that I find Wikipedia so noble a cause and so vital a pursuit. One person cannot know even a small fraction of all knowledge; yet through this collaborative effort, perhaps we can get that much closer to true enlightenment.
And as Rabbi Yehuda ben Teima writes in Pirkei Avot 5:23, "Be bold as the leopard".
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Assume good faith
Assume the presence of a belly-button
Don't stuff beans up your nose
Please do not bite the newcomers
No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man
Staying cool when the editing gets hot
No angry mastodons
The world will not end tomorrow
Wikipedia is not...
The universe does not revolve around you
Words of Pessimism
Murphy's law: Anything that can go wrong, will
Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment
Hanlon's razor:Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
My contribution to Wikipedia
[edit]Besides being an administrator on the English Wikipedia (where I participate mainly in deletion in its various forums and responding to vandalism and vandals) I also participate in many Wikiprojects, namely those related to Judaism In these categories I have created and done very major overhauls in a number of articles (which I will enumerate in the future). I also bill myself as a wikignome (or maybe Obsessive-Compulsive, making tiny edits all over the place, whether considered minor or major. I also tend to follow up edits with other edits (usually more minor) including things I have forgotten after clicking the Save page button.
I am quite passionate about issues regarding Judaism and Israel and love to debate topics relating to these, but I also maintain a semblance of unbias as I write or edit articles on these topics. I think one of the most important things to remember is that Wikipedia is first and foremost is to be a verifiable encyclopedic wiki (it says so right above the Save page button) and it is one thing to be passionate about something (this motivates edits on said topics) but it is another to include your bias within the articles. I am a stickler for policy and will not hesitate to bring up questions about the verifiablity, POV, et al. of any article. I am highly intolerant of vandalism and I will quickly revert any that I see. I am Pro-IP Profiling and look first at changes on my watchlist for anonymous IPs as those tend to contribute more vandalism (A recent study of the WP:Vandalism Studies concluded that about 97% of vandals are IP users). As such I am also in favor of quicker semi-protection for pages that are either vandalized or edit-warred by anonymous IPs. For other me-related things, there are links in some of my userboxes if you decide to stalk me.
Though I live in the Pacific Time Zone, you will find me editing at odd hours (probably because I'm in grad school). You will not, however, find me editing (or manipulating electricity for that matter) on the Jewish Sabbath or holidays. I will usually have a header on this page during these times (but sometimes I will forget). Therefore, understand if I don't get back to you during these times. Otherwise, I am usually pretty quick on getting back to people who post to my talk page. Occasionally I can also be found on the Freenode IRC network on #wikipedia_en and in the admin channel, on as Valley2city.
Torah Portion of the Week
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Moses directed the Israelites to appoint magistrates and officials for their tribes to govern the people with justice, impartially, without bribes. “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” he said.
Moses warned the Israelites against setting up a sacred post beside God’s altar or erecting a stone pillar.
Moses warned the Israelites against sacrificing an ox or sheep with any serious defect.
If the Israelites found a person who worshiped other gods, the Sun, the Moon, or any celestial body, then they were to make a thorough inquiry, and if they established the fact on the testimony of two or more witnesses, then they were to stone the person to death, with the witnesses throwing the first stones. If a case proved too baffling for them to decide, then they were promptly to go to the place that God would choose for God's shrine, appear before the priests or the magistrate in charge and present their problem, and carry out any verdict that was announced there without deviating either to the right or to the left. They were to execute any man who presumptuously disregarded the priest or the magistrate, so that all the people would hear, be afraid, and not act presumptuously again.
If, after the Israelites had settled the land, they decided to set a king over them, they were to be free to do so, taking an Israelite chosen by God. The king was not to keep many horses, marry many wives, or amass silver and gold to excess. The king was to have the priests write for him a copy of this Teaching to remain with him and read all his life, so that he might learn to revere God and observe these laws faithfully. He would thus not act haughtily toward his people nor deviate from the law, and as a consequence, he and his descendants would enjoy a long reign.
The Levites were to have no territorial portion, but were to live only off of offerings, for God was to be their portion. In exchange for their service to God, the priests were to receive the shoulder, cheeks, and stomach of sacrifices, the first fruits of the Israelites’ grain, wine, and oil, and the first shearing of sheep. Levites were to be free to come from their settlements to the place that God had chosen as a shrine to serve in the name of God with their fellow Levites, and there they were to receive equal shares of the dues.
The Israelites were not to imitate the abhorrent practices of the nations that they were displacing, consign their children to fire, or act as an augur, soothsayer, diviner, sorcerer, one who casts spells, one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead, for it was because of those abhorrent acts that God was dispossessing the former residents of the land.
God would raise a prophet from among them like Moses, and the Israelites were to heed him. When at Horeb the Israelites asked God not to hear God’s voice directly, God created the role of the prophet to speak God’s words, promising to hold to account anybody who failed to heed the prophet’s words. But any prophet who presumed to speak an oracle in God’s name that God had not commanded the prophet to utter, or who spoke in the name of other gods, was to die. This was how the people were to determine whether the oracle was spoken by God: If the prophet spoke in the name of God and the oracle did not come true, then that oracle was not spoken by God, the prophet had uttered it presumptuously, and the people were not to fear him.
When the Israelites had settled in the land, they were to divide the land into three parts and set aside three cities of refuge, so that any manslayer could have a place to which to flee. And if the Israelites faithfully observed all the law and God enlarged the territory, then they were to add three more towns to those three.
Only a manslayer who had killed another unwittingly, without being the other’s enemy, might flee there and live. For instance, if a man went with his neighbor into a grove to cut wood, and as he swung an ax to cut down a tree, the ax-head flew off the handle and struck and killed the neighbor, then the man could flee to one of the cities of refuge and live. If, however, one who was the enemy of another lay in wait, struck the other a fatal blow, and then fled to a city of refuge, the elders of the slayer’s town were to have the slayer turned over to the blood-avenger to be put to death.
The Israelites were not to move their countrymen’s landmarks, set up by previous generations, in the property that they were allotted in the land.
An Israelite could be found guilty of an offense only on the testimony of two or more witnesses. If one person gave false testimony against another, then the two parties were to appear before God and the priests or magistrates, the magistrates were to make a thorough investigation, and if the magistrates found the person to have testified falsely, then they were to do to the witness as the witness schemed to do to the other.
Before the Israelites joined battle, the priest was to tell the troops not to fear, for God would accompany them to do battle against their enemy. Then the officials were to ask the troop whether anyone had built a new house but not dedicated it, planted a vineyard but never harvested it, paid the bride price for a wife but not yet married her, or become afraid and disheartened, and all these they were to send back to their homes.
When the Israelites approached a town to attack it, they were to offer it terms of peace, and if the town surrendered, then all the people of the town were to serve the Israelites as forced labor. But if the town did not surrender, then the Israelites were to lay siege to the town, and when God granted victory, kill all its men and take as booty the women, children, livestock, and everything else in the town. Those were the rules for towns that lay very far from Israel, but for the towns of the nations in the land — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites — the Israelites were to kill everyone, lest they lead the Israelites into doing all the abhorrent things that those nations had done for their gods. When the Israelites besieged a city for a long time, they could eat the fruit of the city’s trees, but they were not to cut down any trees that could yield food.
If, in the land, someone slain was found lying in the open, and the slayer could not be determined, then the elders and magistrates were to measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns. The elders of the town nearest to the corpse were to take a heifer that had never been worked down to an ever-flowing wadi and break its neck. The priests were to come forward, all the elders were to wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken, and the elders were to declare that their hands did not shed the blood nor their eyes see it done. The elders were to ask God to absolve the Israelites, and not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among them, and they would be absolved of bloodguilt.
Hebrew and English text
Hear the parshah chanted
Commentary from the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University (Conservative)
Commentary from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Conservative)
Commentary by the Union for Reform Judaism (Reform)
Commentaries from Project Genesis (Orthodox)
Commentaries from Chabad.org (Orthodox)
Commentaries from Aish HaTorah (Orthodox)
Commentaries from the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation (Reconstructionist)
Commentaries from My Jewish Learning (trans-denominational)
Commentaries from Aleph Beta Academy