alpha Torah cloud

here's a very alpha peek at my Torah Cloud.
It's sort of a tag cloud that contains every word in the Humash, sized relative to how often it appears. Looks a little better in IE, but in Firefox, hovering over a word will give you the number of times it appears in Humash.

very alpha, numbers might not be perfect, it's a work in progress.

tefillah blogging

I've started blogging my daily meditations in tefillah, because it's the most essential part of my day, and because I don't have time always to break down my learning into bite-size postable tidbits.

In the interim, and hopefully even when I get back to blogging Torah, I will try to sum up a new aspect of my tefillah every day; may HaShem grant us all newness in our tefillah always.

There may be those people who voice a question or idea that Rav Shlomo Carlebach explained: When a relationship is spoken about, (to people who are outside the relationship) it greatly cheapens and takes away from the relationship.

How is this tefillah blogging different? I'm not telling you about my relationship with HaShem, only sharing with you some of the insights that come along the way. More importantly, I'm only sharing them as a means to allow others to think more about tefillah in a new way, from a new perspective, and to develop their own relationships with HaShem.

Think of each tefillah blog as roshei perakim, just the table of contents to what we can make of our tefilloth. If anyone thinks this is a really bad, misguided, foolish, or egotistical idea, please set me straight.

12 shevat

On 12 shevat four years ago, I started this blog.

Today's Hayom Yom:

Intellect and excitement are two separate worlds. Intellect - a world cold and settled; excitement - a world seething and impetuous. Man's avoda is to combine them, unite them. The impetuousness then becomes transformed into a longing, and the intellect into the guide in a life of avoda and action.

Lately people have been talking in the J-blogosphere about learning out someone's tikkun from the aliyah for the parashah on the day they were born. This Torah blog was born on 12 shevat, 5764, the Torah portion for the day includes the destruction of the Egyptian might, and Bnei Yisrael singing Az YaShir. So from this we can surmise the tikkun and purpose of this blog :) To do away with the mask of physicality and to celebrate HaShem's revealed light, to delight in the Shechinah.

[note: recently I had considered deleting this blog, out of fear that some of the concepts might be mistaken and lead people to difficulties in understanding or even harm. I chose to keep it around, but I hope to reflect more heavily on the teachings I'm giving over and more clearly mark my own ideas. b"n]

public service and minor self-promotion announcement

I've created a (very beta) tool for cleaning out comment spam from any/all of your blogger-based blogs.

http://www.yitz.com/commentscreen.html

Please feel free to check it out, and give me your feedback, I've used it to delete at least a hundred pieces of comment spam in a matter of minutes. It's sorely lacking a search feature, but I hope to add it soon.

Thanks to any and all who may try it out. Be careful not to erase comments you intended to keep, there's no way to restore deleted comments. You can always add a few test comments to your blog and then delete them to see how it works.