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Shiviti (restored by Andrew Meit, from the David Simonsen Manuscripts Collection)

Shiviti - The Royal Library of Denmark David Simonsen Manuscripts Collection (Restored by Andrew Meit - Final)

We are grateful to Andrew Meit for restoring a Shiviti from the Royal Library of Denmark’s Simonsen Manuscripts Collection. The image was slightly adjusted by Aharon Varady. All files including the vector art are shared with a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) Public Domain dedication. . . . → Read More: Shiviti (restored by Andrew Meit, from the David Simonsen Manuscripts Collection)

Shiviti: perceiving the world as an expression of divine Oneness

Image: המנורה כתובה by Ba'al haKokhav (CC0)

Given that the Torah forbids impressing our imaginations with illustrations of the divine, some other method is necessary to perceive divine Oneness. One method is found in the verse in Psalms 16:8, “I have set YHVH before me at all times.”

שִׁוִּיתִי יְהוָה לְנֶגְדִּי תָמִיד׃ Shiviti YHVH l’negdi tamid I have set YHVH before me at all times.

. . . → Read More: Shiviti: perceiving the world as an expression of divine Oneness

How to craft a Pamphlet Birkon for Blessings After Eating and other prayers

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Beginning late last year, I began a project to translate the Birkat Hamazon using Rabbi Simeon Singer’s English translation and the Nusaḥ ha-Ari as the basis for publishing birkonim (or in Yiddish, benchers). The original work was sponsored by the Teva Learning Center and its executive director, Nili Simhai, to be used in birkhonim specifically designed for use during weekdays during Teva’s Fall season. . . . → Read More: How to craft a Pamphlet Birkon for Blessings After Eating and other prayers

Barukh Shem Kavod Malkhuto — an illustrated meditation on the unification of imagination and awareness through empathy

Image: Hidden in Plain Sight by Aharon Varady, an image of a page found in a box of shemot at Isabella Freedman Retreat Center, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported

When works are printed bearing shemot, any one of the ten divine names sacred to Judaism, they are cared for with love. If a page or bound work bearing shemot falls to the ground it’s a Jewish custom to draw up the page or book and kiss it. Just as loved ones are cared for after they’ve fallen and passed away, when the binding fails and leaves fall from siddurim and other seforim they are collected in boxes and bins and brought for burial, where their holy words can decompose back into the earth from which their constituent elements once grew, and were once harvested to become paper and books, and ink, string, glue. While teaching at the Teva Learning Center last Fall 2010, I collected all our shemot that we had intentionally or unintentionally made on our copy machine, or which we had collected from the itinerant teachers who pass through the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center on so many beautiful weekend shabbatonim. While leafing through the pages, I found one and kept it from the darkness of the genizah. . . . → Read More: Barukh Shem Kavod Malkhuto — an illustrated meditation on the unification of imagination and awareness through empathy

A Decision Tree for Choosing Free/Libre Licenses for Cultural and Technological Work

Licensing-Creative-Works-for-Advancing-a-Creative-Culture-decision-tree

To help creators of new works navigate the panoply of free/libre, open source, and copyleft licenses, I made a decision tree flowchart as an image map with clickable links to respective licenses and relevant articles. . . . → Read More: A Decision Tree for Choosing Free/Libre Licenses for Cultural and Technological Work

Free/Libre and Open Source Licensed Unicode Hebrew Fonts

Open Source and Unicode Hebrew Font comparison

“Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems.”[1] The importance of sharing documents with Unicode 4.0+ compliant Hebrew fonts was underlined for us in early 2010, after the liturgy of a popular siddur was contributed to the Open Siddur Project . . . → Read More: Free/Libre and Open Source Licensed Unicode Hebrew Fonts

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