Lately, the deep-summer heat has been discouraging me for going outdoors for extended periods of time. I hadn't done much in the way of walking for a few weeks, so last Wednesday I took advantage of the cooling evening to hike out toward the hills to the southwest of town. I followed the trails and dirt roads that snake around the hills until I saw some lights from must have been the village of Akhbara. Across the valley I saw a small light that I thought must have been a campfire.

Last night's hike was a bit more eventful. I went down to the familiar trail that runs through the wadi to the west of town, the trail with the white-blue-white markers. Very soon after reaching the trail, I heard the growling of wild boars and looked across to the other side of the gully where a mother boar was heading uphill straight away from me, followed by a small herd of cute little piglets. As I continued, I saw a few more packs of boars, each of two to four adults with half a dozen or more youngsters trailing along like ducklings. The first time I encountered the wild boars in the woods, I was a bit intimidated and backed off as quietly as I could. They're much less scary, though, when you have a ravine between you and them and not so much tree cover to hide them. Watching them, I realized that they were at least as interested in avoiding a close encounter as I was, which clued me into the key for dealing with them safely. When I hear a growl come out of nowhere, my first instinct is to freeze up and make as little noise as possible, but this will only make a boar more nervous since they're also afraid of the unknown. So the proper thing to do is to keep confidently walking, keeping your footsteps as clearly audible as possible. Given the chance, boars are much more skilled at slinking away into the rocky brush than you, so why not let them do all the work at avoidance? This worked like a charm all through the rest of my hike.

I was feeling pretty peppy as I hopped down the stony hillside to the bottom of the wadi, and the light of the setting sun was enough to make me quite hot when combined with the exercise. So I was quite pleased when I reached the creek where several valleys intersect, along with the hiking trails that run through them. After resting and splashing myself with water to cool down, I chose to continue on the white-blue-white path, which led along the south bank of the creek. I passed several ruins of buildings constructed out of stone in the old arch-based style that seems to have been popular over the past several centuries in this area. The ruins had signs warning against the danger of collapse. I approached a deep alcove created by the remains of a stone room embedded in the slope to discover bats flying around in the twilight of its shaded vault. The bats were cute.

I'm all out of time, so I'll wrap this up tomorrow night.

I made an apple pie, rectangular though it may be. I tossed in raisins and prunes that I had lying around in an attempt to keep them from going to waste. It's still too hot to know if it was a success or not.

I rewrote the front page of nanoo.org and made it match the new appearance of the diary and links pages.

I slightly optimized the size of the photographs on www.chavas-music.com by replacing the transparency with the background color of the page in which each image is meant to be displayed.

The most important book I got last week was Wrestling with God and Men. It is a call to the Orthodox Jewish community to find an acceptable solution for people with a homosexual orientation who do not wish to reject Orthodoxy. It pains me greatly that I feel the need to clarify that a halachic view which sentences any person to a life in which any kind of meaningful, loving partnership is categorically denied is not acceptable, but Rabbi Chaim Rapoport very clearly asserts that such a level of cruelty is indeed acceptable in his comprehensive and technically expert treatise, Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic Orthodox View.

In any case, I devoured Wrestling with God and Men all at once in a single night. The parts of the book that touched me the most were those in which the Midrashic story of Daniel the Tailor was related. This tale recounts how an ordinary tailor had the guts to confront the Rabbis of his age with their lack of compassion for the plight of the mamzer, a person born of a forbidden sexual union, forbidden by the law from marrying practically anyone within the Jewish people and thus doomed to a marginal, loveless existence. Daniel interpreted a section of Ecclesiastes concerning the unmitigated suffering of the oppressed as speaking about the Great Rabbinic Court's execution of the law against the mamzerim, who cannot be blamed for the sins of their parents. Daniel further interpreted that even though no human being provides comfort for the mamzerim, God takes the responsibility to console them, and promises to eventually redeem them from their cruel circumstances at the hands of their fellow Jews. Though the law was never reframed in Daniel's time, later authorities became unwilling to fully implement the law of the mamzer, to the point that later rabbinic decree forbade the "outing" of families in whom the presence of mamzerut in the bloodline could be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don't think that the analogy to the halachic treatment of homosexuals needs much explanation. The story gives me comfort.

As little as a year ago, I was not willing to accept the premise of the book that the interpretation of the law which has stood for so many millennia could change. I was still stuck in the dogmatic cage that convinced me that the only way to stay within Orthodoxy would be to live the life of martyrdom prescribed almost universally by the Orthodox Rabbinate. I was still grinding my teeth on the wearying and worn-out conviction that the law is the law and you just have to grin and bear it. How and why I escaped from that death-trap is a story for another time and place, but it suffices to say that the essence of my inner change was the internalization of the idea that the spirit of the law must override the letter. The rest flows from there.

I think that many people may miss the point of this book by assuming that its core thesis is its attempt to reinterpret the sacred literature in a way that legitimizes homosexuality. The book's attempt to do so is merely a concrete example that is a tool for supporting its true thesis, less explicit though it may be. In my mind, the most important message of the book is that the application of Halacha in this regard can and will change if and only if the community at large feels motivated by the demands of compassion for such a change. Thus, the only way that the situation will improve for Torah observant Jews who are gay is through addressing the human factors, by refusing to allow the community to continue turning a blind eye to our suffering, not through any formal legal argument or rational proof. Logic will not change the law, for law is a living thing whose change is ultimately governed not by its letter, but by its spirit. The Torah is not ink on parchment, but black fire on white fire.

In less poetic terms, Halacha will certainly respond (however slowly) to the awareness of the very real human needs that are currently denied to gays by Orthodoxy, and it will only respond through such an awareness. My bile is aroused by the fact that most of Torah-committed Judaism is still either deeply sunk into callous insensitivity or hiding behind one cowardly veil of self-deception after another. However, my faith and hope are bolstered by the firm belief that Judaism must align itself to nourish the human soul rather than crush it, for human love and humane justice are its very essence. All the rest is commentary.

Today I got an email message from a helpful stranger telling me that all the links in my entry for ParseTime on PyPI were broken. Indeed they were. I had submitted the information about ParseTime to PyPI when I first developed it, and the software led a quiet and happy life on my Web server until the early summer of 2004, when I lost a rather significant amount of data in a hard drive crash (the most powerful lesson in proper backup procedure). This little slip of a Python extension module was one of the more significant things lost.

But in March of this year, I found the time to recreate this bit of code out of my memories and the wisps and scraps I had managed to glean from Google's cache shortly after the hard drive catastrophe. I dare say the second time around ended up with an implementation that is more concise, more robust, and more clearly written. But somehow, I never got around to tying the last bits of ribbon around the module's packaging, and so I never made the code accessible through the Web. I soon forgot about the whole thing, since the it was done more out of curiousity than out of any pressing need on my part. So until today, all the references to ParseTime on the Internet remained invalid. Thanks to this kind reminder, though, I've revived something that someone may find useful in their adventures in programming.

The small irony of the situation is not lost on me: a significant part of my job is to nag other people about broken links to their software. The cobbler's kids go barefoot.

This afternoon, Becca needed a nap but Ashira wasn't the least bit tired. So the bat-signal strobed across the sky and I swooped in to save the day. Boobalah greeted me with her usual beaming smiles. I can't help but get the impression of Avraham's face when looking at Ashira smile, which is weird because I can't consciously see it when I look at Avraham himself. It could be the beard getting in the way. I'll have to dig up and scrutinize some of his old baby pictures.

Anyway, we swept out of the bedroom to find what adventures we could. We grabbed the coffee mug on the table and twisted it every possible angle (with resultant coffee drips on the table-top), played peek-a-boo in the playpen, snatched and clanged utensils in the kitchen, fiercely sucked on a bottle of water (she practically insists on holding it all by herself), strolled in the garden to caress the leaves on the trees, and chased all sorts of interesting toys across the floor. Sweet pie really can zoom around on the floor with her belly crawl, just like Becca claims. She's earnestly trying to learn to crawl on her hands and knees instead of inch-worming on her belly. It's a bit frustrating for her. She gets herself perched on her knees and palms and seems to intuit that she could more a lot faster if she could somehow move forward from this position, but as soon as she pushes forward, she flops right back onto her belly. I think the secret she needs to learn is how to put one knee in front of the other in an orderly sequence instead of relying on semi-random thrashing.

Eventually, Ashira reached the kind of fussy that indicates that she's getting really tired. But this energetic, wide-eyed baby can't seem to latch on to the idea of voluntarily resting. So the secret is food. I really didn't want to wake Becca any sooner than necessary, so I decided to be a little naughty. Knowing full well that Becca prefers to keep close track of Ashira's diet, I sliced off a chunk of apple and used it as a pacifier. I left the skin on since I didn't have enough time or skill to peel it one-handed (even if I could find a peeler), but I think this worked out for the best since it kept Ashira from liberating very much solid pulp from the apple chunk with her vigorous gumming, while still letting her taste a steady flow of juice. Again, she assertively fed herself as I cradled her in one arm, pausing briefly to retrieve the piece of fruit whenever she decided to toss it into space. As Ashira's eyelids ever so slowly became heavier, I read the book that I had wisely brought along, The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt. At long last, those big blue eyes closed as much as they ever do, although the first time she slipped into sleep I accidentally flustered her for a few seconds with a bit of irrepressible laughter that was triggered by the hilarious way in which her eyes rolled back into her head as the drool-soaked apple drooped from her slack jaw.

This blissful nap lasted for a good while until I innocently leaned back in my chair, which creaked loudly in response, breaking the spell. As usual, Ashira was groggy after a midday nap, and the apple snack had only whetted her appetite. I was late enough for work anyway, so I relinquished sweet cheeks into the arms of her mommy, no doubt also into the arms of Morpheus again, given that nursing was imminent.

P.S. Huge congratulations to Patrick Lenz (creator of freshmeat.net) and his wife Alice.