מיץ פירות

^{‹Meetz Peirot›}
“Fruit juice”
···› from root מ-צ-ה “to squeeze”
(not to con­fuse with מ-צ-א “to find”)

What a juicy topic. It’s multi-lay­ered, not only if you let it settle.
Juice “from con­cen­trate” is boiled down to about 10% its orig­inal volume for ship­ping across the world, and some unde­clared addi­tives are used to homog­e­nize it back into some­thing resem­bling juice once re-diluted with water; some juice drinks con­tain extra sugar or fur­ther addi­tives, how some hardly con­tain any fruit at all… 

Besides that, most juice including “not from con­cen­trate” is pas­teur­ized, i.e. heated for a few sec­onds to 85° centi­grade, about 185 Fahren­heit, and then it lasts up to a year in car­tons or plastic bot­tles, sev­eral years in glass bot­tles. How can this be? How dead (micro­bi­o­log­i­cally, chem­i­cally, ener­get­i­cally) does any sub­stance have to be, so that you can keep it in a con­tainer for years without it going off? (I must admit I wonder about that even more with tinned fish…)

Is juice “healthy”? It used to… but the tides seem to have turned against it. Man­u­fac­turers often want to lead us to believe that the essence of the fruit is squeezed into each carton. Yet without the fiber and all the intact cell walls, juice con­tains high levels of sugar, typ­i­cally 10 per cent or more. That’s pretty much on par with the sugar levels in common soda drinks, the very sugar levels that every health con­scious person detests them for! Yes, with no-sugar-added “direct” fruit juice, it’s all “nat­ural” — but then, aman­itas are also “all-nat­ural”.

The ben­e­fits from eating fruit lie mainly in the nutri­ents and fiber that you get mostly from all the bits around the juice. With pome­gran­ates for example, the yellow/white stuff (called meso­carp) around the seeds and arils is very much edible and con­tains high levels of tan­nins and other nutri­ents. Yet it is most often dis­carded, as a by-product of juice production…

How much of the fruit will you be able to appre­ciate by drinking the juice? How much of the essence of the tree that those apples or oranges grew on, how much of the morning dew and evening sun that it soaked up? How much of the scenery that the tree over­looks, how much of the damp soil min­erals that the roots tap into? How much of the souls of the ani­mals that sat in its shade or nested on its branches? 

---

Like­wise — how much essence of true reli­gion are you expecting to receive by reading scrip­tures only, without the cul­tural and lin­guistic con­text that they are embedded in, and that they emerged from? By reading a trans­la­tion, and only the books that some com­mit­tees decided over cen­turies were “canon”, deeming others “apoc­ryphal”? How much has been taken away? And what has been furtively added, without declaring the addi­tives? How much inter­pre­ta­tion has been added by the trans­la­tors? Just keeping in mind that the orig­inal Hebrew text of the תַּנַ״ךְ (Tanakh) had no upper- or low­er­case let­ters, no punc­tu­a­tion, some­times not even space between let­ters (at least according to Nachmanides)! 

Juice for thought… to be continued.

---

פִּסוּק

^‹Pisuk›
“spacing/punctuation/accentuation/phrasing/widening”

Double-spacing.  Growing up I never encoun­tered it.  When I moved to the UK, I saw it, and even adopted it for a while.  I still think it’s pretty; but it also gen­er­ates irreg­ular gaps in the flow of a para­graph — a bit like hic­coughs.  In the good olden days of type­set­ting, when it was still a craft, an “em-quad” spacer lead block would usu­ally be placed after a period (full stop).  When type­writers came along, and type­set­ting turned into typing, there was only one (fixed) width of space actu­ated by the space bar, and it became an approx­i­ma­tion to put two stan­dards spaces — at least in much of the Eng­lish-typing world.  Two spaces are wider than an em-quart though.

I have an old type­writer, pur­chased some years ago at a flea market in my home­town.  When I type the odd poem or piece of prose on it, I quickly notice a big dif­fer­ence: every mis­take is imme­di­ately inked on paper.  Cor­recting it requires some form of a white cover-up, or re-doing the entire sheet.  On the com­puter, the non-imme­diate typing and the boon of the back­space key rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way we work yet again — it allows the writer to take much less care, to think while typing, re-writing, re-struc­turing, copying and pasting… drafting on screen, rather than in the head in advance.

Back to double-spacing: com­pared with the em-quart, two spaces are too wide, one space is too narrow.  As with any spir­i­tual debate, we do well entering and main­taining the dia­logue under the premise of “let’s not find out who is right and who is wrong; let us assume that we are both wrong, attempting to approach truth from dif­ferent angles, dif­ferent lengths… and find the beauty in each others’ stories.” 

Source: https://www.writing-skills.com/one-space-two-full-stop

---

תיאטרון בובות

^{‹Ta’a­tron Bubot›}
“Puppet The­ater”
···› the­atre of the dolls/puppets/marionettes

Are we pup­pets? Clay in our mak­er’s hands? Yes, but the mate­rial is not entirely pas­sive, its char­ac­ter­is­tics feed back to the forming hands. We are HaShem’s coun­ter­part, the abut­ment, the counter-bearing He chose to make, to not be alone, in His self-suf­fi­cient one-and-all­ness, lacking nothing but… us: an oth­er­ness. Our ten­den­cies are opposed to Him – nec­es­sarily so. For if we were per­fectly aligned with him, we’d be an exten­sion of His, pro­jecting out­ward into infinity, but with no space present. HaShem decided to give up infini­tude, at least to a degree, tem­porarily, to make a cre­ation. He retracted, though not lit­er­ally, not com­pletely, from a “vacated space”, that he placed us in, the uni­verse, a spu­rious space-time-con­tinuum — flimsy when com­pared with His ever-present con­sis­tency, yet in itself, self-evi­dent. Here we are, playing parts.

Some­times graceful, with bouncy step, some­times slouchy and grouchy, some­times serious, often fatuous; face­tious, fas­tid­ious; nuanced; whole­sale, out­right… true, though often also fake, playing roles means, we think: catering to expec­ta­tions and patterns.

As a musi­cian, “playing” has yet another dimen­sion: it means prac­ticing, honing my craft. There’s no other way, any instru­men­talist will con­firm to you: you need to play to improve. Thus, playing is dead serious, there’s nothing playful about it. Or is there, still? What if HaShem is playing us, all the time, His cre­ation? Are we His Stradi­varius, or His ship­ping crate? Does He have to slap us, or can He bow us gently, to pro­duce the sound He wants? 

We are His orchestra. So the ques­tion turns from
“What role do you play?” to “What part do you play?”