|
I'm a rabbi. You guys have NO idea how many acronyms you can come up with until you do work in a language without written vowels, where acronyms can become vocalized words effortlessly, and all great scholars are known by their acronyms. Seriously, rabbinics is like the army with the number of acronyms we have. First time I really got into a heavy rabbinics conversation, and I saw someone trying to follow the track of "...if you look at RaSHI, and then you look at RaSHBaM, and you compare what they say to the RAVaD and the RiVaSH, check the Ta"Z and the SHa"CH, and the German SHu"T, you can see a throughline of precedents that all agree that YAba"Zei l'AKu"M can't be SHa"Tzim;" they looked like they were trying to shit a brick, and I realized I had unwittingly fallen into the jargon circle of Dante's Inferno....
(All of that acrobatonymics just means that certain rabbinic authorities all agree in their responsa or commentaries that Jews who are deliberately apostates may not qualify as leaders of public Jewish prayers.)
__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
|