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From: R. Kovacs
Subject: Formal grammar
Date: 21 Tevet 5783
Devorah makes an important distinction.
My zeyde could not read a clock — he never learned. The numerals meant nothing to him. My aunt once bought him a pocket watch, a beautiful thing with Hebrew letters instead of numbers, and he thanked her gravely and put it in a drawer. He never looked at it.
But he knew when Shabbos began. He watched the sky. He listened for the shamash. He felt the change in the air — he said the world grew quieter, that even the birds knew.
A clock cannot do what my zeyde did. But a clock can record what time my zeyde said Shabbos began. These are different things.
Devorah's parser is like the clock. It does not observe. It records.
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