Success Is Not Proof: Tzidkat HaTzaddik 64–65
Things are going well. Your plans are working. Doors keep opening. You feel that Hashem is helping you, and perhaps He really is. Does that mean you’re right?

טַל יַלְדֻתֶיךָ Tehillim 110:3
Dew of Your Youth is about thought, memory, matters of faith, and the systems we build to keep our thinking from dissolving.
Jewish texts, personal workflows, family archives, and languages learned along the way.
If you’ve ever tried to organize your soul with Markdown, welcome.
Things are going well. Your plans are working. Doors keep opening. You feel that Hashem is helping you, and perhaps He really is. Does that mean you’re right?
A Hebrew speaker reads Tabnit’s Phoenician curse against grave robbers, carved on a recycled Egyptian coffin, with the guesses and corrections left visible.
My father and I were learning אותיות ס״ב–ס״ג in Tzidkat HaTzaddik, where Rav Tzadok talks about the qualities people inherit from their parents. There are some interesting ideas here. There are also a few places where I had to stop and say, “Hang on. Didn’t you just tell us the opposite?”
A Hebrew speaker reads the ninth-century BCE Mesha Stele without first studying Moabite, keeping the misreadings visible, to see how far Hebrew actually gets you.
Head covering, six hours between meat and dairy, an ever-longer siddur: how the practices of the especially pious quietly become everyone’s minimum.