בס״ד

Kavanot: Introduction

Thoughts on Tanach and the Davening

I originally started this site in 2011 to help my davening and organize my thoughts, especially about the שמנה עשרה and its origins in תנ״ך. I never got around to doing that and that part of the site has the topic heading and a few notes but nothing else. Hopefully I will get back to it some day.

In the summer of 2012 I started teaching a class in תנ״ך, connecting the life of David with תהילים‎, and that has been a lot of work and a lot of fun, and a great way for me to keep learning. The notes for those shiurim are at Shiurim, along with outlines of Shmuel, Divrei Hayamim and Tehillim.

In the summer of 2013 I teaching a Shabbat morning parsha class, and while I obviously can’t bring the computer with me, I find it useful to write out my notes and those are on this site as well.

I’ve also used this site as an experimental playground for an editor that helps me write the notes, using Javascript to implement things like a Hebrew keyboard and HTML editing. Each page has an “Edit this page” link at the bottom and you can play around with that (you can’t save the changes; this is my site!).

As of 2014-09-04 I started using Emanuil Rusev’s Parsedown to allow Markdown syntax in addition to plain HTML. The downside is the inability to add attributes (most notably for my use lang attributes), so I still have to use a lot of vanilla HTML. I also do some custom text-munging, changing straight quotes to curly ones and double hyphens to true m-dashes.

As of 2020-03-20, as shul shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I started giving the classes online, recording the audio and linking to those files along with the notes.

As of 2020-5-28 I implemented my own extension to Parsedown, called KavanotParsedown to incorporate all my desired extensions to the Markdown syntax. The source now is almost all Markdown, with little HTML, but things copied from the Internet are of course HTML. Markdown is nice in that you can generally mix them freely.