Here

2009-07-22T11:45:00.002-05:00

somehow i started to get emails from "InTORAHnet,"* I have to admit to not reading most of them. For whatever reason I recently opened the "dvar torah" on parashat shlach. The idea was somehow to connect the balfour declaration/early zionism, the spies, and the talit. It concludes:

When we wrap ourselves in a Talit - may we remember the eternal connection between G-d and the Jewish people; and when we look upon the flag of Israel may we too remember that its intential [sic] colors and purposeful design are reminders that a people of destiny has a land of destiny. In the words of the Zohar, "G-d, Torah and Israel are one."

Ahhhhh! Am I right that he is implying that "Israel" refers to the land thereof in the famed quote? The fact that the quote is supposed to support something about the "land of destiny" suggests yes. The obvious wrong-ness of such a reading, and the fact that he also refers to the Jewish people, suggests no. Or is he playing on a supposed ambiguity (which is also an obviously wrong reading)? Anyone?

* "a resource project of Yeshiva University Center for the Jewish Future -South Florida Initiative, where Rabbi X serves as Senior Community Scholar and Executive Director."

** incidentally, I tried bar ilan and couldn't find the precise phrase (or anything like it - ppl seem to be confused as to the order anyway) anywhere, including the passage ppl cite for the phrase (zohar acharei). It is about the idea, though, but am I missing something?

2009-06-08T19:52:00.001-05:00

just wondering, perhaps un pc-ly: do native-hebre-speaking-and-gay people really call it "gaavah" or is it just stupid americans with dictionaries and no context?

2009-03-10T22:19:00.002-05:00

in another random internet moment, someone has been trying to sell this coffee table for $40 for months. (Actually, it started at $50 and they came down to $40 about a month or two ago.) All caps with exclamation points just doesn't make it more attractive, though... I will give hir credit for persistence, though. I guess s/he lives in the rare Manhattan apartment where one can afford to leave a large piece of furniture that one doesn't want to own sitting around just in case...

2009-03-10T20:23:00.002-05:00

i don't know if it will for you, but when i viewed this webpage instead of photos it had captions describing what photos should be there, presumably for internal use. The captions are "Hispanic Mom/Daughter/Baby Photo" "Asian Mom/Baby Photo" and "Native American Family Photo." For some reason I found this funny. I mean, we all know a trying-too-hard multicultural ad campaign when we see it, but it's somehow amusing to have the emphasis on ethnicity confirmed by accident...
In other news Baby is very cute.

2008-09-14T23:25:00.003-05:00

I'm pretty sure I remember the bald guy in this picture from the days I used to wait, always feeling sketchy but relying on my white-female privelege not to look like a terrorist/stalker, outside Lehman for Oren. Or maybe it was someone else equally imposing. Alas.

In totally unrelated news, I was recently at an engagement party. Mother-of-bride-to-be gave a little speech about looking forward to sharing more happy occassions, combining our families, etc. Some older woman yells out, "Lots of babies!" Calling a fish a fish, i suppose.

In other other news the prospect of getting a job does not amuse me. And in general I have a lot to do and am tired. Blah.

a fashion interlude

2008-08-13T21:15:00.003-05:00

i sink to a new low with the following poll:

as between the following two shoes, which is more "professional" (in the most conservative sense of the word)? how much more? (B comes in my size, A comes in a size i can wear but that's not my size... B would be black, not the other colors shown)
A or B

i asked oren but, well, he's not exactly an expert on women's shoes.

on the topic of shoe shopping:

ladybug, ladybug

2008-08-05T21:22:00.002-05:00

Some weeks ago (I'm guessing late June) I noticed one ladybug hanging out in our bathroom, usually right where the wall hits the ceiling. Cute.
A few weeks later there was a second. I had visions of exponentially growing ladybug populations. Memories of the ladybug invasion of Chicago my second year of college. I mean, ladybugs are cute, but not when they're everywhere (alive and dead).
Maybe my ladybugs were both the same sex, or otherwise incompatible, but after a few weeks the population had grown to just three. Today I noticed a fourth.
It looks like the rate of growth is linear, and slow. And they may fly away home come winter, though perhaps the opposite, who knows.
When they crawl on my stuff I try depositing them out the window, but they seem to come back. I'm really just concerned that they are going to establish a large, permanent settlement. I guess it's wait and see.

(In case you can't tell, I am on vacation between work and school and find boring things amusing, and blog-worthy).

In honor of ladybugs:

(perhaps to much levity, or at least music, for the nine days, :) but watch it at some point.)

My favorite line:
"They talked about the high price of furniture and rugs/
And fire insurance for lady bugs."

put down the duckie, star studded cast

2008-06-23T20:29:00.002-05:00

youtube is great for old sesame street. and ernie songs are the catchiest. perhaps i will make this a series.

Dinners

2008-05-12T20:00:00.002-05:00

So, I like to think we have a policy against going to dinners. Of the fundraising variety, that is.
This policy has two prompts:
1 - they are often boring, and the only way to avoid them without insulting people is to have a blanket policy.
2 - they cost too much. I would rather give $X to an organization that spend $X to go to a dinner where 100+ of it is not tax deductible. When do we ever spend 200+ for diner out together
I've made exceptions in the past when I was invited to dinners for free. I am also in principle open to dinners that don't cost that much (eg our shul, which has lunch on shabbat in the social hall...) They raise money by the infernal adbooks, but at least the overhead there is low...
So...now I was invited to a dinner for half price (Still a lot). The organization is one i am fond of, and their dinner is unusual in that it has Torah-classes beforehand (so one could in theory make an exception without jeopardizing future dinner refusals). They want me to come because I have learned and taught there, so I can help give donors fuzzy positive feelings about the place.
I'd probably rather donate the cost of attending (though I can't say I will actually add to what I normally give them) than attend, but it seems they think otherwise. So, what to do? And is there any hope of escaping dinner attendance as a grown-up?

Lieberman and Darchei Shalom

2008-04-06T21:47:00.002-05:00

Someone I know, I think male, told me a story:
A non-jewish person asked R.D. Shaul Lieberman if he was troubled that certain laws are only "because of darkei* shalom." Lieberman answered yes, he was troubled. Later, he told his studnets, "I only said that because of darkei shalom."
Has anyone heard of this story? (It doesn't have to be Lieberman, btw...) A popos of a paer i am writing, does anyone have a source?

*On the topic (sort of, except to the extent the new topic is really grammar...), is it darKei shalom ir darKHei shalom? Mishlei 3:17 (darchei noam) is without a dagesh, by analogy i would imagine D.Shalom would be too. But a quick google survey indicates that people i trust to actually know grammar** are morelikely to use "darkei." thoughts from someone who actually knows something?

**irony intentional

yay, neighbors.

2008-03-25T22:08:00.003-05:00

last night, due to some extenuating circumstances, i had to move some heavy things around late at night. my downstairs neighbors banged on their ceiling and i tried to be quite, but i'm sure it was still annoying. I half expected a note, and if I had remembered I might have written a preemptory apology this morning. (of course, i forgot...) today, i got the following typed letter:

Hello:

We, your neighbors, were yet again awakened by excessive noise from your apartment at aproximately 1:00 in the morning. This happens a few times every week.

It sounds as if you are frequently pushing and moving heavy furniture about in the middle of the night, making it very difficult for all of us to sleep.

We understand that we live in a building of tenants with different schedules, but we'd very much appreciate if you could curtail making loud noises in the evenings, especially during the over-night.

Thank you for your consideration and assistance in resolving this issue immediately.

Your neighbors at [adress-, 4th, 5th, and 6th Floors.

So yeah, i felt bad and wanted to apologize anyway, but this letter got me annoyed instead of contrite. Immature, but true. So i turn to the internet to vent my frustrations, since it seems a better target than the neighbors themselves (if i can even identify them - see second point) and oren is away.
First, the only furniture we regularly/ever move late at night is dining room chairs. so i'm not sure what the "frequently" bit is about. It seems they're not either, since it was only the actual loud noise that prompted them to write a letter rather than any of the alleged previous occurrences. I have the feeling they are sensitive to, but realize they shouldn't complain at, normal noises, but took this opportunity to complain anyway. It just annoyed me because they took a real grievence and made it into stop-being-awake-late-at-night, which is not really ok to ask.
Second, they made it essentially impossible to apologize. "Your neighbors on the 4th, 5th, and 6th floors" (rather than. eg, "4B") are a bit hard to identify. I suspect that my immediate downstairs neighbors wrote it, and _maybe_ spoke to someone else about it, but I have a hard time believing anyone upstairs heard it (or cared, since our upstairs neighbors seem to be awake and about, including moving stuff, closer to 3 am than 1...). That said, I don't _know_ who it was, making it hard to know whom to respond So, the self-aggrandizing just makes it logistically harder for me to deal with this in a neighborly way, and also makes me less inclined to do so since i'm now annoyed instead of apologetic.
ps - oren just called, so i delivered this rant in person, but it's already written, so i'm going, stupidly, to post it anyway...

kitsch

2008-03-19T22:20:00.004-05:00

while i can't really find a way to excuse having run across this on youtube, once i did i felt like i should watch to the end to confirm my suspicion that the adult woman's face is always blocked out (it is: by hands, siddur, or flowers). Watching to the end I saw something curious. At around minute 5 we see an invitation to a "Wedding" between "he-hattan: ha-shabbat" and "ha-kallah: am yisrael." Now, there are those* who objected to the personification of shabbat as female in (inter alia) BT Shabbat 119a.** But once it's going to be a wedding, it's pretty clear that shabbos is the woman. So, perhaps the skilled videographer is used to B"Y being the kallah vis a vis God and just assumed we always are (ie, replaced shabbat for God, a questionable though not insane theological proposal). Or, even more perhaps, the same impulse to block out women's faces is related to being squeamish about eroticizing shabbat. Well, at least it's consistent...

* Rambam, hilkhot shabbat 30:2 (", וחכמים הראשונים היו מקבצין תלמידיהן בערב שבת ומתעטפים ואומרים בואו ונצא לקראת שבת המלך.")

** רבי חנינא מיעטף וקאי אפניא דמעלי שבתא, אמר: בואו ונצא לקראת שבת המלכה. רבי ינאי לביש מאניה מעלי שבת, ואמר: בואי כלה בואי כלה.

odds and ends

2008-02-03T22:07:00.000-05:00

1 - re: the relationship of my alma mater (high school) to its alumni: recently, "kol bogrei rambam," the alumni-only version of the newsletter that slighted Noah Feldman, congratulated a certain graduate for being honored at the annual UTJ dinner. Is it just me or does that mean they just don't know what UTJ is? (ps - I imagine this was obvious, but disclaimer: the fact that I assume Maimo would have issues with UTJ doesn't mean I am taking a position on any of those issues.)
2 - A high school classmate of mine was recently seriously injured in a rock-climbing accident. Her hebrew name is Sarah Menuchah bat Mina Chanah, for the tehillim inclined... She is now in rehab, walking and interacting with people, but she was heavily sedated and essentially nonresponsive for a number of days. Said alumni newsletter (or, rather, the email to which the newsletter was attached) recorded this with: "Please note that Sara ________ ’99 is recovering at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston from injuries sustained in a recreational rock-climbing mishap." Mishap"? Hello? (In all fairness, perhaps her family didn't want something too alarmist going out to hundreds of strangers, but it still struck me as odd)
3 - Perhaps at a later date I will unpack why I still feel the need to publish nitpicking criticisms of my high school on the internet. For now I'll just state the obvious: I have some unresolved issues with their M.O. (by which I meant modus operandi, but the other MO probably too...)
4 - blah. forthcoming post on my uneventful service as a non-juror.

Neat Maggid Mishnah

2008-01-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

Short summary: Rambam gives a reason for the prohibitions of muktsah on shabbat that seems to contradict the Gemara's stated reason. In explaining this, the Maggid Mishnah has what I think is an interesting insight into the process of legal change. Longer version follows...

רמב"ם יד החזקה - הלכות שבת פרק כד

(א) יש דברים שהן אסורין בשבת אף על פי שאינם דומין למלאכה ואינם מביאין לידי מלאכה ומפני מה נאסרו משום שנאמר (ישעיהו נ"ח) אם תשיב משבת רגלך עשות חפציך ביום קדשי ונאמר וכבדתו מעשות דרכיך ממצוא חפצך ודבר דבר לפיכך אסור לאדם להלך בחפציו בשבת ואפילו לדבר בהן כגון שידבר עם שותפו מה ימכור למחר או מה יקנה או היאך יבנה בית זה ובאי זה סחורה
ילך למקום פלוני כל זה וכיוצא בו אסור שנאמר ודבר דבר דבור אסור הרהור מותר:
There are things that are forbidden on Shabbat even though they are not similar to a melakhah and they do not lead to doing a melakhah. And wht were they forbidden? Because it says (Isaiah 59:13) "If thou turn away thy foot because of the sabbath, from pursuing thy business on My holy day; [and call the sabbath a delight, and the holy of the LORD honourable; and shalt honour it, not doing thy wonted ways, nor pursuing thy business, nor speaking thereof;]" - therefore it is forbidden to a man to walk in his business on Shabbat, or even to speak of them, such as if he would speak with his busness partner what to sell tomorrow or what to buy or how to build such and such a house and in what business he should go to X place. All this and similar things are forbiden as it is written (Ibid) ""nor speaking thereof" - speaking is forbidden, speculating is permitted.
...
(יב) אסרו חכמים לטלטל מקצת דברים בשבת כדרך שהוא עושה בחול ומפני מה נגעו באיסור זה אמרו ומה אם הזהירו נביאים וצוו שלא יהיה הילוכך בשבת כהילוכך בחול ולא שיחת השבת כשיחת החול שנאמר ודבר דבר קל וחומר שלא יהיה טלטול בשבת כטלטול בחול כדי שלא יהיה כיום חול בעיניו ויבוא להגביה ולתקן כלים מפינה לפינה או מבית לבית או להצניע אבנים וכיוצא בהן שהרי הוא בטל ויושב בביתו ויבקש דבר שיתעסק בו ונמצא שלא שבת ובטל הטעם שנאמר בתורה (דברים ה') למען ינוח:
The sages prohibited carrying a subset of items on Shabbat as he does on a weekday. And why did they come upon this prohibition? (1)* They said, if the prophets warned and commanded that your going about on Shabbat should not be like your going about on a weekday, and the talk of Shabbat should not be like the talk of weekdays, as it says "nor speaking thereof," a fortiori that carrying on Shabbat should not be like carrying on a weekday, so that [Shabbat] should not be like a weekday in his eyes and he will come to lift up and fix utensils from one corner to another or from a house to another, or to hide-away stones or such. For behold, he is unoccupied and sitting in his home, and he will seek something to busy himself with, and it will end up that he did not rest and nullified the purpose, as it is written in the Torah "so that...shall rest" (Deut 5).
(יג) ועוד כשיבקר ויטלטל כלים שמלאכתן לאיסור אפשר שיתעסק בהן מעט ויבא לידי מלאכה ועוד מפני שמקצת העם אינם בעלי אומניות אלא בטלין כל ימיהן כגון הטיילין ויושבי קרנות שכל ימיהן הן שובתים ממלאכה ואם יהיה מותר להלך ולדבר ולטלטל כשאר הימים נמצא שלא שבת שביתה הניכרת לפיכך שביתה מדברים אלו היא שביתה השוה בכל אדם ומפני דברים אלו נגעו באיסור הטלטול ואסרו שלא יטלטל אדם בשבת אלא כלים הצריך להם כמו שיתבאר.
And furthermore, when he will inspect (?) and move utensils whose utility is forbidden, (2) it is possible tat he will utilize them a bit and come to [do forbidden] melakhah. (3) And furthermore, because a portion of the folk are not tradesmen, but are idle all theur days, like the travellers and the corner-sitters, who all their days desist from melakhah. and if it were permitted to go about and to speak and to carry as on all other days, it would end up that [such a person] had not rested a discernable resting. Therefore, desisting from these things is a rest that is equally applicable for all people. And because of these things they touched upon the prohibition of moving objects and they forbade, that one should only move on shabbat utensils which he needs, as will be explained.
[השגת הראב"ד - ומפני דברים אלו נגעו באיסור הטלטול ואסרו שלא יטלטל אלא הכלים הצריך להם כמו שיתבאר א"א עוד אמרו (שבת קכד) אטו טלטול לאו צורך הוצאה הוא ועוד אמרו (שם שבת קכג) בימי נחמיה בן חכליה נשנית משנה זו שאמרו שלשה כלים קטנים נטלים על השלחן נמצא כי מפני חיוב הוצאה אסרו בטלטול מה שאסרו שהוא גדר להוצאה]:
Raavad: [attacks the Rambam's given reasons based on Gemaraot that imply that the reason for the proibition of moving objects is lest one come to the melakhah of carrying (tiltul mishum hotsa'ah).]

*I numbered what I think are three distinct reasons in the Rambam...
While the Rambam does seem to nod to the possibility that _tiltul_ is forbidden because of _hotsa'ah_ (lest he come to move items from one house to another, eg), it is true that his reaosns are novel and seem not to agree with some Gemarot. The Maggid Mishnah seeks to explain this:

מגיד משנה הלכות שבת פרק כד הלכה יב

אסרו חכמים לטלטל וכו'. רבינו כתב בכאן טעמים נכונים מאד באיסור הטלטול ולא נזכרו בגמרא ובהשגות הזכיר הר"א ז"ל טעם אחר שהוא מפני גדר ההוצאה כמ"ש בגמרא (שבת קכ"ד:) בכל הכלים אטו טלטול לאו צורך הוצאה הוא בתמיה ולא הזכיר רבינו טעם זה לפי שאע"פ שבתחלה נאסר הטלטול מפני גדר ההוצאה בימי נחמיה בן חכליה שלא היו נזהרין בהוצאה אח"כ התירו קצת כלים כמוזכר בגמרא (שם קכ"ג:) ונאסרו השאר מפני הטעמים שכתב רבינו. ומ"ש אטו טלטול לאו צורך הוצאה הוא רצו לומר כי סבה ראשונה לאסור הטלטול מפני גדר ההוצאה ואע"פ שבטל הטעם לא בטלה גזרה. ואפשר שרבינו הזכיר טעמים אלו שחדש הוא ז"ל ולא לומר שאין שם טעם אחר וזה נראה יותר
Our Rabbi wrote here reasons which are quite right regarding the prohibition of moving items, but they were not mentioned in the Gemara. And in the glosses R. Avraham (Ra'avad) mentioned another reason, that it is because of a fence to carrying, as it is written in the Gemara (Shabbat 124b) "Is moving objects not [forbidden] because [it might lead to] carrying?"
And our Rabbi did not mention this reason, because even though initially moving items (tiltul) was prohibited as a fence to carrying in the time of Nehemiah son of Hakhliah (this is based on other sources that suggest that the prohibition of titul was initially much wider than it is now, and that it was instituted by Nehemia to curb Sabbath abuse in his generation), for they were not careful with carrying, thereafter they allowed [moving] some utensils, as is mentioned in the Gemara (Shabbat 123b), and the rest were prohibited because of the reasons that our Rabbi has written. ...That is to say, the initial reason to prohibit tiltul was as a fence for carrying, and even though the reason became null the decree did not.
And it is [also] possible that our Rabbi mentioned these reasons which he innovated, but not to say that there is no other reason. And this seems better.

Although the MM prefers his second answer (the Rambam does not disagree that tiltul is a fence for carrying he just wanted to give his own reasons too), I thought the first was very interesting:
Law X is instituted to prevent A. Later on, law X is modified to X'. X' no longer prevents A (ie, if you can move about certain items, you might come to carry them...). But, X' stays on the books. MM says "even though the reason is null," but then he implies that, at least according to the Rambam, while the initial reason may be null, there are new reasons: B,C, and D (the reasons Rambam gives for our version of tiltul). So we see the law evolving. It seems B, C, and D were not reason enough to initiate th law, but are enough to keep it going, and keep it going _in modified form_, once reason A gets it off the ground. Neat, eh?

hobbyhorses

2007-12-20T12:01:00.000-05:00

Overuse of antibiotics is one of my favorites. So I was pleased to see this article confirming my paranoia. OK, maybe not pleased, but vindicated? Or just presented with an easy way to spread the gospel?

The face of women learning...

2007-12-20T11:43:00.001-05:00

This article, or, more precisely, the picture, got me brooding. On the right is Beth Samuels. I didn't know her well (though we were distantly related), but Beth's death was a real trauma in the Drisha community. Her picture is now on the wall, with a plaque naming the High School program after her. The picture of smiling Beth is a symbol of loss. It's somewhat shocking to me, then, to see her picture appear anonymously, with the caption "women studying Torah." Is it happy or sad the she is an anonymous face of women and Torah, in a JTA stock photo from years ago?

ICWA, intermarriage, and not-studying-for-finals

2007-11-29T14:22:00.000-05:00

The final and much dreader exercise in the Lawyering Program curriculum is an oral argument exercise focusing on the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. ICWA resurfaced in my Family Law reading this week, prompting what follows. Congress' state intent was to "protect the best interests of Indian children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families" (25 U.S.C. § 1902).
So, what happens when admittedly Indian parents choose to cut off all ties for the child by purposefully leaving the reservation to give birth, and selecting a non-Indian adoptive parent? No dice, says the Supreme Court, "for Congress was concerned not solely about the interest of Indian children and families, but also about the impact on the tribes themselves of the large number of Indian children adopted by non-Indians." (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians v. Holyfield, 490 U.S. 30, 49 (1989)).
What if an Indian parent has cut ties with the tribe before even becoming pregnant with a child she seeks to surrender for an adoption by a non-Indian (actually, gay and Jewish) couple of her choice? I learned in Family Law that ICWA still applies according to a New York court. (In re Baby Boy C. 805 N.Y.S.2d 313 (App Div 2005)).
ICWA does have an exception to its preference for placement with and Indian family for "good cause," and the Bureau of Indian Affairs includes the request of the child or parent as "good cause." In Baby Boy C the appellate court declined to make a good cause determination itself, but left the question open on remand. In Holyfield, good cause is absent because the question was decided on a different part of the statute. Holyfield's failure to mention good cause does give some pause, however, such that perhaps individual parental preferences are not a clear cut/obviously controlling exception.
So what about intermarriage? Well, it seems to me that the arguments against interfaith marriage on a personal level tend to be weak (by which I mean uncompelling and perhaps incoherent). That is, it's hard to argue to an individual who thinks otherwise that intermarriage is a bad decision for them, individually. The strong (as in, coherent and less likely to sound silly) arguments are on a national (tribal, if you will) level: we are concerned, to paraphrase the Court, not solely about the interest of Jewish individuals and their partners, but also about the impact on the tribe itself of the large number of Jews marrying non-Jews. (For now, I leave open the soundness of this concern even when the children will be raised at least as Jewish as they would with a secular-Jewish second parent.)
Is this racist? Well, perhaps, but my point here is only that American law, and society, seem to tolerate a very similar sort of racism in a particular context, which might imply that, even from a secular perspective, there are at least legitimate values on both sides.
Of course, Indian law is "different" because of the quasi-sovereign status of tribes. However, from an internal-Jewish perspective the situation looks a lot like it does from inside the tribes, and recognition of that tribal perspective as legitimat is at least interesting.

ps

2007-11-01T09:22:00.001-05:00

Actually, on a less trivial note, what does anyone think of this article?
I thought it would be more interesting than it was, but it's still somewhat interesting...

goings on

2007-11-01T09:15:00.000-05:00

Blogging about nothing is about the last thing i should be doing now. (I hope oren doesn't read this today ;) ). But, it's always the last 2% of packing that's the hardest. You know, the packing of all the things that you left to the end because you didn't know what to do with them. If you're me, you are usually in a real rush by the time you get to them (whereas now I have at least 1 hour at home before the movers come... ;) ) so you just throw them in boxes. this is ok. Just so long as you unpack those boxes and figure out what to do with all the _stuff_ later which, if you are me, is no guaranteed. But at least I finally threw out the salad dressing from _last_ pesach...
In any case, the last few weeks have featured me doing 20-minute errands during most of my 10 minute breaks, looking for apartments, finding and apartment (yay, washington heights!) and pack-pack-packing. That is not interesting at all, but that is all.
Well, I guess I learned some moderately interesting things in between too. Perhaps I will write about some of those things another time. but not now. Until then.
Miriam

discriminatory intent in israeli law?

2007-10-26T11:29:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure that this post is worthy of being the only one in 5 weeks, but it's going to be.

There is a story floating around. (Summary: an Israeli girls school (allegedly) physically separates students based on ethnic heritage (ie, Ashkenaz/Sefarad).) I don't usually blog about things just to rant about them, and that's not my point here. But, I was curious about the last paragraph:

מנגד, טוען עורך-דין דני יקיר, יועץ משפטי מהאגודה לזכויות האזרח בישראל, כי כוונת המוסד החינוכי אינה משנה דבר, מה שחשוב זה מה שקרה בפועל: "זה בכלל לא משנה אם במקור, היתה כוונה להפלות תלמידות מזרחיות או לא. התוצאה של האמצעים שננקטו שם היא הפרדה מוחלטת בין האוכלוסיות, באמצעים מאוד משמעותיים".

It seems this lawyer says that an action that discriminates, even if it was not motivated by invidious motives, is illegal in Israel. This is in contrast to the US, where discriminatory intent is always necessary. True, in the US, an egregious (state) action like the one at hand would likely be ruled illegal because egregious disparity can serve as evidence of discriminatory intent (cf yick wo v hopkins), but the Israeli lawyer seems to be making a stronger statement than that - that proof of discriminatory intent is totally unnecessary. Does anyone know, is this the law in Israel?

a belated kedushas levi

2007-09-16T18:13:00.000-05:00

Oren found the following on R"H:

זמרו לא-להים זמרו זמרו למלכנו זמרו (תהלים מז,ז). לבאר, כי בראש השנה וביום הכפורים שאז הוא המתקת הדין צריך האדם לחתוך את הדינים ולעבוד את הבורא במדת הרחמים ולא במדת דין ששופט את עמו, רק לאחוז במדת הרחמים וכמו האב שופט את בנו. והנה ידוע שא-להים, מרמז על דין. וזהו זמרו, כלומר תראו לחתוך זה המדה שלא ישב במדת דין שופט את עמו, רק כאב את הבן והוא יציל אותנו מכל דופי:

"Sing praises to God, sing praises" (Ps 47:7 - the Psalm we recite 7 times before shofar-blowing). To explain, that on New Year and on the Day of Atonement - for then is the sweetening (hamtakat?) of the judgment - a person must cut (through) the [strict] judgment and serve the Creator through the attribute of mercy and not through the attribute of judgment by which He judges His people, rather to grasp the attribute of mercy, and as a father who judges his son. And it is known that "Elokim" suggests judgment. And this is "sing" (z.m.r. - the root can also mean "to prune" (as in, cut a tree)), as if to say cut (through) this attribute, that He will not sit in the attribute of judgment judging His people, rather as a father [judging] the son, and He will save us from all bad.

It's no accident, presumably, that the medium of "cutting" through judgment to mercy is music...

"God who answered Hanania, Misha'el, and Azaraih will answer us"

2007-09-04T03:49:00.000-05:00

In honor of Ellul. (I was putting off this post until I got back into my Spertus subscription and aded the Hebrew sources, but I'm going to put that on hold for the moment with the intention to post updates, ("beli neder").)

The following derashah is my translation of a short essay by R. Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg (aka "Seridei Eish") which can be found in the collection of his work called "Li-ferakim."

TB Pesahim 53b:
This also explicated Todos man of Rome: What did Hanania Mishael and Azariah see that they gave themselves over for the sanctification of the Name? They reasoned a fortiori about themselves from frogs: If frogs, who are not commanded regarding sanctification of the name, it is written about them "and they will come upon you (Egypt) in your houses...and in your ovens and in your kneading troughs" {when are kenading troughs found near the oven? - at the time when the oven is hot}, then we, who are commanded regarding sanctification of the name, how much more so.

The Rishonim and Aharonim have already dealt with this Baraita - see Rashi, Tosafot, and Maharsha.

And that which appears to me to explain the sequence of ideas in this Baraita: Rabenu Tam has already explained that the image which Nevuchadnezzar made was not a real idol. Rather, he made a statue for the glory of the king, and in such a case we do not say "[you must remain loyal to God's commandments] even if He takes your life." So, if Hanania et al had asked a question in the house of study, [the rabbis] would have permitted them to transgress and not be killed. And this is the question of Todos man of Rome, "what did they see, etc...?": Why did they not behave like the rest of the people of their generation, who would bow to the statue and were saved?

And to this he answers: They reasoned an a fortiori argument... The intention is not to an "a fortiori" argument in the logical, legal sense, for [if so] this [argument] is broken (ie, illogical) from many sides, as the explicators have already gone on at length and have had difficulty settling [the issue]. Rather, its intention is to the mode of association and analogy. This "a fortiori" was said by way of (ha'avarah and hash'alah - implication?), by way of a metaphor only. Todos, man of Rome, hints with this to the primal inner strength that breaks out (boke'a) and rises in the soul, and bursts in a person, at the time of action, from the hiddenness of its depth beyond the boundary of perception and clear knowledge, and operates and pushes its master, and forces upon him a particular way of acting without becoming concerned with the letter of the law (shurat ha-din) and that which is optional and mandatory. - Just as the frogs in Egypt, who were not commanded regarding sanctification of the Name, for behold commandments and free will are irrelevant to them, rather everything they do comes from the strength of the nartural-divine law that is imprinted (tavua) in them from the six days of creation. And similarly, that which they would do in Egypt, they were not acting of their own knowledge, but rather with the force of an internal rule that pushed them, and its (shahar-?) they did not know. And once they saw a flaming oven, they did not first stand and consider for themselves how far is the boundary of the commandment and where the optional realm takes over, rather they jumped into it without any hesitation or reservation, and they were burned alive joyous and happy to do the will of their maker which He worked into them. A single and undivided will filled them, whether in their subordination to the tasks of their natural lives until the hour of wonder, whether at the hour they went out to fulfill a miraculous mission and to make known in the world also from this perspective their sender, their leader, and their supporter (mekhalkelam).

And see what they said in the midrash (Sh"R 33, 5): Rabi Yosi said, Pinchas explicated regarding himself: If a horse gives its life for the day of battle - even if he dies he gives his life for his master - then I, for the sanctification of the name of the KBH, how much more so!

However, experience teaches that the spiritual reaction that is not preceded by questioning or advice, takes an important place in individual and communal life. And sometimes, it decides the destiny of entire nations and movements, whether to the rod or to lovingkindness - its power is not greater with the large things than regarding the small. She has her own ethical realm (? - reshut) and logic. She does not consider/deal with (mithashevet) the regular letter of the law, nor with measuring sticks (tools) readily available for the benefit of the individual and community. This we also learn from the lives of the great religious personalities. Hanania Mishael and Azariah serve as an example of this.

First, a discourse on jumping into fires al kiddush haShem is uncanny in retrospect. (RYYW survived a number of concentration camps.) Of course, the haredi reprinting of Li-ferakim which I own doesn't have dates for most of the derashot. (This is especially annoying since if I recall correctly dates do appear for most essays in the original version. I haven't made it to the JTS library to check, though...) But basically everything in the book was written in the 30s.

Second, I think ideas like this are really important given the obsession with "halakhic man" I encountered for much of my life. Acc to RYYW, it seems, sometimes the "Torah" way to act is from true religious impulse, oblivious to halakha.

Once I'm spinning it that way, though, I have to note that he's talking only about one sort of religious impulse, which has to do with death. In principle, once halakhah is not the last criterion in one area it should lose it's status in others. But, for some reason it's easier to say kill yourself in violation of halakhah than some much more mundane things. My first thought is that this has to do with ascertaining motives: perhaps it's easier to untangle a truly "religious" motive from other strong urges that may masquerade as religious when one's life is on the line. That is, for most people, valorizing a violation of halakhah in martyrdom doesn't license something they want to do anyway for other reasons... Alternatively, perhaps halakhah is the province of details. The less fundamental something is, the greater the presumption that a true religiou impulse follows halakhah. But, halakhah alone can't "fit" momentous religious moments, which require the totality of the religious personality to encounter them?

Grace Paley (a"h)

2007-08-24T12:37:00.000-05:00

I heard Grace Paley read a story (I forget which) at a conference on Women and Judaism at Yale when I was a senior in High School. I bought her book. (or maybe two of them) I became something of a fan, though I had sort of forgotten about that until I read that she died.

...In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.
To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, hairpin rhetorical reversals and capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.

So go read some, perhaps...

on head coverings

2007-08-24T08:58:00.000-05:00

In that wonderful sourceof news, AM New York, I learned that the TSA has a new policy on headgear.

Acc to the TSA:

Head Coverings
On August 4th 2007, TSA implemented revisions to its screening procedures for head coverings. TSA does not conduct ethnic or religious profiling, and employs multiple checks and balances to ensure profiling does not happen.

All members of the traveling public are permitted to wear head coverings (whether religious or not) through the security checkpoints. The new standard procedures subject all persons wearing head coverings to the possibility of additional security screening, which may include a pat-down search of the head covering. Individuals may be referred for additional screening if the security officer cannot reasonably determine that the head area is free of a detectable threat item. If the issue cannot be resolved through a pat-down search, the individual will be offered the opportunity to remove the head covering in a private screening area.

TSA's security procedures, including the procedures for screening head coverings, are designed to ensure the security of the traveling public. These procedures are part of TSA's multi-layered approach to security screening.

On my way to Chicago last spring, as I was waiting to collect my shoes at the end of the screening process, the TSA employee asked (in a voice worthy of a meddling grandmother) "so, what religion is this?"
I though about getting offended, then I glanced over at the two women in headscarfs (one also in a wheelchair) waiting for special screening, thought about the time, and said "oh, Judaism."

I'm told sheitels are good for flying (or at least for passing security) for this reason. But I'm not quite there yet...

Early Interview Week

2007-08-21T22:10:00.000-05:00

It feels like this.

Moment:

Interviewing (Tax) Partner: "So, people with a background in Talmudic Law often have an interest in Tax law. Why do you think that is?

of missions, statements

2007-08-12T22:45:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to blog about some absurdities of recently notorious alumni newsletter of my esteemed alma mater. Particularly, the statement that appears, free-floating, on the last page of every issue:

"The creation of the State of Israel is one of the seminal events in Jewish History.
Recognizing the significance of the state and its national institutions,we seek to instill in our students an attachment to the State of Israel and its people as well as a sense of responsibility for their welfare."

(example)

What this assertion has to do with the other things on the page - like who won what math competition or is the new student government president, has always escaped me. A recent lookjed post pointed me to the mission statement of Frisch and things got curiouser:

"The raison d’etre of The Frisch School, as a unique educational institution of Bergen County, is to promote the values and study of the Judaic heritage as defined within the Written Law (Bible) and Oral Law (Talmud). The wellsprings of Judaic values, under whose rubric all others may be classified, are:

a) the dignity of the human being
...
b) the sanctity of the Jewish people
...
c) the centrality of Medinat Yisrael

We believe that the creation of the State of Israel is one of the seminal events in Jewish history. We seek to instill in our students an attachment to the State of Israel and its people as well as a sense of responsibility for their welfare.

(emphasis added)

On to google, and it seems quite a few other schools, including at least one solomon schechter,* use the same language.

*This is relevant to the extent I was surmising perhaps it is an "Association of Modern Orthodox Day Schools" thing...

So what exactly is going on?

yesterday

2007-07-22T12:29:00.001-05:00

was my father's birthday. (happy birthday!) while looking for an appropriate e-card i discovered that, according to the greeting carders, yesterday was also monkey day.
What is monkey day? well, the official website explains it, as does wikipedia. there's even a petition to make it a national holiday.
But... according to the "offical" sources, monkey day is Dec 14! So, apparently, July 21, like so many other "holidays," is a creation of the greeting card industry...

assorted

2007-07-19T13:41:00.000-05:00

1 - i noticed that i get my most focussed reading done on the train on my way to the library (where i promptly waste time on the interweb) and then (dissilusioned with myself) on the way home (where, i tell myself, i will work harder, except that i don't...) so, yesterday, i just didn't get off the train at my stop. i was wary of getting too far out for fear of getting stranded at new lots avenue or somesuch (and, given events of yesterday, it turns out my paranoia was for once perhaps useful). however, i rode most of manhattan and read two law review articles. not bad.
i also got to people watch.

1a - the reason i'm wasting time blogging about nothing right now, actually, instead of riding the train so i can get work done, is that I'm waiting for a UPS delivery. of course, the "infonotice" slip does give the would-be deliverer four possible three-ish hour windows to check off for "approximate time of next delivery." on this slip, helpfully, three of the four are circled...

2 - i'm growing avocados. I've tried this before, with little success. However, I'm still hopeful, especially since this time i have real toothpicks (in the past i';ve improvised with everything from twisty ties to paper clips) and a very sunny window sill.
the toothpicks are courtesy of the new West Side mikvah. as far as i'm concerned, actually, the availability of toothpicks may be the most significant difference between the new and old mikvaot. (the new one is very shiny and somehwat more professionally run as well, for better and for worse. it's been discussed elsewhere)
basically, the way they set it up at the new mikvah, they bundle a lot of the provisions. so, if you want q-tips. you have to open a package that contains not only q-tips but cotton balls and toothpicks as well. (similalry, but even sillier, if you want soap, you have to open your own personal bag that conatins not only soap, but a low quality manicure set, nail-polish removal wipes, travel size toothpaste, disposable slippers, and other things that, unlike soap, one might very well not want at all...) but what of the things you don't want? they tell you the whole bag is yours to keep. so, while i try to leave the tings i will never use anyway, i figured it wasn't terrible to take home the toothpicks for a worthy cause.

now aren't you glad to know all that...

in which miriam tries to be a "lawyer"

2007-07-05T21:38:00.000-05:00

at some point i decided i would go through the madness they call "early interview week" and see what comes of it. apparently, i am supposed to have been thinking about it since then, which of course i haven't. however, by monday, i need a list of firms. my lack of investment in this process obviously doesn't bode well for my ability to impress people, but anyway...

How self-aware is the Gemara?

2007-07-03T22:16:00.000-05:00

תלמוד בבלי מסכת סוכה דף יח עמוד א - דף יט עמוד א

אתמר,
סיכך על גבי אכסדרה שיש לה פצימין - כשרה.
שאין לה פצימין, אביי אמר: כשרה, ורבא אמר פסולה.
אביי אמר כשרה אמרינן: פי תקרה יורד וסותם.
רבא אמר פסולה: לא אמרינן פי תקרה יורד וסותם.
אמר ליה רבא לאביי: לדידך דאמרת פי תקרה יורד וסותם - אפילו הפחית דופן אמצעי! –
אמר ליה: מודינא לך בההיא, דהוה ליה כמבוי המפולש.
לימא אביי ורבא בפלוגתא דרב ושמואל קמיפלגי,
דאתמר: אכסדרה בבקעה,
רב אמר: מותר לטלטל בכולו, דאמרינן פי תקרה יורד וסותם.
ושמואל אמר: אין מטלטלין בה אלא בארבע אמות, דלא אמרינן פי תקרה יורד וסותם.
אליבא דשמואל - כולי עלמא לא פליגי.
כי פליגי אליבא דרב;
אביי כרב.
ורבא אמר לך: עד כאן לא אמר רב התם אלא דמחיצות לאכסדרה הוא דעבידי, אבל הכא דלאו להכי עבידי - לא.

I'd like to outline the structure of the Gemara so my point is clear. The content is actually not relevant to my point (or, perhaps, my point is actually not relevant to the specific content), for better of for worse:

The Gemara presents a mahloket between Abaye and Rave. The Gemara then proposes that perhaps this mahloket is "the same" as another mahloket between Rav and Shmuel. That is, Abaye/Rava disagree about the rule for one set of facts, and Rav/Shmuel disagree about the rule for another set of facts. The Gemara suggests that the reasoning for the different rules lines up - in this case, Rav with Abaye and Rava with Shmuel.
The Gemara then claims that the mahloket between Abaye and Rava is really within the ruling of Rav. ie, they disagree as to what Rav would say about their case/facts given what he said about the other case/facts. (Apparently they agree on what Shmuel would say to their case. Rashi says Abaye would still rule differently than Shmuel, though I'm not sure this is the only reading. In any case, what's relevant is that neither is in the position of having to make Shmuel's position mean something it doesn't seem to.)
The problem with saying that both Abaye and Rava are ruling within the opinion of Rav is that Rav's ruling actually seems to contradict the reasoning of Rav. The Gemara is aware of this, and comes up with a way for Rava to explain how Rav could rule one way in one case and apparently rule differently in a similar case - arguing that the cases are not actually similar enough to justify the same ruling. This part of the Gemara is in bold.

Now, why am I writing about this? One frustration I often have with Gemara is that the Gemara will put plausible and implausible arguments on equal footing. I generally, for the sake of my own sanity, assume that there is some degree of self-awareness on the part of the editors that the symmetry they impose is not always real. However, this is usually (though by no means always) just an assumption. The reason I brought this Gemara is that it is an example of a situation where the Gemara itself is aware that one position is more plausible than the other, hence nifty for me.
Recall, the Gemara sets up the position of Rav in one case, then asserts that Abaye and Rava disagree as to what Rav would say in a similar, but not identical, case. The similarities between the cases create the inference that Rav would side with Abaye, however, leaving Rava out in the cold (since the Gemara is not content just to say "Rava holds like Shmuel"). The solution is for Rava to come up with a distinction betweeen his case and Rav's original case which makes the rule from one inapplicable to the other. Said distinction is, in my opinion, not wholly implausible, but definitely not as intuitive as simply saying that Rav and Rava disagree. Structurally, however, the Gemara sets up two equal opinions as to Rav's position. That said, on closer inspection, what language does it use to do this? It says אביי כרב. ורבא אמר לך: עד כאן לא אמר רב התם אלא.
"Abaye is like Rav. (ie, Abaye follows from the simple logical understanding of Rav), and Rava would say to you: Rav would not extend his ruling from there this far..."
The statement "Abaye is like Rav" implicitly undermines the whole project of saying "both Abaye and Rava hold their opinions according to Rav." The editor seems clearly to be picking sides. I thought it was neat.
Thoughts appreciated.

PS: I should note that the motive for making Rava consistent with Rav, as opposed to just saying Rava follows Shmuel, seems to be to harmonize what the actual halakhah is. That is, according to the principles of psak, the normative halakhah should follow both Rava and Rav, so there has to be some way the two are compatible... So, the less-plausible reading is halakhically necessary!

Bork Bork Bork!

2007-06-29T11:27:00.000-05:00

maybe there can be too much of a good thing. but maybe not. enjoy in moderation.

modest mice

2007-06-22T16:30:00.000-05:00

ALG tagged me with this thing they call a meme. Well, I hate to disappoint, and I also hate to do what I'm actually supposed to do now, so I'll give it a shot...
it's very long, and i don't know if i have anything interesting to add, but anyway...

1 Regarding sleeves, collars, and skirt-length/shorts/pants, do you dress the same way you did when you were five? Fifteen?

When I was 5, I owned one skirt, i think, and I was always begging my mom to let me wear it. I wore a lot of pink, purple, and turqoise (my mom tried to change that but i was steadfast) and used to do this thing that was, in my opinion, cute, where i wore t-shirts over turtlenecks in the winter (not that that's so relevant). i wore shorts in the summer, but never sleevless, probably at least in part for sun-protection. i definitely went (mixed) swimming at the town pool.
When I was 15 I was post-Camp Sternberg so I was in theory covering my elbows, though the fashion at the time was to do so with oversize t-shirts, which weren't quite as long on me as on others. i seem to recall that i would expose up to a tefach (measured by my very own hand, as opposed to in inches) below my collarbone, though i think my mom would sometimes get annoyed by this. i wore pants for basketball and other athletic things. i worse short sleeves for basketball too, actually, but i pretended they weren't. (this was psychologically easy given the general oversize t-shirt fashion of the time...)
also, at 15, almost all my clothes were too big (body image, etc...) and some shade of gray. (i include dark green, navy, maroon, and even white in "gray")

2 If you dress differently now, why?

well, the biggest way i dress differently is actually that i started wearing clothes that fit, and also ones with patterns and colors. i think that was just part of growing up and out of all the teenage body-angst. i wear lower necks now, i'm not sure why. i just do. maybe it's because, after learning a bit, i became convinced that the collarbone rule was actually made up. (as in, didn't exist more than, say, 100 years ago), and made-up halalkhot annoy me. (other examples of made up halakhot are the precise ways in which one must check vegetables, or the number of minutes one must spend bathing in preparation for mikvah immersion. maybe what i'm getting at is that these things should be formulated as standards, not rules...)

3 As a child, how, if at all, were you taught about tsniut in the home and/or school? What were the rules? How were they presented?

we had a dress code (skirts below the knee, no sleeveless or cap sleeves) in school. my mom wears pants and would have been happy for me to do likewise on my own time. the rules from school weren't really taught at all, just sent home in the handbook every year. as for the rules from home (which had more to do with no high heels and no slinky black dresses for pre-teens - ie, actual modesty), they came up shopping. my mom's reasons were usually incomprehensible to me (like certain styles being too "adult" or inappropriate). the school's reasons were basically "we say so."

4 How does your dress differ from your mother's in terms of tsniut (not, say, fashion sensibility)? From your grandmothers'? From your sister's or sisters'?

mother: she wears pants, i generally don't. she also, on the theoretical level, covers head, not hair, though her hair is so short this is usually not an issue. (she has shocked some friday night guests by coming to the table in a yarmulkah, but i think she may have given that up now...)
grandmother: there are pictures of my bubbe a"h at the beach in a bathing suit (and no head covering, as far as i recall) from the 50s. when i knew her she wore bubbe-style tichels (foam lined for shape) or sheitels. i don't know if she ever wore pants, though her sister (my great aunt, a"h) had some choice pant-suits from the 70s that she continued to wear when i knew her...

5 Do you dress differently inside your home and outside your home, regardless of who is present?

sometimes, mostly not. no real method to my madness here. except that for whatever reason i am definitely less makpid on covering hair at home (i do still cover my head for strangers...)

6 Do you dress differently depending on where you are or what you're doing? Is this for halachic or social reasons?

pants for athletic things (eg, hiking). stockings and high necks in certain neighborhoods, partly because i think these standards actually depend on local custom and partly because i don't like people thinking i need kiruv...

7 Do you dress differently if you are in a mixed (men and women) setting versus a women-only setting?

yes.

8 How do you define tsniut as a halachic concept, either as it currently stands socially or in some halachic vacuum?

i usually don't. by which i mean, i don't know.

9 If you had full freedom to rewrite halacha, what would you do with tsniut?

phrase it more in terms of standards than rules, though i think there are some things that can't really ever be ok (no exposed thighs, breasts, bellies, shoulders - probably for men too, as applicable). i might do away with hair covering, but i'd probably want all people of all genders to head-cover. wigs would be seriously reconsidered, except for parnassah reasons. (but that's largely cuz i think they're gross) more deeply, i'd want to reemphasize the non-covering aspects of tsniut. even as it relates to dress, i think the main point should be not to think abt what you wear all the time, spend a lot of money on it, etc. you know, cheap jeans and a t-shirt, (or maybe generic communist jumpsuits?), for everyone...

10 To what extent do your decisions about dress and/or head covering reflect:

* social reality of your Jewish community? (i.e., wanting to fit in, or, alternatively, not wanting to fit in)

a lot. but not so much fitting in as that the community (or some average of the various communities i circulate in) creates a default that i usually feel no reason to change.
* an immutable halachic code?
talk about loaded questions. definitely defined by halakha (with the possible exception of necklines, as discussed above), but i'm not sure what "immutable" adds here...
* personal physical comfort?
the main reason i wear sockless sandals, tichels > wigs or hats, etc, is comfort...
* feelings that people should focus more on your mind/actions than your body?
yes, but this more dictates my style than the rules i follow.

11 How would you rank the importance of following communal and/or halachic standards with regard to Shabbat, kashrut, and tsniut? (I'm not discussing nidah/negiah now, which is usually the third after Shabbat and kashrut.) Do they hold equal weight in your mind?

my instinct is to "rank" according to halakhah itself, in which case shabbat and kashrut seem to me to clearly have a more substantial de-orayta component, as well as generally more well-developed laws. (this is why tsniut doesn't substitute so smoothly for niddah in the big three...). all three are about the same in terms of how much i fret about them. (ie, i don't usually, for better or worse...) right now, i think shabbat is the one that i appreciate most on a "spiritual" or personal level, but that is subject to change in different life situations...

12 How important is the idea of "בגד איש" to you in determining your dress?

not.

13 How important are the ideas of "שוק באשה ערוה שוק באשה ערוה" and "טפח באשה ערוה" (see Brachot 24a) to you in determining your dress?

very.

14 If you are married or otherwise in an exclusive relationship, to what extent does your partner influence your dress decisions, tsniut-related or otherwise?

not very much. i mean, he'd care if i uncovered my head and started wearing miniskirts, but probably mostly b/c it would be a sign that our attitudes toward halakhah and torah were no longer similar... in general, i try to limit my fashion dictations (except when asked) to removing clothes with holes from spouse's wardrobe, and he's similarly hands off. we're just not that kind of people...

on this note, someone once questioned me on my wearing (very loose) pants around the dorm, and it came up that my mom wears pants. she asked "your father doesn't mind?" i think he would find that question just as amusing, and odd, as i did (and not because my mom wouldn't listen anyway...).

15 If you are dating, to what extent does your date influence your dress decisions, tsniut-related or otherwise?

16 How, if at all, do your feelings about your body influence the way you dress?

i think i sort of talked abt this above, and shabbos is coming...

17 Do you enjoy buying clothing for yourself?

not as much as i once did, partly because i've accumulated so much i've become picky and try only to buy things i will actually wear a lot. also i'm really cheap, and haven't found the hunt for bargains in new york to be as fruitful as i remember the one in boston being in my youth...

18 Do you think that looking attractive and being tsniusdic (either halachically or socially defined) are mutually exclusive or mutually inclusive? Do you think that looking sexy and being tsniusdic (either halachically or socially defined) are mutually inclusive or mutually exclusive?

i don't think either pair is either mutually inclusive or exclusive. though i do think that trying to look sexy is not tsniusdik, i think actually looking sexy (ie, in the eye of an onlooker) is up to that onlooker, who is free to make mountains out of molehills (or pinky fingers)...

19 What, if any, do you feel are positive results of tsniut? What, if any, do you feel are negative results?

positive: no more bad hair days. in general, i think at this point in life it helps my body image not to feel i have to show a lot.
negative results are being hot in the summer. also, the only thing that really bothers me about hair covering is sticking out in non-jewish settings (both on the level of "looking funny" and on the level of having details of my identity suddenly identifiable, subjecting me to tokenism, etc... ie, what happens to men when they wear a kippah...)

literacy...

2007-06-22T16:06:00.000-05:00

from an article in the New York Times:

"The study found that eldest children scored about three points higher on I.Q. tests than their closest sibling. The difference was an average, meaning that it showed up in most families, but not all of them."

does the new york times really have to explain what it would mean to say "on average three points higher"? ack!

there is a joke in boston that goes something like this:

a man is waiting in the express checkout line at the supermarket, right under the sign that says "ten items or less (sic)," with a full cart. when he gets to the front, the cashier asks, "so, are you from hahvad and can't count, or are you from MIT and can't read?

2007-06-20T15:02:00.000-05:00

apparently, the polite way to tell someone you are waiting for them to finally have children is to say "simchas by you!" or somesuch. of course, you can always be like the guy in shul who, after seeing me for the first time since my wedding, said "now, a bris!"

a word problem

2007-06-19T13:16:00.000-05:00

miriam had $M in her checking account. She deposited a check for $N. The citibank machine said she had "N+M available now."
Let's say miriam writes two checks (C1 and C2) and makes one transfer to another account (T). Let's say fruther that C1+C2+T < M+N. Will miriam's checks bounce? If they do bounce, what does "available now" mean?

arggg...
(and apologies again to the person to whom this actually effected...)

the moral of the story is, of course, not to trust machines when they tell you things that you think don't make sense/may not actually be true...

have you heard "yoya" at any weddings lately?

2007-06-03T21:35:00.000-05:00

Over at R. Josh's (and presumably elsewhere, though I'm not on top of the whole interweb) there's been a lot of discussion of a new OU/NSCY website promoting "abstinence." Well, the topic was posed to the lookjed listserve, and I found one response particularly...interesting.

Many are of the opinion that the entire matter should not be discussed, heard written about, etc. Sex education is a "no no." The best way to curb immoral behavior is to do whatever possible to remove it from the mind. The more it is in the mind of people the more it will be explored, played with, indulged in and violated. There is no way to avoid it. If you want a liberal democratic "enlightened" society you will have to pay the price with promiscuity, high divorce rate, tardiness in getting married (if at all) and a general state of frustration and unhappiness. Sex education does much more harm than good. I have a lot of experience with communities where these topics are never in the limelight. The youth are so pure that it is a pleasure to look at their innocent sweet faces. ... Sex education is given prior to marriage and everyone seems to be very content, on the whole. This is the only really effective method. All other compromises generally just don't seem to work, although there is positive and negative in almost everything and I am sure that some have benefited from the website, but the above method is much more effective.

Of course, there are some problems with this view. First, factually, my impression (all hearsay, obviously) is that it is not actually accurate to say that rebbeim in your average yeshivish boys school don't talk about sex (aka the yetser hora, etc...). Furthermore, even to the extent they don't talk about it, I don't think it is really that far from the mind of the young men in question. (If it is, countless tsnius books will need to rethink the "MenHaveNoSelfControlThinkAboutSexAllTheTimeCantBeTrusted" trope...)
However, I think he may be on to something with girls. For whatever reason, it seems to be completely possible to get many high school girls to sublimate all their sexual interests/energies. And it's true, the temimus of many such young women is a wonder, and harder to find among the coed-socializers. This leads to the second potential problem, which is that these girls are basically the only ones in their community totally not thinking abt sex, and the very fact that they are not educated seems to leave them vulnerable in many ways. However, I think the commenter brought a pov that at least deserves to be aired.
Which brings me to the title of this post. When i was of bar- and bat-mitsvah-going age, I recall the favorite dances being "yoya" and "yidden". I've noticed of late that "yoya" isn't as popular as it once was - I can't remember the last time I heard it at a wedding. Of course, fashions change, and the fact that yoya is a secular song whose lyrics, not being pesukim or otherwise recognizable from the litrugy, may be hard for poor American band leaders to sing (as well as perhaps "inappropriate" in heimishe settings...) probably doesn't help it.
On Sunday, at a friend's daughter's bat mitzvah, I witnessed another possible reason. It seems that the young folks have a new-fangled dance to yoya. this dance is, well, not appropriate. by which I mean that the same choreography could easily be transplanted to a music video. (I'm not saying that in the way old people refer to "MTV" and generally mean "not what we used to do," but rather that I really could be in a pop or hip hop video.) However, my initial shock (I am such an old fogey!) was replaced with bemusal (word?) rather quickly since it was quite clear the girls dancing had no idea. that is, no idea what they were doing could be done provocatively. It was kind of cute, and reminded me of the lookjed post above. Of course, the communities where sex-ed is a real no no tend to be the communities where sucha dance would be outlawed by any self respecting menaheles in a second. but still, the parallels remain...

the palace of torah

2007-05-31T22:14:00.000-05:00

Three years ago Dr. Tamar Ross published a book. last month, R. Aryeh Frimer wrote a review. I have to admit I was quite taken aback by 1- the tone and 2 - the complete failure to actually engage many of the points he attacks.*
I've just read her response.
I'm not sure I agree with everything she says, (rather, I'm pretty sure I'm not comfortable with some of it) but I do think she has the upper hand in this argument overall. And in general, I'm glad to be reminded of what she stands for, since it helps me in a lot of ways.

Also, I happened to have been discussing something very much like the first full paragraph on p. 14 with my former chavruta earlier today:

It is not internal religious logic, but rather the obsession with borders and denominational lines that drives considerable segments even of Torah U-Madda circles to selectivity in their willingness to veer from literalist interpretations of dogma that cannot be defended on rational grounds. It is this that drives them to engage in often ludicrous contortions and splitting of hairs in order to come up with some consistent doctrinal formula that distinguishes between Orthodox conceptions of Torah and halakha and those of other denominations...

* [eg, TR observes that it's odd that Torah study for women and innovations in women's prayer (eg, womens tefillah groups) have received very different responses/levels of acceptance despite looking like quite similar innovations, allegedly, from an ex-ante perspective. AF responds that the difference is that learning was implemented with rabbinic approval, WTGs not. Assuming any/all of the factual observations/assertions are true (TR points out that beis yaakov was hardly uncontroversial), somethings still sounds circular here, no?]
arg.

a public service announcement

2007-05-29T14:27:00.000-05:00

The Golders Green Hotel has Bedbugs. Bed Bugs. (it also smells and has various other things wrong with it. but most of those fall under the "you get what you pay for" category, i think...)
hopefully this information will make in into the google universe, to help future travelers...

(as some of you know, I* have a sad history with the blood-sucking insects in question, thanks to my Manhattan neighbors, so I was quite annoyed to encounter them again.)

* Oren, on the other hand, seems immune to bites. good for him...

shabbos table math

2007-05-21T10:38:00.000-05:00

the appetizer:
for any prime p > 5, show that p^4 - 1 is divisible by 240.

the menfolk at the table continued with various math brain teasers for the better part of the meal. every three problems or so, one of the Wives would say "listen to you, you're still talking about the same thing! who cares?!" and then make some joke about men...

lest i come off as mean, the meal and people were lovely, and atypical
(in a good way) in many other ways.

on being hard of hearing in a foreign counrty

2007-05-15T13:48:00.000-05:00

for various reasons not fully understood and not worth detailing here, my right ear was not functioning well yesterday. (needing popping, but unpoppable) B"H, better now. Being temporarily and unexpectedly disabled was odd. Apparently since my voice was echoing in my head I was talking too quietly. I had to focus terribly just to hear the nice lady trying to show me how to use the audio guide at the national portrait gallery. (The guide itself was fine via my "good ear")

There is a joke that goes something like this:

Old Man: Doctor, my wife's hearing is getting terrible, but she refuses to be tested.
Doctor: Well, you can do some informal testing for me at home. Say something to her first from the next room, then moving closer and closer, saying the same, thing, until she responds, and see how close you have to get.
__ (later that day...)
Man (from living room): "what's for dinner?"
Man (from doorway to kitchen): "what's for dinner?"
Man (from 5 feet away from wife): "what's for dinner?"
Wife: "meatloaf, for the third time!"

Oddly, I was the opposite of the man. Ratter than assume nothing was happening if I couldn't hear it, I assumed I was always missing something important. I kept turning to see if someone was saying something, calling me, if something had happened, etc. maybe because the change in my hearing was not gradual. I did find that I walked into people more, etc, because apparently one of the cues I use to figure out what's going on that I can't see is hearing.

anyway, that's all for now. Thankfully, it's back to normal. so in retrospect, it's kind of like one of those activities in fourth grade where you wear a blindfold and get led around for a few hours...
makes you appreciate what you have, i suppose...

you know you're away from home when...

2007-05-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

it takes you 10 minutes to figure out which product in the supermarket is for washing clothes.
then, when you get home, you open the washer-dryer-in-one contraption to release a torrent of water onto the hardwood floors of your pseudo-spiffy corporate apartment.* you finally figure out how to make it work and it turns out it takes 2:34 (that's hours: minutes, not minutes: seconds), drying not included... but at least you (ok, let's make it your husband to keep this totally hypothetical....) have clean undershirts.

*spiffy enough, it turns out, that they left you some clothes-washing tablets, but you, in your ignorance, didn't recognize what they were for until you bought some of your own...

apparently it rhymes in british

2007-05-15T13:41:00.000-05:00

"nothing's fitter than a chicken in a pitta"

2007-04-20T15:32:00.000-05:00

overheard on the subway: three adolesents talking about the Virginia Tech shooting.
#1: (gives a midly accurate rendition of the facts)
#2: "yo, that nigga's a G"
#3: "na, that ain't no G, that's crazy."

2007-04-14T22:08:00.000-05:00

is this website run by a frum jew?

happy. kosher, and redemptive pesach!

2007-04-07T22:01:00.000-05:00

an apology, of sorts: At least two people whom I did not call when I was in Chicago a few weeks back have already found out, so I suppose I might as well come clean: I went for a family simcha, knew that I wouldn't possibly have time for everyone I know there (including some other family!), and so figured there was no point in contacting too many people. Pretty-much all the non-family visiting I did do was determined by whom I happened to run into on the street. (Running into people on the stret was actually quite fun, and one of the cooler things about the trip...) It was really a pleasure to be back, and perhaps some other time we will make a more comprehensive visit...

Happy pesach!

HPV

2007-04-07T21:42:00.000-05:00

Katha Pollitt Likes the HPV vaccine, and doesn't like people who don't:

"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.

Elsewhere, the family research council apparently supports vaccine availability, just not compulsory vaccination (fair enough), but that's not my main point.* Pollitt's bewilderment at the suggestion that HPV immunity might lead to teenage promiscuity seems fair, and is shared by many (including my mom, with whom I was discussing this for some reason over pesach). Well, I had this thought:
A lot of abstinence only sex education stresses the "threat"** of HPV: it sounds like HIV, after all, but is a lot more common and condoms are less effective against it (so they say). SO, my theory is that the abstinence only crowd make a somewhat irrationally big deal out of HPV in the first place, which is what makes them worry that a promise of HPV protection will encourage promiscuity. I don't know why, but I was pleased with myself for putting this information together...

**not that it's not a threat, but it's more a "geee maybe I should get a pap smear" type of threat than an "i'm going to die if i get this" threat...
*Also not my main point, though probably more important re: how public health works in this country, is whether the push to vaccinate helps women or Merck...

leil shimurrim

2007-03-29T23:30:00.000-05:00

רמב"ן שמות פרק יב פסוק מב

(מב) ואמר ליל שמורים הוא לה' להוציאם מארץ מצרים - כי שמר להם הדבר מן העת שגזר עליהם הגלות שיוציאם בלילה הזה בבא הקץ מיד, כי בעתה אחישנה (ישעיה ס כב). או טעמו, ליל שמורים הוא לה', שהוא שומר ומצפה ללילה שיוציאם מארץ מצרים, שהקב"ה מצפה לעת שיהיו ראויים להוציאם משם:

According to Ramban, Leil Shimurim is either: the specific date God had destined for the redemption, which God then waited for OR: The night that God has been waiting for, when bene Yisrael finally merit redemption.
In the first reading, God sets the trigger and waits for it. In the second, B"Y are directly responsible for the triggering event. [The first is found in the gemara, the second original to Ramban (as far as I know). ] I just thought that was interesting

Wexis bonus

2007-03-28T16:50:00.000-05:00

The Jastrow Bonus (aka Jastrow Jackpot, closely related to the Frank Find) is one of those familiar staples we have all grown to love. Lately, as I've been using less Jastrow and more Lexis/Westlaw, I've had a curious thing happen: In the course of a (usually not so fruitful) search, usually of Law Review articles, for something I am working on, I run into something interesting that I want to read and would never have found otherwise.
For example, I ran into a student note by a high school classmate at a different school who wrote on something I had briefly toyed with working on over the summer.
The mechanism of these "bonuses" is different than with Jastrow, but I think it deserves to be canonized anyway. I just need an alliterative name...

superfluous literary allusions are cool

2007-03-26T23:33:00.000-05:00

The Lawyering Program starts the year with an exercise in statutory interpretation and rule-formulation dealing with a rule that says "no vehicles in the park." this particular exercise is, it seems, well worn. Nevertheless, the particular pretensions of the lawyering program add a charm, of sorts. The ordinance in question is enacted, we are told, in a New Jersey municipality called Brideshead. The neighboring town, which comes up in later elaborations, is called Macondo Hills. I've been wondering all year whether this means we will, in fact, revisit the exercise at the end of the year. It seems not to be in the curriculum, but someone else had the idea:

"Return to Brideshead: Driving in Wharton Park"
A debate concerning statutory construction, legislative history,
and executive signing statements
presented by the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society.


much to my chagrin, they managed to miss the obvious title!

some people...

2007-03-22T00:13:00.000-05:00

The case of Rushdie is one of inclusion; the process starts with a certain collusion of classes. I am suspicious of class-bias arguments against Rushdie; however, with Rushdie's recent work (I shall except Haroon and the Sea of Stories, whose wonderful flight into fancy is a compensatory withdrawal into the classless imagination) the following argument holds water. He is from middle-class India, and his joining the educated ranks of the West at Cambridge is more a bringing together of taste and class than the development of a contestatory literature. I realize that any attempt to connect his Satanic Verses with his class background (i.e. as an expression of its failure) can be read as a feeble gesture; but it is more often true than not that writers from his class have, as their central focus, their own career in view. At times, this careerist motivation is clothed in the garb of activism, just as it is expressed in pluralism. Yet their literature is not about the larger sphere of activism. There are, of course, exceptions to this essentially weak rule -- but Rushdie is not one of them.
more

i guess i, as people of my class are presumably wont to do, missed something when my major interest in the book was the characters...

on supervision

2007-03-16T15:25:00.000-05:00

email from a professor:

This is a long and detailed email. Please make sure you read through all of it.

A few comments & notes on the ICWA 1st Drafts (I have read them):

Format Issues:

1) The Preliminary Statement starts on page 1. Everything before that (ToC/ToA) is small roman numerals. How does one do this? Ask those in class that have done it already or get familiar with Microsoft Word.
...
3) Check the BB rules for citing to Complaints, Answers, Exhibits. Many of you appear to have made up your own rules. There is a reason for the BB. Discover it.

...
Thats it for now. Please enjoy the rest of your break. I have spent the last 5 days reading 28 briefs and commenting on them - I cannot think of a better way to enjoy a week "off."

apparently, someone didn't get the memo: expressing your dissatisfaction with your job to the people you are employed to teach does not motivate them to like your class more. in fact, iot may make them act a lot like you: bitter and unhappy about assignments.

maot hittim

2007-03-16T13:27:00.000-05:00

my mother, like many women with houses, thinks the most notable thing about tu bishevat is that it's 2 months before pesah. i, however, have trouble keeping track of it all. So, first. a friendly rmeinded to myself and others to give ma'ot hittim before it's too late.
Last year, i neglected to do so, and ended up scrambling to give to some chareidi organization that took donations online, which put me on the mailing list for an endless stream of sob stories. I have considered posting about this for a while, and always think better of it. I mean, poor people need money, organizations tell sob stories to get it to them. and it's not a crime to write melodrama at a middle school level, even if i personally find it irritating. I have no reason to doubt the honesty of most organizations, though i suspect that many tsedakah organizations, like noprofits (and businesses) in general, could learn a lot re: operations and efficiency. I don't think too hard about not giving htem money because I prefer to give locally. but still, something about these brochurse just drives me bonkers. the passover special from a "widows and orphans" fund was no exception:

cover page: "when their king is gone, who will answer their questions?"
inside:

tall and brave, twirling his black peyo with termbling hands, Shaya begins reciting the Haggadah. He's the man of the house now, and it's up to him to lead the Seder. he's all of sixteen years old, but Mommy and the children are looking at him expectantly, trusting him to guide them through the whole leil shemurim (sic).
...
Four year old Yitzy asks the questions shyly, skipping the standard opening sentence of Tatte... (his rebbe had told him that it wasn't really part of the Mah Nishtanah and could be skipped.)
...
Yom tov brings with it happiness and excitement - but also memories... memories of their father presiding over the Seder table like a king; memories of their mother, glowing like a queenas she served the most delicious meals. the memories hurt; the pour salt on the wounds that have never healed properly and they overtax the victims (sic) strength, leaving them ill equipped to endure the crushing poverty that has become their lot.

I feel like by picking this apart I will end up inadvertently saying bad things about trgic situation, so I'll leave it there, but it seems to me the problem as presented needs a lot of fixing that has nothing to do with money...

ghosts

2007-03-12T22:14:00.000-05:00

of course, two weeks after we do our taxes, a W-2 arrives from the board of ed regarding $500-some that I never actually received as part of the retroactive union contract. I actually thought this might happen, but I let myself pretend it wouldn't... arg.

help for the ignorant

2007-03-07T13:34:00.000-05:00

why is the first aliyah of Ki Tisa so long? I can see why the whole egel story is in one long (second) aliyah, but why not break up the first aliyah a bit and condense some of the short ones at the end?
all i can think of is that there is soemthing about having the egel be read at Levi - imaginative, but, i suspect, not correct.
i also don't know how to find this out in a methodical way.
thoughts?

of tube sock sleeves and sleep deprivation...

2007-03-02T02:38:00.000-05:00

one side-effect of oren not waking up early every day (well, he is, it's just not in this country, but even when he was here and sleeping late...) is oren not going to sleep early. in turn, i have quickly reverted to my unproductive staying-up-way-too-late of yesteryear, and, now as then, in the guise of working on something school related. grrr.

that said, in some of my non-working i stubled upon this via volokh. there are various products that i think would be useful to me that are available only, or most cheaply, on websites that market to muslim women. (on that note, aside from the price differential, what is the difference between an "abaya" or "jilbab" and a "shabbos robe"?) i've never ordered from one, partly because i don't actually need more clothes or headcoverings or such, (though who can resist long arm sleeves?*) . But even if i did, somehow it rubs me the wrong way.
the first issues is the knee-jerk "what if my money is supporting terrorism?," which i think is largely irrational given all the other things i buy without asking questions. the second is that most of these sites have selling points about how great it is to be recognizably muslim, etc, which, well, i don't want to be. so even if i could use an item and still look jewish, i feel weird, like somehow i'm crossing into territory where i don't belong. an analogous test-case might be buying tsniusdik wedding dresses from mormons, which i've heard of more than once. on this note, i am pretty sure i would not be comfortable buying such clothing from a flesh-and-blood "islamic clothing" store. should that impact internet shopping choices? does any of this make sense?

sleepily...

*In Camp Sternberg, people used to make items for similar purposes out of tube socks. I guess camp is a little less formal...

Purim

2007-02-28T16:38:00.000-05:00

Over shabbat I heard some of the aspects of this Purim drashah.
Two points I took away: 1 - the structure of Ahashverosh's palace is set out to parallel the mishkan/mikdash: it has increasingly restrictive access as you get closer to the king, no one can enter the innermost chamber without permission, etc...), and is called "birah" - a word only used to refer to the mikdash elsewhere in Tanakh. 2 - the midrash capitalizes on this, saying that Ahashverosh wore the clothing of the Kohen Gadol and served with the vessels of the Temple, etc.
Rabbi Liebtag (predictably), takes this in a Zionist direction, suggesting that the megillah is chastising the Jews for remaining in Persia and mistaking the false "temple" of Ahashverosh for the soon-to-be-rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem.
I wanted to take it in a slightly different direction, talking about the general questions of access to God in a mikdash-less, nevua-less, miracle-less world. (Esther is at the cusp of the transition from the Biblical world to the one I describe. many sources attest to this. I am too lazy to cite them all.)
This is where the Sfas Emes I posted before comes in.

שפת אמת ספר שמות - לפורים - שנת [תרל"ז]
כנוס כו' כל היהודים הנמצאים בשושן כו'. כי הבינו שהגזירה הי' ע"י החטא שנהנו מאותה סעודה של אחשורוש. ולכן נאמר לעיל עשה כו' לכל כו' הנמצאים בשושן כו' משתה כו'. וכן כאן הנמצאים. שזה קאי על בנ"י. כמו שדרשו חכמים בפסוק שתי בנותיך הנמצאות כו'. ובזה התענית תקנו זה החטא ושבו בתשובה שלימה. והוא פלא שבאותה המשתה עצמה נעשה ההצלה שנהרגה ושתי אז. וזהו כעין אמרם ז"ל בתשובה מאהבה. הזדונות נהפכו לזכיות. והקב"ה ראה שישובו בתשובה שלימה. ונראה שלכך תקנו זה היום למשתה. לאשר כי נהפך להם חטא המשתה על ידי התשובה כנ"ל. וי"ל זה פי' הפסוק ובכן אבוא אל המלך אשר לא כדת. פי' שהתקרבות אל הבורא ית' יהיה ע"י החטא עצמו. והוא שלא כדת ע"י תשובה כנ"ל

loosely translated/summarized: "...they understood that the decree was because the sin that they had taken pleasure in that feast of Ahashverosh...And with this fast they corrected this sin and they returned in complete teshuvah. and it is wondrous that in that very feast the salvation was made, for Vashti was killed then. And this is like what they (rabbis) ob"m say regarding teshuvah from love: the intentional sins turned to merits....And it seems that this is why they established this day for feasting. For the sin of feasting was switched/turned around for them via teshuvah, as above. and one might say that this is the explanation of the verse "and so I will come to the king as is not lawful, [and as I perish, I perish]," the explanation is that the closeness to the blessed Creator will be by way of the sin itself. and this is "as is not lawful" - via teshuvah, as above."

The SE is saying that one comes to God by teshuvah, but he phrases it as coming to God by sinning, as sinning is a prerequisite to teshuvah. as he phrases it, sounds pretty radical.

I am also tempted to connect this to "averah lishmah," (see Nazir 23b) since (the end of) the very pasuk he cites of "coming to the king (=King) as is not lawful" is interpreted elsewhere (Megillah 15a)) in the midrash as the moment where Esther forfeited her marriage with Mordechai by soliciting Ahashverosh actively. That whole idea needs more work.

But, my real interest was just the idea that the "palace" of evil is structurally the same as the palace of God, and, indeed, there is a direct path (teshuvah) between the two that cannot be accessed from elsewhere, it seems.

Purim is all about opposites, i suppose...

take my blood, please!

2007-02-28T16:33:00.000-05:00

I never have much success giving blood. I think I've been dismissed for marginal anemia (of the "you're not sick but you can't give blood" variety) two or three times in a row. But, I'm O negative, so I keep trying...
At a blood drive on Tuesday, I finally registered at 12.8 for iron (12 is the cutoff. i'm usually 11.7 or so). And yet - the Man got me down. I arrived on time for my 11:15 appointment, but I was still waiting to get to a gurney where I could wait to get stuck with a needle at 12:55. Since class was at 1:05, and my prof is a stickler for, well, everything (he starts exactly when the second hand hits 12), I had to go.
However, for my time, I got two free passes to the Bronx Zoo, expiring at the end of March. Since I am one person, and my usual outing-companion is away, any takers?

the beginnings of a thought

2007-02-27T23:40:00.001-05:00

שפת אמת ספר שמות - לפורים - שנת [תרל"ז]
כנוס כו' כל היהודים הנמצאים בשושן כו'. כי הבינו שהגזירה הי' ע"י החטא שנהנו מאותה סעודה של אחשורוש. ולכן נאמר לעיל עשה כו' לכל כו' הנמצאים בשושן כו' משתה כו'. וכן כאן הנמצאים. שזה קאי על בנ"י. כמו שדרשו חכמים בפסוק שתי בנותיך הנמצאות כו'. ובזה התענית תקנו זה החטא ושבו בתשובה שלימה. והוא פלא שבאותה המשתה עצמה נעשה ההצלה שנהרגה ושתי אז. וזהו כעין אמרם ז"ל בתשובה מאהבה. הזדונות נהפכו לזכיות. והקב"ה ראה שישובו בתשובה שלימה. ונראה שלכך תקנו זה היום למשתה. לאשר כי נהפך להם חטא המשתה על ידי התשובה כנ"ל. וי"ל זה פי' הפסוק ובכן אבוא אל המלך אשר לא כדת. פי' שהתקרבות אל הבורא ית' יהיה ע"י החטא עצמו. והוא שלא כדת ע"י תשובה כנ"ל:

af simchas

2007-02-20T01:06:00.000-05:00

we went to a fantastically leibedik wedding tonight. the couple, and the rest of us, should have much nachat, simchah, etc, for a long time...
this probably doesn't reflect well on me, but the real reason i bring it up is not to gush about how lovely it was (which it really was), but rather to solicit thoughts on a practice that sort of disturbed me. the wedding was in a well-known hall where I have attended many previous weddings. this was the first time I saw people, err, "collecting" at a wedding, though. it struck me as really not ok. i'm not sure if that makes me a grinch.
relatedly, there was a troop of yiddish-speaking young men in army fatigues and motorcycle helmets who apparently come to wedings there regularly, do some shtick (which they didn't manage to do tonight), and ask for money. It struck me that they are the chassidic analogy of the guys who do breakdancing in times square. ;)

puzzlement

2007-02-08T12:28:00.000-05:00

why is it that almost all of the spam that comes with the tag [SPAM##] in the subject line evades my spam filter? (in fact, these tend to be the only spam messages that get through...)

slow

2007-01-27T22:36:00.000-05:00

it took me a number of days to realize that the family name in shechter poultry v. US is actually meaningful.

who watches the watchers?

2007-01-25T10:53:00.000-05:00

תלמוד בבלי מסכת ראש השנה דף כ עמוד א

I
[what precedes this is a discussion of what reasons are good ones to manipulate the length of months (eg, to keep yom and shabbat from falling out consecutively to allow burial before decomposition begins). the whole discusion presupposes that the rabbis can manipulate the lengths of te months, at least to some degree, hence the following discussion:]

II
איני? והתני רבה בר שמואל: יכול כשם שמעברין את השנה לצורך - כך מעברין את החדש לצורך?תלמוד לומר +שמות יב+ החדש הזה לכם ראש חדשים - כזה ראה וקדש.

Is it really so (that the rabbis can lengthen the months as they need)? but Rabbah Bar Shmuel taught a baraita: One might think that just as they lengthen the year (by inserting a 13th month to create a leap year) out of necessity, so they can lengthen the year (by declaring Rosh Hodesh on the 30th instead of th 29th day from the last Rosh Hodesh). thus it teaches us: "this month is for you" (read: this new moon is the one you should use. see rashi Ex 12:2) - see this and sanctify the month.*

III
אמר רבא: לא קשיא; כאן - לעברו, כאן - לקדשו. והכי קאמר: יכול כשם שמעברין את השנה ואת החדש לצורך - כך מקדשין את החדש לצורך? תלמוד לומר החדש הזה לכם, כזה ראה וקדש. וכי הא דאמר רבי יהושע בן לוי: מאיימין על העדים על החדש שנראה בזמנו לעברו, ואין מאיימין על העדים על החדש שלא נראה בזמנו לקדשו.

Rava said: it is no difficulty. Here - to extend it. Here- to sanctify it (earlier than the 30th day), and thus goes the statement: One might think that, just as they extend the year and the month ot of necessity, so too they may sanctify the month out of necessity. thus it teaches us "this is the new moon for you" - see this and sanctify. (ie, "see this" is necessary before declaring Rosh Hodesh early, but merely "seeing this" does not require the rabbis to declare rosh hodesh).
And (if so, this opinion is) similar to that which Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: They may threaten the witnesses regarding the new moon that was seen in its time (preventing their testimony) in order to lengthen the month, but they may not threaten the witnesses regarding the new moon that was not seen in its time (to testify that they saw it anyway, in order) to sanctify it (early).

IV
איני? והא שלח ליה רבי יהודה נשיאה לרבי אמי: הוו יודעין שכל ימיו של רבי יוחנן היה מלמדנו: מאיימין על העדים על החדש שלא נראה בזמנו לקדשו, אף על פי שלא ראוהו - יאמרו ראינו! -
Is this really so? But behold, Rabi Yehudah Nesiah sent to Rabbi Ami: Be aware that all of Rabbi Yohanan's life he would teach us: they may threaten te witnesses regarding the new moon that was not seen at its time to sanctify it. Even though they did no see it, they should say "we saw it."!

V
אמר אביי: לא קשיא; הא - בניסן ותשרי, הא - בשאר ירחי.

Abaye said: it is no difficulty. Here (they may threaten the witnesses even to shorten the months) regarding Nissan and Tishrei, Here regarding the rest of the months.
(at this stage, the fate of the positionin part III is unclear: it was initially introduced to explain how the rabbis may lengthen the months to prevent issues from coming u re: timing of holidays. Now the the gemara, per Abaye, says that in holiday-containing months the rabbis may even shorten the month, and in the rest of the months they may even lenthen it. However, I do not understand the reason they would want to lengthen a non-holiday month... help?)

VI
...
. רב דימי מנהרדעא מתני איפכא: מאיימין על העדים על החדש שלא נראה בזמנו לקדשו, ואין מאיימין על העדים על החדש שנראה בזמנו לעברו. מאי טעמא? האי - מיחזי כשקרא, האי - לא מיחזי כשקרא.

Rava Dimi of Nehardaa teaches the opposite (of the position of RYBL in part III):
They may threaten the witnesses regarding the new moon that is not seen at its time to sanctify it, and they may not threaten the witnesses regarding the new moon that was seen at its time to lengthen it.
What is the reason? This (lenthening the month) appears to be a lie, this (starting the month early) does not appear to be a lie.
(if we were to relate the drashah of "see this..." to this opinion, we would say that it indicates that if one sees the moon, one must sanctify, but not that one may not sanctify the month eaqrly without a moon)

*Refresher (correct me if i'm wrong...): Rosh Hodesh is when 2 witnesss come and say they saw the new moon, except that even without witnesses a month can't be more than 30 days long. So, the point of saying "see this and snactify" is that you must sanctify the new month upon testimony of a new moon - there is no rabbinic discretion to extend the month.

Discussion:

I think this sugya-segment is intersting because it brings up two different reasons the Rabbis would check their own authority. (here, leading to opposite results!)
the first is implicit, I htink, in the position of part III: the rabbis may ignore testimony in order to lengthen the month, but they cannot cause testimony to be fabrcated. This position seems to be concerned with the internal legitimacy of the bet din: what has it been given the authority (from God) to do? It may be that the rabbis can ignore the new moon that God has put up there in the sky (akin to "shev ve-al taaseh?), but they cannot fabricate a new moon where none exists.
the background here is the many midrashim that tie the power of the rabbis over the calendar (eg, "asher tikrau atem be-moadam...) to the same verse (hachodesh hazeh LAKHEM), thus citing this verse to limit rabbinic power seems to me to indicate a discomfort with sweeping rabbinic discretion and an attempt to make sure the rabbis can't make arbitrary/counterfactual decisions with impunity. At this stage, the gemara is concerned with the fundamental legitimacy of rabbinic authority: how much authority did God actually give the rabbis?

The second check is external: legitimacy in the eyes of the people. thus, in part VI, the rabbis apparetnyl have the power to coerce false testimony: to create a moon where none exists, but they must be afraid of counterfactual prounouncements that can easily be discovered. Thus, if everyone has seen the new moon, the rabbis cannot legitimately turn away witnesses and say there was no moon, since this will appear as a lie (essentially, to coopt a metaphor from elsewhere, putting the baby back into the womb - it's there one day, allegedly absent the next...) However, they can "create" the moon via coerced testimony since this does not blatanlty contradict the order of nature (perhaps only these two people were in the right place at the right time, given visibilty conditins, etc... and in any case everyone will see the moon the next day, presumably, giving some sort of "retroactive" feeling of truth to the poronouncement that it was present even the night before).

This second check is in some ways more cynical, though I can think of at least one other source that is explicitly concerned with the same issues. (precise location evades me. the story about the two rabbis discussins non-Jewish cheese, etc) that said, I find it interesting (though not sure how to articulate why) that the two approaches appear in one sugya, and produce opposite results.

PS - if you made it this far, thanks. I am told I have a problem with length.

torah learning and physical strength

2007-01-04T20:48:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to put together a shiur and was hoping to pick some of your brains...
In the story of Resh Lakish's (re?)turn to Torah learning (Bava Metsia 84a), when Resh Lakish accepts the yolk of Torah, he loses his strength (at least as Rashi reads it, and I haven't seen anything else). Similarly, when Rashbi comes out of the cave (reference escapes me at the moment), his son in law is upset to see him covered in sores, but Rashbi says thathis weak physical state is the only reason he has been able to attain such a high level of torah learning.

So, what I would like to augment htese two sources:
1 - siilar situaitons/stories elsewhere
2 - later comentators who discuss the connection (inverse) betwen physical/Torah strength
3 - examples where physical strength, in ocntrast, goes hand in hand with torah greatness.

thanks for enabling my too-busy/lazy-to-actually-reasearch-ness

of klein bottles and "atomic" clocks....

2006-12-26T13:33:00.000-05:00

a few months ago, oren and i received these glasses from one of my high school teachers (a Conservative rebbetzin) as a belated wedding gift. a Few weeks ago I finally toveled them and have since been using them a lot. (We were actually low on glasses...)
I really wonder who thought of the glasses, and who buys them. I would guess that "frum people" is not the answer to either. I would further guess that they are a common gift from moderately affiliated people to their "frummie" friends and relatives. But they're still fun. If a bit odd.
On the subject of funny wedding gifts, the most useless, but perhaps most amusing, was this.
One of my personal favorites was the atomic clock.
I originally registered for it because they have them at Drisha and I thought they were cool. Particularly when they reset themselves: seeing clock hands move spontaneously around the face of the clock multiple times per minute is rather amusing, if eerie...
What I did not know at the time was that our atomic clock would have a special habit of resetting itself to 3 hours 45 minutes slow every Friday, and then correcting itself by Monday morning. Again, amusing, if not useful. Actually, it took me a few frustrating weeks to figure out that there was a method to the incorrect timing, but now I think it's endearing...
I don't know what the point of this post is. Ideas for all out there who are in the market for inexpensive fun gifts around this time of year (or another)...

Darkness and the Festival of Lights

2006-12-21T19:34:00.000-05:00

for the irrelevant intellectual history of this post (in my own head), see the previous post...

1 בבלי עבודה זרה ח עמ' א
מתני' ואלו אידיהן של עובדי כוכבים קלנדא וסטרנורא ...
גמ' אמר רב חנן בר רבא קלנדא ח' ימים אחר תקופה סטרנורא ח' ימים לפני תקופה וסימנך +תהלים קלט+ אחור וקדם צרתני וגו'
ת"ר לפי שראה אדם הראשון יום שמתמעט והולך אמר אוי לי שמא בשביל שסרחתי עולם חשוך בעדי וחוזר לתוהו ובוהו וזו היא מיתה שנקנסה עלי מן השמים עמד וישב ח' ימים בתענית [ובתפלה] כיון שראה תקופת טבת וראה יום שמאריך והולך אמר מנהגו של עולם הוא הלך ועשה שמונה ימים טובים לשנה האחרת עשאן לאלו ולאלו ימים טובים הוא קבעם לשם שמים והם קבעום לשם עבודת כוכבים
TB Avodah Zarah 8a
[Mishnah lists the non-Jewish holidays around which it is prohibitted to do business with the non-Jews, beginning with "Kalenda" and "Saturna"]
Gemara: Rav Hanan bar Rava said: Kalenda is 8 days after the solstice; Saturna is 8 days before the solstice...
Our Rabbis Taught (A Baraita): For Adam saw that each day was getting shorter and shorter. He said 'woe to me. perhaps because I messed up, the world is darkening for me and returning to tohu va-vohu (pre-creation chaos), and this is the "death" which was inflicted on me from heaven." He got up and sat 8 days in fasting [and prayer]. When he saw the period after the winter solstice, and he saw each day was getting longer and longer, he said 'it is the way of the world.' He went and made 8 festive days. the next year, he made both these and those holidays. He established them for the sake of heaven, and they (the Romans) established them for idolatry.

Observations on this passage:
1) The view of cultural transmission is interesting: Everyone (Jews and ROmans) knows there;s supposed to be something around this time, but the content changes depending on the culture...
1a) Also interesting how they deal with the fact that our light-related-solstice-holiday seems to follow a general pattern: by affirming that, yes, in fact, it all derives from our common human ancestor!
2) According to this story, the position of Bet Hillel that we light one candle more each night may take on a new meaning...
3) Adam's winter holidays have two themes: confusion/despair and restoration of a sense of order/hope. It seems, especially given #2, that our hanukkah may represent the latter, but what of the former? It would certainly be ironic if the ROmans retained more of a remnan (albeit corrupt) of the dual nature of Adam's holiay that we do, no?
#3 is the lead in to the rest, so keep it in mind...

2 מסכת סופרים כ:ב
מצות הדלקתו, משתשקע החמה ועד שתכלה רגל מן השוק, ואף על פי שאין ראייה לדבר זכר לדבר, לא ימיש עמוד הענן יומם ועמוד האש לילה לפני העם. ואם הדליקו ביום, אין ניאותין ממנו, ואין מברכין עליו, שכך אמרו, אין מברכין על הנר עד שיאותו לאורו. ואין חוששין לפתילתו להחליפו עד שיכלה.
Masekhet Sofrim 20:2
the commandment of ligthing it, fromwhen the sun sets until legs leave the marketplace, and even though there is no proof (from the biblical text) for the thing, there is a hint/mention for the thin: 'the pillar of cloud shall not during the day and the pillar of fire at night before the people."...

I think the "hint" is that the "fire" is "before the people," hence must be lit while people are still outside.
Hower, the reaosn I bring it is that, again, we have a fire that corresponds to our hannukah practice, but in its own context its juxtaposed with smoke/cloud. SO, what's the symbolism of the smoke/fire, and how, if at all, does the smoke play into our hanukah?

3 שמות ל
(ז) וְהִקְטִיר עָלָיו אַהֲרֹן קְטֹרֶת סַמִּים בַּבֹּקֶר בַּבֹּקֶר בְּהֵיטִיבוֹ אֶת הַנֵּרֹת יַקְטִירֶנָּה:

basically, the rituals of menorah preparation and lighting are connected, in time, with the rituals of ketoret-burning. Another fire<->smoke/cloud pair.

Rav Lichtenstein suggests that the Jewish experience, or perhaps the religious experience in general, has two parts. first is the experience of knowledge, access to God, enlightenment: this corresponds to the fire. Second is the experience of mystery, of not-knowing, of obfuscation and inability to truly access/comprehend God: this corresponds to smoke.
So, our observance of hanukah focuses on the former: the fire, but we must remember that what sets us apart from Greece is not that we have light and they are darkness: Greece and its philosophy were indeed "enlightened." The Greel form of enlightenment, however, represents the firw without the smoke: without the recognition of humna limitations in teh face of the divine, etc.
Thsi point works well with the fact that the pillar of smoke appears during the day, and the pillar of fire at night: the light-time has an added element of obfuscation, and the dark-time has an added element of light. That said, what is there in our Hanukah observance that explicitly recognizes the ketoret aspect? this connects to quetsion #3 above: what corresponds to Adam's first 8 days?
I suggested to my class that maybe its the very fact that we light at night, in the darkest part of the year. But I (and they) were not totally satisfied.
Thoughts?

smoke, fire, hanukah, etc...

2006-12-21T19:24:00.000-05:00

(aka, some content for a change...)
the following is based on a shiur i recently gave to undergrads at NYU as part of the conspiracy to keep dayschool graduats engaged with Judaism.

the background:
It all started when I somehow ended up at the Gush Hanukah mesibah during my "year in israel." I mean, it was awkward, because I was a seminary girl and suddenly found myself in a room full of boys. ahhh! (i was sitting in the couples corner, at least, because i was there visiting married friend...)
Anyhow, Rav Lichtenstein gave a neat sichah. The summary is here, at #39. By reading it you would never know he used the words "mysterium termendum" (tee hee), but otherwise i was very glad to find it so i didn't have to rely on memory for my shiur... (Actually, I sent something similar out in a yavneh email a few years ago (those were the dys...), based on memory. I had forgotten one of the sources until I looked it up in the Yavneh archives...)
Anyhow, the summary basically only cites pesukim, but I think a lot of rabinnic sources are on point too. (R'L might even have mentioned them. For sure some of them were in the back of his head, at least..>)
Anyway, that's all by long-winded way of introduction. Actually, I;m going to post the content in another post so it doesn't look to long...

woohoo!

2006-12-20T23:06:00.000-05:00

(four day weekend)
no, i'm not done, but almost, and proper festivities require planning...
can someone recommend something festive going on in mnahattan/brooklyn thursday night? since i'm looking for something chanuka related, ideally, the normal ways to find such activities seem less useful.
(i realize as i ask that the vast majority of jewish-msic-themed-things are terrible, but one can always hope...)

2006-12-20T09:47:00.000-05:00

ummm...

weatherphone?

2006-12-19T15:14:00.000-05:00

in boston, there is a number you can call to hear the weather forecast for the day (and week, if you stay on the line that long...). Is there such a thing in new york?

a comedy of errors

2006-12-18T19:20:00.000-05:00

today (all times are approximate...)
1:36 pm: Miriam decides (fortuitously, it turns out) to double check her exam schedule.
1:37 pm: she notices that the exam she though was tomorrow at 2 is today at 2.
1:38: She quickly emails herself her outline (allowed in the test). On the way, counting her money, she realizes she's about $4 short of enough for a cab, so she resolves to have the cab stop at an ATM.
1:40: unable to get a can right away, she runs to the ATM herself.
1:44: she gets into a cab. the driver is remarkably good at the whole manhattan driving thing, and turns off the west side highway into the village at about 1:50.
1:54: the hood of said cab starts to smoke. miriam pays and runs to cab #2
2:03: cab #2 drops her off. she tries to print out her outline only to discover she forgot to click send. unphased, she pull sout her laptop and resends, prints, and runs off.
2:10 miriam settles into her exam, only 10 minutes late.
i'm not sure if its good or bad that this was the subject i was most confident about...

unfortunately, there doesn't sem to be a moral to this story just yet...

dat moshe, etc

2006-11-29T11:25:00.000-05:00

for a while i;ve speculated that there is a connection between the "dat moshe ve-yisrael" by which we marry and the "dat moshe vi-yehudit" of mishnah ketubot 7:6.
Yesterday, i read a ketubah of a woman from the dead-sea region in mishnaic times (a wealthy society lady, not a sectarian) where the translation read "according to the laws of moses and the judeans." I'm not sure what the original read, but I thought reinforcedd the yisrael/yehudit connection by providing an alternative that is sort of like each: yehudim.
anyhow, i have no idea what to make of this, or where to find out.
thoughts are appreciated.
M
ps - in my attempts to find the mishnah citation above without actually opening a mishnah (ie, via google), i came across a seemingly article, moderatly related... didn't read it, though, because my first final is in two weeks...

tee hee.

2006-11-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

i just noticed that the woman in the bud light advertisements currently in subways has three arms in one of the picturers. (she's holding the bottle in front of her with two hands, but then her left arm is hanging behind her...)

highlight of monday

2006-11-14T16:13:00.002-05:00

watching Richard Epstein on CNN a few years ago discussion Intel v. Hamidi. It was just funny for many reasons. the best part was when the reporter, who seemed not to follow any of the previous discussion, announced the topic coming up: cat abductions.

2006-11-14T16:09:00.000-05:00

one of my professors has the habit of calling on people who don't like to talk in class when no one else is volunteering. Some of those people don't tlak because they're not paying attention, others because they just don't like to talk in class. In education circles we call that a "different learning style" and it's ok. but apparently not here.
Today, he called on one such person:
P: XXX, what do you think?
X: I'm not sure
P: your'e not sure what you think or you not sure you have any thoughts?
X: i'm not sure what i think, i guess
P: well get sure.
...

apparently outright meanness is tolerated from old, famous professors. but the culprit here is neither. grrr.

treife medineh

2006-11-06T21:57:00.000-05:00

An email invitation from the "young leadership division" of a well-known frum organization recently evaded my spam filter.

Subject: Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow....

Inviting me to a "food and wine tasting" (insert attempt to sound posh while sounding really not here...)

two things:
1 - i think it;'s funny that frum people think if you use elipses instead of a word because that word conveys something you consider inappropriate it's ok even if your whole point is to evoke that word.
i am reminded of political postrs in chareidi neighborhoods in yerushalayim admonishing various ministers not to bring "etnan ..." to the House of God.
sometimes, it's more salacious to leave things unsaid, reinforceing taboos, tahn it would be just to say them...

2 - more importantly, i think it's a little applaing that a frum organization thinks taht's an acceptable slogan for one of its events.

why i hate haloween

2006-11-01T12:41:00.000-05:00

1
the greenwich village halloween parade meant it took me close to an hour to even get onto the subway after leaving school yesterday. (i kept going where the policemen told me to go only to be told upon getting there that the entrance/station was actually closed...)

2
it's gross. i mean, clown suits are fine, but miniskirted "nurses" comingling with blood-spattered corpses is just gross. really.
this is connected to a more general issue of squeamishness on my part, i suppose. i find that my underexposure to popular culture makes me extremely sensitive to gruesome images (eg, subway advertisements for a tv series about a serial killer featuring limbs of corpses, or basically anything having to do with any incarnation of the movie "Saw"). i mean, i just don't want to have to look at such things.

the end. i'm off to attend a lecture in lieu of doing a rather substantial project that's due, err, tomorrow...

hag 2

2006-10-16T07:35:00.000-05:00

in which 3 other people have moderatley unexpected stays with us, a good time is had by all, and oren gets called a "bra burner." who'da thunk...

hag 1

2006-10-16T07:34:00.000-05:00

in which we made new friends during an unexpected sukkot-stay in manhattan.

gevaltic (sp?)

2006-09-26T13:46:00.000-05:00

an amazing one-liner from rabbi schwartz

שׁוּבָה, יִשְׂרָאֵל, עַד, יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ:
עד ועד בכלל

i wasn't actually listening enough to figure out where, if anywhere, he took that from or went with it...

strange

2006-09-26T13:44:00.000-05:00

for the record, i have completed at least 3 assignments in law school well ahead of their deadlines. this is truly amazong. i only hope it can continue without signalling other, less worhty, shifts in personality...
on the other hand, i just learned how to connect to the wireless network at school, which means my efficiency will likely be severely muted.

2006-09-22T08:06:00.000-05:00

i thought i was going to call all sorts of people before yom tov., but, well, i haven't yet, so ketivah vehatimah tovah to whoever reads this...

baruch dayan emet

2006-09-14T19:01:00.002-05:00

I wanted to take a moment to honor someone I think was a special person. I just found out today that Tikva Frymer Kenskey passed away recently. Despite some obvious differences in religious orientation, I found her, in my limited contact with her, to be all the good things people say. Her approach was never "dry," but always sought spiritual meaning in the Torah. And she let me sit in on her graduate class when I was a freshman (if I recall correctly). t.n.ts.b.h.

sanhedrin 43a

2006-09-13T16:53:00.000-05:00

There is a famous and curious passage (not) found on Sanhedrin 43a. A gemara about Yeshu, censored in the published Gemaras but available in Dikdukei sofrim, among other places. The same Gemara goes on to discuss 5 of Yeshu's (alleged) students. All of the students have names that are conveniently similar to biblical verses which the students cite to protest the Rabbis' attempt to execute them. For example, one of the stsudents is named "Nakai" or "Naki" and he cites Exodus 23:7 - נָקִי וְצַדִּיק אַל-תַּהֲרֹג. The rabbis respond with a similar pun indicating that "Naki" ought to be destroyed.

So, what's it all about?
One option would be to find something about each verse cited and explain its role in a Jewish-Christian polemic, or somesuch. (I haven't done this, but if someone does do tell...) Instead, I want to look at the overall form as itself saying something about J/X polemics.
Each of the "disciples" cleverly reads himself, personally, into the Biblical text. The Rabbis, in turn, read them out. On the first go-around, it seems that the text wants to uphold the Rabbinic readings of the Bible as authoritative against the upstarts. Taking this idea further, though, I might want to say that the Rabbis are protesting a particular feature of Christian exegesis - the tendency to read the person, Jesus, into biblical verses that traditional Jewish interpretation would see as broader or more generally relevant. The disciples all read themselves personally into the Bible, and the Rabbis read them out, mirroring a rejection of the similar readings-in more central to Christian thought? If so, it's interesting to note that the Rabbis use the same tool - personalizing a verse - that they are fighting, just with a negative instead of a positive spin.

I don't know if this is right. I particulalry don't know much about Christian exegesis. It's just a thought I had...

stern-faced

2006-08-31T11:12:00.000-05:00

I asked two women walking in the village for directions to traders joe's yesterday.
They didn't know.
Then one asked, "did you go to stern."
I said "not at all," thinking she meant NYU's Stern and wondering why she would ask.
Then I reevaluated the question - "Stern College or Stern School of Business?"
"Stern College," she clarified.
"No, neither."
"I teach there."
I thought the whole exchange was odd. Had she mistaken me for a specific indiviual she had taught or just thought I looked the part?
With tongue fimrly in cheek, though in a very friendly tone, I said, "We all look the same," to which she laughed rather heartilly.

Now, if someone ever accused me of making a they-all-look-the-same mistake I think I would be embarassed, no? *

Well, whatever, I just thought it was odd. Just goes to show I have a reason to be self-conscious about wearing socks on my head every day.

*Insert rant about how only certain priveleged identities get the benefits of political correctness...

the best is yet to come

2006-08-28T14:40:00.000-05:00

i said so to a fiend of ours who got married the other night (an easy prediction when someone is getting married b/c, not only is marriage happy, but the person has also, presumably, been engaged, and thus definitionally unhappy, for many months...), and it echoed with this in the back of my head, thanks to tiki. Today, i heard the same line from a law professor, with a slightly different feeling.

but anyway, hi tiki!

the new yorker

2006-08-25T15:27:00.000-05:00

Seattle was the first time I had to answer "New York" to the question "Where are you from?"
Before getting married, I would answer "Boston, but I live in NY," or some other confused hodgepodge that threw in Chicago too, depending on my mood...
Since we got married, we've been to Boston, where everyone knows where I''m from and asks "Where are you living?" to which I have much less trouble saying "New York" b/c I am, in fact, living here... We also went to our friendly local Bergers in Buffallo, but there most questions centered on our connection to Zev, and hence on Chicago, not New York. (Once the Chicago connection was established, the questions "where are you from?" and "where are you living now?" got asked separately...)
But in Seattle, I couldn't give my Boston Shpiel, b/c Oren's not from Boston and we were usually being asked as a unit. I settled into an answer that partitioned "originally" and "now" for both of us, but still, to be "from" New York. I don't know if I can handle that...

look ma, i put pictures online!

2006-08-23T13:15:00.000-05:00

to see pictures of aforementioned mountains, marmots, etc, go here.

vacation musings...

2006-08-21T17:34:00.000-05:00

This morning we returned to the Hot Smelly City (henceforth: HSC) from a week at a Randomly Chosen Western destination (Seattle and related WA places...). I don't have much to say but it was very very good.

some random highlights, because i know you really care:

we saw two big mountains. amazing in different ways.

i learned the meaning of "subalpine meadow" and we climbed through clouds (which gave the whole thing a fairy-tale mistiness) on a trail recommended by Josh (thanks!).

animals encountered (as we invaded their habitats by car, foot, or kayak...):

~seals
~coyote (oren thinks it was a fox. i'm actually not sure, embarassingly enough...)
~chipmunks (lots, and not your wimpy subirban ones either...)
~chinook (king salmon)*
~marmot (outside of city limits)
~blue heron (official state bird, no less)
~lots of butterflies

We played the last-minute-planning game and for about half the trip made reservations half an hour before we showed up at our lodging for the night, bringing us to some nifty B&Bs that felt (especially the first one) like Martha Stewart had met vintage Americana...and gone on crack. Seriously, people who have Obsessive Decorating Disorder have apparently found their perfect profession.

We were hosted by some former Chicagoans (this was random - we were set up by the shul, but it was neat) with two cute children and two cats for shabbat. I suppose it was lucky I forgot to mention my cat allergy because it turns out I seem to have gotten over it. (yay!)

As our last activity, I locked the keys in the car and we sat around for an hour listening to some punk rockers practice their drums in what had otherwise appeared to be a very quiet residential neighborhood.

*for the punsters, we watched the salmon in a fish ladder at the Ballard ~~Lox~~ Locks**

**To give credit/blame where it's due, this pun was, unshockingly, not mine originally...

I leave you with the following question: Why do fish jump? I always knew the song said they did it in the summer, but (deprived pseudo-city girl that I am) I never saw it seriously occur until this trip. What's it all about?

?!

2006-08-06T22:20:00.000-05:00

i was disturbed to find out that i may have some competition!

linguistic imprecisions...

2006-07-21T08:11:00.000-05:00

recently a friend was complaining about orthodox shuls (in this case, self-consciously "progressive" ones) in which ppl make annoucnements like "no one should leave the room b/c we need to keep a minyan" or "everyone should come on time so we can get a minyan for barchu." at the time i sort os smiled and nodded, thinkig i mostly try not to get annoyed by similar stupidity anymore (mostly, perhaps, because i haven't encountered it in a community where i have even a hava-amina of not feeling alienated in a while...), but the following announcement caught my eye for its bizzaritude:

All synagogues, as well as camps, yeshivot, Kollelim, and other groups, are invited to sign up for one or more one-hour slots any time day or night during the first eight of the upcoming Nine Days, during which they will guarantee at least a minyan of ten individuals learning Torah in this time of crisis for Israel and her people. The groups are free to learn whatever topics they like, and there will be audio, video and text resources available on the OU web site for those interested, as well as live web-cast shiurim during the day for those who wish to participate.

what does that mean? one might think that there's no reason to use the awkward gender-neutral language of "individuals" unless you mean it. but this is the OU afterall, and a "miyan" means men*. does the word "individuals" just come include men and boys over 13?
further confusing things is that a number of slots are filled by women's insititutions. notably dirsha, which, granted, may be intentionally insensitive to such issues, but also some more frum-sounding place...
silly.

*tee hee, alliteration...

Snoods for Everyone

2006-07-20T18:16:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to the good rabbi for pointing out this site to me.
Tee hee.

Sanhedrin 45a - Reading In or Out?

2006-07-06T18:33:00.000-05:00

NOTE: This is really long. I am sorry. But I really think it's interesting and being too brief would miss the fun part. Maybe I'll turn it into an article some day, iy"H. So skim it if you like, skip it if you must, but I hope you get soemthing out of it, whoever "you" are...

Many have charged that the Gemara's alleged "derivations" of laws from Biblical verses are often more ex-post-facto justifications of laws whose "real" source (historically speaking, i suppose) is not the text of the Torah, but, for example, some pre-existing, un-explained tradition or a rabbinic value-judgement.

Often the Gemara subtley challenges the stated reasons or derivations for laws in the course of a discussion, but the perception remains that the Gemara itself believes that the laws come from the Torah text (some people think it's important to say "exegesis, not eisegesis" here...)

Today, I ran across a Gemara that I found interesting in light of this question: Are the biblical verses the source of the laws in question, or the justification for an outstanding rabbinic edict with its own fairly obvious reasons?

{NB: please pardon the moderately grim subject matter. Perhaps more on that at another time...}

תלמוד בבלי מסכת סנהדרין דף מה עמוד א

גמרא. תנו רבנן:
האיש מכסין אותו פרק אחד מלפניו,
ואשה שני פרקים, בין מלפניה בין מלאחריה,
מפני שכולה ערוה,
דברי רבי יהודה.
וחכמים אומרים:
האיש נסקל ערום,
ואין האשה נסקלת ערומה.

מאי טעמייהו דרבנן -
אמר קרא +ויקרא כ"ד+ ורגמו אתו.
מאי אותו?
אילימא אותו ולא אותה -
והכתיב +דברים ט"ז /י"ז/+ והוצאת את האיש ההוא או את האשה ההיא.
אלא מאי אותו -
אותו בלא כסותו,
הא אותה - בכסותה.

רבי יהודה אומר:
אתו בלא כסותו,
לא שנא איש ולא שנא אשה.

למימרא דרבנן חיישי להרהורא,
ורבי יהודה לא חייש להרהורא?
והא איפכא שמענא להו,
דתנן:

Our Rabbis Taught (in a baraita):
They cover the man (who is about to be executed) with a scrap of cloth in front,
and the woman with two scraps, both in front of her and behind her,
because she is all "ervah" (sexually inappropriate),
these are the words of Rabbi Yehudah.
And the Sages say,
the man is stoned naked,
but the woman is not stoned naked (ie, she is fully clothed, not minimally covered as Rabbi Yehudah would have it.)

What is the reason for the rabbis?
The text said: And they shall stone him" (Lev. 24).
What is (the meaning of) "him?"
If you will say, "him" but not "her," (ie, women are not stoned at all),
but (the exclusion of women from execution altogether is impossible because) it is written (Deut 16), "And you shall take out that man or that woman..." (In the context of execution).
Rather, what (is the purpose of the word) "him?"
"him" without his covering (clothing).
However, "she" - with her clothing.

Rabbi Yehudah says:
"Him" (means) without his covering -
(the law) does not differentiate between a man and a woman.

Is that to say that the Rabbis worry about "hirhur" (innappropriate sexual thoughts), and Rabbi Yehudah does not worry about hirhur?
But we have recorded their opinions int eh opposite way,
as it is taught in a Mishnah...

If we read the Gemara as one organic unit, we find something surprising. It gives a scriptural derivation for the Rabbis' ruling that women are executed clothed, but then proceeds to analyze the law as if the verse was not the reason. Instead, it assumes that the differential reasoning is based on considerations of sexual modesty, a conclusion one might easily draw from the Rabbis' position, but which seems at odds with the technical scriptural derviation. the Gemara seems to assume that the jurisprudential concerns of "hirhur" and the scriptural derivations function simultaneously as the "reason" for the law, even though only one can be its original motivation.

If we look at the passage in stages, the picture changes slightly.
The text of the actual Baraita is:

ואשה שני פרקים, בין מלפניה בין מלאחריה,
מפני שכולה ערוה,
דברי רבי יהודה.
וחכמים אומרים:
האיש נסקל ערום,
ואין האשה נסקלת ערומה.

The Baraita records only the positions of the Rabbis and Rabbi Yehuda, not the scriputral derivation. It is the Gemara itself (stam for the academics...) that steps in and asks, in Aramaic, "What is the reasoning..." This Baraita is quite similar to the Mishnah it follows, which reads:

תלמוד בבלי מסכת סנהדרין דף מד עמוד ב

משנה. היה רחוק מבית הסקילה ארבע אמות -
מפשיטין אותו את בגדיו.
האיש מכסין אותו מלפניו,
והאשה מלפניה ומאחריה,
דברי רבי יהודה,
וחכמים אומרים:
האיש נסקל ערום,
ואין האשה נסקלת ערומה.

When (the one about to be executed) was four cubits from the stoning-house,
they would stirp him of his clothes.
They cover the man in front,
and the woman in front and in back,
these are the words of Rabbi Yehudah.
But the Sages say,
The man is stoned naked,
but the woman is not stoned naked.

The only significant addition of the Baraita seems to be the explanation of Rabbi Yehudah's opinion:מפני שכולה ערוה. The woman is covered more than the man because she provokes inappropriate sexual thoughts. This reasoning seems to lead directly to the question "Is that to say...." regarding which side actually worries about "hirhur."

Thus far, I've laid out the following structure in the passage:
1 - Baraita which hints that the reasoning behind the rulings in the mishnah has to do with sexual thoughts.
2 - Scriptural justifications for the rulings of the Rabbis and Rabbi Yehudah that ignores the sexual-thoughts concern.
3 - Question by the Gemara that assumes the rulings are based on general opinions about sexual thoughts.

part #2, though it follows the Baraita, seems better suited to the mishnah, since in the mishnah does not hint at any reasons for the rulings and is thus ripe territory for a proposed scriptural derivation.
Why, then, does the Gemara choose to bring a Baraita that seems to illuminate the reasoning behind the mishnah, then discuss the rulings' scriptural bases as if the reasoning in the Baraita didn't exits, then go back and discuss the rulings as if the new, scriptural reasoning didn't exist?

One partial solution is to note a problem in the reasoning of the Baraita itself: the sex-related rationalle is brought up regarding Rabbi Yehudah, but it is the Rabbis who are more stringent about keeping the woman covered. If one scrap of cloth in front and one behind is sufficient to deal with the problem of "kulah ervah," why are the rabbi so much more stringent? This is where the verses come in. the Rabbis exempt women from the nakedness requirement altogether, and so don't even encounter the ervah problem, whereas Rabbi Yehudah, because he requires her to be naked, must deal with it.

I called this solution partial because, while it haldes the transition form #1 to #2, it does nto explain the transition form #2 to #2 - the Rabbi's reasoning seems to have nothing to do with "hirhur" - it is just a scripural exemption! Siilarly, Rabbi Yehudah, who does not believe there is such an exemption, does concern himself with the problem of ervah, and, implicitly, of hirhur! So, the question in #2 seems to ignore the derivations of part 2!

One might make various suggestions regarding redaction and confusion at this point, but that's no fun and not something I'm competent to do, and anyway it upsets some people, myself often included.

I had some funky half-baked litrary-type thoughts which I'll get to, but first, a word from the Rishonim.

On one hand, Rashi tries to harmonize the drashot with the jurisprdential arguemnts: Later in the Gemara, the discussion assumes that being stoned naked hastens the death, and hence minimizes the pain of the victim. Rashi sees the Gemara's discussion as stemming from this assumption. Even if the Rabbis think a woman is technically exempted, according to their reading of the verse, from being stoned naked, why not institute such a rule so as not to draw out her suffering? The fact that the rabbis do not make such an enactment lead the Gemara to conclude that perhaps they are worried about sexual thoughts on the part of the witnesses, whereas Rabbi Yehudah is not. (This explanation is eventually rejected...) this harmonization works ok with the ideas, but not with the flow of the text. (It requires an idea only stated at the conclusion of the Gemara to be tactiyl assumed at its beginning...)

On the other hand, Tosafot and others claim that the scriptural derivations are simply thrown out. Their justification is two fold: First, the flow of the discussion ignores them, and, second, there are flaws in the derivations themselves which make them unviable as interpretations. This latter problem is elabvorated by Rabbenu Yonah with no clear resolution. From my perspective, their complaints against the derivations seem valid enough - if the word "oto" is already being used to derive "him without his clothes," it can't do "double-duty" and imply "him and not her," as the Rabbis would need it to. Thus, this verse can't be the source for their position, and we are left with the jurisprudential arguments that the sugya cites (in the part I left off above...).

Tosafot's critiques of the derashot are somewhat compelling, but my impression is their real motivation is the problem within the gemara. In other contexts, after all, they try and resolve apparent problems in derashot rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater...

Tosafot rejects the derivations so that the sugya can make sense and present a clear line of reasoning behind the various positions. However, I might suggest that the obfuscating derashot themselves are a rare moment of rabbinic self-awareness. There's nothing inherently wrong with them, and the Talmud is not bothered by the fact that they do not fit completely with the jurisprudential discussion. In fact, if we return to the 1-2-3 structure above, it seems that it's the derivations in #2 themselves that lead to the question in #3. The bottom line according to these derivations is that for the Rabbis, women are not stoned naked, whereas for Rabbi Yehudah, they are. Juse how naked (one covering or two) is not discussed. Thus, in this formulation, it makes sense to assume that the Rabbis position is more concerned with female nakedness than Rabbi Yehudah's, hence the question in #3. (If you recall, this question does NOT make so much sense following #1 directly...)

We are left with something curious: The Gemara assumes that the positions staked out by various scriptural machinations have underlying jurisprudential or conceptual reasons. Once someone takes one side in a scriptural debate, if that position also has an implie conceptual underpinning, we can presume his position on that conceptual issue in contexts outside of the ones dictated by these verses. That's pretty radical if you ask me.

On that note, I return to my original question: Which came first, the derashah or the ruling?

Shabbat Shalom

fire and water

2006-06-13T15:18:00.000-05:00

Two passages from the Yerushalmi:

תלמוד ירושלמי מסכת סוטה פרק ח דף כב טור ד /ה"ג
(following a discussion of how many commandments were on each of the two tablets, with possible answers of 5, 10, 20, 40)

חנניה בן אחי רבי יהושע אומר
בין כל דיבור ודיבור דיקדוקיה ואותותיה ממולאים בתרשיש כימא רבא
רבי שמעון בן לקיש כד הוה מטי להדין קרייא הוה אמר יפה לימדני חנניה בן אחי רבי יהושע
מה הים הזה בין גל גדול לגל גדול גלים קטנים
כך בין כל דבר ודבר דיקדוקיה ואותותיה של תורה

אמר רבי תנחומא איתקשיית קומי רבי פינחס אתיא כרבי יודה ולא אתייא כרבי מאיר מה טעמא דרבי יודה לקוח את ספר התורה הזה על דעתיה דרבי יודה דו אמר איכן ספר תורה היה נתון כמין גלוסקוס עשו לו מבחוץ והיה ספר תורה נתון בתוכו מה טעמא דרבי מאיר ונתת את הכפורת על הארון מלמעלה על דעתיה דרבי מאיר דו אמר אין מוקדם ומואחר בתורה ואל הארון תתן את העדות אשר אתן אליך ואחר כך ונתת את הכפורת על הארון מלמעלה

רבי פינחס בשם רבי שמעון בן לקיש
תורה שנתן הקב"ה עורה אש לבנה חרותה אש שחורה
היא אש ומוכללת באש חצובה מאש נתונה מאש מימינו אש דת למו /

Loosely translated:

Hananya the nephew of Rabbi Yehoshua says:
Between each and every commandment her details (dots?) and her letters are "filled with beryl" (Shir haShirim 5:14) like the large sea.
When Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish would arrive at this verse, he would say "Hanina nephew of R. Yehoshua taught me well.
just as in the sea, between one large wave and the next large wave are small waves,
So too between every thing (davar. ie commandment, dibbur?) the details and letters of the Torah. (The "wave" theme is a play on the beginning of the verse from Shir haShirim: "yadav gelilei zahav" - "gelilei" (rods) sounds like "gal" (wave))

[Return to aprevious thread in the discussion about teh size of the Holy Ark. According to one opinion, it would not have been large enough to accomodate both the tablets, the borken tablets, and the Torah scroll. That opinion holds that the scroll was placed not inside, but in a special compartment next to the Ark.]

Rabbi Pinhas in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish:

the Torah that the Holy One, blessed be He (KBH) gave, it's surface (orah?) was white fire engraved (with?) black fire

She is fire, and composed of fire, hewn of fire, given of fire, "from His right hand, a fiery-law for them" (Deut. 33:2)

תלמוד ירושלמי מסכת שקלים פרק ו דף מט טור ד /ה"א

חנניה בן אחי רבי יהושע אומר
בין כל דיבור ודיבור דיקדוקיה ואותיותיה של תורה ממולאים בתרשיש כימא רבא
רבי שמעון בן לקיש כד הוה מטי הדין קרייא הוה אמר יפה לימדני חנניה בן אחי רבי יהושע
מה הים הזה בין גל גדול לגל גדול גלים קטנים
כך בין כל דיבר ודיבר דיקדוקיה ואותיותיה של תורה

אמר רבי תנחומא איתקשיית קומי רבי פינחס אתיא כר' יודה ולא אתיא כר' מאיר מה טעמא דרבי יודה לקוח את ספר התורה הזאת ושמתם אותו מצד ארון ברית יי' וגו' על דעתיה דרבי יודה דו אמר איכן היה ספר תורה נתון כמין גלוסקוס עשה לו מבחוץ והיה ספר תורה נתון לתוכו מה טעמא דרבי מאיר ונתתה את הכפרת על הארון מלמעלה וגו' על דעתיה דרבי מאיר דו אמר אין מוקדם ומואחר בתורה אלא ואל הארון תתן את העדות אשר אתן אליך ואחר כך ונתתה את הכפורת על הארון מלמעלה

ר' פינחס בשם רבי שמעון בן לקיש
התורה שנתן לו הקב"ה למשה נתנה לו אש לבנה חרותה באש שחורה
היא אש מובללת באש חצובה מאש ונתונה מאש הדא הוא דכתיב מימינו אש דת למו

this is basically the same as the previous. notably, in the last segment, "harutah be-esh" instead of "harutah esh." I'm not sure if this changes the mening, just as I'm not sure which is really inscribed onto which from this formulation. also, "muvlelet" (mixed in) instead of "mukhlelet" (composed) of fire.

There is a parallel midrash in Bamidbar Rabbah:
במדבר רבה (וילנא) פרשה יג ד"ה טו טז ביום

ד"א מלאה קטרת שבין כל דבור ודבור שהיו כתובים בלוחות פרשיותיה ודקדוקיה של תורה היו כתובים ואתיא כההיא דאמר חנניה בן אחי ר' יהושע ידיו גלילי זהב אלו שני לוחות הברית שכתוב עליהן כתובים באצבע אלהים גלילי זהב מה הגלים הללו בין גל גדול לגל גדול גלים קטנים כך בין כל דיבור ודיבור פרשיותיה של תורה היו כתובים ודקדוקיה

Here the "male" theme is picked up from a different verse, and the connection to "yadav gelilei zahav" is fleshed out - the two hands of God, as it were, are the two tablets, which are wave-like in that they contain small waves in between, etc.
Here, what is included in between is "parashiyot" (not "otiyot") and "dikdukiyot." the metaphor of large/small wavees is attributed to Rabbi Hananya himself, not to Resh Lakish's understanding of R. Hananya.

And one in Shir haShirim Rabbah:
שיר השירים רבה (וילנא) פרשה ה ד"ה ב חנניה בן

ב חנניה בן אחי ר' יהושע אמר בין כל דבור ודבור פרשיותיה ודקדוקיה של תורה היו כתובין, ר' יוחנן כד הוה פשיט קרייה והוה מטי בדין פסוקא ממולאים בתרשיש, הוה אמר יפה למדני בן אחי ר' יהושע מה גלים הללו בין גל גדול לגל גדול גלים קטנים, כך בין כל דבור ודבור פרשיותיה ודקדוקיה של תורה היו כתובים, ממולאים בתרשיש, זה התלמוד שהוא כים הגדול, הדא דאת אמר תרשישה, הדא מה דאת אמר כל הנחלים הולכים אל הים; מעיו עשת שן, זו תורת כהנים, מה הכרס הזה הלב מכאן והכרעים מכאן והוא בתוך, כך תורת כהנים שני ספרים מכאן ושנים מכאן והוא באמצע, עשת שן, מה עשת שן זה את עושה ממנה כמה יתדות, כמה רמחים, כך תורת כהנים יש בה כמה מצות, כמה דקדוקין, כמה קלים וחמורים, כמה פיגולים, כמה נותרות, כתובים בתורת כהנים.

Again, its parashiyot and dikdukiyot. Interestingly, the sage who expands upon Rabbi Hanina's position is not Resh Lakish but Rabbi Yohanan. Again, the "gal" drashah here is connected to the beginning of the verse, and the phrase ממולאים בתרשיש is the source of a new drashah: whereas previously it has been a general reference to how full of laws the tablets were, here it refers to the Talmud specifically. Not surprisingly for Shir ha Shirim Rabbah, this passage goes on to expound on all the phrases in the original verse from Shir haShirim, focusing on teh centrality of the Book of VaYikra and the Temple services.

I don't feel competent to try and claim which version is original, though I might be able to come up with an unsubstantiated hunch if I thought about it long enough...

Anyhow, the reason I bring these in is really the two Yerushalmi passages:

Two statements of Resh Lakish*, separated by the apparently unrelated leftover from a previous discussion, liken Torah to a sea of water and to fire written on fire.
Moreover, in the image of waves laws flow into each other, whereas in the fire-image the laws are as clearly delineated as black and white.

Resh Lakish seems quite taken with the fire-derashah, repeating how fiery the torah is in many ways. However, when it comes to this one verse he praises another person's water-imagery, blurring the boundaries of his own otherwise adament vision.

No punchline. Just neat.

*And here the alternative that this is Rabbi Yohanan becomes quite relevant...

pleasures of the flesh...

2006-06-12T11:51:00.000-05:00

two major ~~wastes~~ uses of time have come into my life recently:

the first is a computer, which has helped me do some productive (Teaching/learning related) as well as some unproductive (card-game related) things. it has also facilitated a subscription to netflix which creates a bizzarre compusion to watch movies when we wouldn't otherwise (eg, erev shavuot). more importantly, it has allowed us to enjoy possibly the best wedding present ever, the simpson's 6th season on DVD.

Computer games may be worse for a marriage than television (not having the latter I can't say...), but real-live games can actually be a source of positive time-spent, hence...

the second acquisition is a chess set. now, while i did beat oren the first time we played he proceeded to destroy me rather embarassingly a number of times after that, until he started letting me take back obviously ridiculous moves and talking about strategy with me, etc, to the point where I have, in the span of a few short weeks (as they say), moved beyond, in my opinion, the "embarassingly bad" stage.
but chess is funny. we somehow think it's better than the simpson's, or solitairre, as a use of time because...what? because it requires strategy? because it's old? because if old men play it in the park it must be socially productive? not clear. the main reason i think it's better is that it involves interaction with another person as opposed to passively participating in something at the same time as they are passively participating in the same thing (simpsons) or actively doing something alone (solitairre). and you don't feel your braincells dying the way they do with stupid games. but i'm not sure how high chess ultimately ranks on the non-bitul-zman scale.
above or below cooking a nice dinner, for example?

the Baraita of r. Pinhas ben Ya'ir

2006-06-06T14:17:00.000-05:00

In a belated daf-yomi-catch-up game I ran across this from about a week ago:

תלמוד ירושלמי מסכת שקלים פרק ג [דף מז טור א]

וכן היה רבי פנחס בן יאיר אומ' זריזות מביאה לידי נקיות נקיות מביאה לידי טהרה טהרה מביאה לידי קדושה קדוש' מביאה לידי ענוה ענוה מביא' לידי יראת חטא יראת חטא מביאה לידי חסידו' חסידו' מביאה לידי רוח הקדש רוח הקדש מביאה לידי תחיית המתי' תחיית המתי' מביאה לידי אליהו זכר לטוב

And so Rabbi Pihas bem Ya'ir would say:
eagerness and care* (zerizut and zehirut*) leads to cleanliness (nekiyut)
cleanliness leads to purity (taharah)
purity leads to holiness (kedushah)
**holiness leads to humility (anavah)
humility leads to fear of sin (yir'at het)
fear of sin leads to righteousness (hasidut)
righteousness leads to divine inspiration/the holy spirit (ruach ha-kodesh)
divine inspiration leads to the resurection of the dead (tehiyyat ha-metim)
resurection of the dead leads to Elijah of blessed memory.

*added in by many commentators b/c it appears in the Bavli, see below, though on their own zehirut and zerizut seem to be rather different...

**In the last mishnah of Sotah, probably a more reliable source, there is an extra step in between taharah and kedushah: perishah = separate-ness.

First, it's not at all clear how this fits into the context of the gemara - the previous statement is one by Rabbi Me'ir that one may perfomr me'ilah intentionally to make sure there is enough for terumat ha-lishkah - not immediately relevant...
(Unless one should be zariz=careful to avoid miscaculating and having to do so?)

In parallel passages in the Bavli(1) below and Yerushalmi (2) below, the connection is clearer, and one might be tempted to say that the word "ve-khen" in Shekalim is transposed from "mi-khen" elsewhere even though it's not super-relevant.

Anyway, amateur text-criticism aside, this statement was later used, famously, by RaMHa"L in his Mesillat Yesharim and thus, I'm sure, has been the subject of much discussion of which I am not aware. However, I did notice a neat comment in the Korban Ha-Edah (R. David Frankel, Berlin, 18th cent.) to shekalim I wanted to post, so here it is: (Hebrew typing kills me, so in English...)

"'...Hasidut': that is that he (the subject of our discussion fo character transformation) will do things that are beyond the letter of the law* in order not to come to any sin. 'leads to divine inspiration': since once he goes beyond the letter of the law They deal with him from heaven things that are outside of nature and let him know secrets of Torah."

Following the letter of the law does not connect you to deeper metaphyscial truths.
The law is like nature- it works fine and is God's handiwork, but the best life transcends both nature and jurisprudence. Neat.

[And rather different from RaMHa"L, who in one place sumarrizes Hasiddut:
נמצא כלל החסידות: הרחבת קיום כל המצות בכל הצדדין והתנאים שראוי ושאפשר.
"It turns out that the general principle of Hassidut: Expanding the fulfillment of hte commandments in all the facets and conditions that are possible."
he also makes consistent references to דקדוקי המצות - the details of the mitsvot - in the chassidut section. In this category, RaMHa"L includes lots of touchy-feely things one might easily also call "lifnim mi-shurat ha-din," but RaMHa"L himself, as far as I can tell, does not to call them that at all...]

*Interestingly enough, the Hebrew expression "lifnim mi-shurat ha-din" means "within the line of the law" - ie, not treading exactly on the permitted/forbidden line, but living well within its bouindaries. The imagery is similar, but not, to the functionally equivalent english idiom of "beyond the letter of the law," in which, rather than shrinking within the Laws limits, one expands upon them. There is something here about conceptions of law and ethics, etc.... maybe I'll think more abt it and write later.

(1)
תלמוד בבלי מסכת עבודה זרה דף כ עמוד ב

ת"ר +דברים כו /כג/+ ונשמרת מכל דבר רע שלא יהרהר אדם ביום ויבוא לידי טומאה בלילה מכאן א"ר פנחס בן יאיר תורה מביאה לידי זהירות זהירות מביאה לידי זריזות זריזות מביאה לידי נקיות נקיות מביאה לידי פרישות פרישות מביאה לידי טהרה טהרה מביאה לידי (חסידות חסידות) +מסורת הש"ס [קדושה קדושה]+ מביאה לידי ענוה ענוה מביאה לידי יראת חטא יראת חטא מביאה לידי (קדושה קדושה) +מסורת הש"ס [חסידות חסידות]+ מביאה לידי רוח הקודש רוח הקודש מביאה לידי תחיית המתים וחסידות גדולה מכולן שנאמר +תהלים פט+ אז דברת בחזון לחסידיך ופליגא דרבי יהושע בן לוי דא"ר יהושע בן לוי ענוה גדולה מכולן שנאמר +ישעיהו סא+ רוח ה' אלהים עלי יען משח ה' אותי לבשר ענוים חסידים לא נאמר אלא ענוים הא למדת שענוה גדולה מכולן

(2)
תלמוד ירושלמי מסכת שבת פרק א דף ג טור ג /ה"ג

מיכן היה ר' פינחס בן יאיר אומר זריזות מביאה לידי נקיות נקיות מביאה לידי טהרה טהרה מביאה לידי קדושה קדושה לידי ענוה ענוה לידי יראת חט יראת חט לידי רוח הקודש רוח הקודש לידי חסידות חסידות לידי תחיית המתים תחיית המתים לידי אליהו זכרונו לברכה

this is directly after a discussion of being careful to eat food in a state of ritual purit, sitting in to the zerizut theme...

overheard in buffalo

2006-06-05T12:49:00.000-05:00

old man to yound boy who held the havdalah candle:
[exaplins that height of havdalah candle-holding predicts height of spouse. then:]
"you better be careful. look what happened to that guy (motions at oren)"

an erev shabbos mishap

2006-05-22T10:51:00.000-05:00

in which i brought new meaning to the term "hand blender."

my first trip to the ER in many years, and my first ever trip without my mommy [:( ], thank God all limbs intact, and only four stiches...

The moral of the story, and the reason I allow myself to post it despite the obvious "pity me" implications, is:
when yout blender is clogged, clear out the mess with a fork.

Also, one of those "how can economics expain this" questions:
The nice PA who stiched me up told me to come back in "a couple of days" just to make sure healing was happening, and then in abt 10 days to remive the stitches. When prompted, she said explcitly I should just walk into the ER for a follow up. On the advice of my chevruta, who had a similar situationn with her son earlier this year, I called my insurance before going back and they informed me, perhaps not surprisingly, that they don't cover non-emergency visits to the ER but would (also not surprisingly) cover a follow-up if I went to my normal General Practitioner.* One suspects that this is fairly common policy. SO why does trhe ER tell you to come back there? You might think they just "want your business" (I had my own reasons re: not having split liability,though in the end I think my doctor is probably more competent and so it's probably for the ebst...), but I imagine that they don't actually recover the cost of a lot of the allegedly "self-paying" visitors. Or perhaps there's a disconnect between the "treaters" and the "billers"?
anyhow...

*Another moral of this story is why its good to "have a doctor" (which I hadn't really since High School until abt a month ago..) so that you have someone who knows you to whom you can bring all yout minor-but-requiring-attention medical issues...

2006-05-17T17:24:00.000-05:00

I received the following email, forwarded, from an indignant friend and fellow alumna:
I think it's fascinating for a number of reasons, some of which have to do with politics and personal relationships with the individual in question (which i think its not nice to blog about). however, while I don't think its a big secret, I think I'll leave out his name for now so as to avoid the appearance of imporpriety...

Dear Fellow Members of the Maimonides Community,

Today, we celebrate Lag BaOmer. One of the important aspects of this day is a commemoration of the courageous leadership of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who kept Torah learning alive in the face of persecution and personal danger. It is customary to go on outings on Lag BaOmer to commemorate the students of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai going into the forest disguised as hunters when, in reality, they were going to Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochaiâ€™s secret cave to learn Torah from him. Fortunately, today, we live in a time and place where we can study Torah openly and freely. Nevertheless, freedom has its own challenges, and Jews in America battle assimilation, intermarriage, and demographic realities. Keeping Torah learning alive still depends on the leadership of great Rebbeim.

In that spirit, we are pleased to announce the inauguration of Rabbi [NPQ] as the first Rosh Yeshiva of Maimonides School. Rabbi [NPQ] possesses the rare combination of talents and abilities which makes him a perfect choice for Rosh Yeshiva. His erudition, piety, energy, vision, organizational skills, and overall menchlichkeit have become well known over his many years of devoted service to Maimonides and are deeply appreciated within the entire community. As Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi [NPQ] has been delegated by the School Committee to ensure that all activities of Maimonides School are consistent with halacha and the established hashkafa of the school.

Rabbi [NPQ] will devote his best efforts to preserving, protecting, and enhancing the religious and spiritual dimensions of the School and inspiring the religious devotion and development of the students. He will be available to entire grades and classes, as well as to individual students, for counseling on religious matters. Rabbi [NPQ] will continue to teach the 11th and 12th grade â€œIssuesâ€ classes and will give a high-level Talmud Shiur to the upper class students. He will also continue his efforts to develop the Ravâ€™s (ztâ€l) and Rabbi Twerskyâ€™s (ztâ€l) teachings for the classroom setting. In addition, Rabbi [NPQ] will provide classes and lectures to the broader Maimonides community.

The School Committee is gratified that Rabbi [NPQ] has accepted this position and looks forward to working with him. Maimonides School has a unique mesorah and hashkafa from the Rav (ztâ€l) and Rabbi Twersky (ztâ€l), and it is our goal to see that the School continues to be infused with this hashkafa. This is the first of what we hope will be many new efforts toward this end.

Enjoy the day. We hope that the rain will stop long enough for all of us to celebrate Lag BaOmer outside in the sun!

The School Committee

I see two basic roads of interpretation, which probably ultimately meet:

1-the school was looking for a formal title for an individual who is still highly involved despite having left his previous official positions. they gave him such a title in the form of a standar honorific/powerful role accpeted in other allegedly similar institutions (yeshivot)

2- the school felt a pressing need for a "rosh yeshiva," or a need for some sort of control and/or a need to have someone called "rosh yeshivah" to stay frum, and this individual fit the bill.

...delegated by the School Committee to ensure that all activities of Maimonides School are consistent with halacha and the established hashkafa of the school.

I am extremely curious what this is about. Are they afraid people are not observant enough, or is the concern really along the "hashkafah" lines? i would guess the latter is a big part, given the focus on the rav and rav twersky, which brings us back to the perennial challenge of "modern orthodoxy" (or whatever alias they choose to adopt) of trying, paradoxically, to freeze the world in the "modernity" of decades past...

On the other hand, one might see this as a sincere attempt to preserve the character not of a "movement" but an institution - just as roshei yeshivah in other places tend to (perhaps?) try and carry on the "mesorah" or such of that place, so too , maimonides honestly sees itself as a yeshivah in which the people currently in power should have been very close to the people previously in power to help continue a vision. not frozen in the past but organically connected to it.
maybe, but i still wonder whether adopting terminology favored by the "right vingers" isn't still a surreptitious nod in the "we're-frum-too!" direction. (perhaps not so much for the frummer-than-thous as for the we're-modern-we-don't-have-to-observe-halakhah crew?)

Anyway, I'll quit rambling about it, but I think its interesting, at least to me ;)

~
a question: what (if any) otehr coed-type/college-prep dayschools have a "rosh yeshivah"?

~~
PS - i just noticed i actually had read about this before (on the next-to-last page), i just forgot. i still wonder if the position wasn't created with the candidate in mind. and the focus on "hashkafah" in both write-ups is striking.

support your local immigrant

2006-05-02T09:17:00.000-05:00

I'm sure a lot of people have written extensively about all this, placing this post more into the "what I had for (breakfast) [activism] yesterday" category, but whatever...

After a weekend of minor annoyances (eg, losing my phone) and other forms of relaxation (of or pertaining to the modern life of the soul) I went with a drisha compatriot to Union Square yesterday afternoon. There was the expected assortment of middle-of-the-road/liberal/humanist sentiment (from "We just want to pay income taxes," "we work for you, now work with us," to various "what ever happened to 'give me your ...huddled masses...'?"), mildly political ("I didn't cross the border, the border crossed me"), and socialist/internationalist/etc "coalitions" (I for one had forgotten about the existence of ANSWER since I graduated from college) with stickers tht say things like "Bush is the symptom, Capitalism is the Disease, Revolution is the cure."

It seemed that no-one could agree on the pronoun that starts of the slogan "___ pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido," which was kind of funny. Also funny, in a different way, was the rapper who did a song about immigrants in which he talked about being sent "home." Not necessarily the thing to stress when the theme is "we are america." ;)

The crowd was almost exclusively non-black latino, with the exception of the hatians who appeared more to demonstrate about what goes on in Haiti than here. I wondered how much anyone even tried to organize in non-Spanish-speaking communities. (ISO posters in English, Arabic, and Spanish notwithstanding - which, btw, always strike me as more of a backwards orientalism than any real attmept at connecting with arabs...)

My favorite speaker, of those I heard, was probably the catholic priest ("there are no "undocumented ones" before God"), proving once again that I probably am more of a religious person thanI often think. Maybe I just liked him because he was the one who's spanish i could follow best, but maybe that itself was because he (unlike some other speakers) didn't feel the need to yell unintelligibly just because he had a microphone.

Two 6-7 year old brothers cought on to the "yell about what's important to you" theme and briefly started chanting "No More School."

Today I got one comment of the "you went to _that_ but you couldn't come to the Darfur rally!?" sort (apparently neither the eight hour travel-time differential nor the fact that even more Jews than have suffered genocides have been immigrants is not relevant here...), which was silly for a number of reasons. Perhaps some other time I'll rant about How Orthodox Jews Discovered Non-Israel-Related Political Activism {That Still Lets Those Who Want To Hate Arabs} Without Engaging In Domestic Politics.

Look at me, I think it's ok to post half-formed political opinions.
Maybe I'll improve in Law School...

and the winner is...

2006-04-24T17:15:00.000-05:00

the happy school.