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Obama beat him to it. Frankly, between the shutdown and the snow, Obama has been very good for frum civil servants who want to get to morning minyanim.
This has been discussed many times before. The short answer is “yes” followed by many caveats:
1. To get into the elite law schools (such as Columbia and NYU in New York – there are at most twenty elite ones in the United States), you’ll need a lot more than a BTL (such as impressive courses elsewhere, fantastic scores on the LSAT, etc.). Many if not most of the non-elite law schools are much less fussy, and a warm body with a respectable LSAT and any sort of undergraduate degree will be welcome as long as they can pay tuition. Some of the public law schools are non-elite in terms of how they impact getting a job, but are highly competitive due to reasonable tuition. The less elite the law school, the better your chance of financial aid in the form of waived tuition.
2. Job prospects are much better at the elite law schools, but if your goal is to be neighborhood lawyers serving a local community, that’s irrelevant ( a JD from Columbia won’t help you if your goal is to hang out a shingle in Boro Park). Remember that in some states one can skip law school and “read law” under an attorney and eventually be able to take the bar. Law school is very expensive, and student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
3. Even if a BTL will get you into law school, it is a handicap if your English is deficient since law school, and lawyers, involves intensive written and oral communication, and a good background in American history and the social sciences will make it more likely to succeed in law school and in becoming a lawyer.
4. If you think going to law school will make you rich, you have not done your research (recently) and are making a big mistake. If your desire is actually to be a lawyer, go for it, and disregard the poor economic prospects, and now is a good time to take advantage of the fact that the law schools are having trouble getting enough students (especially the non-elite).
Jewish music is the music that Jews like. Frum Jews have their own styles and preferences, and they tend to be influenced, often indirectly, by the local goyim (e.g. a hasidic nigun based on a 19th century waltz, which they probably heard even though it is unlikely any hasidim ever danced to a waltz).
Africa produced plenty of food. The only problems they have are when the local government does something stupid such as having a civil war. With modern technology reaching worldwide, no one starves any more (unless someone is starving them by design).
Make sure that all devices and program are using the same system for coding Hebrew, and that both devices have compatible Hebrew fonts installed. The gibberish means they weren’t using the same system (as when a unicode document gets downloaded into the older ASCII standard), or that the Hebrew support hadn’t been activated.
You are required to tell them if any children who are living at home have a drivers license. If you don’t and you have an accident, they might be able to cancel your policy retroactively since you were committing insurance fraud.
If the child is truely an adult, you don’t need to tell them if the child is not claimed as a dependent on your taxes and doesn’t live at home. Also, they don’t charge if the child is at a dorm at a considerable distance (for a New Yorker, I believe Chicago is far enough away).
If the child doesn’t need a license to commute to work or school, why did you let him get a license?
A clever trick I discovered is for the child to get the license immediately before leaving for Israel. That’s far enough away that it doesn’t affect rate, and when they come back they have the status of a new driver who has been driving for a year (or more) without an accident — even though they haven’t driven since they left home for yeshiva.
charliehall: If colonists (or later immigrants) weren’t coming here to practice their religion in peace and avoid discrimination for being a member of a religious or political minority, they were someing here to be free of the economic constraints of living in societies where everyone had a place and if you didn’t like your station in life you had very few means to change it. That’s true even of the many founding fathers who biggest concern was avoiding being drawn and quartered as traitors (as they called the losing side in political disputes back then). Of course many were common criminals but they often had a choice, and “transportation” was often preferred because it offered a chance of a new life.
It’s only in the late 20th century that Europe started to get away from the “manor mentality” of a society in which there was no upward mobility. Socialism largely regulates what you do and what you can become, you become a cog in a machine in which individual initiative is seen as anti-social – and Americans are descended from those who took the initiative to come to a new world to build their own lives.
Socialism is the master tells you what you want, and you are happy with that, because you know that your betters are wise and are making good decisions for you. The sorts of people who liked being slaves or serfs, love socialism. Americans (other than blacks) came to America to have the personal and economic freedom that was always lacking elsewhere. But if you were a happy slave, you’ll be happy as a socialist.
A more benign explanation is that the community is reacting to two big changes. First, the economy collapsed six years ago and while improving is unlikely to ever recover, and more and more young men are (responsibily) reluctant to get married and start a family until they have the means to support them, meaning men will marry later. Such developments are natural and hardly earthshaking. Even for families with a tradition of becoming professional scholars, the economic decline affects them indirectly since the donors who finance the yeshiva world are less well off.
Second, we are finally adjusting to the fact that prior to the mid-20th century, we have very high infant and maternal mortality, but this radically changed in the mid-20th century (invention of anti-biotics, defeat of the Nazis, etc.), and there is less pressure to have as many children as possible since now, unlike a century ago, we can reasonably expect that all the mothers will survive their childbearing years, and almost all the children will reach adulthood. There is less to worry about. In all cultures, family patterns take a few generations to shift when these changes occur, and due to the holocaust the decline in child mortality (of which anti-semites were a major factor) occured somewhat later.
Bigots are bigots. You can’t argue with them. Would you have bothered writing a nasty letter to Julius Streicher? Do you understand to the bulk of the secular left, which includes most non-Orthodox Jews, hareidim are a social ill in need of being removed from society. That you take her so seriously suggests you fail to see her and them for what they are – you think they are good people who are misinformed or prejudiced, rather than evil people who acting quite reasonably for evil doers.
to zahavasdad: Unlike blood testing, DNA testing can prove paternity and maternity with almost certainty, and even so ancestry for multiple generations – assuming you have good DNA samples. That’s why it might be valid to prove someone is actually Jewish based on the maternal grandmother’s DNA (the situation of a child of a disappeared woman) since all that matters for determining Jewishness is maternal descent. It gets more complicated if you are trying to argue that someone is a mamzer since the laws are more complicated and there are virtually irrebutable presumptions in place to minimize the liklihood of someone being a mamzer.
Do you mean DNA testing to:
1) Determine who the mother is? (e.g. a child put up for adoption but who suspects a given women is his/her mother, a not uncommon situation in Argentina where some Jewish babies were adopted by non-Jews after their mothers were disappeared)
2. Determine if a woman became pregnant by someone other than her husband?
3. Determine some sort of more distant relationship?
I believe the first would probably allow DNA testing to prove someone is Jewist. I believe the third would have no halachic significance ever. I don’t believe the second would be accepted to prove someone to be a mamzer absent more significant evidence but I’m sure there is debate over the matter (with the more traditional being the least willing to accept scientific evidence).
How could frum Jews possibly boycott the New York Post. Unlike some newspapers (e.g. the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times if you ignore its editorial bias), the Post doesn’t provide useful information about public affairs or economic life. It frequently has offensive stories from a variety of perspectives.
You have to be a patron of something first, in order to boycott, and what frum Jew would admit to have been a regular customer of the Post?
Children that age (though they don’t believe they are children) tend to be very hard to motivate – in all cultures. Bluntly, being a grown-up means being burdened with having to support a family and means having to give up control over what you do in order to do what is best for the family. It’s no surprise that most 18 year olds are not overly anxious to give up childhood. Be happy that for your child, being a child means learning in yeshiva – what the “competition” does in a similar situation is largely undiscussable on YWN. Sooner or later he’ll have to become a responsible adult and support a family- and most 18 year old think “sooner or later” is postponable. In all truth, how many of us were anxious to become hard working, nose to grindstone, members of the economy at 18?
You should follow the local practice as this is merely a form of derekh eretz, not halacha). Remember that the last real smicha was almost 20 centuries ago, but Ashkenazi frequently use “Rabbi” as a courtesy title (similar to “Mister” which indicate a rank well above mere peasant, or the French “monsieur” which indicated a nobleman). Indeed, in Yiddish, “Reb ….. ” was the only form of address Jews used for each other (unless they person was really assimilated in which case they were “Herr” or “Mister” depending on country – which was an insult when used for a Yid).
You don’t have to prove you are interesting or unusual, since a yeshiva student is be definition quite unusual (“weird” as they would say) from their perspective. You need to prove you can do academics since at a good university (meaning in New York, Columbia or maybe NYU) you are competing with the best of the best. Do lots of APs and CLEPs, all of which you can prepare for independently.
Learning Torah counts as something that makes you exotic if combined with good academic accomplishments in western subjects. Universities like diversity, and someone who is a relic from the middle ages (from their perspective – remember a yeshiva is very much structured like a medieval university) is valued. Remember that in most universities, studying classical texts with medieveal commentaries – in the original script, is usually done only by graduate students.
Completing college level work in diverse subjects via AP or CLEP look very good (shows you are smart and can work independently in all subjects). It shows you can function in the competitive environment (remember yeshivas are non-competitive, unlike universities where only a certain percentage are allowed to do well). If you have a vocational goal, something related to that helps. A wife and child help from a diversity perspective and make you eligible for lots of financial aid.
All languages have different euphemisms. Words the cross between cultures can be prolematic, even for dialects withing a language. Words that were mildly rude in the secular Yiddish of pre-war New York and quite obscene in the Yiddish of modern Boro Park (just ask Chuck Schumer, D’Amato tried to be cute and insulting and ended up being crude and vulgar, and an ex-Senator). Sometimes words derived from one language get different meanngs in another (the English word “sodomy” is of Hebrew origin but has nothing to do with the Humash origins of the word). Hebrew is more tricky since itg was primarily used by Bnei Torah for over 1500 years, and Bnei Torah are much more refined than the average user, so much crude language dropped out of Hebrew and is absent in modern Ivrit.
There are just things you have to learn with learning a language. It is interesting, but not a big deal.
MHY: There was a distinct western dialect but it is largely extinct. You might find a few surviving speakers in Switzerland, Strasbourg and Amsterdam – but between assimilation, nazis and the overwhelming presence of speakers of other dialects, the western dialect vanished.
The length of the day, and the month, and the year, were designed by Ha-Shem.
For the most part the current calendar system was invented in ancient Mesopotamia and was already in use by the time of Avraham Aveinu. If you have a complaint, go to Iraq and dig up a Sumerian and argue with him.
If you already know German and Hebrew you are 90% of the way there. If you know Hebrew and another Germanic language (such as English or Dutch), you are about 50% of the way there. You can use textbooks and occasional translations or bilingual works to fill it the rest.
There don’t appear to be any good textbooks appropriate for frum Jews though Weinreich’s (which is basically pre-World War II) and others such as Zuker’s (multivolume with audio materials but recent) reflect the secular Yiddish as it existed before World War II. Frum Jews always spoke Yiddish differently (more use of Hebrew words, and without many of the “colorful” phrases that secular Yiddishists are proud of), plus World War II shifted the demographics since the Jews speaking the northeastern (Litvish, yeshivish) dialect had a much lower chance of survival than the southeastern (Galicianer, hasidiche) dialect. It might be nice if someone produced a textbook of the “living Yiddish” as spoken today in community’s where the children grow up speaking it as a first language.
Heavy snow occurs in Yerusalayim once every few years. What may be different now is more people have central heating (without central heat people were used to dressing warmly indoors during winter, and using keroscene space heaters, meaning they weren’t affect by power loss).
If you attribute bad weather to Ha-Shem objecting to some policy, then do you attribute good weather to good policies? That is a problem if you object to the government since Yerusalayim usually has good weather.
If you believe in global warming with the religiousity of many of the left, the snow is a shock, but if you are so foolish to confuse normal weather variance with climate change, you are easy to shock,
The only reason to be skeptical of a vaccine is if it is for a disease you are highly unlikely to get (which is why they no longer offer smallpox vaccines, which used to be standard), which is probably the case, for example, of a frum person and a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease. But that’s a rare situation, as most of the vaccines are for diseases that would otherwise be common (polio, measles, etc.).
modified
Vaccinations are very bad for parnassah, especially of doctors, nurses and the hevrah kadisha.
If you have sufficient funds to own a “dress” wardrobe as well as a “regular” wardrobe, then the “dress” wardrobe will include shoes. If you had a meeting with President Obama or Queen Elizabeth (depending on your country), etc., if you would have a “dress” wardrobe for the occasion, and that includes shoes, you have your answer.
If you would wear your regular clothes for such occasions as Shabbos or meeting your Head of State, you wouldn’t have special shoes for the occasion.
The Israelis have argued that a one-state solution won’t work since Arabs and Jews hate each other. Remember that in a single state, based on the original “Palestine/Eretz Yisrael” borders, Arabs would be a clear majority. The Arab position is that the fight isn’t about borders or settlements, but over partition. They want a single state from the desert to the sea.
If a significant number of Jews support the Arab position, and if the Arabs can point to Jewish communities living under their rule with Palestinian passports, it would totally undermine the Israeli’s claims. A simple majority in the United Nations could repeal the partition resolution and call for an internationally supervised election to establish a democratic government.
If the zionists manage to force all the hareidim (including those supporting Shas, Agudah and Degel ha-Torah) to become anti-zionists (similar to Satmar, Toldos Aharon, Neturei Karta, Eidah hareidis), and the Arabs exploit this by offering to allow hareidim to live in their territory (a return to the pre-1914 status quo) this would seriously undermine Israel’s right to exist.
Israel was created by goyim (and assimilated Jews) as a place to be a haven for persecuted Jews. If the most Jewish part of the population is supporting a democratic non-zionist solution, it will undermine the zionists and lead to the end of their dream of a secular state. Remember, hareidim have no problems being an autonomous minority under Islamic law.
You can put the subject anywhere in the sentence thus if you see:
DOG BITES MAN in English, the word order tells you the dog is biting the man and you must be in that order. In Hebrew you can any of the words first, second or third depending on emphasis, since the present of ?? before the noun tells you who is biting whom. Caveat: in modern Israel, to be considered part of the Ashkenazi elite you must use English word order (subject predicate object).
The terms “dumb” and “stupid” or “feeble minded” are inexact and have become quite insulting. It also is a very complex subject since few individuals are consistently deficient, e.g., someone who has trouble with understanding to read or knowing how to act in common social situations, may turn out to be quite advanced in other areas such as music or math. Referring to “mental disabilities” is deliberately inexact since the situations are inexact.
“Development disabilities” refers to any sort of mental or physical problem that dates back to birth or before, or shortly thereafter as opposed to something that developed later in life such as disabilities relating to disease or injury.
tzaddiq:
In Torah we have theocracy, rule by G-d, not rule by a government. A “king” who goes against Torah can be overthrown.
Most Jewish commmunities throughout history were dominated by a coalition of the leading Talmidei Hachamim and the leading citizens (a typical method of election was to choose be at random and ask them to pick the leaders – since a leader in Jewish tradition is responsible for paying the community’s financial needs this was alway a very rich person – in fact in some communities they had a “CEO” with the title “Parnas”).
OUTtorah: If your accent is not what you want it to be, you can work on it. Speech lessons helped many New Yorkers escape the lower class ethnic ghettos by learning how to sounds WASP.
I tend to think one should look at what someone is saying and doing, and not be prejudiced by what he looks like or his accent.
Mandela’s opponents were Nazis (real ones,not neo-nazis, they spent World War II in prison for conspiring to turn South Africa over to the Axis) – which alone explains why South African Jews were prominent in the anti-apartheid movement. Mandela managed to not only take over the country (not all that hard, it was near collapse given the fall of communism and the near universal opposition to racism in the west), but to do so peacefully, convince his enemies to support him, and leave over a stable and democratic government (note he was never a “president for life” and always had opposition which wins elections on the provincial and local level). Someone such as Ben Gurious was a failure in that today’s Israel is hardly the secular socialist homeland he dreamed of. Churchill wanted to preserve an Empire which fell immediately. Mandela is probably closer to George Washington who established a democracy that would survive without him (assuming it does, but it looks optimistic).
For a third world country that is in a permanent state of war, Israel is doing fairly well economically. The infrastructure reflects it.
Democracy (or Tyranny) are good, or bad, depending on who is running it. The advantage of a democracy is that it requires many people to agree, and a large number of people are unlikely to go off on some horrible policy compared to a single man who can simply be deraged. Any policy you complain about under a democracy, and and does occur under tyranny, and is usually much worse (e.g. you complain about “intermarriage” in a democracy, but what about in tyrannies where they saw intermarriage of different groups as a social goal, such as the Greeks in Eretz Yisrael).
Does anyone get upset since virtually all Ashkenazis mispronounce “Ayin” (?)- saying it as if it was silent. And Anglo-phones tend to butcher the Ches (?) and Sefardi constantly confuse the “kamets” and the “patsach”. And what about upper-class northeasterners in the United States who pronounce “heart” the same as “hot”?
The truth is that the spoken language of Eretz Yisrael is not some invention of the zionists, or a recreation of ancient Hebrew. It’s a natural evolution that, as is highly predictable, tends to combine the Ashkenazi mistakes with the Sefardi mistakes. The syntax and grammar also can be creative as well (ever notice that most Ashkenazim put the subject before the predicate, as is done in English).
It was probably a ‘th” at one time based both on how the Temanim pronounce it, and more importantly, on how the Talmud transliterates words from other languages. All languages tend to evolve over time, which is why a lot of English words are “mispronounced”, for example not saying the final “e” in “come”, and totally mauling words such as “light” (which should be prounced the same as the Yiddish “licht”).
Ideas are in your head. Patents and trademarks require a lawyer
While frum children perceive the story in the ways many of the posters perceive (i.e. we can relate to the idea of being a separate, superior, semi-secret civilization existing in “plain sight” of the dominant culture), the books has many deliberately Christian undercurrents that most frum Jews don’t notice but that we should be aware of (though not necessarily concerned with, since these tend to be Christian literary conventions that aren’t all that offensive from our perspective, but they are in there).
Were they ever allies? The US had an interest in supporting Israel, in part as a foil to the pro-Soviets (such as Nasser) and as a foil to the anti-western Islamists. No US troops have ever come to Israel’s aid, and no Israeli troops have supported the US in any of its military endeavors. Israel has no treaty of alliance with the US, and has issued no guarantees of Israel’s security. The US does not sell its best weapons to Israel (e.g. the F-22 or any advanced stealth technology). The US and Israel have friendly relations, and in some matters coincidental interests, but they aren’t allies (at least, not in the sense that countries such as Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Japan and Australia are allies with whom the US has a treaty obligation to assist in times of war).
Western society is based on classical Greek (which merged with the Romans). Western culture is Greek culture. The reason the goyim study ancient Greek literature and philosophy is that it is the basis of their own civilization.
Obamacare benefits those without good jobs (meaning for major employers who provide liberal health benefits), and those with serious medical problems (cancer, AIDS, and most relevant to us, having babies). It hurts those who don’t have employer provided insurance, especially if they lose that insurance due to the new rules and have to pay more for less, and it hurts healthy people with jobs (enough to be off Medicaid,not enough to have a work provided policy) who have to buy very expensive policies they don’t need.
LAB: During the period of the Talmud, how would you address female other than by her personal (first) name. Would you call her “wife of Huna” or “Daughter of whatever”? While Romans had family (and “clan” names), Jews did not. You went through life being Piloni ben/bat Piloni.
Baruch ha-Shem we live at a time when frum people are so spoiled.
We have a physical standard of living that means that a pauper among us probably lives better than an affluent person did 100 years ago. Who among could manage living in a world with potatoes as the basic staple, new couples got a sheet to carve out a private living quarter, nobody suffered from obesity, air conditioning didn’t exist and most homes didn’t have central heat – not to mention serious problems of anti-semitism (not a punk punching someone, the government trying to massacre a village).
Try living like your great-grandparents did, and then complain.
Derech Agav: That some people think its a matter of tznius is irrelvent, even if you are that person. What matters is what the person you are talking to believes. What to one person is overly formal and stuffy, is to another person a sign of basic respect. Given the surnames are a goyish invention, and for Ashkenazim a very recent one (we only switched to inherited surnames about 200 years ago – less in eastern Europe), there is clearly no halachaic issue. What matters is trying to figure out what the other person expects and that requires developing appropriate social skills (e.g. African Americans get highly insulted to be called by forename unless you know them very well, most secular Israeli regard you as stuffy and unfriendly if you use a surname, etc., etc.).
Minhagim vary by office and subculture. Traditionally Jews didn’t use surnames (note that in our culture, women keep the same name when married — Pilonis Bas [Piloni her father]). Using surname when everyone used forename can be very insulting, and using forename when everyone else uses surname can be very rude. — Among frum Jews it is even more confusing since we’ll often use forename (e.g. Rab Yaakov) for someone we like, but surname (Mr. Cohen or Herr Cohen, depending on language) for someone we don’t consider to be “one of us.”
Every politician one dislikes and disagrees with needs to go. Convince half your fellow voters, and you get your wish
A husband who has not given his wife a “get” is required by our law to continue to pay her bills. If we enforce this, it would largely solve the problem since no sane man would in effect give his credit card to the woman he has come to hate. The fight over children is a separate issue that will continue to exist until the children are old enough to take matters into their own hands – and this is regardless of the parents marital status.
The approach we should take in the US is for a woman’s lawyer to object to any civil divorce on the grounds that the man is not seeking to truely dissolve the marriage, and therefore the divorce is an attempt to commit fraud on the legal system. If the frum community offered to pay for the women to “lawyer up” when a man separates without giving a “get” it would resolve most matters.
“Poverty” is hard to define. If you accept the standard of “middle class” from 50 years ago, there is virtually no poverty (either in Israel, or America). Even among frum Israelis, diseases related to affluence (e.g. diabetes, caused by having too much to eat) are common. Comparing a poor Israeli to, as an example, the first Baron Rothschild (late 18th century), there is much that Rothschild would view with envy when looking at a poor kollel family (better selection of foods and especially of fruits and vegetables, low infant and maternal mortality, antibiotics and vaccines, drinkable water, indoor plumbing, air conditiong, electric lights, transportation faster and more comfortable than horseback). The truth, is that 21st century people are living as well as kings were a few centuries ago – and that’s true even those who are mesiras nefesh with their parnassah to do mitsvos. Note how “schnorrers” come to America to ask money for luxuries (as they were defined a century ago) such as large apartments, fancy weddings, etc.
The real poverty is in places like north Tel Aviv or the secular neighborhoods and temples of America, where the people are totally impoverished of mitsvos and lead meaningless lives with no hope for the future (which explains why they don’t want children – to them the future is meaningless). We in the truely affluent neighborhoods such as Bnei Brak and Boro Park should pity them, but there isn’t much we can do to help. Their poverty is self-inflicted and the only solution is in their hands but they choose not to realize it.
So what if Yiddish is a pidgeon of German with large chunks of Hebrew, and smaller chunks of Aramaic, Old French and miscellaneous Slavic languages throw in. English is also a pidgeon of German with large chunks of Hebrew, a few traces of various Celtic dialects and misc. pieces from other languages thrown in for flavoring (including many Hebrew and Yiddish words).
The point is that (if you are Ashkenazi), Yiddish is our pidgeon, and no one else’s. It is the language our ancestors spoke for 800 years. While all our important literary and scholarly works were in Hebrew (similarly, almost nothing of significance was written in English for 400 years after the Norman conquest, and serious scholarship didn’t beging to appear in English until the end of the 18th century), but Yiddish (or for the Anglo-Americans, English) was the language people ate and breathed in. It is the language the best reflects our cultural and religious traditions. This is the reason so many Yiddish words entered our English disalect as well as modern Hebrew.
zen3344: In one of novels, it turns out one of Spock’s human ancestors (meaning on his mother’s side) is Jewish – remember that since most non-Jews marry goyim, having a Jewish surname is “proof” that one isn’t Jewish. By that novel’s theory, Spock would be Jewish.
The original series presented the Vulcans as being very “Jewish” (his was in part Leonard Nimoy’s doing), with (from a Hollywood perspective) super-nerdiness, bizarre customs and extreme commitment to academia.
Why do most people assume it is the woman’s fault when they hear about a divorce??
Do you have any empirical evidence to suppport that assumption (or are you reflecting your own views)?