Always_Ask_Questions

So, you may be better off reading or listening to a class that covers a topic in depth, maybe looking up multiple sources yourself. When you go through several sugyot like that, then you may want to go through whole text.

Color is cultural. If I recall, an appropriate present to the wife in Israel was linen clothes, in Bavel, colorful, and I don’t think the colors were fifty shades of black. Red wasn’t appropriate, though

Avira, and what is do great about Sephardic kids assimilating into black hats? What would be wrong with them wearing turbans and learning Ben Ish Hai? Ironically they are wearing black hats for opposite reason that you do: to be like others around them..

But it seems the main contention point is your view that nonreligious Jews building a Jewish society in eretz Israel is a pure evil… Understandable perhaps when seen through the lenses of multiple bitter battles of european history, but maybe we need to take a bigger view, as Chafetz Chaim did when he refused to go settle in petach tikva: I will have to visit eida and Rav Kook, and I’ll have to go to one of them first and then the other will not learn Mishna Berurah. I’d rather see Mishna Berurah in EY than be there myself.

Bonus question: where in Petach Tikva he was supposed to live?

balagan is probably original Persian and then Turkish before Russian, but it did find a home in Israel!

bitachon, kibutz – you are mixing up the word core meaning and context: I presume Baal worshipper will have bitachon in their idol.

agada = true story – I think Rambam will put this in the first category of those who repeat words of Sages respectably, but do not understand science. Again, the way people use it reflects their attitude, not unique to Ben Yehudah

Chashmal – you have a point here. In defense, Septuaginta translates Chashmal as elektron (amber), suggesting an easy translation of electricity, that was derived from elektron. This was a trend common to all nationalistic language devlopers. See French academy that defends the language by forcing translations of English terms.

But a bigger picture – while early Zionists had a choice between Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew – and chose Hebrew for ideological reasons – think what would happen in 1950s when Jews from Arab countries came to Israel – they might have either stayed in their countries and end up under Saddam/Assad/Ayatollahs, or came to Israel and either have to learn Yiddish or created a multi-lingual society where people understand each other even less than now.

Avira, my point is that the fashion is for everyone in certain communities to dress like talmidei chachamim had pluses and minuses. Pluses are increased self esteem and increase in desire to be like talmidei chachamim. The minus is that after some time people delude themselves that they made it even when they are not, and people from outside judge Torah by them. When I am cut off by a car driven by someone in a black hat, I don’t have time to see what brim it is.

> Succahs should always be kept dry

I thought we were moving to Sukkah to fill vulnerable and not depend on all the protections we have at home. If you insist on maintaining perfect temperature, humidity and acidity in your temporary dwelling, you might be defeating the purpose

Syag, I am confused and intrigued – what exactly you don’t believe in the “murder theory”?
A. that people died? this is confirmed by “excess deaths” statistics by now…

B. that our actions affected how many people died? As a kid understood it, if the world would stay home for several weeks, the plague would have stopped. You said before that early period deaths were hard to avoid. This might be. But most deaths were later on, from fall 2020 to February 2021.

C. That your community consists of such tzadikim that melech hamaves skipped it? Still, can you rely on the miracle, and with some many Talmidei Chachamim passing, are you saying you are more deserving than them?

D. Maybe you are saying that this is just a small number of people who died – 2 in a 1,000 that it is barely noticeable and you can’t really connect their deaths with a specific behavior? Hashem does not have this problem though. Sad to think about a person who arrives to Olam Habo with a bunch of humros b’yado, prepared for questions: were you honest in business? I never wasted my time on that! Did you have a learning seder? every day, even during pandemic. Instead he is taken to the room with common criminals and shown a video: you coughed at your hevruta, then your hevruta coughed at his father, who coughed at Rosh Yeshiva ….

> They’re on the same page.

Being on the same page is a good place for arguing. Like Rashi and Tosofos.

Avira, you are wonderfully sensitive to your heritage, you should e as sensitive to people coming from different perspective – Hebrew, English, Hungarian … As Herman Wouk’s grandfather said, departing for Israel after years of trying to find Yiddish-speaking students in US: I probably should have learned English, but at first impression it sounded too crude …

Also, note that some of the fights of previous generations do not have to be fought a century later: Hebrew of anti-religious Zionists does not affect current Israeli Hebrew-speakers; going to University 200 years ago was a haskalah statement, and is a getting a job statement now.

Go to Amazon warehouse. They pay $15/ hour, you should be able to afford food with thi, if you make your shabbat as chol.

> Hebrew, by contrast, was designed for the specific purpose of “reviving” judaism to be zionism

R Yaakov Kamenetsky when visiting R Ouerbach’s yeshiva remarked tahat Mo/ashiach will come from that yeshiva – because they switched top shiurim from Yiddish to Hebrew, thus, enabling Sephardim to also attend.

A better way to prepare for the next “new virus” pandemic is to get younger.
On the other hand, you want to prepare for all other viruses it pays to be older and already have the t-cells. So, it is catch-22.

According to Zeynab Tufekci, there was a pandemic in the 70s that killed 700K people – all in the 20s and younger … As they know now, it was because it was a virus from the 50s that Chinese continue testing on live people and it eventually went “viral” and affected only those who were not affected in the 50s.

I did not say a word about myself. I did not wear a mask until last February.

>> I have friends who PRE COVID 1will not ever touch a shopping cart without bleaching it,

I am glad that you are blessed with good friends.

> Bilaam viewed Hashem like any other AZ

Bilaam is a stickler to “halakha” – he follows Hashem in “small and big”. He just refuses to consider what Hashem actually wants. He is told “this nation is blessed”, but he is still focused on his narrow question – can he go and try to curse. He refuses to accept reality around him and tries to find terutzim to allow him do what he wants.

most important argument for being careful with these issues: it does not matter whether someone deserves reparation in theory, what matters is the public policies that will be enacted in response. And most of those that are proposed are bad for the society and bad for the former slaves.

Here is a simple test to see if someone is sincere: do they support choice in education – vouchers for private schools charter, online – anything that will help at least some poor people to escape bad schools . If they do not (and most unfortunately do not), it means they do not really care about helping these people, but about some other things.

>> How about from the get go of Covid there allows for a range of opinions and it is not worth arguing about it?

I did. I think I came here first to hear opinions of people who disagree as I was surprised by some of the behaviors I saw and heard of. Unfortunately, I did not hear any rational arguments. This is together with overwhelming evidence that being careful saves lives.

I also never heard from any Rabbis who had a permissive opinion. ​Local beit din issued a call for stay at home. In two places, where I saw people not being careful, the Rabbis always were. One of them told us that he approached an Yid in the street and admonished him.

Also, we may not be getting full information about what Rabbis think, for whatever reasons. For example, I only recently learned that R Edelstein gave his first public speech in front of his students. I am not sure why facts like that were not known, maybe you were but nobody quoted him before.

> Perhaps Chareidim can become more “modern” and still be clearly Orthodox while MO who want to move to the left become otd.

We use right/left colloquially as a political attribute and it does correlate with Haredi/MO division in US – Charedi are voting more rightwing , I am not sure we can apply it to our relationship to Hashem, and we already have right/left notion in Judaism. Are T’Ch who knew science more “left wing”? R Soloveichik? R Hertz? Rambam? Rabban Gamliel? is Shmuel more left-wing than Rav, because he seems to be stringer in dinim/business, while Rav in “religion”?

>> We were told repeatedly by the CDC and medical personnel that this virus CANNOT be prevented. ,,, Especially with inadequate masks

Some of that original pessimism was because many believed that vaccines can be developed so fast and will be so effective and society will not be able to SD forever.

“cannot be prevented” and “slow the spread” are contradictory – as we “slowed the spread”, vaccines were developed and now most people who did not have it before will be safe. “slow the spread” means that without measures we used, there will be an extra million dead.

There was no reason for “inadequate” masks after first 1-2 months. K95 masks are widely available. Furthermore, if you were able and chose to change your lifestyle temporarily, you could live without masks most of the time.

You seem to circle to some generic philosophical “expert conclusions” instead of focusing on simple medical facts – being not careful causes increased virus propagation and people sick. Virus does not know about CDC recommendations, it just needs a person nearby to jump to.

common > OTD= No shabbos or Kashrus n

so, what about those kids who were eating kosher at school, but not at home. For the teachers who do not know them well, it will look like a kid went OTD, while he merely went home. I am not denying the original premise though, just calling for counting carefully. A story from a Rav at a college in support of the thesis: a mother calls him and starts asking details about kashrus on campus. After enough questions, Rav asked her back: did you take the kid for a multi-day hike? Yes. did he take his tefillin with him? Oh, no … Then maybe you should be worrying whether he is going to take it to college, not my kashrus …

> t were still slaves themselves a

the agada talks about Mitzrim suing Jews in front of Alexander the Great, that is some time later, in the context of other clever responses by Geviha ben Pesisa, see Sanhedrin 91a. Geviha ben Pesisa starts his responses thrice: if I lose, you can say they defeated a Hediyot… so, it underscores that his argument is not really very good, but a clever legal trick.