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> I do not expect the President to resign and let Harris ascend. The backlash would be too great in a close election.
XCTL, could you ask Ms Harris-Emhoff at the convention “what did you know about President condition and when did you know that?”.
When reporters jump on you, tell them that you are also a reporter and YWN CR readers want to know the answer.a publication from Ner Le’Elef (*) touches on the idea of osek b’mitzvah, and does not find it fully convincing as a halachic instrument. I frankly did not mean it as a strict halachic argument, just a sentiment that they seem to find at least reasonable.
WOMEN’S ISSUES BOOK TWO Women in Mitzvos, p. 32-34
In a sense, a woman is considered to be continuously עוסק במצוה , and we have a principle that Osek BeMitzvah Patur Min HaMitzvah. Indeed, there are some Rishonim who hold that even if one has a lost object in his house it is considered sufficient to exempt him from doing another Mitzvah like giving Tzedaka (even though he could actually manage to do both mitzvos simultaneously) However, most Rishonim disagree with this approach. They hold that the definition of an עוסק במצוה is quite stringent. As the Meiri (. ברכות יא ) …. “one who is engaged in one Mitzvah is exempt from a second Mitzvah, [they only intended this to apply] so long as he is still actually involved in the first Mitzvah, and the second Mitzvah can only be done at the expense of the first.” … We would then question why a single woman or a widow whose children are all grown up etc. would have these exemptions at all. Perhaps these Rishonim would say that a woman is exempt from time-based מצוות because her entire approach to serving G-d is one of constant readiness to respond to changing realities. For example, although one can easily provide for children’s physical needs according to certain schedules, if one is really going to allow children to develop as unique personalities, fulfil their creative faculties and fine-tune their moral sensitivities and values, it requires constant alertness, availability and engagement. Under such circumstances, even when one is not actually busy with the Mitzvah one would be
exempt [Sukkah 25]. In addition, one may ask why women should only be exempt from Zeman Gramas. According to this approach, a woman is considered permanantly Osek BeMitzvah and should therefore be exempt from all other positive mitzvos as wellThis is answered by saying that it is true that a woman is not always considered Osek BeMitzvah. However, her situation is such that she can never know when she is going to be Osek BeMitzvah. Therefore, it was specially time-based Mitzvos, which require a woman to free her schedule at a particular time, from which she was exempt. And even though many time-based mitzvos can be done for a whole day, a woman can easily be busy the whole day. The Torah did not want her to have to figure out just when she is Osek BeMitzvah and when not since even Tirda Demitzva is enough to exempt one ( סוכה כה ). However, this is difficult. For we do know that the Torah, for whatever reasons, did obligate a woman in some time-based Mitzvos. Now, although a woman does not have a general exemption form these mitzvos, why can she not exempt herself from them whenever she is busy with her family? And the same goes for any other mitzva with which a women is obligated. Perhaps we can modify our original logic by saying that, although a women isn’t truly Osek BeMitzva when she takes care of her family, but the Torah wanted her to get the message of how important this is, and regarded her, with respect to time-based mitvahs, as if she is an osek bemitzvah. This might also explain why all women are exempt from this category, because it isn’t because of the actual business with her family that causes the exemption, it is the message of how important taking care of her family is, which is the source of the exemption.
Yserb, Most of jobs assigned to women seem to be the ones done at home. It does not mean they were “homemakers”
Before the industrial age, most people did not “go to work”, unless they were farming in the fields or travelling as merchants. Look at Nezikin, say Bava Batra discussing all kind of businesses in the mavoy …
RebE, just my own peshat, no good source. I’ll ask.
The “asmakhta” idea is from a rav who said he, at some point, started making a list of time dependent mitzvot that apply and those that do not – and the lists were of equal length.In older times, weak children died out when they were young. In our times, an average surviving adult is weaker than an average surviving adult 200 years ago, so he can be harmed by a traditional diet of kishka and mashka. Also, as people live longer, the diseases that develop later in life become of more importance.
well, mostly _men_ worked on farms, women worked more at home. Gemora lists all jobs a woman is supposed to do in the house, with part of that could be done by the her maids if she brought some. She had to do at least some work to occupy herself. When women had capital and capabilities, halakha allowed them to run those businesses.
Nowaways, men invented a lot of machines that perform the jobs in the house, and society started schools, and recently free pre-Ks, to take care of the children.
exemption from time is an asmakhta – there are more exceptions than not … I am thinking women are exempt by the principle “osek b’ mitzva patur mimitzvah”. Almost anything the women is doing when taking care of the house is a part of the mitzva – chesed, assisting in learning, chinuch, etc so she does not need to interrupt to do _other_ mitzvot
While I am not a fan, I think that Jews who married a non-Jew are doing a wrong thing, but a non-Jew who marries a Jew might be a tzaddik/tzadekes, unless s/he is doing it because of perceived Jewish power & money 🙂
xCTL,
there are now multiple articles describes (with names) all the people who noticed that Pres B had cognitive issues starting 2021 and how they asll re-assured themselves, or were reasssured, or ignored, or were not given access, or were threatened. This is getting close to how members of Chinese Communist party behave, simply playing their voting role.Could you please look these formerly “pledged” electors in the eye and ask them how they chose to become part of this game, agreeing to vote for the candidate about whom they knew they did not have enough information? And if they did have enough information, they should show integrity and vote for Pres B. I am sure he will reconsider if the electors will vote for him.
I hope it will be a good lesson for the citizens of this country to understand how Chinese and Russians feel and how we got to be led in the same direction …
> True kenoim who know what Chabad stands for do not use their services or interact with them.
This is not true in my experience. I’ve seem yeshivish and Satmar travelers staying at Chabad houses. Maybe they check it out and avoid crzier ones, I do not know, do not go there either 🙂
ExCTL, I am looking forward to your live comments from the convention.
Guys, go google for images of lithuanian jews / mir yeshiva/ teltz yeshiva … and you will see how Jews were typically dressed both in the streets and in the yeshivos.
I tried to put a list of broken links but they did not show up.Bilaam would be comfortable in this forum. He had access to Hashem and knew how to string words together, and then tried to use it for partisan purposes.
And for those who can not apprehend how someone be sympathetic to another party, please understand that parties and media know more about us than we know about
them. They develop messages and write stories targeting hard maybe 1% of population that holds certain views. Once in a while, someone happened to be in that 1%, or they
develop messages directed towards our community. So, people can fall for silly things. The best cure is to discuss issues here in a respectful and truthful way.Coffee, you had to take _some_ English classes … I did not take any legal ones, only business 🙂
Somehow, several posters claiming that pursuit of truth allows them to discard civility, are not always good at actually modeh es haemes.
Let’s start with a minimal requirement – strive for truth or be nice. At the next class, we can try doing both at the same time.> if someone doesn’t say just the right thing.
hopefully, standards for Yidden talking to each other should be higher than for American politicians. We are all affected by this plague, but maybe, D- posters are generally more assimilated, or more attuned to non-Jewish discussion style, so it looks so ugly here. In other venues, I see both sides having obnoxious posters in equal proportion.
Gadol > f you want Reb Moshe to change his ways, punishing Reb Yankel is unlikely to create the needed incentive for Reb Yankel to behave differently
Reb Yankel Hagadol, sigh, this attitude explains a lot .. please try to keep up with all the lessons that Hashem sends to you indirectly.
Gut shabbos> unsuccessfully assassinated
OXYMORON
Ex-CTL, I am not a lawyer or an ex-lawyer, so I am allowed to be imprecise. I did not punched a chad near a name of a kosher candidate.
Dofi, you are out of line. Cool down.
maybe you should first start with pronouncing ayn like a teimeni
Rocky,
I said “if there is competition”. Book and bookstore market may not be so good, so you might be right. But also keep in mind, costs of developing a book, especially with a translation, are high. So, maybe sponsors enable publishing more books than would otherwise published.If you are looking for affordable English seforim, search amazon books and click on “used only”. You get good conditioned books at < $10 each. I found out about this when the kids gave me a present of multiple of my favorite seforim and I wondered how they were able to afford that 🙂
gadol > Perhaps his $15 donation to some progressive voter registration group several years ago is the smoking gun.
perfect his smoking gun is the smoking gun.
Rocky > The printing company is going to print it and make a profit; no matter what, all the donors are doing is giving the printer more money.
If there is competition, then the printer’s profit will reflect the donations and the sale price will be lower.
Probably, a more effective way to do tzedokah would be to donate money directly to the buyers – a voucher upon presenting a receipt for the siddur.
jackk > You do not find a single exception with President Joe Biden.
Jackk, Pres Trump already answered your question if you watched the debate. He asked whether Pres Biden ever fired anyone. I’ll add to that, none of people who work for them are independent actors, most of them came up the hierarchy serving previous bosses. They don’t want to, and can not complain. Congress member who have some independence started complaining.
yechiel > he did EXTREMELY WELL at that news conference. Ignoring that, eh?
At the first glance, I thought this was sarcasm and double-checked whether I was the one who wrote it. I actually watched this conference to do my own diagnosis. Even at 2x speed, President’s thinking was painstakingly slow. I felt bad for the old man embarrassing himself. Someone @ WSJ tried to defend Pres B by describing how Reagan was deteriorating during last year. This op-ed has about 2,000 comments all saying the same thing: Reagan stepped down from the high level, Biden is sliding from the unremarkable level he was when he was younger.
Also, NYT headline writers are off their rockers. Latest one: Dems push Biden to xxxx – Last thing a stumbling old man needs is a push!
EXCTL>Being honest:
We like to live amongst our own kind
We vote for Jewish candidates
We look for and use Jewish professionals (medical, legal, accounting, etc.)
We shop at Jewish owned businesses.Does this make us racist?
—
On one hand, I agree with you. At the same time, I skipped voting for a Jewish VP candidate despite respecting him … another relative of mine used to avoid meeting that candidate’s mother for years, as she was always asking whether he voted for her son …I am not the only one trying to vote for the good of the country. USA is doing somewhat better than other countries avoiding narrow voting for personal interest. For example, dem strategists are complaining for years that Americans are voting down “death taxes” despite 99% of them “benefiting” from such re-distribution…
How could R convention be preceded in a short order by – an opponent bumbling debate and a half-hearted attempts to fix them; a failed bullet producing an iconic defiance picture; and a prosecutor dismissal? It is either a well-timed conspiracy or a yad Hashem ….
the only argument against the conspiracy is the near-miss of the bullet, who would risk that even if Wilhelm Tell was shooting. Unless, it was paint and not blood. Your thoughts?
If you don’t change – do you know anyone who does.
Show of hands – anyone here who plans to vote for a different party this year? Or change between voting and not voting.
The Camp Drama is an excellent point for research. a year from now, compare development of kids who did not get to the camp with their classmates who went to a different camp. Let’s see any differences in middos, learning, health.
ExCTL > The descendants of slaves idea is one only considered by the elite, not the masses
So, you are saying masses are plain racist? It could be, but more likely simply emotional and following the flow.
As an example, gallup has a “poll” about “immigration” – scary quotes because they do not use “illegal” in most questions, conflating legal and illegal immigration, while clearly referring to illegal in other questions, like “closing the border” . So they have these 2 questions, approximately:
1. would you give citizenship for the immigrants who are already in the country if they follow certain (undefined) conditions – yes 80%
2. would you agree to immediately deport everyone who is currently in the country illegally. yes 40%So, at least 20% answered yes to both questions, although these answers are incompatible. Well, maybe they just want any resolution, just want to debate to end?!
ujm, indeed, the best is to sponsor kiddush and havdala and be mentioned in yakum purkan (that seems to support your idea omitting those whose names are on the building walls).
Sir, when you have a 50% chance of divorce for _a_ wife, your chance to keep at least one out of your three wives is staggering 87.5%!
This presumes independent interaction with each of them. But if you are not able to afford three houses, then they might all walk out as a group on you.
We need to define MO before we argue about it. See the text above I just posted. For me, this is MO, and I think many gedolim would agree to it, r Soloveitchik, R Schwab, R Auerbach. Not sure about R Kotler.
However, we are still very far removed from the ideal. And so
are all other yeshivos and mesivtos which employ for their “English” department non-Jewish or irreligious Jewish teachers. If only the secular teacher would be endowed with ידבוע become toneshamos Jewish mechanech and desire to be hashkafaha proper ! Then he or she would not only manage to impart a masterful secularםשה education with results which would impress the parents as well as the authorities, but every secular lesson could be turned into a genuine Jewish experience. Rather than subjecting the students of a yeshivah to the schizophrenic jolt of switching over in the afternoon from kodesh to chol, and exposing them to the fascination of a foreign culture and non-Torah values, the ideal Torah im Derech Eretz teacher of the secular department would be capable of serving the whole . ןילוח לע תרהט שוקה to the students as menu of secular knowledge First of all, the secular teacher would impress his or her students with the concept that a first-class general education gives the student the wherewithal to make a kiddush Hashem in the outside world. Secondly, as a true mechanech, he or she would control the library, and all required reading of English literature would be discussed from a Torah viewpoint, clarifying where our Torah ideology differs from the philosophy of the author. The compositions written by the students should discuss the ideological Jewish interest contained in the literary masterpieces: what we can accept, and what we must reject.
This “black support” thing is really a mental aberration, and a racist at that. Neither Barrack nor Kamala are descendants of slaves in America. They are both in part high-privileged (white or Brahmin, with a touch of slave owners), and part African, unrelated to US. How do they redeem any slavery sins of America, real or imagined? The only legit salve descendent who lives in the WH was Michelle, but she did not like it.
A good example is R Huna’s intervention into malfunctioning food markets:
farmers were bringing food from villages and then whatever is left at the end of the week was lost. So, the farmers started bringing less to avoid losses, leading to shortages and higher prices. Classic market failure.
R Huna started buying leftover food at the end of the week to increase supply. But he did not give away the food for free – this would create a “great society” welfare system, with poor expecting handouts, not buying, and destroying the market again. Instead, he sent that food down the river – not to be destroyed, as this will be asur, but to be picked up by downstream poor who will not distort the local market.
I wish Pres Johnson learnt this Gemora …
skripka > . You must hate the tannaim who established socialist policies such as burying everyone in plain wood caskets,
I agree, maybe we should tune in more into what halachik sources actually say? I think, they generally prefer market solutions and user fees, while at the same time providing safety net and human dignity when needed.
For example, we give food upon request, but investigate whether they really need clothes. We give based on residency and based on minimal daily food requirements. We collect payments for security services proportional to the benefits to either lives or property.
R Schwab (what year?) > break off your professional relationship with those who, for instance, consider Yishu HaNotzri merely a failed moshiach
Great language on unity in these words, but can someone clarify when did RCA have such a relationship with other religions? R Soloveitchik paskens that it is possible to meet with other religions to discuss social/political/world issues, but _no_ discussions about theology. When someone asked about an invite to the Vatican congress where they decided to rescind their anti-Jewish doctrines in 1960s, he paskened not to attend: if they want to do teshuva, great, they should deal with that. We have nothing to do with that and should not even come and thank them for that.
> And it was that which he said justified “Modern Orthodoxy” – survival, nothing else
This is not the justification I saw in R Soloveitchik speeches and letters. Maybe there are several and I paid attention to the one that speaks to me.
This is the one I read, my paraphrase:
The world is changing very fast and we are exposed to new challenges. If we, Jews, claim that we have eternal Truth from Hashem, then we should be able to address these challenges. “Hiding in the caves” is not an adequate response to challenges that Hashem is sending us.Re: YU, he writes, I think, in 1940s-50s, probably while considering or just after starting at YU, he proposes a goal of streamlined curriculum that mass-produces Rabbis who can lead communities: say a parsha dvar Torah, organize davening, do correct marriages and know enough of gittin to refer to more knowledgeable people. He contrasts it with Litvishe yeshivas that he knew from the old world, where people could be studying esoteric subjects for years without giving back to the community. He is not, obviously, against learning lishma, he just felt a need to produce Rabbis for multitudes of Yidden, especially those who were arriving. As he already lived in US for a couple of decades, he was probably a good observer of the social changes.
Was he able to produce Rabbis that would reach those who were rapidly assimilating? I don’t know. But the direction looked reasonable. This is about same time Chabad was starting their efforts. Separatist O had great strides in protecting and growing their own community, but I don’t think it found enough confidence to deal with other Yidden until maybe 1980s.
maybe Dean Philips can win CT primary absent other contenders and get a leg up on delegates?! Any other primaries left?
There is a mitzva (for _you_) to teach your children Torah. There is no mitzvah to send them to the forest with some other wilder chayos.
Kuvult, Rashi suggest best time to teach is from 16 to 22, so after that, they might be ready to go to the streets.
Disclaimer: most of our children are currently in labor camps. (that is, laboring in camps, leaving no time for shtuyot).
Thanks for these quotes. I think they are railing against something what was MO in 1930s to 50s. I never heard a “modern” MO quote Graetz or Dubnow or having O-R collaboration in issues of religion (R Soloveichik paskens that it is osur to enter a non-O place of worship even at the expense of not fulfilling mitzva of shofar).
I will not go as far as Dr Pepper to consider every D voter an ignoramus or pasul, but I am very confused when people reject reasonably clear facts, whether they are Ds or Rs or Is. It seems to me that Ds suffer more from this, but I could be biased.
Some of such things include things that were good under T (economy, support of Israel, pressure on China, Russia, NATO payup) and things that are not so good under B (inflation, illegal immigration, Afghanistan, Ukraine).
It also includes wild manipulation of data. During the infamous debate, B showed clear mind when “quoting” statistics, conflating results of Covid disruption with normal economy. He was in clear mind at those moments, those were well-prepared and well-remembered mis-representations, not memory lapses. I understand why a politician will do that. But I am at a loss when a fellow Yid says similar things. Maybe this is cultural assimilation where we use “freedom of speech” to try to convince our brothers instead of following Jewish values of following the truth and staying away from falsehood.
There are articles now how power people around the world are preparing for T presidency, which they didn’t do last time around. Their biggest concern is unpredictability that they don’t like in their nature. Their preparation includes (1) doing things T might like and that they found made sense – increase NATO budgets (2) find contacts close to T (3) try to create defenses against decisions they don’t want in case T goes there – transfer Ukraine support from US to NATO. So, the world seems to learn how to live with T, so I suggest you do too.
A good point. We need to read a fine print in three oaths: what are we supposed to do if another group of Yidden violates the oaths. Surely, this was a consideration. And if it was not – it is a classical case for oath annulment: did you expect X to happen? No. So, those who feel bound by the oath, should convene a beis din and get it done. We all can join, so that they don’t feel so bad about it.
would Josh Shapiro be a centrist candidate who can carry PA and out-of-nowhere become a first Jewish Pres?
T’Ch are also expected to provide protection to others.
Makkos 11 discusses Kohen godol caring guilt for unintentional murder. Even when a lion ate someone 3 parsangs from Yehoshua b’ Levi, Eliahu did not visit him for 3 days. I do not know, though, what to make out of such temporary punishment.
That Bava Basra gemora raises a lot if questions. One would be – what kind of T’Ch are deserving such protection in terms of learning and behavior.
Maybe we can use Ravina’s approach when he tried to force his poor neighbor Runia to pay up for the fence: he sent a worker into Runia’s field to prentend to pick up dates, and when Runia started shouting at him, Ravina said – so, you do need protection?! So, if we have T’Ch who showed that they do not need physical protection or financial support from amei haaretz, then they should be left alone. As in Bava Batra, when T’Ch refused to pay up a Roman tax (which was more like a one time gezera rather than dina d’malchuta, if this matters) and merchants threatens to leave the city, T’Ch saud – ok, leave and this worked out. So, current T’Ch should be ready to live near the border and refuse protection from Tzahal.