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I was trying to explain that the idea of always looking for past “sins” is dangerous. A simple idea of “do not murder” expressed in 10 commandments is much simpler. As an example, I brought the German population that, by itself, was not involved in any murders, they “only” supported it based on their understanding of how bad Jews, Poles, Brits are, or were in the past. So, the world being not black and white does not mean that we need to excuse murderers. If you do accept Putin’s culpability, there is no reason to discuss academic history of Slavs in the same sentence.
Speaking in shul about politics risks the tax free status.
huju, I don’t know about lakewhut but why would someone with economic knowledge support more taxes on people with some income? These people are already paying more in taxes that those below (as our taxes are proportional). If you think things are not fair “enough”, why not propose a compromise like “less taxers for those with income below”, such as decreasing further 10K SALT limitation that was introduced in 2017 and is obviously piad by rich people?
Avira, I hear you on what your RY said. I was not the one questioning this. It really depends on local conditions. If your governor would act against voters, then it is reasonable to be quiet. Especially, as it seems from the result, the R- did not really have a chance. The question now is what will your community do after the election. Continue insisting that our schools should be getting government funds and not be accountable for what they do with them or find some reasonable accommodation.
Syag, I am not sure what are you accusing me of? Expressing my opinion that uncareful behaviors caused deaths and supplying facts to support my opinion? please clarify. As to actions, I did not detain anyone or forced masks on some pure souls. I did help a couple of places to improve their ventilation, I hope it was not a crime. Those who wanted to breath more virus still had enough places to visit.
Avira, Fauci did not “run the country”, politicians did. American restrictions were on par with other developed countries.
jackk, when there is a consistent reaction to current events with “BUT remember”, it is not a reflection of interest in Jewish history, but political support of the attackers.
And history is full of cases where such justification is used for a new attack, such as Germans justifying actions against Jews by a reference to Jews participating in 1918 revolution; attack against Poles by cases of Polish attacks against German civilians. See a recent 2015 book “The German war” by Nicholas Stargardt who brings together diaries and letters from that time.
several thouts here:
Was not antagonizing the governments one of the shevuos? I hope voting against someone is not break the shevua in a free country. But maybe NY politics is vindictive enough so that the governor will act against those who did not vote for her?Just voting itself should be sufficient to raise power of the community
After election, maybe we should take the shevua seriously and try to accommodate demands where they are reasonable. If you don’t take the shevua seriously, then you have no excuse not to move to EY.
philosopher, we are zoche to live in a world that at least externally recognizes the value of peace and a number fo countries, at least in Europe and Northern America, do not fight with each other for 80 years. Then, one country breaks these norms and attacks the other, a normal human response is to condemn that. If in response, you start contemplating what happened in these places in previous generations, it is just sick, in my opinion.
But again, my question was not really to you to explain your position, I think I understand it. I am asking the others whether they see people with such views in their communities.
Avira > the left wouldn’t dream of granting them amnesty.
Not what you referred to, but note that in all countries, sadly, opposition was using pandemic to attack the government for alleged failures. When elected, opposition then switched to accommodating popular opinion. We should demand politicians to do the right things, but we can not rely on their righteousness.
As of now, US excess mortality is 15% on par with Poland (UK, Israel is 9, France, Germany 5).
To what degree this is due to the country medical system or overall organization, I don’t know.
The timeline suggests that it is only in part to “pre existing condition”: US is higher but within a pack of half of developed countries up to February 2021. So, US was doing almost as well as other reasonable countries. Most of relative decline is from June 2021 to February 2022.
“Confirmed deaths” statistics give a similar picture.So, collective desire to not be bothered cost on the order 100,000 lives.
I understand people who miss going to stadiums and bars, but I still do not understand Jewish thinking. When avos were confronted with hunger, they would go to Mitzrayim (sic!) to get food at the cost of personal safety. They would not rebel against H’ and say – we are gonna learn Torah in EY, do not bother us with gashmiyus. So, I can’t fathom Jews denying conditions that they observe.
And, obviously, many gedolim, like R Edelstein, R Henneman took the events seriously.Then, the only explanation is that these Jews were convinced that nothing was really happening: people did not die, it is liberals’ fall, they are not fair to us, etc. Those who “identify with Trump” present the most confusing picture – refusing to take vaccines that Trump spent so much effort pushing through government regulations. Among all explanations, Occam razor seem to point to simply uneducated people listening to political radio and websites and following whatever their hearts desire.
I value this forum as I can meet here representatives of different lines of Jewish thought. I met most of them IRL also – from Sanderistas to anti-medinistas, from pro-Fauci to anti-vaxers … but the several people here who consistently post pro-murder remarks here make me wonder. I do not see them where I daven, am I not travelling in the right circles?! Do they sit quiet in shul, answering omen to the brochos of shalom? Do other people here meet such people in their shuls or yeshivos? What schools produce them? Maybe they are just russian trolls sent out to all corners of internets? or maybe some recent Jewish arrivals from Ukraine to the free world bitter at their former neighbors? Any thoughts?
a quick summary of R Avigdor Miller on vayera:
Avraham will command his household .. Rambam: it means he’ll teach middos … you need to go specialist. Not just any Rabbi, the one who specializes in middos. You can not know about middos without learning Mishlei. And there are .. roshei yeshiva who did not learn Mishlei. The whole Tanach is full of good council; only you have to learn it in a proper way.> How many of the independent thinking advisors made Trump change his mind?
One clear one is postponing withdrawal from Afghanistan. In other cases, I don’t have insight in how worked on the inside, but the people I mentioned above all pursued their favorite policies. I don’t know whether T listened to them from the beginning and let them do what they think are right or change his mind later. for example, Bourla reports that when T called a WH meeting of pharmaceutical CEOs, everyone was talking medicines but Bourla’s rep suggested that the vaccine can be developed fast enough to be relevant. T immediately jumped on the idea and supported it.
I think eliminating Iranian terrorist leader was Bolton’s idea. Not sure who developed strategy if finishing off ISIS. Lighthizer pursued his tough line dealing with China …
Every Yid or a group who sit down to learn in any small shtibel or in their houses are the Torah world.
The Torah world is not limited to a location or age group.Avira > they keep the mitzvos without compromise, goyishe influence, and consider torah study to be the central,
congrats, this is a good start, but you give yourself enough caveats here to slide back every time you disagree with someone. Is going to work, or doing professional work, compromise? This would invalidate many Tannaim. Is knowing Aristotle or science – goyishe influence? Here go Rambam and other Rishonim. Of course not, you say, “I know it when I see it” and here is where one loses the objectivity and follows emotions.
I suggest you tighten your definition to make it less ambiguous.
RebE, good, so when you start looking into that, you see certain things! I am primarily discussing this not for the zchus of politicians but for my concern that we can’t talk ehrliche between each other.
For his cabinet, for example, you need to give him credit for having people like Mattis, Bolton, Pompeo, Lighthizer, Esper, Barr, Sessions, Azar, DeVos, Haley. These are all independent thinkers and actors, often with ideas different from Trump. Yes, he fired some/most of them eventually, but he hired and listened to them first. I just googled Biden, and I see one person who had an independent career outside of being a politician or Biden’s staffer – Janet Yellen. Obama – maybe 2-3 people.
tax breaks for the rich – most significant change was restricting rich people from writing off expensive mortgages and local taxes. Dictators: pressing Europeans to stop Russian pipeline, restricting Chinese companies, forcing Europeans to pay more for NATO. Covid – US mortality is indeed 2x worse than comparable countries – and even worse after Trump, as well as vaccine attitude. Biden, similar to Trump, declares victories periodically because it is politically convenient, except there is nothing like Warp speed, remaining issues are not addressed. In all of the above, you seem to be upset at some Trump speeches, without judging fairly his actions that are in public record. After all the learning you had, RebE, you should be able to be a shofet tzedek.
Relevant to this thread, Trump has Jewish grandchildren and those Jewish politicians often not …
Lostspark, great idea but could you do it somewhere nearby like Canada or Cuba? R Avigdor Miller writes that we should learn lesson from reading about Vietnam; if we don’t learn, events move closer and closer until we learn. So I suggest learn from history
RebE, you are entitled to your own opinions but not the facts. I understand it is not your fault, your radio is on some wicked channel. He had multiple advisors who are independent thinkers, and they had disagreements and discussions. In some cases, he changed or delayed his decisions. Most anti T republicans complain about style but not substance of his policies on any topic. If you admit the facts, I’ll take your opinions seriously then.
> Black and white, with a fedora.
this is circular reasoning – we dress properly because we dress like we dress. And others are not proper because we are Hashem’s fashion setters.
at least for women who lately dress in similar colors, sans fedora, Gemora says mefurash that in some places a present for ladies are coloured clothings – that were way more expensive back then.
U> Jews dress differently than gentiles.
There is value here, but we need to admit that generations and generations of Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Bavlim, Israelim dressed like most people around them. Some wear a hat because “this is proper to be dressed in front of an important person” – opposite of what you are saying.
easier voting benefits low education/income voters that are in many case Democrats.
Raban Gamliel lost the argument that only proper students could learn and they brought in extra benches, but did they put all the benches in the first row!?
I recall from learning this sugya that there is absolutely no problem taking difficult things like talmid chacham – not working on erev 9Av, etc.
Good question. There is definitely a value of dressing up like someone and then you start behaving like one, sort of a neder. On the other hand, possible problems:
– Tocho Kvaro – you presenting yourself as something you are not (yet?), leading to:
– gnevas daat – people get up when you come in, do business with you, marry their daughters to you, etc …probably most concerning – others have a mitzva to aspire to be talmidei chachamim, and they will look at someone who just dressed up as an example, and then _they_ serve as an example for the next generation ….
Personally, I am not concerned that Talmidei Chachamim dress a certain way that they can be seen from afar. I am concerned that non-Talmidei Chachamim dress like Talmidei chachamim causing confusion for others – and themselves.
Yserbius > Rebbe did so with the kavona that going to the Mikvah would save him from hypothermia.
Rebbe here is interfering with a good story! Original story teaches us to be moser nefesh and machmir in every situation, while the real one lacks educational capacity other than Rebbe trying to survive. I can see teachers using the first one even if they know the second.
Yserbius, I think we need to take into account the issue of moris ayn. Not only elections have to be reasonably fair, they need to be seen so by most of population. And it is a challenge given amount of possible disinformation around. So, I would support reasonable transparency actions – observers, voter ID, etc that help people feel that elections are fair, even if I don’t think amount of possible fraud is not high. As an example, my kid read the rules that the first time voters need to bring an ID and did so – and was surprised that he was not asked for one!
> there’s nothing wrong at all if they decided to dress like they did in Europe,
~~~~~~~
Freudian slip 🙂1 is the one! the problem with the platfoem our days that you lose more voters than you gain with it. Romney had a reasonable platform and lost. Modern elections seem to require certain level of populism and massaging the message to be competitive. If D-s give away money strategically to various groups not just in general (as Romney mentioned 47% even ar his time) but right before the elections, you need to counter with something to activate all your voters.
chance of winning is the same, but expectation of winning is different, right? Not sure how this works, with accumulation of the prizes, is playing becomes actually profitable on average at some point? or everyone understands it and starts buying thousand of tickets?
What was Chazon Ish’s explanation of his position on elections?
Avira, other than not liking my explanation on the background of what Rashi is saying, maybe you can comment on the substance?
As to “political”, it only means that some issues are more acute at certain time periods. If Rashi were to live during Melech Shlomo’s time, maybe this would be less of interest. Is it not interesting that Rashi lived actually during times when goyim were fighting between each other for EY, while trampling through the area where Rashi lived with tragic consequences? When you read Chazon Ish 100 years from now, would you include background on his relationship with Ben Gurion et al as context?
coffee, these problems are a little harder than what you have in standard statistics. You may think about a problem: given 10 random events, I get 10 same outcomes, this is not likely BUT in this case, the criterion for selecting 10 random events is usually constructed post factum. That is, there are 100 ways to define events you plan to look at: those that were within 1%, or those in the South, or whatever. Then, the chance of having these 10 events having same outcome is subject to selecting these 10 according to some rule.
the way to test this is by dividing your data in (at least) two parts: use 1990s data to analyze and define how you select events, and then check ONCE on the data from 2000s.
What would be wrong with wearing Arab or Persian levush according to those who wear Polish levush?
> you should always be allowed to be mechalel shabbos for cancer research
right question. Here is where logic of the teshuva applies – this is multi-year multi-person work and one needs to rest some time … even then – if a person really makes an impact on humanity with a reasonable probability, does he need to go to minyan? learn the parsha? drive to pick up kids from school and buy chalav isroel? I am not even talking about watching TV or posting on YWN …
is this far-fetched for a regular guy who is tinkering in the lab with mice?
a quick calculation:
life-expectancy in US increased 10 years in last 70 years, or 1/6th of a year per year. Let’s say 25% of it is attributable to medical research, or 1/25th year per year per person3 mln people die per year in US. So, medical research saves 100k man-years every year.
there are 100K medical researchers in the world, so each researcher saves on average one person every year just in USA. And surely some more than others … hope I made this correctly.
> yes, they change their numbers as it gets closer to the polls. I
the question is – do these changes consistently going from pro-D to competitive and then they analyze their final results as unbiased. I am not saying this is the case, I am saying this is something to check out.
Avira, the shaila was apparently asked by a legit person. a good question when is “research is not active pikuach nefesh”? What is a direct or indirect link? In this case, vaccine development was a pretty specific set of steps, not research of some unknown things. For example, mRNA formulations were done within the first month, after that there were a number of steps testing, developing specific techniques, mitigating problems, etc. Granted, there were uncertainties in each step – some approaches did not work out, some slowed down, in some cases manufacturing failed, but it was a set of a small number of paths, each consisting
To put it in simple turns – you hear that someone’s boat is slowly drowning in a lake. You are going to get your boat and tow it to the lake. So will 20 other people. Some of them will get stuck in traffic, some boats are old and may not start. Some on the boat may not survive until any of you will come. Is this direct or indirect?
Another question here – how do we deal with expected results when probability of success are small but payoff is high? That is, 1% chance is multiplied by 1,000s of lives saved.
When other politicians were thinking on how to re-educated Sephardim, Begin was addressing them, elevating them, reminding them that they are descendants of traditions of Rambam …
> Begin was the closest thing to a frum PM … He also kept shabbos and Kashrus.
Sigh
coffee, not always, some stories, even by reliable sources, do not get published or of interest. We read what we want to hear.
Coffee, right, so he works through person’s natural qualities. Maybe your quote can be understood the following way: melech is elected by people, therefore, we deserve what we elected, and thus Hashem is reacting to our election decision, rather than personal decisions by the elected official. He is there to represent mitzvos and aveiros of the voters and to get corresponding rewards and punishments.
akuperma, agree on most points. If someone gets too concerned about current events, go to the library and open papers from any previous times and see how unhappy and worrying people were.
Of course, what is different now is that we see everything faster. If you read about German population attitudes during WW2 – they do not look different from what Russian population does now: similar attitude that the world is against us, thus we are doing what is needed to survive, and “look what they are doing to us” … any Nazi escalation included “we now call for peace”,” they started shooting across the border”. etc. You may get concerned – “but now you can see events in real time”. Note that German attitudes generally did not change towards the end of the war and shortly after. for example, during death marches from the camps in the last days of the war, Polish villages would generally help/feed the prisoners, while German would not.
coffee, best defense of Biden I ever saw. Send him a message, he will start saying “Hashem made me do this”. Maybe he is more like Pharaoh, his behirah was taken away on the account of all his previous stubborn statements.
A related shaila was asked by someone involved in covid vaccine research in 2020 – whether he should continue working on shabbos. The answer (I think from someone from YU) that he should not – (1) as he needs to rest at some point, he can as well do it on shabbos, (2) there are multiple companies working on this and why do you presume that you in particular are the person to develop the right one.
In retrospect, I do not fully understand the teshuva. Speed of vaccine development was such that there were multiple projects overlapping and dependent on each other. A lot of effort went into speeding things up. So, if someone was involved, he could have a reasonable case to work on those shabbatot when his project made a difference. A day was worth several thousand deaths.
yungerman > doesn’t give him a right to throw away the entire Torah cause now currently he’s busy doing a mitzvah
Right. This is why we are talking here about being meikel rather than “throwing away the entire Torah”. But it is also true some people feel that way on every chumra. I am not sure if this is more of standing for Hashem or personal insecurity that giving up on one chumra will break the person. Maybe there is a difference between someone considering adding or subtracting a chumra if you had it from childhood. Same as difference between taking and rescinding a neder in general.
538 approach is not bad, but I still suspect some pro-D bias there. It is virtually impossible not to introduce your own preferences in the models after tinkering with them for months. Also, 538 and similar tend to paddle dramatically towards Republicans in the days before election so that their final prediction is closer to the final result. At least, it is my recollection. It would be interesting to test these sites about their early prediction – that is when they affect voters, not their last minute position.
As to this election, they went from 35% R- chance in the Senate to 60% at the end during the last month, so the trend would hit 100% by the time they count the votes 🙂
people who were late for minyan (aka captives) have an option to say Shma/Shmone Esre with the kahal first and then catch up.
Does Menchaem Begin have anything to do with encouraging Sephardim to uphold their own, leading to creation of Shas?