Always_Ask_Questions

> sofek mamzer is worse off than a known mamzer.

if everyone is sofek mamzer, then nobody can marry nobody, except those who are mamzerim vadai. In such, invesrted, world, hasan and kalla would need to bring kosher witnesses to certify that their parents were brother and sister, or bring a ketuba with other than a father’s name, and beis din need to investigate date of kesuba being before the birth. I am sure, there will be fakers, who will not reveal that the husband gave a get, trying to fool this opposite beis din.

n0 > A serious learner should always have what to say.

R Salanter had a different opinion: you should always preach Yiddishkeit. Sometimes even with words.

interestingly, Greeks (Aristarchus) figured out that Earth runs around the sun and approximate distances to sun and moon, but his theory was rejected because they could not see any parallax from the stars. They did not figure out that stars are too far away.

another interesting question of antiquity – where visible stars (about 1000?) are all that is there, or there are more. Bava Basra talks about it.

Important to have priorities straight. Having a lofty mushy goal creates a lot of place for mistaken priorities and opportunities for enemy propaganda. Look at western Europeans who decided that thermometer is a bigger enemy than dictators. Now others are paying for their aveiros that they thought were mitzvos.

Avira, yes, this seems like a chazoka – most people I met so far were not aliens (upon verification in case of doubt). So, if someone presents himself as an alien, he needs to prove it.

is your goal to lose weight or mass? If the former, just move to the Moon or at least Everest.

Re: shmurah matzah – if anyone is in the business, I suggest ordering shmurah and regular matzah from Ukraine now. They are overflowing with grain that Russians are blocking in Black sea. So, making matza or any other long-lasting product would make economic sense for everyone.

amom, I think I agree with your evaluation that girls are less prepared because all that is required from them is to have enthusiasm. But then, I disagree with your implications: you first say that girls are not prepared for the hard path, and then that not enough girls got enthusiastic about this path. This may be the issue with the chinuch – a well-meaning teacher posits the goal of raising learners and wives of learners and the raising enthusiasm achieves the goal in the short term. If you were to teach them more seriously and having better expectations, you may end up with less candidates for full-time learners’ wives, but they will be more successful and the rest will choose the path that corresponds to their abilities.

As you imply, the teachers are “fighting” family influences. You seem frustrated that parents are winning too often, but think about all frustrated parents who not only have to pay tuition for their – and your – kids, but also need to fight for respect from the kids.

Halakha, as I understand it says: respect to the Torah teacher who give Olam Habo comes before respect to the parents who give Olam Haze. But in case of parents hiring the teacher, parents get the kavod as they are providers of this olam habo. And if the parent is also a teacher (and most modern yeshiva/seminary-educated parents are), they also get kavod first as they provide bogth olam habo & haze, even if they are not paying much of tuition themselves.

ubiq > there are a few blat in Yevamos she’d recoil from too

I am not a “progressive” but it seems that R Moshe great-great-grand-son will not agree with this (because R Moshe’s granddaughter might be learning Yevamos).

Avira > The notion of intelligent life contradicts the ideas of Hashem not creating something for no reason

As the first Beis symbolizes, we do not know everything that Hashem knows. There might be other worlds that we do not know of (or were as Midrash Rabba posits: אָמַר רַבִּי אַבָּהוּ מְלַמֵּד שֶׁהָיָה בּוֹרֵא עוֹלָמוֹת וּמַחֲרִיבָן, עַד שֶׁבָּרָא אֶת אֵלּוּ) and Hashem does not care for us to know of. If we were to encounter another civilization, then we will have more questions, but until then I would not worry too much.

Avira,
you may be right and your opponents holding by minority opinion, but generally exalting R Moshe to press people to disregard a different serious posek is simply halachic bullying. With pasken with R yohachan against Resh Lakish in almost all cases, but R Yohanan did not resort to “do you know who I am” argument and one time when it became personal did not end well and is probably a lesson for us.

n0 > I like the idea of being objective as the goal.

a question to those involved in serious learning: how consistent is self-evaluation in terms of a student understanding his level and his ability to reason. I presume that if a teacher is a great Talmid Chochom, he will give that feedback, but – what if he is not? How does the student know? how does a prospective mechutan knows? Trusts representation of the teacher? Gvirim of the past generation would hire a talmid chacham to evaluate the prospective choson, but this does not seem to be done in our days.

Many professions and hobbies have objective markers – SAT, GRE, marathoner’s times, chess rating… Why don’t we have some public-facing measures that will help learners and others to see the quality of the product? I know that any measurement affects the process and people start learning for the test, but still an imperfect test might be better than none.

ujm > The first one seriously learns for 10 hours; the second one seriously learns only for two hours, and is “battling” his other eight hours there.

I have two job candidates. One works hard the whole day and does not produce anything. Another – works great for two hours and then browses internets. Who would I hire? None of them. Why are your choices so poor?

Seriously, to the person who sits and sits and learns nothing. R Preidah who lived long had a student who required 400 repetitions to learn (note, he learned eventually). He might be better off going to work and having yissachar/zevulun parternship with someone. This is what someone who cares about this guy would suggest (one of the amoraim did this with his son who was not good at learning, then he tried to teach him business ..). If he has no other prospects and is financially secure, it is great if he sits and learns and gets his sechar – 1/400th of infinity is still infinity. Usual caveat – if he is using OPM (other people’s money) this would work only if there is a full disclosure to the donor, whether this is a private philanthropist or a taxpayer, and they are happy to fund his learning

Gemora mentions, I think, R Yaakov who sent his son for a semester, then examined him and, after finding his learning lacking, told him to stay home and work the fields, and went to learn himself. He is them placed into a room with some nasty mazik that would kill anyone else – to clear real estate for the yeshiva, so he presumably had a good judgment. So, when you are suggesting that someone not learning much should sit in the yeshiva whole day – is he doing it at the expense of someone else who could use a stipend? Maybe someone who is working and learning, but a stipend will help him free a couple of extra hours a day for learning? Of course, if your community balabosim are supporting everyone who wants to learn, then it is not a problem.

As to those who learn 2 hours and don’t do much the rest of the day, those are worse of course, especially if they are paid to do that. But it is not a very good argument to say that someone is better than outright thieves.

There is a sevorah here: if there are multiple civilizations, then some of them will be more advanced than ours and they’ll figure out space travel and we would see something from them. An alternative is that they all ended somehow, whether in nuclear wars or floods, which seems to be supported by a midrash that Hashem created and destroyed worlds before ours

ujm,
thanks for your psak. I presume a frum yid would not pasken it for himself. And asn0 says, there are possible differences here. Are there any written or oral or whispered teshuvos from that period? Also, interesting for WW2 generation.

yes, you can.
A question that has an easy answer as long as you wait enough.

Not sure what the argument is about but I agree on a possible difference of perceptions – Sephardim start with basics and do them well and even when learning Gemora focusing on peshat and practical implicatiosns, with Ashkenazim focusing on lamdus. Similar to a professor from my bubba’s lessons – why do I need arithmetic, when I am professor of calculus (she was evidently not a Brisker). This latter approach used to be controversial by Maharal, etc. Our time brought a new challenge when we have. Baruch Hashem, multitudes learning rather than just yachidim. I suspect lamdus goes with them as well as calculus with most of college students.

As to testing sugyos, I would suggest first test ability for sevorah, ability to reason logically, that is a prerequisite to any meaningful lamdus.

interesting discussion. I suggest when there is a key number in these calculations like OTD rates – try to come up with several sources/way to compute it. Don’t trust one source that might be biased, but don’t dismiss it either.

for OTD rate – what is distribution by age? I resume teens, early 20s would be the time. If boys get married older, they might have more time to go OTD before marriage .. this might be a “good thing” preventing a family tragedy later or a good thing, preventing the OTD from happening.

The idea that we need more people @ FDA to have more formula is questionable. Biden just used pda to alleviate problems created by current FDA employees.

ujm, are you by any chance a gilgul of Robespierre?

Mod, you decide whether this should be a public or private post.

I noticed on Russia-related front page posts several posters provide in-your-face pro-Russian defences are posting 1st or 2nd time and were registered recently. This is a classic example of Russian paid activists that are active on web and social media all over the world. I wonder whether you or your provider provides any screening for such things (repeated IP and other simanim) to make your life easier. Possibly, you already rejected 1,000 of them and we see only a couple.

If this stays private, I’ll send specific links

If you send names we’ll delete them if they show up on this side

All these tuna-eating yidden, do you know whose daas Torah were they following?

When L Rebbe was paralyzed and moschihism was igniting, a local Rav called Rebbe’s secretariat and asked them how he can be of help in these difficult times. They asked him to publicize that this craziness is not coming from them. So, the Rav said it publicly. So, while this is not a direct testimony of what the Rebbe himself would think about it, but as close as it gets.

Clearly, multiple wives exist on halakha, but what about real life?
Tosefta Ketubot 5:1 : R Tarfon engaged 300 women eat terumah during hunger. (on this note, one of my relatives engaged or faked marriages with several women to take them to the safer side of the war front during WW1)
Tosefta Yevamot – saus 2 families of cohanim come from tzaros
Yerushalmi Tevamot mentions R Yehuda HaNasi telling one brother to do yibum to 12 sisters-in-law
Agrippa
Raban Gamliel II (through yibum)

Archeology: found a ~ 440 BCE ketubah saying that the husband agrees not to take 2nd wife

source: Goldfeder, Mark. “The story of Jewish polygamy.” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, vol. 26, no. 2, 22 Oct. 2013,