akuperma

Federal civil service is by applying, having OPM rate your resume, and getting called for an interview. Filling out the application is important since that is where one can explain that you really meet the requirements (e.g. explaining why your years in kollel are at least the equivalent of a B.A. in humanities, to meet a stated requirement). Lower level jobs may involve testing, but professional jobs don’t. OPM gives a list of top candidates, and you get interviewed. The person making the decision has to explain the choice to his or her boss in writing. — Patronage jobs involve knowing people in the right places and often paying off people; these jobs often involve Senate confirmation. I believe only one person with a yarmulke has ever gone that high. — While federal jobs are all over, the highest concentration is in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area (which includes some neighborhoods with affordable housing). The OPM website handles the whole country.

Whether a government job pays better than the private sector depends on the nature of the job, and how what looks at fringe benefits. In general, professionals are paid less than the private sector, but often have better benefits and working conditions (excellent medical care, secure retirement benefits, often a ban on unpaid overtime). Shabbos is much less likely to be a problem working for the government than working for a large employer in the private sector (as one as one avoids jobs that inherently require work on Saturday such as police, medical, etc.). In most government service, there is great job security even one is incompetent. Discrimination is not a problem, at least in civil service (patronage jobs are more like private sector).

For non-professional jobs, the government tends to overpay. Thus the government rarely has problems recruiting clerks and janitors, but often has a problem recruiting professionals.

Note that there is never an “upside” financially in government unless you are a crook. When you hear of someone who get rich while working for the government, assume they either had a side business or were corrupt. That’s especially true of those with political jobs (appointed as patronage, rather than merit selected).

The law of supply and demand works regardless of what anyone attempts. Given that there is no shortage of candidates for jobs, it seems the wage is at a correct level. By comparison to college teachers, there is a tremendous oversupply of qualified applicants (sometimes hundreds of applicants for a single position), suggesting that their wages are too high. At present the supply and demand for teachers of Torah studies seems to be roughly at an equilibrium suggest the wages are neither too high nor too low.

One should note that teachers in Jewish schools get many benefits that make the low salaries more tolerable, such as being free from the discrimination anyone frum encounters working in the well-paid outside world. For most Torah teachers, switching to a better paying career would mean giving up much Yiddishkeit.

The person who objects to sitting next to the woman should offer to move (presumably to a middle seat, or switch to a less crowded flight). He should have arranged his seat previously (and a frum travel agent would know to book an entire two in order to avoid a problem). El Al, unlike, for example, Southwest, lets you book an actual seat in advance. In the US as well, the hareidi would be considered an out of line passenger and would probably be offered refund, especially if there was someone waiting to take the seat.

No man is required to give a “get” (or get divorced) UNLESS he previously entered into a marriage contract. No one is coerced into marriage. The only difference in that under Israeli law a husband has to do something to get divorced, whereas in most countries the husband can be divorced in absentia. In America, if someone is summoned by a court and ordered to do something, they are locked up with no appeal until they do what they have been ordered to – they lose almost all right to appeal since “they hold the key to their own release” – by obeying the court order.

If the reason for laws closing businesses on Shabbos is to honor Shabbos and promote menucha, they are “religious coercion”. If they are to prevent discimination against workers who don’t want to work on Shabbos, and to offer a level playing field for frum business owners, they are necessary for inclusion of frum Jews within the zionist state.

If you hold Israel is a secular state with many Jews, then the kosel is no more than an archeological site, importantly only as the past and future site of the Beis Mikdash (though secular reject the “future” part). If you think there is anying Jewish about the medinah, then it would be reasonable that the kosel is treated with kedushah – however most Israeli reject the idea that the medinah is Jewish.

If one holds that the “Modern Orthodox” are part of the Torah world (and when we start working on political alliances, we certainly do consider them, and the kosher food industry certainly counts on them, etc.), one can’t complain that their converts act like the rest of the “modern orthodox” community, and that community tends to have very “creative” interpretations of halacha (which allows them to eat kosher ingredients prepared on cold non-kosher utensils, participating in sports as long as one lets a non-Jew handle the money, carrying in a Karmelis, dressing in manners that frum Jews find objectionable, etc.). One doesn’t expect Ivanka Trump to be frumer than her family’s rabbi, and especially, one doesn’t expect her to be frumer than her husband.

The goyim have an expression about “the chickens coming home to roost”. The Democrats have made it a routine to engage in mob violence to block Republican speakers or to force the dismissal of Republicans from jobs in universities and elsewhere, and have glorified those who call for murdering the president. This is where it leads. Based on how America has reacted to politically motivated assassins in the past, the country will rally against the anti-Trump “resistance.”

In the above post, the word I intended was “pidgin”, though actually the more correct term would be a “creole” or simply a mixed/hybrid language, or in 21st century terms, a “Mash-up”. However neither Yiddish nor English are corrupt forms of a language.

The evolution of the name Ashkenaz is distinct. It had nothing to do with DNA. It was a name for someplace up north, and when Jews stumbled into Central Europe they wrote home and tried to explain where they were.

All Jews came from West Asia, which includes Turkey, Syria, Mesopotamia, Eretz Yisrael, etc. It isn’t like there was a pure strand of DNA in one particular place. People moved around, frequently. Just note the various place the אבות lived in during a mere four generations. What the DNA has shown, that is significant and was very disappointing to secular Jews (who don’t like being Jewish), is that Ashkenazim are not descended from diaspora converts but are from the same “stock” as all the other Jews (so much for various theories that we are really Turks from Central Asia, or some other such ancestry untainted by Jewish blood).

If France were to move its embassy to New Orleans (or more realistically, if israel were to move its embassy to Brooklyn), the United States would be insulted. The only option would be to break diplomatic relations. That means client states, such as Israel, which need the superpower’s help more than the reverse, are stuck when the patron chooses to insult them. Given the Tel Aviv is the economic, cultural and political center of Israel, having an embassy in Jerusalem is not all that important. Nothing prevent the current ambassador from living in Jerusalem, and one can argue that Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are no further apart than, say Far Rockaway or the southern tip of Staten Island from mid-town Manhattan. The bottom line though, is that by not recognizing Israeli ownership of territory gained in the 1947-49. the US is officially agreeing with those question the legality of the medinah’s existence under international law.

Persecuting hareidim – and he didn’t get a medal?

You are aware that “Mary” is actually the Anglicization of a Latinized form or the Hellenzation of the Aramaic form of the Hebrew name מרים? “Chris…” (Christopher, Christine, etc.) on the other hand as no Hebrew name that could be used.

In Germany, the assimilation began around 1800, so it was perhaps six generations (remember also that non-frum Jews tend to delay marriage and have fewer children, so their generations take long). In any event, most German Jews left in time. In Eastern Europe, where most of the deaths were, the movement towards assimilation was perhaps only three generations old, at most. Also remember that the person an “off the derekh” Jew has most in common with is another “off the derekh” Jew, which affects the rate at which such communities become safek non-Jews. It also should be noted that assimilated Jews were more likely to survive since in some cases the Germans wouldn’t know they were Jewish (especially outside of Germany), or they might have had less than the required amount of Jewish ancestry to be targetted – and of course assimilated Jews had a much easier time pretending to be goyim.

The word “sovereign” means “above all kings.” Orthodox Jews, at least some of them, hold that Ha-Shem is our “sovereign”, not a medinah. If you are a nationalist, it means you hold that your state is number one, that it is not bound by any laws other than those of its own legislature. Almost by definition, a nationalist is holding that Ha-Shem’s laws are not supreme, since if they were, the state would not be “sovereign.” Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement, by definition rejects that idea (thus the zionist sing that now they are a people free of Ha-Shem’s laws, the infamous עם חופשי verse in the zionist anthem).

P.S. And even if you hold Ha-Shem gave Eretz Yisrael to the Jewish people, according to our traditions it was a conditional gift to allow us to do mitsvos, and wouldn’t cover a secular state whose whole raison d’etre is doing averios.

Best selling sefarim are usually in the public domain, since their author’s are long dead. In some ways the market resembles that of non-Jewish publishing in the first centuries of printing. To be a “best selling” author of sefarim, become a leading scholar, have many talmidim, and there is still probably enough time before the end of the world for our sefer to become a best seller.

But the whole idea of zionism was and is to established a nominally Jewish state free from Torah and Mitsvos. And the IDF is part of the state. To create an IDF that is not anti-Torah, one needs to create a non-zionist medinah.

Note that in the United States, if some was prejudiced against Blacks or Hispanics (and note that frum Jews are a higher percentage of the Israeli population than Blacks or Hispanics are of the American population), the prejudiced person would be considered unacceptable to serve as an officer in the military, and probably would be largely excluded from any form of public service such as a member of the legislature. If Israel, including the IDF, were to give up zionism, the entire elite of society, and his includes those who run all government agencies, and especially the army, would be excluded. This is highly unlikely to happen. No matter how much the Religious zionist (and Modern Orthodox) yearn for Jewish state in which religious Jews are not discriminated against, those who rule Eretz Yisrael years for a state in which religious Jews are not present.

One should remember schools often offer merit scholarships, and the richer the school, the more they offer in terms of “need based” aid. Also one has to consider where one wants to work (City University of New York is not well known nationally, whereas Columbia is). If you want to work in a different part of the country, choose a school well known in that region.

And if the US can broker a pact with the Muslim Middle East whereby we drop support for Israel, thereby effectively forcing Israel to agree to some sort of “dhimmi” status jurisdiction under the Muslims, in exchange for the Muslims agreeing to stop terrorism against the western world and to keep the price of imported oil law, thereby promoting peace and prosperity in the western world.

There is much to be said for support for democracy and self-determination, even of small groups who lack the means to coerce others. An American that is based on moral principles is actually in our interests.

Olam ha-Ba is quite safe. It’s the world of emes. This world is the world of sheker (fake world). Don’t lose sleep over it. In a wink of an eye you’ll realize its a bad dream and no more.

Does any standard time make “sense”. There are three parts to this:

1. Should we go back to the same sort of clock (still used by Yidden to determine when to daven) based on sun time, roughly dividing the daylight into 12 hours (hour length varies during the year). The goyim switched a few centuries ago, at most.

2. Should we have time zones at all (they were introduced by the railroads in the 19th century). Before then Baltimore and New York would have different times – but before telecommunications no one cared.

3. The idea of daylight savings is not to “waste” the early morning daylight when everyone is sleeping and to move that daylight to evening when people are awake and about. Unless you are into a “Visikin” minyan, you probably get up at the same time regardless of whether it is dark out or not. If you don’t like daylight savings, or standard times, one can alway get up consistently at the same time regardless of government time (note that most people going to a Viskin minyan, get up roughly an hour before sunrise regardless of official times).

How is it respectable for boys to smoke? While historically women have tended to be less inclined towards addictive vices (smoking, drinking, various other drugs), that may be due to either biological or cultural factors that cause women to be more level headed (if you hold by Darwin, if young women tended to be as crazed as young men, it would seriously interfere with child rearing and be very dangerous for the children).

Since we’ve been pronouncing it that way since before they added the 19th brachah, so the grammatical reasons for it are less important than the fact that is a well established custom

Styles vary considerably based on subculture and region. If you would go on a job interview without a jacket and tie, or go to meet President Trump dressed that way – then its probably okay to go to shul without a jacket and tie. Note that many hareidim don’t wear a tie – which in other circles is a sign of disrespect. In the past men often wore a fedora on Shabbos, even though it was a “working week” hat, at least among the better dressed upper crust people. And in many countries, the rabbanim didn’t wear a jacket (particularly in non-European areas). Another factor is local custom of wearing a tallis (since a tallis, which originally was worn as outwear similar to a jacket, makes what is underneath less significant).

The only halacha is one should wear your best clothes to shul on Shabbos and Yuntuf, and that is not an absolute standard.

One should remember there is a difference between schooling and education, between what one does in a structured setting, and what one learns. If Hareidim rejected “secular studies”, then when one walked through Boro Park of Williamsburg you would notice that all the stores were run by goyim or at least “modern” Jews, since running a business requires a variety of skills involving secular knowledge (languages, math and accounting, law, economics, etc). The fact that most hareidim do not study “secular subjects” in yeshivos (e.g. no learning Latin, or how to solve quadratic equations, or the difference between Keynes and Hayek, or Marxist social theories) does NOT mean they are ignorant and dumb. Frum Jews have always, and still do gain secular knowledge as necessary – but gaining such skills is NOT a function of what one does in a formal school setting, since traditionally frum Jews reserve the formal school setting for Torah studies.

The only change is that fedoras became more popular as a dress hat, which began when hats started to go out of style (attributed to President Kennedy losing his top hat for his post-swearing in walk down Pennsylvania Avenue). Since they were a “dress hat” (fedoras were traditionally an un-dress, weekday hat), they tended to get nice. Other hat styles seen in the community (Streimels, Homburgs) are unchanged. In the past, people wore caps more often, but they were never Shabbos-dik (and remember, the pictures you see in the past were of weekday hats only, for obvious reasons). Also most frum Jews tend to be more affluent, and dressing better is part of that (in the past they were dominated by diamond workers and sweatshop workers, now we have lots of lawyers and accountants)