Always_Ask_Questions

as redleg says, people are not very good at estimating low probability events – falling of the 6ft platform, catching COVID from short encounters, crossing street in dangerous places.

to see the value v. cost of such procedures, you can sometimes conduct a social experiment. Compare two localities with different rules or different attitudes towards rules and look at the accident statistics.

for example, look at statistics before and after a new OSHA rule is in place. Or nearby cities in different counties or states with different rules. Upon someone’s claim here that Jewish communities are doing fine under COVID without a need to bother, I looked up death rates in Lakewood and surrounding communities and saw a factor of 2x difference (or 4x if you adjust for Lakewood younger population).

I think these missionaries put an extra value on a Jew v. a heathen. It seems like a transformation of the medieval view that Jews in ghettos is the proof that they are right. Now, they feel that they need our approval. This would explain why they are specifically interested in observant Jews.

Avi, interesting idea, but I understand the issue that we want Torah understanding of the issue if possible. If not, then use democracy as a second best option.

Then, in our time, we don’t have a situation when an Adam Hashuv is not available – they are all a call or an email away. I don’t think it matters whether a talmid chacham is an economic expert himself or he asks an expert, as long as he has intellectual capability to deal with the issue. Every expert consults others, books, etc. The point is that the final decision is based on Torah framework and not on the economists.

Here are a couple of examples where outcome may differ:
paying teachers. Current policies in US favor heavy regulation of schools, tenure and union protection for teachers. Halacha seems to favor unlimited competition, exempting teachers (as well as peddlers of perfume) from standard medieval guild protection – to make education more affordable for poor people. In other professions, we balance interests of buyers and sellers, but in education, interests of buyers are much higher. That’s the Jewish value and economists may or may not agree.

another one – COVID rule relaxing. Politicians care about economy and about reelection. A Torah authority might be more careful.

We can also have different solution depending on different behaviors. Famous one that Roman inspector did not like – Jews pay half of damage by an animal, while non-Jews – full, because we presume that Jew was watching the animal and damage was unintentional.

Thus, for example, during COVID in a community where kids can learn at home with parents, they can be told to stay home. In a community, where kids will be roaming streets and facebook, kids might need to come to school despite the risk.

>> Yiddish is Yidden’s common tongue.

How non-inclusive of you! R Yaakov Kamenetsky while visiting r Auerbach’s yeshiva suggested that Maschiach will come out of it, because the yeshiva had top shiurim in Hebrew rather than Yiddish, enabling Sephardim to join.

So, it is about context. In some circumstances, Yiddish helps preserve Jews, in others – divides.

Avi K, thanks for the correction Bava Batra 9a, Adam Hashuv indeed. Shita Mekubetzet says Adam Hashuv = Talmkid Chacham + community parnas. So, he seems not interested in the opinions of unlearned merchants and members of kollel, only those who are both learn and are in business. [O, horror ]. Rambam says “Haham Hasuv”, H’M 231:28 uses a similar term “haham hashuv mamono al ha tzibur” …

R Moshe is mentioning these halakhot in the context of allowing modern labor unions. Not clear to me whether members of the union are same as independent artisans. Maybe in “skilled labor”.

I see R Auerbach quoted as referring similarly that as in our days talmidei chachamim do not involve themselves in business affairs, then “it is as if there is no adam hashuv”. This is unclear, as according to definitions above adam hashuv is not just talmid chacham but also parnas, so it is literally there are no adam hashuvim, not “as if”.

This leads to a question – is it a good/bad/pareve thing that we do not have an “adam hashuv” people? Gemorah seems to imply that it is better to have them. so, should people in yeshiva go into business, or should business people learn more to make more hoshuve people?

Avram >> His interpretation of the quote from Rabbi JB Soloveitchik

I failed to add a context: his was asked regarding what girls should learn at school. He asked back whether this is a practical question and the school will follow up. He was not willing to pasken if this is not leading to a practical resolution. This is similar to your own experience.

>> Ballest Teshuva, I laughed and said no,

As Gerer Rebbe said on an occasion “and why not?”

(when a Husid inartfully said – I daven in this shul with baaley teshuva, but I am not one of them).

Reagan did not name an airport after himself, but Biden has a huge welcome center on I-95. Everyone who is smart enough to build something in his n ame without spending his own money, is surely special. Even Cuomo re-named the bridge for his father, not himself.

The irony of building a welcome center for fossil-driving public …

his last words were:
How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?

or maybe these:
You herd of—Boils and plagues
Plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorred
Farther than seen, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile!

or maybe these – and this is really abhorrent in this group:
a plague of these pickle-herring

>> who was educated with the poison of “Modern Orthodoxy”

well, seems like you are listening to some inappropriate shows also, not sure why such flippant insulting of a broad swath of observant Jews is OK. Please clarify who allows that.

R Feinstein was 19 when Great War started and lived under Russian civil war and Soviets, hardly a normal “Europe”. So, you need to look further at the background of the responsa. Maybe, for example, the wife became pro-communist and influenced by those ideas, rather than a mother of 10 who decided to take time off.

seemingly reputable sources now discuss another matter: Facebook donated money to multiple counties for various ways to encourage voting – vehicles, vote verification, etc. the end result is possible incerase in D votes. Not verified.

>> The capability was clear decades ago

that there are viruses around. But not that you can lock the whole world with it. C19 achieved remarkable success in airborne propagation, pre-symptomatic infection, attacking multiple systems and, according to some research, ways to fool immune system (this explain pre-symptomatic – C19 starts multiplying while preventing immune system from working).

Syag, I appreciate your sincerity, but I noticed that you always try to find the worst interpretation of my words for some reason. I am not being flippant – I just presume that people take the idea instead of trying to find what to blame me for. That is why I may look like a blank face – as you are answering to something I did not mean. Say, I am saying that kollel is not work (in the discussion about people paying for their own expenses) and you accuse me of not respecting that people in kollel do not work hard. what should I say – “my best friends are in kollel”? You can also accuse R Elazar and R Ishmael b’ Rav Nachman that teach a need for derech eretz before learning Torah.

If you disagree – feel free to bring some arguments, sources, data. That is what discussions are for.

Avram > people who care about doing the right thing by Hashem and who come across a situation where they don’t know what the right thing is – and so they ask a shaila.

Of course, but people choose what to ask based on what they think is important. There is a lot of stuff declared in this group that seem to deserve a shaila – taking a lot of free food, taking welfare, not learning profession, not wearing masks, going to mass events. In many many cases, it is not clear whether the person asked a shaila, and sometimes I inquire what was the answer and almost never get a straight answer.

Maybe sometimes, if you dont feel it dserves a question, you can still ask a shaila to convince someone else (say, me). As a friend of mine dragged his son (and me) to a posek in Mattesdorf with a loaded “question”: when his son is playing soccer and the father is going to mincha – should he continue playing or go with his father? it was supposed to be a great less in kibuf av – until the Rav suggested to the kid to break from the game for several minutes and daven mincha right there.

n0, two comments:
1) what I mentioned _is_ Torah. Both in terms of learning how to think and in specific sugyot. Why wouldn’t you teach bein adam l’havero to your kids? You need to look wider sometimes. For example, I am connecting Radak on Elisha and the bears with trade unions.

2) to be clear, I don’t think there is one universal answer here, as I alluded before. Some people live in insulated communities. Even then, we may not appreciate how connected kids are now electronically. As with the virus, if you send a kid to a group setting for others to teach them, if they have no phone, friends or friends of friends have. But not everyone has such background. I am coming from families that had engineers and doctors for a number of generations. CTLawyer probably comes from lawyers on Mayflower. Rav Salanter’s son was a ship engineer, if I remember correctly. Rabban Gamliel had 1000 yungele learning Torah and 1000 – Greek. We are not all the same, and it is OK.

Participant, thinking in Europe is that it is the role of the government to censor, not private businesses. So this is more of a European approach. I do not deny irony here.

Maybe a business perspective is better: first amendment works when we have a “marketplace” of ideas. We seem to have a monopolistic structure right now, with several large companies dividing a market to minimize competition. Starting new media is a good approach. But it is pretty hard to break monopolies. so, then government regulation is in order.

In my places, people tell me that unfortunately people got used to that, and there are numerous messages on local mail lists – I have extra milk, who would like to take? Is this happening in other places or a local phenomenon? I don’t know who to blame – governments who just waste our money away or people who who have no problem taking.

A story: when I was dirt poor, a couple of housemates in similar circumstance invited me to go with them, to a place, they said, where you can get cheap fish. It was a long ride, and it turned out it was less than cheap – they were picking up leftovers from the floor at the wholesaler market … I did not know how to react without offending them. So, I bought myself a big box of (still cheap) fish and said that I am all set and will wait for them. They asked me to hold some of their stuff … Later on, when things became better, one of them recalled – remember when we took you to the wholesale market… somehow, we never ended up going there again …

> Unhealthy does not equal dangerous.
Webster is your friend: unhealthy=harmful to health. dangerous=likely to cause harm.
If you are trying to distinguish between harm to yourself and others, it is probab ly not correct and also this may be a libertarian thing, but not a halakhic one.

BTW, we already saw Kiddush Hashem by Israeli government when they were first to vaccinate – not only buying the vaccine but doing it faster than others. Now, with many US states already rescinding indoors mask mandates due to population pressures, Israel will do it in 2 weeks from now. To appreciate how Israel valued human lives with this decision – Their case rate is 20x lower than US and was at that low level for 3 weeks already. Not sure whether this is due to the fact that a large subset of population is resilient with all other threats around, or just the politicians did not buck to pressure.

Birth rate in US: 65 per 1000 women/year in 2001, decreased to 59 in 2018
but look at maternal age:
15-19: decreased from 45 to 18
20-30: decreased from 110 to 83
30-40: increased from 65 to 76
40+ to increased from 9 to 13
so, there seems to be 2 major effects:
1) decrease in early birth, which is in part probably a healthy thing, considering the circumstances ..
2) later births

Opened the thread with trepidation of some other bad news… Baruch Hashem, it is just a metaphorical explosion. Maybe they are using scooters to fulfil a mitzva of respecting their parents and visiting them more often?

I would also think that moto-scooter is less self-harmful than biking in big cities, at least by spending less time on the road.

Halakhically, communism is currently different from roman paganism, because it is still being worshipped. So, visiting Ufizzi is easier than Karl Marx museum …

so, if we disregard the low culture of talk show, the question resolves to whether we need to expose kids to other cultures. I can quote here a definite psak from a choshuve Rav, who told the class that he is often gets shailos from college students whether they can attend a class on comparative religions. Students were interested – so that is the psak? Answer – depends on the student. For those who have a risk of being lured by some aspects of the discussed avodah zara, it is not recommended. For those, who expect to meet different types of people in their life and have a mind to address this, the class is recommended.

My post-covid commentary is that this has to be done with parents in the room, whether it is an academic class or a political debate where you can learn together and connect it to the Jewish values.

ujm > Having less babies by rejecting nature as offered to you by the RBS”O is a relatively new phenomenon

Same as kids throwing away unfinished food. We live in an age of plenty and have yeshurun problems.

>> A woman’s place is in the home.

I understand halakha gives considerable autonomy to women. On one hand, it is definitely fine if the woman stays at home. Some current government people disagree. They are now quoting numbers of women who stayed at home during COVID as a generational “setback”. They insist on measuring and forcing women into workforce without, seemingly, bothering to ask those women what they actually prefer.

On the other hand, halakha definitely allows for women in business, allowing them to keep and manage property. Even in Torah learning, R Yehuda brings an unprompted example of Beruriah learning from multiple teachers to someone who thinks he can learn fast. She probably had to travel to get to all of these classes, unless they were on zoom.

You can make a case that halakha requires a woman not to be idle. Then, with all the (men-invented) dishwashers and washing machines, there is less things to do at home. Of course, standards of tideness increased in response (mostly by women themselves!). So, then she can either need to work or teach the kids. So, she needs either a profession, a Torah education, or secular education. Otherwise, we are essentially relegating women to spending their times to make the houses look better than Joneses, which is not a mitzvah at all.

PS New consideration – women can now work or do business from home, maybe resolving some of the contradictions?

>> Tell the kids to stay far away from politics.

this is exactly what I said. If you think they can be in a totally isolated environment, then shoin …
My Rav likes quoting a Hasidishe Rav in 1920s Poland who would not let his daughter to the street [ina Hasidic neighborhood], as there was no way to escape the influence.

So, for those who will get exposure wither in college, or worksforce, or secondary via conversations with other people who have exposure, you need to guide them with Torah values. The person who asked here – obviously if his kid is asking about a radio, then he is exposed – even if he is not listening to the radio, he is talking to people who listen to the radio.

>> Communism is no more of an avodah zarah than any political stance.

Just a little more deadly to Jews and the world in general than many. And attracted a lot of Jews at a time. That is why I mention it. Chafetz Chaim’s daughter asked hom for a brocha to have children tzaddikim. He gave her a broach to have many children. She thought he misunderstood .. He said – we can’t guarantee in this generation …