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Syag, I am confused and intrigued – what exactly you don’t believe in the “murder theory”?
A. that people died? this is confirmed by “excess deaths” statistics by now…B. that our actions affected how many people died? As a kid understood it, if the world would stay home for several weeks, the plague would have stopped. You said before that early period deaths were hard to avoid. This might be. But most deaths were later on, from fall 2020 to February 2021.
C. That your community consists of such tzadikim that melech hamaves skipped it? Still, can you rely on the miracle, and with some many Talmidei Chachamim passing, are you saying you are more deserving than them?
D. Maybe you are saying that this is just a small number of people who died – 2 in a 1,000 that it is barely noticeable and you can’t really connect their deaths with a specific behavior? Hashem does not have this problem though. Sad to think about a person who arrives to Olam Habo with a bunch of humros b’yado, prepared for questions: were you honest in business? I never wasted my time on that! Did you have a learning seder? every day, even during pandemic. Instead he is taken to the room with common criminals and shown a video: you coughed at your hevruta, then your hevruta coughed at his father, who coughed at Rosh Yeshiva ….
GH, true, you can’t keep other things in the tefilin bag, but what you put a tefilin bag in the cooler – does the cooler still have the status oof the tefilin bag or not?
and recall, people used to put tefilin on the window in the bathroom, until (allegedly) ladies of the night started picking them up for blackmail …
> They’re on the same page.
Being on the same page is a good place for arguing. Like Rashi and Tosofos.
Common, I don’t know which words you don’t understand as you reply in generalities: those who were not careful increased propagation of COVID and contributed to 600K people in US dying. If you are meikel on that, you should expect less respect that people who are meikel on shabbos or kashrus.
As you did, I was going back to one shul last June, measured their air flows, opened windows. Then, half of the minyan would close windows and wear masks half-way despite (Lakewood-type) Rabbi’s instructions. When an elderly person came in and they continued the same way, I just did not see myself davening with a group like that.
PS The fact that I was instructed [by my wife] to wear a mask (on a plane) in mid-February, while CDC and common saychel decided in mid-March, was a proof who I should listen to :). Mi hu hahama – roa es hanolad.
Avira, you are wonderfully sensitive to your heritage, you should e as sensitive to people coming from different perspective – Hebrew, English, Hungarian … As Herman Wouk’s grandfather said, departing for Israel after years of trying to find Yiddish-speaking students in US: I probably should have learned English, but at first impression it sounded too crude …
Also, note that some of the fights of previous generations do not have to be fought a century later: Hebrew of anti-religious Zionists does not affect current Israeli Hebrew-speakers; going to University 200 years ago was a haskalah statement, and is a getting a job statement now.
A related concern – outside mezuzos where they get direct sunlight, especially in hot climate. I am told to use wooden and NOT to use metal cases in such cases as the parchment will just burn.
Go to Amazon warehouse. They pay $15/ hour, you should be able to afford food with thi, if you make your shabbat as chol.
Because that’s how rabbis of old look on the photos … Before color photos … They also look very serious – because it took many minutes to capture the picture ..
> Hebrew, by contrast, was designed for the specific purpose of “reviving” judaism to be zionism
R Yaakov Kamenetsky when visiting R Ouerbach’s yeshiva remarked tahat Mo/ashiach will come from that yeshiva – because they switched top shiurim from Yiddish to Hebrew, thus, enabling Sephardim to also attend.
Ani gar be-midibar.
First it rhymes, second it refers to the explanation that Hazon Ish gave to Satmar Rebbe about the yeshiva system he was establishing in Israel, following Rambam that if one lives in a bad place, he needs to move, and if there is no other place, then go live in the midbar. The original SD.
This was 70+ years ago, so you are on the way to double over Moshe Rabbeinu’s record in the midbar.
A better way to prepare for the next “new virus” pandemic is to get younger.
On the other hand, you want to prepare for all other viruses it pays to be older and already have the t-cells. So, it is catch-22.According to Zeynab Tufekci, there was a pandemic in the 70s that killed 700K people – all in the 20s and younger … As they know now, it was because it was a virus from the 50s that Chinese continue testing on live people and it eventually went “viral” and affected only those who were not affected in the 50s.
again, anyone who is suspicious of mRNA technologies – did you try J&J, sputnik or sinopharm?
? I apoligized for not writing carefully and posting invert of what I intended. I am also sorry you are not satisfied with my apology! 🙂
I did not say a word about myself. I did not wear a mask until last February.
?? just saying I mised “not” in
Some of that original pessimism was because many believed that vaccines can NOT be developed so fast>> I have friends who PRE COVID 1will not ever touch a shopping cart without bleaching it,
I am glad that you are blessed with good friends.
So, Pres Biden told us that he’ll do the job of distributing vaccines that Pres Triump provided to him. As it is, new vaccination rates are decreasing steadily from April, now at 0.2% per day. Canada, many EU countries are doing 1% a day. Some of then are already ahead of US in number of people with at least 1 vaccine and no sign of slow-down. According to a left-wing articles, Feds do not have many ideas beyond what governors are already doing and sending Kamala and EdD Jill around. US seemingly has hard time even re-sending expiring vaccines to countries that would use them. Sad.
smerel, I don’t think you can judge who is leaving yiddishkeit by counting activists. Most people move on with their lives without joining organizations.
> Bilaam viewed Hashem like any other AZ
Bilaam is a stickler to “halakha” – he follows Hashem in “small and big”. He just refuses to consider what Hashem actually wants. He is told “this nation is blessed”, but he is still focused on his narrow question – can he go and try to curse. He refuses to accept reality around him and tries to find terutzim to allow him do what he wants.
Syag: hahaha that it was thought the vaccine would come quick and save the day. Trump was the only one who thought that and everyone knew he was nuts.
Apoligizse, I skipped “not” – I absolutely agree with you. You can see that business experience at the top level of government helps solve problems.
I do not understand the rest of your post. Yes, there were some people who were careful but got exposed. Statistically, people who were more careful, were less exposed. Yes, virus was spreading before it was understood, but not everyone was exposed. R0 – number of people that are infected by one carrier was about 2 at the beginning and fell down to less than 1 when SD was introduced.
It may be you are focusing too much on masks themselves and taking worst case of bad masks and wondering about the protection, but surely SD was important – those who were circulating less were better off. Again, I only learned post-factum that Panevezh Rosh Yeshiva was apparently not giving pubmic lectures until he and his students were vaccinated. Was he unreasonably careful? Why didn’t he go out [ublic after his vaccine without requiring students vaccinated
most important argument for being careful with these issues: it does not matter whether someone deserves reparation in theory, what matters is the public policies that will be enacted in response. And most of those that are proposed are bad for the society and bad for the former slaves.
Here is a simple test to see if someone is sincere: do they support choice in education – vouchers for private schools charter, online – anything that will help at least some poor people to escape bad schools . If they do not (and most unfortunately do not), it means they do not really care about helping these people, but about some other things.
there is a recent Pew research about Jews in US. It has information about switches between denominations, interpmarriage, etc. I did not read the whole report yet.
>> How about from the get go of Covid there allows for a range of opinions and it is not worth arguing about it?
I did. I think I came here first to hear opinions of people who disagree as I was surprised by some of the behaviors I saw and heard of. Unfortunately, I did not hear any rational arguments. This is together with overwhelming evidence that being careful saves lives.
I also never heard from any Rabbis who had a permissive opinion. Local beit din issued a call for stay at home. In two places, where I saw people not being careful, the Rabbis always were. One of them told us that he approached an Yid in the street and admonished him.
Also, we may not be getting full information about what Rabbis think, for whatever reasons. For example, I only recently learned that R Edelstein gave his first public speech in front of his students. I am not sure why facts like that were not known, maybe you were but nobody quoted him before.
> do not want Rebbeim to influence their children, just to teach them.
not all, but some Rebbeim in a Litivishe school were influencing my kids to use “modern” as a generic swear word for everything they disagree with, as some do it here. To borrow your words, “This lack of respect for religion rubs off on the children.” When we went online, kids kept the middos they learned, but stopped swearing.
> Perhaps Chareidim can become more “modern” and still be clearly Orthodox while MO who want to move to the left become otd.
We use right/left colloquially as a political attribute and it does correlate with Haredi/MO division in US – Charedi are voting more rightwing , I am not sure we can apply it to our relationship to Hashem, and we already have right/left notion in Judaism. Are T’Ch who knew science more “left wing”? R Soloveichik? R Hertz? Rambam? Rabban Gamliel? is Shmuel more left-wing than Rav, because he seems to be stringer in dinim/business, while Rav in “religion”?
HaKatan, I agree with most of it. There is this all-american minhag that a 18-y.o. needs to move away from family to an expensive dorm to develop on his own…Jews accepted this – and it works either with colleges and yeshivas and seminaries. Especially for those who go to areas without Jewish community – what is the motivation? If they choose such a college to begin with with parent approval – can we presume that there is a problem to begin with, not with kids in college?
As to hashkafa, I think parents should be more pro-active discussing those before kid goes to college. Most people eventually gets exposed to politics, science, culture. Even if they do not have a fbook, their friends do. My observation is that in many schools, whether modern or not, Jewish and general educations are on separate tracks. English/History/Science teachers might be normal, or they can push various agendas on their own. I guess schools with no English education do not have that problem..
>> We were told repeatedly by the CDC and medical personnel that this virus CANNOT be prevented. ,,, Especially with inadequate masks
Some of that original pessimism was because many believed that vaccines can be developed so fast and will be so effective and society will not be able to SD forever.
“cannot be prevented” and “slow the spread” are contradictory – as we “slowed the spread”, vaccines were developed and now most people who did not have it before will be safe. “slow the spread” means that without measures we used, there will be an extra million dead.
There was no reason for “inadequate” masks after first 1-2 months. K95 masks are widely available. Furthermore, if you were able and chose to change your lifestyle temporarily, you could live without masks most of the time.
You seem to circle to some generic philosophical “expert conclusions” instead of focusing on simple medical facts – being not careful causes increased virus propagation and people sick. Virus does not know about CDC recommendations, it just needs a person nearby to jump to.
Avram,
I agree that in normal circumstances, people should be davening in a shul.
I also think that current period allows for a range of opinions and it is not worth arguing about it.
I stopped by an indoor minyan in a huge building, and the only persons, besides me, who had a mask was a medical doctor and an apparently unvaxed youngster, as the gabbai gave him a mask. Rabbis and lawyers did not have one… the rules were to have a mask up to several weeks ago …common > OTD= No shabbos or Kashrus n
so, what about those kids who were eating kosher at school, but not at home. For the teachers who do not know them well, it will look like a kid went OTD, while he merely went home. I am not denying the original premise though, just calling for counting carefully. A story from a Rav at a college in support of the thesis: a mother calls him and starts asking details about kashrus on campus. After enough questions, Rav asked her back: did you take the kid for a multi-day hike? Yes. did he take his tefillin with him? Oh, no … Then maybe you should be worrying whether he is going to take it to college, not my kashrus …
philosopher: it’s ok … people want to FORCE their OPINIONS
as I explained, it is not symmetric. People who are careful are usually not harming anyone. If I’m not going to the pizzeria, I am harming the store owner, but I am not obligated to support him to begin with, and I use other services instead.
People who are not careful are part of the reason we had 600K people dead and more sick [proof, thanks to my kid: if everyone would stay at home for 2 weeks, the virus will be gone. QED]. You can have your argument that it is just a small problem, that your community has magic protection. that it is ok to kill the grandma for the sake of your mental health, etc. But you need to make your argument, and the other side does not. Similar to any other topic: a person who hits kids needs to prove that it is mutar. The person who is nice to kids, does not have to prove anything.
> t were still slaves themselves a
the agada talks about Mitzrim suing Jews in front of Alexander the Great, that is some time later, in the context of other clever responses by Geviha ben Pesisa, see Sanhedrin 91a. Geviha ben Pesisa starts his responses thrice: if I lose, you can say they defeated a Hediyot… so, it underscores that his argument is not really very good, but a clever legal trick.
again, you don’t like mRNA, you can take J&J, AZ, Sinopharm, Sputnik, wear full N-95, or just stay home. If none of these choices are good for you, then this is not a rational, but a religious position. You are simply refusing to accept reality that Hashem put you in.
This reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend some time ago who brought up multiple reasons for not eating kosher meat. Most of them did not stand scrutiny, but he settled that it will cost him too much. I then offered to pay for his family’s meat. Everyone got interested in this insult – I was a grad student and he had a very high-paying job. He then switched saying that it takes too much time to go get it. I am embarrassed to say that I was not tzaddik enough to offer deliveries, looking back at that, I probably should have. (that was before Amazon and UberEats)
I am not sure which exactly schools are discussed here. but I think a number of such schools have kids from less observant families to begin with – who view a Jewish school as a good prep school with Jewish kids, with varying attitudes towards religion. Of course, we hope that these kids will be affected by the school to the better, but it may not be the case. So, we need to count outcome separately based on their family history. This is similar to some teacher/school evaluation metrics that look at the improvement by the school comparing with what kids were before, rather than looking at current grades.
philosopher, people who take vaccines and are careful are not negatively affecting anyone, except that you feel you are surrounded by sheep, and we probably also give you an ayn hara.
people who do not take vaccines and/or are not careful contribute to continuation of the pandemic, causing damage to the society, and dead and sick people. Even people who are vaccinated can still be infected. As we talked before, 95% protection from infection is based on the same behavior with and without vaccine. If you take a vaccine and relax behavior while being in the same treat environment, your risk is still high. For example, if a person is in the group of unvaccinated uncareful people and is close to them for a sustained time period, he will get infected, even as his chance of getting seriously sick is not high. Still, it is possibly some damage to health that we do not know well enough. It is seen now in Israel – even with very low overall rates, the moment rules are relaxed, one person can infect tens of people.
Most significant benefit from the vaccine comes from the group effect – R0 <1: each person infects on average less than 1 person and soon everyone around is clean. Currently, US R0 is just lower than 1 – 0.85 – it achieved lowest point of 0.75 on May 25 and went up for the two weeks after that, when everyone started relaxing the rules. Most Europe (except UK) and Canada have now R0=0.5 that is decreasing dramatically. US also now vaccinating 0.3% of population per day – as much as under Trump, while Europe does 0.8% per day.
RebE > . A responsibilty on the public is a responsibility on each individual of the group.
I think Sam is pointing out that when the tzara is for a group, then it relates to the problems of the whole group. [see Pharaoh’s dreams when he was not satisfied with explanations that were personal and not communal].
And if the group ( a gantze velt in this case) includes Jews, then Jews might be the problem [see Yona on the ship]. So, maybe anti-semites have a point blaming Jews for all kind of problems [See Beitza 25, why Hashem gave Jews Torah to protect the world from us]
coffee > got “reparations” technically from מצרים look at the midrash
I was thinking about it too – notice that Jews used the reparation idea only in defense against Mitzrim claiming money from us! We remember Mitzraim but not because we are looking for their payoff. Otherwise, every Seder would include a list of things Mitzrim owe to us. We do not. The trap of former slaves may be partially explained by selection: everyone except them (and natives) volunteered to come to America, whether legally or illegally, under duress or lured by the riches, every American packed suitcases and got moving. So, everyone has a certain attitude passed on in their families and was somewhat unusual among their peers. Slaves did not have that and, in addition, all their families were destroyed.
> , a few months in a dorm destroys everything the kid picked up in yeshiva.
While I do not want to underestimate the challenges, should we not ask – what is the value of 12+ years of Jewish education that is destroyed in a few months of a dorm?
Disclaimer: my kids are packing up right now for the (online) college.
> And when it will be His Will then the virus will become extinct
So, it seems to be His will to create a vaccine so fast, but some rebels refuse to take it preventing all of us from return to normal life – and have hutzpah to complain.
to previous questions from Participant, according to my limited understanding:
vaccines increases immune response. Yes, it may move someone from symptomatic to asymptomatic, but at the same time, it will prevent someone else from asymptomatic transmission at all. Very weak vaccines, like Chinese, seem to be creating problems on countries like Mongolia, possibly because of immediate relaxation of rules. Vaccines create 2 responses – antibodies and T-cells. Antibodies prevent transmission and also decrease with time and possibly with variants. T-cell take time to respond, so they prevent serious illness but not transmission. T-cell response may even improve with time and is covering more variants. In the same Mongolia, cases skyrocketed, deaths increased way less, at least for now.there are lots of lessos learned from this pandemic and new questions:
– need to monitor for outbreaks and react to them in real time (closing borders was considered impolite, not anymore)
– domestic (or democratic) production of medicine and other strategic goods (not just USA, EU is looking at that also)
– quick vaccine development (mRNA) and methods to do Phase 3s quickly (Trump’s achievement)– accountability (not solved). Would we allow someone to claim a mistake for a minor nuclear explosion or would we invoke MAD doctrine? should the same apply to bio-weapons?
– decoupling of virus protection from politics (not solved)
Participant: 1/3 were vaccinated, 1/2 were children, 70% were Delta. While the level in the country is low, the cases seem to be connected with arrivals, some from low-risk Cyprus. Israeli gov is asking Israelis not to travel for fun. They are not saying it to visitors from Chutz, but think for yourself.
MA > Please explain.
people were exposed to transmittable diseases all the time. They either took protection or not, and contined living (Obviously, we are coming from those who did). For example, Newton did most of his work on physics after abandoning Cambridge for his estate for a couple of years during a bubonic plague pandemic.