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>> 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.Health, there is this attractive idea of “them” – Tzedukim, Reformim, Tzionim who created some problems. Well, all these movements started at some moment from inside of Jewish community – in response to some other test that Hashem challenged us with. Of course, everyone has a free will, but it is fair to ask whether Jewish community as a whole didn’t fully stand to the test, not just the peshayim. To again quote R Salanter – when someone does not learn well in beit midrash it affects a professor in Berlin. Anther example – Chofetz Chaim not greeting a melamed who did not accept Trotsky as a kid.
To your example, R Berel Wein traces zioni-religious fight in Israel to the animosity between kahal and community coming from the tragedy of Cantonists that Russia forced the communities to provide – and the choice would often fall on poor and orphans. And while the Czar has most of the blame, many kehilot, such as Vilna, were weakened by chasidim/misnaged split that Russian government exploited.
tocho k’voro just showed up In Daf Yoma 72b – both Rava and Abaye say that this is a requirement for T’Ch, or (Abaye) it is a toeva. Nobody seems to contradict here. Maybe the opposite opinion was OK for Tannaim in EY, where they can control behaviors better, but would lead to abuses in Bavel?
> What’s the halachic basis for Yekkes only waiting three hours
what’s the halakhic basis to do only 6 hours?! really menchen did 24 hours according to Gemora.
Avram, he sounds ambiguous:
>> We do not require masks or 6 feet separation because we are totally outside.which I read that he prefers outside without masks to davening inside with masks. But later he says that he somehow likes his new minyan. What I am saying, there is no reason to argue about this during the transitional period, hopefully to the better. We usually don’t fight about other issues where there is a range of opinions, same here.
Maybe the OP can clarify, but here are some possible reasons he might have, consciously or not: there is a mutual good feeling between mispalelim who literally went thru heat and cold together; there might be people who go to the main shul who were disregarding safety rules; they may not have liked something in the shul atmosphere to begin with …
Note that there are now reports from multiple areas that post-pandemic lead to many people re-evaluating their lives – jobs, work-home balance, education .. there are always people like that, but now we had a moment of a collective world-wide teshuva movement. Hopefully, we all utilize this moment for the better.
> who sometimes do the Yekkishe washing … also sometimes eat milichigs three hours
is this a major kulah? you make Kiddush, you wash, you eat challah, just in a different order. You also make kiddush with clean hands. Just had in the daf, Kohen Godel reads one of the parshiyot by heart instead of a scroll to avoid tircha d;tziburah, surely you can say kiddush with clean hands. I’ve seen people doing it not as a routine but in certain circustances, say in a sukkah where coming in and out takes long time.
lowerourtuition – a good question. How do you think Isroel Meier HaCohen would say it?
btw, NYT obituary says Chofetz, they should know! NYT wished him long life so much, they listed his as 105, not 95.> “Kulahs” – That is reserved for you M.O. Guys!
why is this lashon hara on BMG? Greater greatness is required for kulos, are you saying none of them aspire to that?
and how about kulos on protection from covid? someone paskened on that
a hard question – as many minhagim may be influenced by cultures we lived in. One example from the Torah would be Hashem insisting on hatzot for yetsiyat Mitzraim – and following up on his threat. So, apparently, He considers important to follow up the time, even when the other side does not insist on it. In other cases, “boker” or “erev” seems to suffice.
Maybe, the bottom line is that you don’t have to go crazy about timing. Asa Avira is saying, depends on the person. One may need a precise schedule, another can dedicate an afternoon to a topic… but if you did make an appointment or a schedule, then you should follow up.
Note that computer culture promotes the Yekkesh attitude: taxes are due until 12:00, same goes with online exams and proposals. Is it the same everywhere or just in US? Do online systems in South America allow for late returns?
Avram,
if the question is should temporary minyanim become permanent, I am on the side of “no” with possible exceptions where people discovered that main shul was not for them for a very serious reason. This is not a new issue, chasidut started with breaking up communities like that.from my point of view, it is still an issue of COVID. US is behind Israel and on par with UK and both of these countries are starting or considering rollbacks of relaxing. Delta’s R0 ~ 7 invites frequent burst that will helpfully be contained. Still with current decreased case levels due to vaccinations, both sides now have on what to rely, that is why I consider it not so important. Compare to good old times, when someone comes to a minyan coughing and sneezing. Some will offer an abi gezund and a tissue, others would move away and give him a look, and both responses are within reasonable limits.
I am not an expert on biology, but I can use statistics – if there are at least 3 different technologies for vaccines 1) mRNA, 2) J&J, AZ 3) Sinovac, Sputnik – and someone finds different flaws in all of them, maybe there is no point in arguing each of the points separately, as there is obviously some other objection.
that’s not all of Munkatz – I recall they are also in Petach-Tikwa near rehov Chafetz Chaim (that was named for the apartment bought for Ch. Chaim)
when a sefer becomes a personal name, should we use it correctly? Maybe, when the naming happened during their lifetime? There were no such people as Beis Yosef or Chafetz Chaim – only Beit Yosef and Chofetz Chaim …
It is amazing how well written Hebrew survived comparing with Oral (and with other languages). Maybe the point is that we can see how reliable written tradition is comparing with Oral. I may not be able to converse with someone from Munkach, whatever country it is, but I can read Rambam (in Hebrew translation)
philosopher, there was no Moscow Russia 1500 years ago, you might be drinking too much vodka. Kiev Rus existed ~ 1000 years ago, that’s where modern Ukraine is. Pale by definition was areas previously belonging to other countries. Lubavich become pro-Russian, rather than Russian during Napoleon wars, still it did not move them from Belorus, which used to be part of Lita.
Somehow, we need to both recognize that we are still in golus and recognize the miracle of beauty of Eretz Israel full of Jewish people and Torah.
We were davening for centuries to be able to return to EY, and when it starts happening – excuse me Hashem, this is not the way I thought this should happen. 0
So we easily recognize idiosyncrasies of yekkes, Russians, Galicians, including how they reflect surrounding societies, sometimes for good, sometimes not … but can we look at ourselves and recognize what looks normal to us, but is not – for american and israeli Jews especially?
Acura, yes I find it a sign of great integrity when a Rav guides the student according to student’s path, not Rav’s, whether in learning style or minhagim. Goes back to Elisha bAbuya riding a horse and telling R Meir to turn back because of tehum shabbat, and Hillel quoting Shammai’s position first