Always_Ask_Questions

Dofi, I understand you are trying to save the kids, but Amazon is actually firing right now, not hiring.
so do not mislead Avira into unemployment. You’ll have to pay him then!

Centrist > i think the only BIG mistake was made by the reporting of the story before the facts were clear.(small mistake done by the man,slightly bigger by the woman, slightly bigger by shomrim)

There is just one person in this story who could have behaved like a mench – and NONE of that would happen.

He could have read a sefer or engage someone in divrei Torah and let ladies finish their conversation in dignity. Why going between any two people who are talking, whatever gender or combination thereof they are? And bother someone’s kid for the whole six seconds. Imagine now, 100 people need to leave and the kid is being walked back & forth for an hour!?

It all started with his gaava that him getting on time to watch the football game was more important than the divrei chesed and Torah that the ladies were having.

Avira,
I was not clear on your position – so you would agree on pollution, but not with “climate issues”?

I don’t think our positions differ much then. I also think that most of the climate hype is an aveira, with people pursuing their political instincts and/or financial interests. It is easier to scare people by some future unknown threat into taxation and submission than solve actual problems.

I think I disagree that this highly visible group of alarmists represent “scientific community”. Most of the latter continue solving world’s problems and do not get into NYT unless something bad happens.
Historical example I used before Fritz Haber got a Nobel for contribution to fertilizer process, saving/creating billions of lives, but lost world recognition, and his wife to a suicide, for inventing poison gas for the German army. World is not paying attention to important things both in ruchniyus and gashmiyus.

why not just use a wired telephone? problem(s) solved.

Avira,
it seems that most people here have hard time believing that you can be so partisan and biased in this forum and more reasonable in the classroom. I can believe it, although not fully. I’d like to address 2 issues:
1) when you discuss an issue – do you present all sides or just the psukim/opinions you prefer? how much do you discuss inyanim related to helping all yidden, including those who are not frum by your standard (maybe not all of them).

2) doing the job parents paid for honestly. I presume that parents are not coming to school for your shitos. If they were, they would send them somewhere else. Pls correct me if I am wrong. At best, they are saying – ok, the school is great in maths, sports, and last year chumash teacher was great, so there is nothing better than that. At worst, they are not aware that you are not holding where other teachers and parents are.

That is, you are teaching kids not in the way the parents prefer. That is, they hire you thru a shaliach (school) to do a job and you are not doing it the way they want. Either they have iyush because there is effective monopoly in the segment of the market or they are not expecting what they are getting. Let me know if you disagree with this premise.

You say it is 1%. There is 20% margin for sending wrong amount of shmata, but this is in the case of error. Not sure what is halakha when you are using bad weights on purpose. Also, it is a human brain you are operating on. Damaging 1% is often killing. Also, some do not believe here that is “only 1%”. Anyway, why go into chinuch when you are cheating by “only 1%”. Go into diamonds, 1% stealing with at least make you rich so you can give tzedokah.

Let me give you an example. Say, the father is teaching his son to become a doctor while at the same time learn a couple of hours a day and do chesed. Then, the boy gets a 7th grade rebbe who teaches him, unbeknownst to me, that those who go to college are mevatel Torah, involve in pritzut, etc. The heilieke Rebbe is totally unaware that the kid has 5 generations of doctors, none of whom went off the derech that way. Can the father sue for lost wages, including unrealized tzedoka and chesed for this and future generation of lost doctors? Or should he wait until the old Rebbe has a heart attack, calls the old father, who says sorry, I do not operate any more, call my son. The son comes and says – no problem, Rebbe, I’ll say kaddish for you with kavanah.

eddiee > you can’t say that since people would be insulted the halacha changes.

halochos ben adam l’havero definitely depend on the havero. Saying something that insults or offends the person depends, in part, if the person is insulted. You can’t tell him that you would not be insulted and, thus, you can say it. It is his sensitivity that matters. And sensitivities change between people, also between cultures, and between centuries.

I heard about 2 identical stories of a bochur saying out of turn “there is no tachanun today”. In pre-WW2 Europe, the gabbay “kindly” asked everyone to stay to the side and invited the bochur to the front row as the “new Rebbe” to teach him a lesson. In Israel, R Ouerbach whispered to the gabbay “skip the tachanun” …

Eddie > My question to AAQ is, why is MY action obviously inappropriate, because YOU reported it?

If you do something that causes adverse effects in the universe, just stop doing it. Safety achieved
by a further step – investigate all cases where you got close to a problem and learn from that. Feds investigate all “near collisions”. Best predictor of car accidents is number of times a person brakes abruptly… But if, to the opposite, you focus on finding blame in others, there is no hope for improving your midos.

Here is an example to illustrate: I was coming to an intersection and thought that I can enter it safely. Then, while I was closing on it, I saw a car going extremely fast, so at the last moment I stopped to let it go. When I moved forward, I saw the fast driver stopped in the other lane. I also stopped, thinking that he needs to change lanes. Turns out, he stopped his mad rush only to wait for me to show me a finger for daring to come so close to his path – and then took off again…

Was he mad? probably. I still made a note to myself to evaluate what is happening before coming too close to the intersections.

Dr. Pepper, this is how free market works – people are trying to do things, some more, some less risky, and some of them work out. You mentioned insurance problem. We, “the people”, had lot of unsolvable problems – horses were hard to feed, wheat was hard to mill, houses were only 2 floors high, and cows were killed to write on scrolls… somehow, people solved many of these problems, so don”t be so upset about the remaining ones.

I found that kabbalists were using Hashmal. Good enough for them, good enough for me.

jackk does not have no business references, businesses are for profit and evil. He has two government references and they’ll stop by to check on you shortly.

Avira, thanks for answering my question and sorry for the scolding you are getting…

I see that you are somewhat in a pickle: you proclaim and teach importance of the truth but then have to say things to your students that are appropriate for the school. I don’t think it is wrong per se, just an intellectual contradiction that I am sure you have a resolution for. It does not look like you are doing it just for financial reasons also.

What I am not sure though whether your declared behavior is always what actually happens. As others mentioned saying, for selected ones, that some Jews are cut off, even if they can come back in not what a serious, non-LW, MO Rav would say .. so, it is probably similar with many other issues that you may not even notice consciously. Also, with sending kids to “frummer” places – I hope this is with agreement of the parents and your school administration. This might be a geneva otherwise.
JJ Herman sent a kid to a yeshiva and then went to tell his parents. I think we would have been arrested in our days.

So, back to putting myself into the shoes of the parents – I presume my kids are serious enough to hear the “truth” for you and I would probably inform the administration when I find out that teaching is not as expected from the school. And I would when kids start calling their cousins not part of am isroel or something like that. In the ideal world, I would also go to beis din to recover tuition and bitul zman.

So, one, not the only, way mesirah is bad – non-Jews will typically inflict harsher punishment than this Yid deserve. A thief can get a long prison sentence or have his hand cut off, instead of monetary payment by us. In this case, kidnapper is hayav misa and non-Jewish punishment is milder.

> I recommend that you never look at a child for more than 2 seconds.

you are evidently struggling with the fact that this person was reported. If he was reported, that means his actions were not appropriate, whatever faults you can find in my logic.

Gadol, welcome back. Do we have here posts from the icebergs!?

The “only” problem with E-sts is that they mix up priorities making Earth into an idol, and in misusing lofty far-away goals in order to extract money frmo us today. Nothing new here. Christians, Communists, etc did the same

huju, what are you questioning? Are you served gefilte fish for breakfast?

Gadol, marrying younger does not eliminate Rambam’s suggested order – work -> house (or prequalified for mortgage, I guess) -> marriage. A 17-y.o. can go get a job and earn enough to use Uber.

this is a very self-centered argument whether the Tam behaved appropriately. This episode is a simple proof that such behavior is not appropriate as it may cause moris ayin and a long prison term.

Maybe, just maybe, there is room to permit when there is a camera that will help during prosecution. Even then it is a big bitul Torah for the Tam, the youngele, his ima, dayan and lawyers, most of whom might be Jewish. And the camera may be off.

To sum, staying away from questionable behavior that might cause a problem is an etzah tova. If you don’t want to walk between two nashim tzadkiyos, just get out a sefer and wait until they finish the conversation. At worse, you’ll do an extra siyum.

> at which point he didn’t have to walk between women, and he exited alone.

Just browsing here, finally a reason for this bizarre episode. Maybe, this should be called
Tzaddik Shoteh (paraphrasing Gemora about someone not saving a drowning woman as chasid shoteh).

emes, you are right to consider issues on their observable merits. Then, there is a hope to figure them out.

for example, fossil fuels made our cities so much cleaner – comparing with the horses that previously occupied and polluted the streets. When you have something even cleaner – and cheaper – everyone will switch to that. “Cheaper” is important – expensive means spending more resources on producing that thing.

And also need to take reality into account – look at Germans who went off their gas and coal, and clean nuclear energy and depended instead on buying cheap Russian gas while growing their “clean” resources – while also enjoying cheap dirty energy that was critical for their manufacturing exports – and not spending enough on defense. I think their behavior is more dangerous to the world than eating from plastic plates.

similar thing may be with some recycling: China used to buy it, now I think it does not, and there is no reasonable way to deal with it. My info may be outdated though.

The main motivation behind kesuba and a large party is for the hatan to take the wedding seriously and not, h’v, be ready to change his mind and divorce first time kallah burns his porridge. So, _hatan_ spending some serious money on the process is OK. 200 zuz is an bligatory amount, at some point bnei kohanim asked for 400. Whatever the market will bear. But there no reason for kallah to do that.

On the other hand, we mentioned before about cheap medieval weddings. Turns out, in 1930 Mir yeshiva, they also had weddings 2 hours before shabbos, then close relatives having a shabbos dinner, and then whole community coming for sheva brochos (just the brochos, not food).

I think I saw this quote in Rambam who did not bring his sources as usual, but I traced it to Zohar.

I think the argument about maskilim is somewhat outdated. It was relevant to University of Berlin 100 years ago, but I don’t think anyone’s observance is threatened in our days by exposure to python programming or even Calculus, lo aleinu. Medical education is obviously a study of Creation.
Is it different in other circles? Anyone went OTD after he/she learned to code? (I am separating actual chochma from social effects of putting bunch of teenagers on campus)

But even in earlier times – if you read Chofetz Chaim, he is warning in multiple essays and letters in 1920s against anti-religious schools who perverse Torah, and to lack of Jewish education, but I don’t see where he says that math and science are bad per se. Maybe I did not see the right letter. Does he

> when i was a kid, the scientists were saying that in 10 years, coastal cities would be submerged

The scientists I know spoke about different things, and achieved many of them. That includes plastics. btw. I know a little from my father O’H how difficult it is to develop a new type of plastics that fits a particular purpose and can be produced commercially.

Just do some meta-thinking. Imagine you talk to someone whose knowledge of Gemora is based on NYT or some more intellectual magazine. You would not expect him to have a clue, right? So, if you are learning about science from similar sources, do you think you know more?

I had once an experience that I hopefully learnt from. A local rov in a small town decided to write a small article about what I was doing there in a local Jewish publication. We sat down and he asked me a bunch of questions and wrote down the answers. When I read the article, the number of errors was astounding. Whatever was the source of misunderstandings, it taught me to take any published info with a grain of salt.

Great, people are now alluding to various statistics sources. Now, start making your case quoting those numbers.

And please don’t throw everyone with a pen into the same bin as “scientists”. Same as putting Rabonim and Reform Rabbis in the same “clergy” category.

The klal is that the closer a researcher is to reality and experiment, the more yashar he is. Physicists are rarely know to fake nuclear experiments. Nuclear bomb worked as predicted … Satellites fly, GPS takes you to your destination without you even knowing how it is being done. It is worse when it comes to economics, and worse to obvious political areas.