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WM, isn’t it a bit strange for Jews to be saying “We posek the Orthodox Patriarchs, not the Catholic Pope”?
Pashuteh Yid, you are hereby declared Chief Rabbi of Beis Ha’Shekel. Your congregation is larger than anyone will admit 🙂
Thanks, bombmaniac. It’s nice to know that we can enjoy the argument while agreeing on the important things.
It’s like those “Prettiest Baby” contests. Every entry gets six votes – mother, father, grandparents.
The greatest Jew is probably living quietly, loving Hashem and his or her family, caring for others, trying to be righteous and do right by the community. And because a heart that great is also humble and self-effacing we’ll never hear about it. Aren’t we taught that the real Tzaddiks whose righteousness ensures the survival of the world are invisible and anonymous even to themselves?
Oomis, a lot depends on your Rov’s background. Was his PhD in linguistics or a something related? What sort of professional work did he do in the field? What got published in peer-reviewed journals? How was it received? As they say “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Did he provide enough and strong enough evidence to overturn the millions of man-years that have gone into our understanding of the history of languages?
Certainly, Jews lived in many parts of the world. But we didn’t live “everywhere”. And many places where we lived already had languages going back a long, long way. Even where there were plenty of Jews, not all of them spoke Hebrew very much. Not many of their neighbors picked up a lot of it.
Consider that the Mourner’s Kaddish and Talmud are in Aramaic because those were the language commonly spoken by Jews in that time and in that place. Insofar as there has been a noticeable effect of Jewish speech on European languages it has mostly been via Ladino or Yiddish which are themselves polyglots including a little Hebrew and a lot of Romance or Germanic bits and pieces.
If your Rov was being careful I’d bet dollars to ham and hold the stakes in my mouth that his thesis was a lot more conservative. Where there were Jews they had an effect on the speech of people around them. Some of this included Hebrew words which made their way – often heavily modified – into the language of the host country. No arguments there. But to say that Hebrew is the basis for any widely spoken non-Semitic language is not supported by the facts. Not in grammar. Not in structure. Not in written language. Not in vocabulary. Even Yiddish is much more an extremely Platt form of Deutsch than it is Hebrew.
My Rabbi has excellent advice on Torah, how to keep kosher, how to be a good Jew and – rarer and just as important – how to be a good husband and a decent human being. I listen to what he says. But when it comes to reconfiguring a router or doing cluster analysis on statistical data I’m better equipped by training and obsession.
Or to drag it back to the subject at hand Every cat his own rat
And that’s pretty much all I have to say on the subject. If you’d like to continue the discussion we can start a thread elsewhere. Or I give permission to the Moderators to give you my email address so we can take it off line.
My point is that things change. Sometimes it’s for the better. Sometimes it’s for the worse. Sometimes it’s neither. What Jews did, what our ancestors considered proper and normal is a far cry from what we do today. An examination of how and why this occured is always useful.
In general phrases like “everyone knows” or “it’s unthinkable” or “that’s the way it’s always been” are warning signs. They often hide enormous assumptions and intellectual blind spots which can lead you far, far astray. A classic example is the “Grass Shack Fallacy”. During WWII troops were taught that a good way to clear a room was to open the door, toss in a couple grenades, close the door and enter after they exploded. That worked fine in France or Germany where people had brick or timber frame houses. Flash forward to Vietnam. The first time a soldier followed his training while clearing a bamboo hut with grass walls was often his last…
Feif Un, does that mean Moshiach came about 3700 years ago 🙂
People in those days had a very different attitude towards the human body and how it was to be used. They were a lot more active at work and in their recreation. We would have been considered pathologically sedentary. Sitting around all day and night staring at books? Never getting your heart rate up or sweating on a regular basis? Nobody lived like that. They didn’t have machines to do everything; they lived in their bodies to a much greater extent than you or I. So their attitude towards the human body was quite a bit different.
Things like wrestling, hunting, riding, archery and so on weren’t “glorification of the human body”. They were normal activities for men outside of the slave classes, and even within them to a great extent. Warriorship is only part of it.
One of my milchig favorites (courtesy of George R. R. Martin):
Take big beefsteak tomatoes
Wrap in puff pastry
Hollow them out.
Fill with Gryuere cheese.
Cover with breadcrumbs.
Bake.
beefsteak tomatoes and cheese!?
Nobody knows.
There are always rumors.
The date is not really important.
What is important is living as if it were about to happen.
A6KB, I don’t normally go armed these days. Saying “May your faith be cursed” to a religious fanatic means the sort of fight where I’d want at least a knife and a pistol. Besides, the inevitable encounter with the legal system goes much more smoothly if it was clearly self defense without that pesky incitement to riot complicating matters.
bombmaniac, it wasn’t assur back then. The historical record is very clear. Jews were known for enjoying wrestling and for being quite good at it. Plenty of sources, Jewish and Gentile, report this. Wrestling wasn’t a Greek/pagan thing any more than wearing clothes, bathing, fishing or cooking.
You wish to believe our customs have never changed. This in no way changes the fact that they have, radically in many cases.
Honestly, even the best cholent is nothing to write home about.
It is lunacy. That’s why the Spawn of Satan, sorry, Tobacco Companies know they have to snare their victims young. Almost nobody starts smoking after twenty. Hence the ad campaigns like Joe Camel aimed at ten to twelve year olds, the association with sports and so on. It’s designed to hook kids while they’re still impulsive and willing to do really stupid things.
OK, time to trot out this old joke again…
Three old friends were talking about Xmas.
The Catholic said “We take a nap the afternoon before. We go to midnight mass. In the morning the kids get up and open their presents. Then we have a big lunch.”
The Protestant said “The kids get up and head for the tree. Then we go to church and sit down to a huge dinner.”
The Jew said “We sleep in late. At about 10, 10:30 we roll out of bed and have a late breakfast. Then we stroll down to the warehouse, look at the empty shelves and sing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’.”
bombmaniac, it’s nothing compared to what happens if you have to go to the bathroom and aren’t thinking…
bombmaniac, a smoker is not necessarily an idiot. He or she is in the grasp of a powerful drug which chemically alters the brain and impels the smoker to seek out the drug even though it is known to be harmful. We are talking about an addiction which is more difficult to shake than heroin or cocaine. Further, some of the best minds in psychology spend their entire professional lives figuring out how to make the addiction emotionally fulfilling, an essential part of the addict’s self concept.
It takes a truly great degree of strength to fight this.
Partial credit, haifagirl.
On really cold days mix enough water with the kitty litter so that it freezes into a solid clump.
When we had two dogs and two cats we never had mice or rats. Not a single one. And we live in an old neighborhood in a city which has a lot of rodent problems.
If you can’t do that, traps are good. Peanut butter or chocolate are much better bait than cheese.
ICOT, we have a main drain line in the basement which backs up. I’ve got some idea of what it’s clogged with, and it’s beyond my little hand-powered wire auger. Would your recommend RR or just the local plumber for this sort of thing?
Jothar, so you posek the Orthodox Patriarchs instead of the Catholic Priests? 🙂
Mostly it depends on what they expect and how they treat me. A Christian who wishes me a good Yom Tov gets a “Merry Christmas” in return. Muslim friends get an “Eid Mubarak” because I know how happy they are at the end of their month-long fast. It doesn’t mean Yeshu ben Maryam was Moshiach or Mohammed was a Prophet. But if they are willing to do the courtesy of respecting my beliefs I do the same for them and acknowledge the name of their holidays.
The one that causes me real problems is the holiday which comes around Pesach. Its name is a corruption of the name of a “deity” and commemorates a story about her descending into and returning from the Underworld.
When I lived in the country and drove a pickup I always kept a few things in the toolbox for just this sort of occasion.
- A folding shovel
- A machete
- Rope
- A gallon of water
- A bag of kitty litter
Extra credit for anyone who can figure out what the water and kitty litter were for…
Seek G-d.
Love, provide for and protect his family.
Make an honest living.
Cherish his wife.
Raise his children.
See a doctor. That’s what they’re there for.
True. That’s why I go with the spice rub and added sauce.
Some people who keep kosher without going full-chumra do brine.
My “cholent” is either black-bean chili with habaneros or – special occasions – a duck and beef bacon (from the forequarter of the cow) cassoulet with white beans.
I know they’re not traditional. But they taste a lot better.
a) It was wedged behind a key-style switch pushing the contact on the switch onto the contact on the fixture much like the penny in the fuse box.
b) The end was still sealed. The primer was undented. I don’t know if it would still have fired… how long has it been since they made 16 gauge shells out of cardboard? … but I wasn’t interested in finding out.
c) Ain’t that the truth 🙂
I’m really afraid to open the walls…
I noticed a circular from the IBEW local advertising a seminar on aluminum wiring for home construction. I don’t really trust the stuff, but they claim it’s fine if you do it right. Any thoughts?
I can only try,
Thank you for your clear, accurate, informative advice. It is (literally) a lifesaver.
We live in a 1908 house. A few years back the original-issue galvanized steel plumbing in the bathroom gave up the ghost. We had a contractor come in to redo the whole thing. I got a call one day “Could you drop by on your lunch hour? We need to talk about a change-order.”
When I got there he had the electrician. The electrician was deep inside the wall which connects the bathroom and my man-cave/study. They showed me how the outlets and lights in my study were in series with a light light in the closet. The juice only flowed when the light was on. There was no light bulb. The outlets only got power because someone had wedged an old shotgun shell under the switch to create a partial short.
Just about the first words out of the contractor were “Please, please, please let us fix this. Otherwise, when the house burns down and you die I won’t be able to make any more money off you.”
I think I broke a few important laws of physics with how fast I signed the change-order….
It’s really very simple.
If you smoke long enough it will kill you through cancer, heart disease or the slow destruction of your lungs.
Tobacco is one of the most addictive drugs in the world. Only meth can be shown to hook you faster and more completely.
Most people have known – or should have known – this since the early 1960s and the original Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking. The tobacco companies knew this in the 1950s but kept it a secret in order to make money. Their own documents show this.
I suppose it’s alright to smoke on Purim, so long as it’s just once a year, the same way it’s alright to shoot up heroin or smoke crack on Purim, so long as it’s just once a year :-
Get a copy of Raymond Sokolov’s How To Cook. Not all the recipes are kosher. Just ignore them. It’s the skills and techniques you’re looking for. And he lays them out very nicely.
After that, I recommend Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food and The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. There’s a lot of variety. The food is wonderful. It’s mostly very easy to prepare. And they are wonderful reading. You’ll learn a lot about Jewish cooking from all over the world including very interesting things about the history like the Jewish roots of foie gras and exactly why Sephardic and Ashkenazi matzoh are different.
The absolutely cleverest, most economical way of getting expensive smoker taste on the cheap was revealed in Lifehacker a while back. Forget the $700 imported Japanese Green Egg cooker. For under $50 – about the price of a Weber – you can have a flower pot barbecue smoker.
How to treat the meat?
Some people brine and rub.
Others cook, basting once in a while.
Some sauce as they cook.
Others just smoke and add sauce later.
I find the spice rub with sauce added later works best.