charliehall

“sponges should not be manufactured on shabbos “

The overwhelming fraction food processing facilities in the US that produce products under rabbinical supervision run 7 days a week. As do most farms. Unless you live off the grid and raise all your own food, you can’t avoid benefitting from Shabat activity. And the poskim for all the major kashrut agencies have no problem with this because they are mostly non-Jews working mostly for non-Jews.

Why not? It is a field for which there is always demand. And if you can get a job in a unionized institution, the pay and benefits are good.

“av harachamim (in memory of the Chmielnicki massacres)”

It is actually much older than that; it was written originally in medieval Ashkenaz in memory of the victims of the Crusaders.

I had horrible acne from age 12 to age 32. What cured it was isotretinoin, which was marketed under the brand name accutane. (It is now generic.) It is a nasty medicine, with lots of side effects, but it really is a miracle drug for acne.

If you are a woman, you MUST be using birth control if you are to take isotretinoin because it produces horrible birth defects in a fetus. That even applies if you are not married and not sexually active in any way, because of the possibility chas v’shalom that you might be sexually assaulted.

The story of isotretinoin is interesting: It was discovered by the 1940s that large doses of Vitamin A would cure acne. My mother took Vitamin A supplements as a teenager for HER acne. The problem is that for most people, if you take enough Vitamin A to cure your acne, you destroy your liver in the process. You do not want to trade acne for a liver transplant. So the chemists came up with a synthetic slightly modified Vitamin A that wasn’t as toxic, and that chemical is isotretinoin. It is also used in some cancer treatments as a chemotherapy agent because it kills rapidly dividing cells — the same characteristic that produces such horrible fetal birth defects.

Consult Your Local Dermatologist, and good luck!

It is much LESS expensive than wine.

I go to one almost every Friday night. It is a beautiful and moving way to bring in Shabat.

From the 2003 Jewish Federation Survey:

Neighborhood # Jews % O # O

Williamsburg 52,700 94% 49,538

Flatbush/Midwood/Kensington 101,100 54% 54,594

Borough Park 76,600 74% 56,684

Fresh Meadows/KewGardens Hills/Hillside 28,200 51% 14,382

http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Archive/C-NY-New_York-2002-Geographic_Profile_Report.pdf

“Why do all geirim fall into the halachic category of zonah”

Promiscuity was rampant in Roman society, especially among the upper classes. I’m reading Adrian Goldsworthy’s biography of Julius Caesar and it is astonishing how open it was. Modern secular society is downright chaste by comparison. Assuming that non-Jews were licentious was based in fact.

Scrabble!

I’ve played Scrabble in English, Spanish, and Hebrew.

If you discover you like the person and then discover some deragatory information, it might be that the deragatory information isn’t really all that important to you and you would have missed your basherte had you been too picky!

“It is a fact that city schools are overcrowded which is one of the reasons why they are failing. The city would have to construct new buildings to be able to take in ALL the yeshiva students”

SOME city schools are overcrowded. There is a high school near me that used to have 6,000 students, but today has under 2,000. The city could quickly reopen wings of buildings like this, and rent lots of portable classrooms.

“By law, you cannot use public funding to pay for religious schools in New York. It’s in the State Constitution. “

There was a very serious attempt to change that provision in the NY State Constitution in 1967. A Constitutional Convention, with a Democratic majority (surprising since both houses of the New York legislature were Republican, as was the governor) proposed a package of Constitutional revisions that included the repeal of the obnoxious Blaine Amendment. I have read that a major force behind this was then-Sen. Robert Kennedy, and the Catholic Church went all out for them. But Gov. Rockefeller only offered lukewarm support and most other Republicans actively opposed it. In the end, fewer than 30% of the voters voted for the changes.

Since then, many politicians have dangled false promises of aid to religious schools. What is needed is a full scale effort to get rid of the Blaine Amendment — and to prepare voters for the higher taxes that would be needed to support religious schools. The latter will be very difficult as property taxes in the suburbs already approach confiscatory levels.

“one way they solved the problem was to have 2 shifts of the school day – I think it was like 7-12 and 12-5?”

This was done in Maryland when I was growing up. I avoided the double shifts but my brother drew the second shift.

The first five Jewish communities in what became the United States were Sefardic, and they did not take converts. The first American adult to convert to Judaism had to go to Eretz Yisrael to convert, in the 1840s. He converted Sefardic, and when he returned to America the Sefardic congregation in Philadelphia accepted him as fully Jewish. I suspect strongly that the reason for the unwillingness to do conversions had more to do with the fact that there were no rabbis in America until the 1840s. Marc Angel, the long time rabbi of the oldest of the American Sefardic congregations, has spoken out often against excessive conversion chumrot.

Here is a suggestion:

Review the first chapter of the Book of Daniel. The intervention was Daniel and his fellow Jewish slaves eating seeds; the control was the non-Jewish slaves eating meat. It is actually the first recorded example of a control group in history; the second would not be until the scurvy experiments in the mid-18th century. You could re-do Daniel’s experiment except that if the study participants are Jews, you’d have to use kosher rather than non-kosher meat: Half your volunteers would be vegetarian for ten days and half would be meat eaters. A stronger experiment would be if you randomly assigned your volunteers via a coin toss to the vegetarian or meat group. Define before the study what you would call “healthier”: Get some independent panel to evaluate the volunteers. Maybe you could also have a nurse or doctor take the blood pressure of the participants. Then let us know the results!

“whos your rov and which gedol does he consult? “

He is a retired rabbi who had shuls in the Bronx, Westchester, Long Island, and elsewhere, who earned semichah from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik z’tz’l (“The Rav”) back in the 1960s. He still works part time as a chaplain. One nice thing about having a rabbi who doesn’t have a congregation is that he isn’t very busy; he always gets back to me very quickly.

He never tells me *exactly* which gedol he consults with for any particular issue; this makes sense because these are private psaks. If the gedol wanted to publish that particular halachic opinion, it is up for the gedol to do so! Similarly, I don’t publish my own rav’s name although I’ve referred people to him personally. The gedolim I’ve most often heard him mention are Rabbi Hershel Schachter and Rabbi David Cohen. But if he personally heard a ruling from The Rav, he almost always paskens that way, even when The Rav was a Daat Yachid.

$90/day; she usually takes 4 to 5 hours. She works for an agency which I think takes a cut.

The eminent domain issue is precisely the problem. In America, you can’t take someone’s property — or even deny them development rights — without paying the fair market value for it. It is in the US Constitution. In many states and localities, it requires a court hearing. How can sechirat reshut work under these circumstances?

“are you “lineman”? I am impressed! “

“lineman”‘s site is very impressive. (And thank you, David, for the compliment.)

“charliehall, I feel you cant compare asking personally to someone asking for you. I’d always feel like I might have gotten a different answer had I explained the issue myself, with the often necessary back and forth dialogue. I wouldnt want to take that chance with an important issue.”

I feel the exact opposite. My rav knows me well and knows where I need to be machmir and where my yetzer hara won’t be tempted by being meikel. Even the gedol hador doesn’t know any of that. Also, I have been taught that it is important to follow a consistent derech and not pick and choose rabbis for shilahs — even gedolim.

(And my rav seems to enjoy it when he gets a chance to consult with a gedol over an interesting shilah.)

I’m surprised that nobody has brought up the issue of sechirat reshut.

david,

The US census estimate for the daytime population of Brooklyn is 2,231,776, which is *smaller* than the resident population. That “someone” misled Rav Moshe.

“There were cities prior to the 20th century that contained

shishim ribo such as London and Paris “

Manhattan had > 600,000 people before 1860; Brooklyn (still an independent city) around 1880; Chicago by 1890.

More on the George Washington Bridge: It has fourteen lanes and still isn’t anywhere close to having 600,000 people. Ordinary surface streets simply don’t have the capacity to have 600,000, even theoretically.

“And remember that those 600,000 had to be in ONE place during that day. That clearly would be the requisite condition. It is highly unlikely that even in Warsaw, ALL the population passed through one city fare during one day. Today, of course, it is more prevalent in the world’s largest cities and this is why in New York, London and others, the eiruv is problematic and relies upon other kulos.”

This is not true. The ONLY place in New York City that has 600,000 people in one day is Penn Station, which is indoors. And even that is misleading, because that is the passenger count: Most of those passengers actually are double counted because they arrive in the morning and return home in the evening. 600,000 people is an enormous number.

iyhbyu,

The snow existed prior to Shabat, in the clouds, in the form of water vapor and/or ice crystals.

Maybe R’Moshe didn’t eat snow, but I love it! It goes great with fruit juice.

I can’t understand why snow would be muktzah: It is edible! How can any food item that can be eaten on Shabat be muktzah?

Daas Yochid,

He counted 7 who do not require 600,000; 12 who do.