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hereorthere,
I happen to be an Alzheimer’s disease researcher; I’ve been an author on over twenty scientific journal articles on Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. I regret to say that there is NO efficacious treatment that prevents or cures AD today despite millions of dollars spent by government and industry. I’ve even advised on such studies. A few drugs improve symptoms for some time but do not stop the disease progression, and they have significant side effects. The situation is very depressing, and completely different from the situation regarding high cholesterol, for which there are efficacious treatments that most people can safely take.
chance,
Vaccines completely eliminated smallpox — the last case was in 1979. In 1952 there were more than 60000 cases of polio in the US with more than 3000 deaths. Then came the vaccination campaign. Today there are zero cases anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, and only a thousand a year in the rest of the world; back in 1988 there were hundreds of thousands of cases before the mass vaccination campaign went worldwide. Measles deaths worldwide have dropped from almost 900,000 a decade ago to under 200,000 today because of a mass vaccination campaign. Unfortunately, some frum Jews have been believing nonsense that people like you put out and we have had the chilul HaShem of kids in frum communities getting measles. Blood will be on your hands if any of those kids die.
hello99,
Are you calling my local Vaad irresponsible? Are you of the same stature as the rabbis on the Vaad? How are you, anyway, who gave you semichah, and who gave you the heter to spread such slander?
hello99,
One more thing: We don’t follow the majority of Gedolei HaPoskim; we follow our own rav! If your own posek holds by Rav Elyashiv, that is what you should do. But mine doesn’t. Most American Orthodox Jews accept the OU and that means Rabbis Belsky, Schachter, and Genack.
hello99,
Actually, halachah IS regional and has been for thousands of years; different parts of the world follow their own rabbis. You can see this in the gemara where rabbis from Eretz Yisrael would differ from rabbis in Bavel. And that remains the case today. For example, Italian Jews eat swordfish and have for generations; who am I as an outsider to tell them that generations of their rabbis were wrong? Yemenite Jews eat locusts; do you have a problem with that?
I follow the rabbis of my community. I buy all my fish from the same kosher fish store that is certified by the local Vaad. There is absolutely no reason to question my local Vaad, which is very well respected.
I suspect that one problem is that many of us don’t learn well enough. For example, there are a variety of halachic opinions regarding eruvim and tzniut, just to mention the two areas mentioned in this discussion, and much of the latter is situational rather than objective. Yet many of us only learn the opinion of our own teacher, or our teacher’s teacher, and much later are stunned to find that many of great stature disagree with that opinion.
My information regarding the position of Rav Soloveitchik z’tz’l came from my own rav, who earned semichah from The Rav in the 1960s.
My information regarding the position of Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin z’tz’l is from a response by Rabbi Yehuda Herzl Henkin to a comment I had posted on another internet forum.
I stand by my statement.
Rov Soloveitchik z’tz’l disagreed with his cousin Rav Moshe z’tz’l on both these issues.
photoman,
Yes, I’m familiar with Rav Moshe’s tshuvah, but my own rav earned semichah from Rov Soloveitchik who pasked otherwise.
Trying my best,
Rav Soloveitchik and Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin paskened that a 40 inch high mechitzah is kosher l’chatchila. Rav Henkin also paskened that a mechitzah must be rigid, so some of the high mechitzahs I’ve seen would not be kosher according to his opinion.
Lashon Tov,
Everyone is the shul I mentioned knows the halachah; reminders are not needed.
Rabbi Avi Weiss is strictly observant, believes in Torah Mi Sinai, presides over a Orthodox Union member shul with Orthodox services conducted with mechitzahs separating the men from the women, does not permit women to receive aliyot or count for a minyan, is a member in good standing of the Rabbinical Council of America and the Vaad HaRabonim of Riverdale and tells his shul members to adhere to the Vaad’s kashrut, strongly supports Orthodox institutions in his own community, and defends Orthodox hashkafic positions in front of sceptical audiences. He also says that the ideal career for a bright young Jewish man is in the rabbinate rather than a profession like medicine or law.
Sounds Orthodox to me.
If you show up for a morning minyan it is quite likely that someone will actually say “hi” to you. And if you are a man who is new to observance, someone might help you to put on tefillin. And if you are unfamiliar with Aramaic and struggle to say kaddish, they will help you out by prompting and not rushing through the prayer.
EDITED
artchill is basically correct. There is no shul I’ve ever seen that follows every halachah much less every opinion. (Is there a shul anywhere that really has no talking, ever?) I’ve received a psak from my rav that I can daven even in an openly non-Orthodox shul as long as the service itself is run according to halachah. (In fact, in a community with no true O shul, it might be a mitzvah to help out a halachic minyan in the basement of a C shul. Eventually they might get enough supporters to break away.)
There ARE some things that some shuls do that should not be done and appearances can be deceiving; my rabbi once warned me about a particular shul with a very high mechitzah that hires non-Jews to heat up the kiddish food on Shabat morning! OTOH I davened this morning in a shul whose mechitzah didn’t even reach my waist; I guarantee that it has been orthodox longer than the home shul of anyone else posting here from anywhere in America (in fact, it was around before the term orthodox had even been applied to Jews).
And don’t even judge by the presence of an open parking lot. I belonged to a shul that had a parking lot that had people coming and going all Shabat: The shul had a lot of doctors and hatzalah volunteers who often got called for emergencies. To have to unlock the gate each time might have cost precious minutes.
HaShem blessed me with many talents. Unfortunately, music was not among them.
eli lev,
See your doctor about high cholesterol. Any decent family physician or internal medicine physician should be able to help you. Millions of people safely take cholesterol-lowering medications many lives are being saved.
chance,
You probably are too young to remember the dreaded childhood diseases like polio and measles that maimed or killed young children by the tens of thousands. Your grandmother would likely have been willing to give up her life for an effective vaccine that would have prevented these diseases. And thanks to medical research, we have them. Unfortunately, a crooked researcher in the UK published an article in the 1990s that falsely claimed that vaccines caused autism; millions of dollars have been spent trying to verify that claim and it is now known with certainty that vaccines do not cause autism. Not vaccinating your children not only puts their lives at risk, it also puts at risk the lives of children with whom they come into contact who aren’t old enough to get the vaccines. It is an incredible embarrassment that the most publicized recent outbreaks of measles have been in religious Jewish and Muslim communities; we are supposed to be better than that.
Everyone should read the writings of Rabbi Yehuda Herzl Henkin, the grandson of Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin z’tz’l, on this subject before they all people baalei aveirot. Rav Henkin brings all the sources, the meikel and the machmir, and even points out where some have distorted the sources.
qa,
There is no evidence that North Korea had any actual nuclear weapons until after 2001. It *did* possess plutonium and the Clinton Administration successfully got them to give some of it up. While Saddam Hussein was a rasha he was not on the same scale as the people who run North Korea and we knew for sure that he did NOT have a functioning nuclear program in 2003.
And it is not clear that what replaced Saddam Hussein is any better for Israel than Hussein himself. Iraq remains in a state of hot war with Israel and could legally attack Israel at any time; that is unlikely only because of lack of military capability not lack of hostility.
Regarding the USS Cole, it was not clear for several months that Al Qaeda was behind the bombing. It was not until January 25, 2001 that we were pretty sure that Al Qaeda was responsible, but that was after Clinton had left office; Condeleeza Rice told the 9/11 commission that President Bush decided not to respond and that she had supported that decision. So the blame, if any, for a lack of appropriate response to the Cole attack falls on Bush, not Clinton.
I can only try,
The assassinations of Orlando Letelier, a Chilean exile, and Ronni Karpen Moffit, a US Citizen Jew (not a Chilean citizen) were part of an international terrorist ring called Operation Condor that were supported by multiple authoritarian governments in Latin America. Another target of Operation Condor was Ed Koch. The parallels with what we face today are scary. The Ford administration did squat as a response, fortunately the Democrats had a huge majority in Congress and under the leadership of Ted Kennedy slapped sanctions on the Chilean despotism, which finally gave up power in 1990. (One of the first things that the new democratic Chilean government did was to pay reparations to the US government and to the families of the victims. I look forward to Arab governments doing the same to the families of the victims of the terror they helped to sponsor, but I suspect I may be waiting a long time for that.)
I can only try,
Bush 43 may have been a better President for Israel than for the US. Unfortunately, he was the US President and not the Israeli Prime Minister and in the former role he had no successes whatsoever and had many failures.
There is no question that Eisenhower was absolutely the most hostile President as far as Israel was concerned. There was a real possibility of a US invasion of Israel in 1956; the US did invade Lebanon two years later.
Lyndon Johnson has not been given credit for the events of 1967. The US had not been an ally of Israel up to then (see 1956), but Johnson tipped off Israel to the fact that Egypt was about to attack, and didn’t respond to the attack on the USS Liberty. Furthermore, his flip to being supportive of Israel (but not settlements) is a policy that has been maintained with no significant change by his eight successors.
Carter deserves condemnation for his repeated unfair blasts at Israel, but those didn’t start until he left office. While President he was actually an improvement over Ford. As mentioned by another commenter, Bush 41’s policy became a lot more benign once Shamir was replaced by Rabin despite the prominent presence of noted anti-Semite James Baker in the administration.
Volvie,
While you are right about the countries you mention, there were “notable exceptions” that shows that not all nochrim are out to do us in. For example, Finland did not let the Nazis touch even a single Finnish Jew — even though the country was allied with Hitler through most of the war.
There is no milk produced in the US from non-kosher animals, period. Almost all is from cows but a small fraction comes from sheep or goats. So there is zero chance that your C.S. milk will be from a non-kosher animal if it is from the US.
We are looking for someone with an advanced degree in statistics or biostatistics and experience in medical research.
I can’t believe the misinformation and conspiracy theories here.
People will die as a result of not taking lipid lowering medicine and/or not adjusting their lifestyle to be healthier. Halachah requires that we follow the advice of real doctors with real medical training.
M&M Kosher Bakery on Johnson Avenue in Riverdale. They also have the best pita bread outside the middle east.
Clearly Truman is #1. He won the war with Japan, stopped Soviet-supported aggression in Korea, created the Marshall Plan and NATO which stopped Soviet expansion in Europe, and recognized the State of Israel. He was helped by some sympathetic Republicans who didn’t believe in obstruction for obstruction’s sake.
Clearly Bush 43 is at the bottom. He got the US into two never-ending wars, one of which is now the longest war in US history. He turned a huge budget surplus into a massive budget deficit with nothing to show for it except those wars. His economic policies led first to a huge decline in the value of the US dollar and then a complete economic collapse in his last months in office. And his Road Map for Peace demanded essentially nothing of Israel’s enemies other than words. There were no successes to balance off these disasters.
One can argue about the relative position of most of the rest but it should be noted that the three most antagonistic to Israel were (in order of decreasing antagonism) Eisenhower, Ford, and Bush 41. (Carter’s hostility didn’t manifest itself until after he left office; while in office he was actually better than Ford.)
Johnson gets credit for tipping Israel off to the planned Arab attack in 1967, not responding to the USS Liberty attack, and making Israel into a US ally. I would rank Ford as second from the bottom as he had no foreign or domestic policy successes, was incredibly hostile towards Israel, and offered no response to a terrorist attack carried out on the streets of Washington DC by agents of a hostile foreign government (but one with a lot of apologists in Washington).
Volvie,
I could present links to the positions to the rabbis I mentioned but YWN does not permit outside links. You will have to find them yourself.
Rabbi Sacks is probably the most brilliant Jewish mind alive today and he should not be dismissed as casually as you do.
Rabbi Goren’s position that one can pasul a conversion does indeed has no precedent in halachah, but that has not stopped the “Gedolim” from accepting it and in fact taking it far further than Rabbi Goren would ever have imagined.
“who said anything of apikorsus?”
Rav Miller z’tz’l, at least according to d a.
Do you
(1) Believe that Rav Miller z’tz’l didn’t say what d a said he said and that d a or his father are liars, or
(2) Agree with Rav Miller z’tz’l that the rabbis mentioned are apikorsim (they all wrote that vegetarianism is ideal from a Torah perspective), or
(3) Disagree with Rav Miller z’tz’l on this issue?
d a,
Do you really believe that Rav Miller z’tz’l would think that Rabbis Cohen z’tz’l, and Goren z’t’zl were apikorsim? Do you think that he would consider Rabbis Cohen and Sacks are apikorsim today? They have all advanced pretty good arguments why not eating meat is the Torah ideal. (And you never have to worry about the quality of the shechita.) Was Rav Miller, great as he was, of equivalent stature?
I’ve been told that the really big employment demand is in construction and agriculture; Israel imports temporary workers from other countries and even hires Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank because Jews aren’t available.
I thought that one of the young men had been returned to Israel.
And I don’t understand the reason for the boycott. There is absolutely no question that the boys WERE smuggling drugs, and they have admitted that they thought that they were indeed smuggling but just thought that it was something less obnoxious (but equally asur). The Japanese criminal justice system, while harsh, does not discriminate against Jews and it is very likely that the other two young men will eventually able to be sent to Israel to serve the balance of their sentence. (Remember that Japan didn’t turn a single Jew over to the Nazis and while the treatment of Jews in Shanghai was harsh, it was far better than the treatment given every other European civilian whom they interned.)
I’d prefer to boycott REAL anti-Semites like the rasha who rules Venezuela and the Arab regimes who let their citizens fund terrorism.
Why don’t we all wait until the investigations are complete?
While there is halachic support for meat meals on Yom Tov, there are also great rabbis who have advocated becoming vegetarians, including Chaim Zundel Maccoby, the Kamenitzer Maggid; Rabbi David Cohen “The Nazir”, his son Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen, his son in law Rabbi Shlomo Goren; and current UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, all themselves vegetarians. Rav Kook also advocated vegetarianism.
The person who made the comment was Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, until recently the Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union. He made the comments with about 20 people present in the room last fall with me in attendance. It was a small comment in a longer discussion about problems facing the Orthodox world today. He clearly saw the financial issues as a huge problem that needs immediate attention.
Jose, I have contacted YWN regarding the identity of the leader I mentioned and I am awaiting a response. I will post again once I hear from the editors.
You can post which leader you refer to.
“Also seems to me to be irrefutably conclusive proof.
Nevertheless, against such conclusive logic (and don’s ask me to explain), I have a feeling the earth actually is the center and the universe revolves around us “
One might say that from a philosophical or religious perspective that the earth is the center of the universe. I’m not a philosopher or rabbi or theologian. But not from a scientific perspective. It is a simple fact that the universe does not revolve around the earth.
‘continuum of scientific “knowledge”‘
Indeed some scientific conclusions are better supported by empirical evidence than others. As a scientist I have to draw the line at anyone who denies the empirical evidence just as a rabbi would have to draw the line at anyone who questions the authority of Chazal.
(I also object to empirical proofs of God or Torah. If you set out to “prove” something empirically, you accept that it can potentially be disproven, chas v’shalom!)
“3. the utterly impossible speed of the stars that must necessarily occur.”
And that is actually the conclusive disproof of the earth-centered universe! Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. It is impossible to get around this.
Regarding the unpaid accounts: When did it become mutar not to pay ones’ bills? Are these really frum institutions? If they didn’t have the money, what are they doing making the order from your company?
I personally heard a very prominent American Jewish leader say that everything will collapse completely within ten years if we continue on the same path. We need over two billion dollars annually just to pay for our schools and with only a few hundred thousand frum families in America I have no idea where the money will come from. Yes, HaShem is in charge of everything in the world, but it is asur to rely on a miracle.
I think it is a great idea! Go for it!!!
The Shulchan Aruch says not to make weddings during sefirat haomer. How do the acharonim get around this to permit them?
My rabbi permits l’chatchilah listening even to live music during sefirat haomer, because the only prohibitions mentioned in the Shulchan Aruch are weddings and haircuts. (Why is it that there are lots of weddings this time of year?)
According to its web site, YU accepts AP scores of 5 (really hard to get) but no CLEP credits at all.
Although it is true that in general, European citizenship is not based on jus soli, most European countries grant citizenship to the children of *stateless* persons at birth. This would affect, for example, German and French Jews who had had their citizenship revoked by the Nazis and/or their collaborators.
Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik z’tz’l also said Hallel on Yom HaAtzmaut.
anon for this,
You are welcome!
volvie,
Participating in a census conducted by non-Jews cannot be halachically questionable if nobody has questioned it in 3000 years. That is the halachic basis. We do not invent new gezerot in our times.
The attention given to womens’ physical appearance is a great example of our assimilation into acceptance of gentile values. I have been married five years and still don’t know what my wife’s dress size is.
I went through the list of tax changes for 2010 and while I found several tax cuts (including one that benefitted me personally), I couldn’t find any increases. I suspect that the letter is a fraud.
Volvie,
Please cite your sources that indicate that there is a halachic problem with participating in the census. If you don’t cite a real source other than your opinion I will have to assume that there is none.
EDITED
“And what makes you thing this point changes how halacha treats the count?”
The count is not being done by Jews. There is no isur for non-Jews to count.
“One that this in fact occured”
The first recorded census was in Egypt, prior to the arrival of Avraham Avinu! Censuses were later conducted by Rome, by the Arab Umayyad Caliphs, by William I of England, and by the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in Eretz Yisrael. The last four included Jews among the counted.