jewishfeminist02

“When a man is called up to the Torah, he is supposed to touch the Torah only with his Talis, not with his bare hand.”

I am well aware of this. However, Pashuteh Yid’s question refers to Hagbah and Glilah, when the Torah is already wrapped up and a person catching it would touch only the velvet covering and not the actual parchment.

If you want a light supper, I would recommend a soup. I (Corn soup with asparagus is one of my favorites; French onion soup is great too, or mushroom barley.) Serve it with salad and thick bread.

Why? Can you explain the answer?

Correct! (Squeak, and feivel’s second answer.) If he says, “You will shoot me,” they cannot shoot him because the statement would have been true, and they cannot hang him because the statement would have been false, so they have no choice but to let him go free. “I am a liar” does not really work, neither does “Can I go free?” (remember, it has to be a statement, not a question.)

I’m not sure about Riddle B, but for Riddle A, would the answer be 31?

Regardless of whether or not unions are good for business, the fact is that workers have the right to unionize if they wish, and Wal-Mart refuses their employees that right. They hand out kits to their managers filled with anti-union propaganda and give them a 24-hour “union hotline” that they can call if they suspect any of their employees of plotting unionization. Once such troublesome employees are identified, they are immediately fired. In this way, Wal-Mart intimidates its employees so that they have to vote no to unions if they wish to keep their jobs. One Wal-Mart in Canada finally managed to push through a union, and Wal-Mart simply closed the entire store.

Very funny.

Actually, the only alcohol I have drunk since landing in Israel has been Kiddush wine. I’ve only been to a bar once, and I didn’t drink anything there.

I can’t imagine that many Wal-Mart employees would be in a good mood, what with the meager wages and insufficient healthcare that they get, all because Wal-Mart refuses to let in unions.

Havesomeseichel- 12.

iluvchulent- Moav and Ben-Ammi.

Here’s a good one:

A soldier has been captured by the enemy. The commander decides to allow the soldier to choose how he wants to die. “You can make one statement,” the commander says to the soldier. “If it is a lie, we will shoot you, and if it is true, we will hang you.” What one statement can the soldier make that will force the commander to let him go free?

Actually, I’m in Israel, where the drinking age is eighteen, so…

Hmm, that’s interesting. Where is this, Lakewood?

Also, there are Wal-Mart stores all around the world (although not, thankfully, in Israel!)

“You wouldn’t understand anyways.”

Joseph, don’t make a statement if you aren’t prepared to explain/defend it.

GMAB and Feif Un, have either of you ever personally been to a slaughterhouse and witnessed the animals’ living conditions there as well as the shechita?

This is getting silly. (Sorry, but there’s just no other word for it.)

Once, I was on the same airplane as a young soldier returning home from several months of service. When we got off the plane, his wife and young son were waiting for him. The son was holding a poster that said You’re My Hero Daddy! When the soldier ran up to them and hugged the little boy, everyone started applauding.

Okay, but in 2004 $223 would also buy more food than it would buy today. And I would not agree with your statement that “you can never go wrong with spending extravagant amounts to beautify Hashem’s Mitzvos.” We are not speaking here of a couple of well-to-do or even modest means who could have cut back on luxuries, but a couple who struggled just to make ends meet. Therefore, the decision to buy the most expensive etrog was just foolhardy in my opinion.

Joseph, if you knew anything about these movements, you would know that they are legitimate forms of Judaism. However, you do not even know their proper names, so I am not surprised that you have this mistaken impression.

This does not apply to Reform and Reconstructionist Jews who accept patrilineal descent, but would you say that a member of the Conservative movement who has Jewish parents, grandparents, etc. is in fact not a Jew?

I get all my shoes at Payless. I have very big feet and many stores don’t go past size 10, but Payless always has plenty of tasteful, comfortable shoes in stock in my size, and for a cheap price. They wear out more quickly than shoes from other stores, but that just means I can go shoe shopping more often without breaking the bank.

“And Chopnik, Obama let slip in Florda (sic) that he’d raise taxes for people making as little as $150 grand. jf02, I’m saying we Jews need our money, and having it taken away to help ‘spread the wealth’ won’t make things any easier, especially for those suffering because of the current economic downturn.”

Everyone is suffering because of the current economic downturn, rich and poor alike, and don’t think for a second that all Jews are rich. $150,000 sounds like a lot to me because my family only makes around $35,000, so raising taxes will make things easier for me and my family. Of course, I count my blessings because $35,000 is still well above the poverty line, and there are plenty of families, Jewish as well as non-Jewish, who don’t always know where they will get their next meal. Is it so difficult to give up a few luxuries? Anyone who’s making a six-figure salary can afford to cut back a little.

#2 definitely resonates with me. There are such high expectations nowadays from diets and pills that people just want a “quick fix” which is simply not realistic. I used to watch the TV show The Biggest Loser where contestants would lose at least 5 pounds every week, usually more. One week, there was a woman who only lost 3 pounds, and her team was so disappointed in her. Yet as we can see from this article, even 3 pounds in a week is too much! The healthy- and permanent- method is to lose weight over a longer period of time and keep it off rather than losing a lot very quickly and then gaining it back right away.

I’m not saying that I feel men’s attractions should change; rather, I don’t think that we should blame heavy girls for being unmarried. Thinking about some of the frum families I know, there are all four types represented in terms of weight: in the majority of the families I know, both husband and wife are average weight or slim. I also know a few families where both husband and wife are overweight, and two or three each where the wife is overweight and the husband is slim, or the wife is slim and the husband is overweight. In the second to last example, do I think that the husband finds his wife unattractive? No, of course not! If that were the case, how could they possibly live together and build a family? Granted, the majority of men perhaps prefer slim women, but so too the majority of women prefer slim men, and I don’t understand why we are only approaching this discussion from one angle.

I am thinking of one couple in particular where the husband is overweight and married to an average weight, pretty woman. He is my brother’s Rebbe, so I have been to their house for Shabbos and know them well. He happened to marry relatively later than most men do and must have dated dozens of women. “I waited and waited for my wife, and thank God she came!” he once said to me with a chuckle. Would you define him as insane? I certainly wouldn’t. It’s possible that all those women who came before his wife rejected the shidduch because of his weight, but she didn’t, and that’s all that matters. When a person looks to get married, he or she is not looking to marry the whole world- it only takes one! So it may be frustrating to have to wait longer for the right person to come along, but it will happen b’ezrat hashem for all the single men and women out there who are overweight. It may be a good idea for them to try to slim down a little for health reasons (and I am speaking here of those who are grossly overweight or obese, let’s say size 18 or 20 and up) but they should not do it only for the purposes of getting married.

Would you suggest that a slim woman who has an ugly face should undergo plastic surgery if she wants to get married?

Actually, I did not quote Rav Kook, I simply mentioned that he too was vegetarian, so I am on solid footing.

(By the way, many murderers do in fact wear pants, but most murderers are male!)

I have not read Rav Kook’s sefer and therefore cannot comment on his prohibition on pants. I have, however, read his 1919 teshuva stating that women should not vote. First, he clearly states in the beginning of the document that he is not really qualified to address the issue and is only writing an opinion because he was asked to by others. Second, remember that he did write this in 1919, at the peak of the women’s suffrage movement. His belief that women should not vote was founded on fears that he had of what such a step would lead to, as outlined later in the document. With the benefit of the passage of time, we can clearly see that these fears were, thankfully, not realized.

I won’t deny that I am influenced by modern society, and sometimes I unconsciously draw conclusions about what is right based on modernity and then have issues when this conflicts with Torah ideas of what is right. I am dealing with this in my own way and I believe that it is an inevitable problem; we just all have it to different degrees. I admire you for sticking by one posek even when you don’t agree with him. But that’s just it- there are instances where you don’t agree with him, where what he says intuitively feels wrong to you! Where do you think this intuitive feeling comes from? Even if you ignore the feeling, you can’t get away from the fact that it exists.

I am not yet a parent, but I can well imagine the tremendous feeling of conflict that faced Avraham Avinu in this week’s parsha. Even putting aside the fact that Hashem had said that an entire nation would come out of Avraham through the line of Yitzchak- who did not have any offspring at the time of the Akeidah- how could Avraham raise his hand to slay his own child? Ideally, we should strive to be on Avraham’s level and have complete faith, but this is not always possible. Child sacrifice is one of those things that seems intuitively and undoubtedly wrong. Yet Avraham accepted it without question. If I were in his position, I think I would fail this test utterly, as would most of today’s Jews.

So, to answer your question directly, I’ll admit that I do “pick and choose” at times, but I would never do something that all poskim unanimously prohibit. (For example, secular society clearly sees nothing wrong with premarital relations, but I recognize that there is no allowance for this within a Torah framework and therefore would not ever consider engaging in such relations.) I would like to be in a place where I can be more consistent in my observance of halacha, and this is something that I am working on, but I am simply not there yet.

Please, let’s not get into that discussion here. I am well aware that the vast majority of this website’s readership is against feminism; I do not need each of you to tell me individually. I believe GMAB started a feminism thread which mysteriously disappeared soon after, so apparently YWN editors do not consider it a suitable topic for discussion.

Like it or not, I am a feminist, and I’m not going to change my ideology just because some anonymous people on a website think I should. Please don’t use asterisks or abbreviate my username to try to ignore my feminism or treat it like a dirty word; there is another “f-word” that I think you would find much more objectionable!

(kitzur_dot_net, I think you probably meant that “orthodox” and “feminist” are oxymorons. I disagree with you wholeheartedly here, as I am an Orthodox feminist. Nonetheless, I can see why some people might think this is so, whereas there is no basis whatsoever for claiming that a Jew by birth who may be completely secular cannot be a feminist.)

Krumme?

“…or you can suggest that the girls try to lose some weight which may solve the problem.”

This will most certainly NOT solve the problem. If a man is not attracted to (I won’t go so far as to say repulsed by) an overweight woman, he doesn’t have to go out with her, and she can find a man who does find her attractive. But to say that at this point she should lose weight is not fair. Men have different tastes in women; some actually find heavier women more attractive, just as some prefer blonde hair and some prefer red hair. Should a woman dye her hair to become more attractive to certain men, only to then become less attractive to others? So it is with weight.

Furthermore, a woman who is told that a man is only interested in her if she is thin will naturally lose some self-confidence. There are so many single women out there who are only getting older, and I’m sure many of them, even if they present a self-assured manner, have thoughts late at night such as “What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I married already?” Suggesting that they have to lose weight or change in any other way only confirms this doubt that maybe something is “wrong” with them and they cannot find a shidduch just the way they are.

Are you differentiating here between an “object” and an “item”? If so, what is the difference?