just my hapence

Where do all the lost socks go?

Whither all the pies?

Blown away and carried off

On whisper-wings of dragonflies.

They sit and wait in Over There

Beyond the Far-Away

Expecting owners there to find

And bring them home again someday.

And so they wait and sit

And wait and sit and wait some more.

TinyTim – Isn’t it the wrong holiday for you? Regardless: merry chanukah, one and all!

<bad French accent>Yuer Menurkey is burekking ze liewa</bad French accent>

VM – Conveniently avoiding answering my questions…

Because HKB’H wanted him to die.

imamom – Ok, let’s break this down a bit. First off:

The point is that IF a person is a shomer Torah u’mitzvos, then they conduct themselves accordingly and ask shailos, so why would one say that such a person is a machasheifa and an oved avoda zora, just because their work involves something that one doesn’t understand?

Well, that wasn’t really your original point, was it? Here’s what you said originally:

Chas v’shalom that we should be saying that a Shomer Torah u’mitzvos is a machasheifah or oved avodah zorah (lashon hora on the internet! moderators, where are you?)

The response is simple, if it is ossur (and there are other potential issurim involved besides kishuf and avoda zara; nichush is one example) then to say that what she does is ossur is not loshon horah. Your starting point is “Well she’s frum, so…” which is the wrong place to start. Never look at the individual, always the actions.

Next.

I don’t understand electricity, but I know that it works! Is my electrician a machasheifa or an oved avoda zora? I don’t think so.

Now this is just silly. Come on. There is no way you can seriously be equating something which has very flimsy pseudo-scientific rationale, which has zero experimental proof, which is pretty much universally not accepted by people with the necessary knowledge to a phenomenon that we know all the scientific basis of to the last electron, that has hundreds of years of experimental data, that we can observe how, when and why it works. Seriously?! Gosh. Talk about an agenda…

The books I listed indicate that “energy” is all around us, all the time. This is a scientific fact (thank you, Albert Einstein).

Now this is one of the most egregious distortions of special relativity I’ve ever seen. All e=mc2 means is that energy and matter are equivalent, that is that one can be converted to the other proportionally. It means that conservation of mass and conservation of energy are linked. Nothing more than that. It does not mean that some kind of wishy-washy “energy” with mysterious powers is all around us waiting to be controlled by those with “the gift” if they can “balance” it correctly (whatever that’s supposed to mean).

No agendas, either. Rational science.

So, the group which uses standard scientific experimental techniques, and is basing their theories on actual scientific knowledge has “an agenda” and is not using “rational science”, but the group who does not and bases their claims on gross misinterpretation of pretty basic science apparently is using “rational science” and has “no agendas”. Seriously, you think these people have no agenda whatsoever, they are simply doing it for the good of mankind and the furthering of human knowledge and not to sell books and services. Ok…

Btw, this is a mature and adult conversation too, or at least I am trying to make it so. Putting forward views to which you are opposed does not make it not so.

yytz/wallflower – I know, but doesn’t it strike you as odd that a symbol known to have been used by a different religion before its first documented use in ours bears a strikingly phonetically similar name. They may mean completely different things but the fact that the names sound so similar is a little suspicious.

OhTeeDee – Good question. Many, many rishonim didn’t believe that gilgulim is part of our mesorah. It mostly became a more mainstream belief around the time of the Ari Z’al, and mostly due to his talmidim spreading the idea and then further popularised by the rise of chassidus. Does this mean that it was one man’s idea? Not necessarily, there are references to Jewish beliefs in metempsychosis since the early geonim and, if you learn certain sugyos in certain ways, possibly in the gemoro too so it may have some claim to mesorah via torah sheba’al peh… It’s not a cut-and-dried issue…

“Noach ish tzaddik”; before you can be a tzaddik, you have to be a mentch…

If I recall correctly, it’s a Kotzker vort (I may be wrong, it’s happened before…).

WIY –

I think that you people have no clue what addiction looks like and how a shmutz addiction totally destroys someone’s life be it a man woman child

Actually, I have a fairly good idea what addiction looks like, in fact I’m in the middle of an assignment about it for my psychology degree. As addiction is currently defined (which is fairly loosely actually), the internet is not addictive. Addictions are defined as having the following characteristics:

1. Excessive, disruptive, compulsive behaviour caused by the activity or substance. All these terms are, however, subjective.

2. Craving the activity or substance in its absence. Again, this is fairly subjective.

3. Tolerance – the amount of substance or performance of the activity needed to achieve the same level of ‘high’ increases over time. This is objective and observable.

4. Physical withdrawal symptoms. These are actual, physical symptoms such as headaches, nausea, vomiting, ‘the shakes’ etc. upon prolonged cessation of the substance or activity. Again, objective and observable.

The internet may, at the very most, qualify for two of the above. It certainly does not qualify by either of the objective, observable criteria. It doesn’t appear in the DSM as an addiction. I know you will google up some studies but the issue really is a lot more complex than a quick internet search. It may be that, in the fullness of time, as more research is conducted internet abuse may come to be classified as an addiction but at the moment it isn’t.

Furthermore, you fall foul of the self-selection bias when you ask us to

Read some real stories and then come back and post your naarishkiet.

The problem here is that you only ever hear stories of when things go wrong because things not going wrong is not a story. Nobody ever went to their rabbi completely broken at the fact that they got the internet and then nothing bad happened. Nobody ever sent a story into a magazine or newspaper which went “I got the internet and it was fine”. “Nothing happened” doesn’t sell. Sure, completely unfiltered internet is a dangerous thing but when it gets blown out of all proportion as in these ads then all that happens is that people get skeptical about the whole issue.

crisisoftheweek –

Most lead guitarists in metal bands could teach college level classes in music theory, some on the level of Stratavarius.

Who was “Stratavarius”? I think you might be referring to Stradivarius but there was more than one of them (it was a family business) and they made violins, they were not musicians nor music theorists.

dveykus613 – 1) Who says those who don’t think everyone should be in full-time learning aren’t mindful of how they can improve their own learning? Plus giving criticism where it is deserved is not just the realm of the personally perfect.

2) And what of all the time that he wasn’t learning? Why is that excused because he now is more serious?

3) Except the Gemoro disagrees with you. We pasken like R’ Yehuda. The Gemoro says “harbeh asu k’R’ Shimon v’lo alsa b’yadam”, which the rishonim explain to mean that neither the parnassa nor the learning was alsa b’yadam. The Maharal in his pirush to the Mishna in Avos that says “kol Torah she’ein imoh melacha sofah lihyos beteila” asks about those in full-time learning and gives two answers: a) presumably they have businesses (i.e. melacha is any form of parnassa not just manual or professional labour) and b) those who we know do not have businesses may perhaps have reached such a madrega as you describe where HKB”H provides for them, but qualifies this statement by saying that there are very few such people. Now do you really think that more people in our dor are on that nmadrega than in the Maharal’s dor?

And I’m not even going to dignify your statement about people in learning having a better chance of staying “spiritually intact” with a response.

*sit there*

Harotzehbilumshmo – If in my job I was to regularly put my head down for a quick rest or play on my phone for a few minutes or go out every hour or so for a coffee/cigarette I think I could rightly be accused of not taking the job seriously. Your definition of toroscho keva (which, by the way, is not a mitzva nor a chiyuv nor even a halocho – merely a piece of advice, granted it is advice from a tannah and should be taken seriously but nevertheless nothing more than advice; providing a parnassah for your family is a mitzvas aseh d’oraisah according to R’ Yehuda [who we pasken like]) would not seem to apply to those who behave the same way in the beis hamedrash. Like it or not, this is the vast majority. Sure when they learn, they learn shtark. Sure they may be ‘involved’ but what they are involved in is the system, not the torah per se that they are learning. Sure there are some very special kollel guys but they are by no means at all anywhere near the majority. Most are just jobniks and that’s the honest truth of it. They turn up, they put in the hours (more or less), they go home. Learning is just what they happen to do.

As for your last gripe, I believe the reason for that is that working people are so looked down upon in yeshivish circles that it wouldn’t matter one jot if the working people learned harder, they’d still get flak for simply being working guys. If the argument against you is that you left yeshiva and shut your gemoro forever then it is enough to defend yourself by saying that you do learn at all. Of course everyone has room for improvement and many people both learning and working could put more into their learning but the current false dichotomy of you either sit in kollel and are pure and holy or go to work and are second-class is what the OP and the rest of us are trying to show up for its wrongness.

ihear – Well thank you for your classic reductio ad absurdum. First of all, halevai it was 9:30 – more like any time between 9:30 and 10:30; it kind of fills up slowly, y’know as people come when they come. And most guys open their gemoros and have a quick “how are you today?” shmooze before they get into the actual learning. A great deal do come in and go straight for the coffee, have a drink for a few minutes, before going back to the beis (often still with the coffee that they proceed to take occasional drinks from over the course of the next 15-20 minutes). You try getting away with that in a workplace.

And to answer your question:

have you ever even stepped foot into a yeshiva? into the mir?

Yup. Learned in the mir for 3 years. After learning in another very well-known yeshiva for a number of years. So all my information comes direct from the source, not (as your baseless accusation suggests) from ignorance.

FriendInFlatbush –

Men are so much more adversely affected by this culture due to their raging yetzer horas.

Oh dear. This again. Ok, so lets start from the beginning. In terms of subjective feelings there is no way to compare male and female yetzer horahs – no guy has ever experienced a girl’s and no girl a guy’s. In terms of looking at the mechanisms through which male and female desires work biologically and neurologically speaking they are identical. Both are based on the release of testosterone and dopamine, both are mediated by limbic system (which is the system in the brain primarily concerned with emotional processing) and the medial preoptic area (concerned with satisfaction of desire). In other words, both males and females find people attractive based on both physical and emotional conditions. The strength of activation in these brain areas is absolutely equal, i.e. when a male or female is confronted with someone that they find attractive and who induces desires in them the amount of brain activity is exactly the same in exactly the same areas and controlled by exactly the same hormones and neurotransmitters. In fact, some researchers suggest that in addition female desire can also be regulated by estrogen implying that at certain times of the month female desires may be stronger than male ones, though this has not been universally accepted. So please stop with the male yetzer horah vs female yetzer horah business, it’s simply untrue.

wallflower – Nobody is saying that most kollel guys do nothing all day, just that they don’t learn all day either. There is middle-ground you know, it’s not all or nothing. Most kollel guys spend a fair bit of the time when they should be learning not learning. They may be in the beis hamedrash with a sefer in front of them but they might not be learning. There’s a lot of shmoozing, coffee-drinking, smoking, stam spacing out, putting heads down for a quick snooze, checking phones, texting, making phone calls, playing games on phones under shtenders and a whole lot more besides. Sure each of these might only be fore five minutes at a time, but they add up. One of the largest yeshivas in the world runs a bus service for its kollel guys so that they can get home for lunch; it leaves half-an hour before the end of seder. That’s the official yeshiva buses. So yes, these guys learn seriously but they don’t do it all of the time that their wives think they do, or that their wives are told by their school/sem teachers that they will be doing anyway.

the-art – Actually there is no single scientific definition of addiction. Excessive use despite the consequences is one criterion used to determine if a substance or behaviour is addictive but there are others, including craving the substance or behaviour in its absence, whether tolerance levels increase over time (i.e. increasingly greater amounts of the substance/behaviour are needed to get the same level of ‘high’ as previously experienced) and whether physical withdrawal symptoms are displayed after sudden, prolonged cessation of the performance of the activity (this is different to craving which is purely an extreme, overwhelming desire to re-experience the ‘high’; withdrawal symptoms are physical, including nausea, excessive sweating, cramps, loss of concentration etc.).

lakewood001 – Addictions are always physical. Some things which are often described as addictive (such as the internet, video games etc.) are not physical and, as such, are not classed as addictions by the DSM. Behaviours which are addictive include overeating, gambling etc. and do have actual neurobiological facets.

JustARegularJew – Interesting point. There is much discussion in the world of addiction research as to whether or not this is the case. The evidence is inconclusive but the DSM does currently go with this distinction between addictive behaviours and addictive substances.

oomis – See above. Always do multiplications and divisions BEFORE additions and subtractions. So the only thing being multiplied by 0 here is the very last 1. You can add and subtract all the rest afterwards. Incidentally, 0 is also a real number.

rebdoniel – Loius Jacobs was no “R'”, he actively tried to destroy British Orthodoxy (of all stripes) and it took all the efforts of Rav Jakobovits to stop him. He was an actual, real apikores (and I do not use that word lightly) being someone “sheshino v’kofar”; he denied Torah Sh’baal Peh, Olam Haba, Mashiach, and Torah Mi’Sinai (he believed that the ‘ideas’ behind the Torah were revealed to Moshe Divinely but the actual construction of the Torah and the institution of the mitzvos were Moshe’s, not HKB”H’s). I admire your desire to be dan l’kaf zechus but in this case it is misplaced. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

jewishfeminist02 –

Example #1: I have never heard of a boy writing a shidduch resume.

I did, my wife still keeps it in a drawer somewhere. All the shadchanim I dealt with assumed I had one, indicating that as far as they’re concerned all guys do.

Example #2: A boy can reject a girl without the girl ever even knowing that the match was suggested in the first place.

And saying yes to a girl only to be rejected is in what way better? Mima nafshach, if he says yes and she says no then she is the deciding factor. If he says yes and she also does, then they date and, again, she is the deciding factor. Only if he says no first does the question of the shidduch going ahead or not rest on his decision. In other words, looks to me like it’s decidedly in her favour.

Example #3: The girl’s family has to come up with the money to pay for most of the wedding expenses.

Depends on the families and how they agree to split it, something that in my family’s experience only takes place after the couple are already engaged. So how does that affect the actual dating process?

Curiosity – 1. Forgive me but if it is the bending that’s undignified then the dimyon to horses doesn’t work. Horses can’t bend down as they don’t stand upright. They drink by lowering their head, by partially kneeling so that the front of their bodies is lower than the back or by kneeling fully to bring their head to the water level. I therefore assumed that the dimyon to horses was to the manner in which they drink, i.e. lapping. This is also the way one drinks from a water fountain, and the manner of drinking of the soldiers who were kept (regardless of whether they were sitting, standing, bending, lying down or jumping around no-one disputes the lapping). This also answers your fourth point.

2. Don’t tell me what I am and aren’t expecting to do. What I was doing was pointing out the difficulties, which, unless you believe it’s assur to ask kashas on a shitta you don’t understand, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Given the difficulties, and given that it’s a da’as yochid that all the other mefarshim disagree with, forgive me for learning like the other mefarshim. Furthermore, if you have answers, please provide them. Don’t just sit there like a 4-year-old saying “I do know, but I’m not telling…”

3. The only reason that the Mahari Kara talks about those standing is because he has to create a 3rd group given as he can’t have the 1st group being chosen as he believes that they too knelt. He is therefore forced to create a 3rd group which he says “could have drunk standing”. None of the other mefarshim have his problem, none have any more than 2 groups – those that knelt and those that lapped – and therefore none learn like the Mahari Kara. Nowhere are any of them mashma, like you claim, farkert. The Ralbag, as pointed out, says b’feirush that they were chosen as lapping from the river showed their fearlessness. The Minchas Shai has 2 groups, those that knelt and drank from the river directly and those that drank from their hands (he is medayek “min hamayim” as opposed to “al hamayim”), which seems to indicate that this was the only difference between the two groups, mashmaus is that those that drank from their hands also knelt (in other words the kneeling was not indicative of avodah zorah, the manner of their lapping showed whether they had discipline, though both still lapped).

Curiosity – First, it’s still lamentable that you can joke about it. Second, I have not seen the Mahari Kara, but based on your misrepresentation of the other mefarshim involved I shall reserve judgement on it until I do. Third, comparing ubiquitin’s opinion to that of the Karaites is essentially calling him an apikores. Fourth, your sarcasm is noted as is your lack of knowledge of fluid dynamics. Fifth, none of that has a single bearing on the licking/lapping issue that I was talking about and which is the only issue which is really shayach to water fountains as kneeling/not kneeling is irrelevant; if we’re quoting ourselves then let me repeat what I said before: “Nobody kneels to water fountains…”

jewishfeminist02 – Sorry, but there’s no evidence for a neurological or developmental basis either. They may well have known from an early age that they have certain ta’aivahs, I knew from an early age that I had a ta’aivah for chocolate, doesn’t mean it’s not a ta’avaih. Unfortunately many people know from an early age that they have a very strong ta’avaih for physically abusing people or a ta’avaih for money that is so strong they will do literally anything to get it. Yet we label these people criminals because ta’avaihs are not excuses (I’m not saying that homosexual ta’aivahs should be criminal, just using an extreme example). I agree with you that a frum Jew with homosexual ta’avaihs who controls them is extremely admirable, but that doesn’t mean that what they are controlling is not a ta’aivah.

jewishfeminist02 – There is very little evidence for any kind of biological basis for same-sex attraction. Foster and non-foster twin studies have shown virtually no difference in probability (as compared to general population) of homosexuality in one twin if the other is gay, ruling out genetic and epigenetic causes. The problem for gay rights activists is that, when searching for a biological basis, the only ‘acceptable’ options are genetic or epigenetic as neurological or developmental origins would then catagorise homosexuality as either a condition or a disorder (note that these do not necessarily imply disease or illness, just deviation from ‘standard set-up’) whereas the activists need to portray homosexuality as simply another variant of the standard human set-up. Simply speaking, a neurological condition would mean that the brain functions differently to the basic programmed settings for all humanity. If we admit such, it means also admitting that heterosexuality is the default mode of human orientation and that homosexuality is, in some way, an aberration. This is something no self-respecting activist is willing to do. The same holds true with a developmental origin, as that would imply that somehow the cognitive functions of gay people developed along different lines to straight people, again requiring the ‘default mode’ being heterosexuality.

Apart from the lack of evidence, there is also the logical problem with a genetic (or epigenetic) basis for homosexuality. If, as pretty much every gay rights activist does, you believe in Darwinian (or even neo-Darwinian) evolution then how does a ‘gay gene’ propagate? In a world in which mating is purely based on attraction and there are no ‘social taboos’ on engaging in homosexual acts (as would be the case with early man) then the gene cannot be passed on as such acts cannot produce conception. No-one can be born from the mating of two males or two females, and those who would have had same-sex desires would have had no need to involve themselves in sham marriages (as many over the course of history did in fact do) as there was no pressure for them to act as if they were straight so no homosexual male would have mated with a heterosexual female (or visa-versa) to propagate said gene.

At the end of the day it is a ta’aivah. Yes, it may be a very strong one but you cannot excuse people simply on the basis of having a very strong ta’aivah. There are prisons full of murderers, rapists, pedophiles, con artists, muggers, bank robbers and burglars to prove that.

Curiosity –

I’m not sure what’s in Shoftim perek 7 because I was in yeshiva

Well isn’t that a sad indictment of the yeshiva system (or at the very least, your yeshiva)…

So, just so you know, Shoftim 7 starts with Gidon having just been chosen to lead Bnei Yisrael against the Midianim. He recruits an army but H’ tells him that it is too large and will not showcase the miracle suitably, plus many of the soldiers are idol-worshippers. So Gidon performs a test. He takes the soldiers to the river-bank and tells them to drink; those that kneel down are discarded as idol-worshippers, those that “lapped like a dog” were kept. So, ironically, the action you say is “undignified for a ben Torah” is exactly how Gidon determined who was a Ben Torah.

Toi – The DB9 is an Aston Martin, not a Bentley. Still, awesome car.

Curiosity – Easy for you to say, you kill cats…