Milhouse

Reish Lokish was not a ger.

And what you write is not really true. Sure, some people will never respect a talmid chochm who’s a ger; no genuine talmid chochom would want their respect. Sure, some schools will not admit a ger’s children; those schools are far from the “best”. And sure some families will refuse to make shiduchim with a ger’s children; boruch Hashem for that, since it saves you wasting time with such unsuitable families.

Serious advice: Make sure this is what you truly want, and don’t have unrealistic expectations. You should understand that although you will come out of the mikveh with a new and holy neshoma, you will not feel any different. Your yetzer hara will be just as strong, if not stronger, and it will be no easier to resist.

It’s like ne’ilah on Yom Kippur; you think that with a blank slate and a new start everything will now be different, but by Sukkos you realize that it isn’t. For you it will be a true blank slate, because your previous averos will have been completely erased and will not be your problem any more, but the yetzer hara that grew on those aveiros will still be there.

Remember the way the gemara phrases the instructions to a would-be ger. It doesn’t say to tell him, “Be aware that yesterday you could eat cheilev and tomorrow you can’t”. Rather it says to tell him, “Be aware that yesterday when you ate cheilev you were not punished with kareis, and tomorrow when you eat cheilev you will be punished with kareis”. In other words we expect that you will do aveiros, and you have to accept that as a result of your decision you will now be punished for them. Basically you’re signing up to go to gehennom. But if you accept that, and would rather be in a yiddisher gehennom than in a goyisher gan eiden, then welcome, welcome, welcome.

Ashkenazim seem more prone to Machloket. I’ve heard this from many ASHKENAZIM

Of course you’ve heard it from Ashkenazim, who fondly imagine all kinds of things about a community they don’t know. You won’t hear it from Sefaradim, who know it’s not true.

Re: Haskala not happening in Sefardi countries, it actually did, in the form of the Alliance. The Alliance was closely linked to the Maskilim, and did lead thousands of Sefardi Jews ever-so-slightly off the correct path.

Reform do not say kaddish for terrorists, and there are no videos of any Reform synagogue doing so.

Reform is a foreign religion, no different from Islam or Buddhism, but it so happens that a very large percentage of its members are Jewish by birth, with Jewish neshamos. That percentage is probably less than 50%, but still very high. The same is probably true of Buddhism in NY; there’s a very good chance that a randomly selected NY Buddhist, if s/he appears to be white, is a Jew. We have to love the Jew, but we have no connection at all to the religion s/he is practicing.

The Hirsh gang within NK (not the real NK) are ochrei yisroel; they actively collaborate with the enemies of the Jewish nation, which makes them traitors. If we know they’re Jewish we need to have pity on their neshamos.

laughing, Lustiger was a meshumad, a Jew who chose of his own free will to become an idolater. Nothing he did for Jews or Israel can possibly cancel that.

Now John Cardinal O’Connor was a true tinok shenishbeh, he never knew he was a Jew, it was only discovered after his death. So his avoda zara can be overlooked, and we can wonder at how his yiddishe neshoma, trapped in such a life, nevertheless managed to manifest itself and cause him to be such an ohev yisroel.

Charlie Hall, as usual, lies through his teeth. There is no evidence at all that Mrs Phillips was a spy, or that the RNC bought her silence. She was certainly pro-German; there was nothing wrong with that.

Harding was a good president and a good person.

How do you explain that people don’t send mail on Erev Shabbos?

What people? I’ve never heard of such people and doubt they exist. Maybe you don’t do this, but you are only “person”, not “people”.

And as Daasyochid pointed out, even if you are guaranteed Saturday delivery that is not necessarily Shabbos. It’s the nochri’s choice whether to make the delivery on Shabbos or after, so there is no problem at all.

I have never received such a ticket, but I would absolutely expect to if I were to drive with my brights on, and fail to turn them off whenever I saw a car coming in the opposite direction. If you can see the oncoming car, it can see you, or rather it could if you weren’t dazzling it with your brights.

>:> Just remember a minhag brocht a din

> No it doesn’t.

Yes, it does, but only sometimes. Sometimes a minhag brecht a din, and sometimes minhag osiyos gehinnom, and it takes someone on a higher pay grade than mine to decide which is which.

Again, ZD, your story is simply not true. Conagra didn’t drop Rabbi Stern because of marketing, they stopped using his hechsher because he passed away! That is a fact, not an opinion. They HAD to find a new hechsher, and Rabbi Ralbag was the most lenient they could find.

And the idea that the OU would suffer by taking on Hebrew National is just ridiculous. If the OU had taken it on, the brand would be universally accepted (for non-glatt, if that’s what it would still be). The problem is that meeting the OU’s standards would be so expensive it would drive away all the current customers who don’t care about kashrus, so it makes no economic sense to do it.

FIrst, as others have said, the US has never promised to fight for Israel, and nobody has ever expected it to. The most we can expect is that It will stand on the sidelines and resupply, as it did in the Yom Kippur War.

The sad truth, however, is that even if the USA had made such a promise, Israel would not be so foolish as to rely on it. The USA has a long and shameful history of abandoning its friends and allies whenever it gets tired or distracted or sees some other opportunity, or whenever some domestic political advantage can be squeezed from it, or whatever.

One of the most dishonorable episodes in US history was when South Vietnam successfully fought off a massive invasion and then turned to the USA to fulfill our solemn commitment to resupply its depleted arms and to provide air support, and the Democrats in Congress refused to fund it, KNOWING AND INTENDING that this would mean our allies would fall to the next attack and would be slaughtered and enslaved. This was unforgivable.

Indeed this was what I wrote when the issue first flared up, and the fact that El Al refused to implement such a simple solution proved to me that they were not interested in resolving the issue, and were motivated only by hostility to religion. It would be very simple to implement both in prebooking and in airport assignment.

Even simpler, they could provide an explicit option to ask for seating next to someone of the same sex, and do the assignments that way. If there was enough demand on a particular flight they could even have single-sex sections. This is a very simple idea, that must have occurred to them but they refused to consider it.

Joseph, the OU, which is the major hechsher in the USA, does not require NYC water to be filtered.

Joseph, yes. If it doesn’t affect the taste then it’s not a problem. if someone ordering vanilla got some chocolate in it, they’d complain. So the rinsing must be good enough to prevent that. Tell me why that should not be good enough for kashrus purposes.

If it’s good enough for customers who don;t want any chocolate in their vanilla, why shouldn’t it be good enough for us?

Joseph, surely they rinse the scoop between flavors.

Why would you want to drink civet coffee anyway?

According to those who drink it, it tastes very good, much better than other coffees, which is why it’s so expensive. I’m sure they’re telling the truth, for the same reason that I’m sure lobster must be delicious: Why else would anyone eat something that looks so disgusting? To overcome the “bal teshaktzu” factor it must be really really good. In both cases, I’m happy to take their word for this and feel no temptation to test it myself.

Rational, even if the bean is really changed by passing through the civet, it remains 100% kosher. Digested food becomes דם ובשר כבשרו, but undigested food does not, and retains its own kashrus status. Non-kosher food found in the stomach of a kosher animal is not kosher; kosher food found in the stomach of a non-kosher animal remains kosher. Therefore the same must be true of what is found in the waste from the stomach.

Honey would not be kosher if not for the pasuk explicitly permitting it.

Carnauba wax comes from palm trees, NOT insects, and is therefore kosher without any question.

Uncle Ben and Joseph, how is this even close to me’useh? Get me’useh is only when the compulsion is directly to give the get. The judge didn’t order him to give a get, he ordered him to fulfill his contract. The judge doesn’t care what the contract was for; it could be to give a get, or to eat ice cream, ככל היוצא מפיו יעשה. How is that different from the classic case where nochrim are not allowed to say “give a get”, but they are allowed to say “obey the beis din”?

The whole stupid argument doesn’t begin. The Jewish areas of Baltimore are NOT in Cummings’s district.

1. The OU permits Blue Marlin.

2. Because of the machlokes between R Belsky and R Shachter, the OU did not decide that NYC water needs to be filtered. Instead it published a fact sheet describing the metzius and the halachic considerations, and advised everyone to show it to their rov and ask for a psak. In restaurants under its supervision it requires filtering, but only as a matter of practical policy, not as a psak halacha.

3. The level of mercury that the FDA and EPA say you have to worry about is ridiculously low. There is no evidence whatsoever that any harm can result, even to pregnant women and their babies, from eating normal amounts of fish. The only known cases of mercury poisoning from fish happened in two bays in Japan, in the 1950s and ’60s, where mercury was being dumped into the water right in the fishing ground. Once it was realized that this is dangerous the practice stopped. The mercury level in the ocean, or in any fishing ground, is not nearly enough to cause any damage, even in pregnancy, unless you eat ridiculous amounts. I suppose if you live on nothing but fish, you might have cause for concern.

Of course people run for Congress to change things. But the changes they seek should be to make things better conform with the values on which the country is built. To make the country great again. It requires a fundamental belief that America is essentially great, and therefore certain details need adjusting to enhance that greatness. Omar and her ilk are not coming to improve America but to transform it into something it never was and must never be. Something foreign and evil. They are not patriots, they’re revolutionaries; they want to overthrow the USA and replace it with a utopia of their own imagining. They want to turn the USA into Venezuela or into the Sweden of their imaginations And they must not be allowed to do so.

Milhouse: Before Moshiach it is forbidden to advocate the expulsion of the nochrim from Eretz Yisroel

Says who? And on what basis?

There was nothing racist about Trump’s tweet. It was stupid and ignorant, yes, just like his reference to the revolutionaries taking over the airports, but he did not mention race at all. Anyone who calls it racist is merely projecting their own racism on him.

And it was not stupid to tell these women that if they don’t like America they should go somewhere else. The only stupid thing was that he told them all to go back where they came from, not realizing that only one was an immigrant. The most reasonable explanation is that he simply forgot he was addressing four individuals, and those words were directed only to Omar, who should indeed go back to Somalia rather than trying to turn America into Somalia.