Pashuteh Yid

Reb Moshe seems to be assuming there are no platonic relationships between members of opposite genders. If you read the tshuva and related ones, he is fairly clear that the issur of talking devarim bteilim to women is that of an intimate nature, as a prelude to forbidden acts. Asking how’s the weather is not what is meant. In addition, his chidush that mere talking is d’oraisa is certainly not pashut pshat in the Rambam or Maggid Mishna there.

But if one believes there are no platonic relationships or friendships, then this will eventually lead to forbidden talk.

Those who are lumping together the woman Rabbi issue with halachic issues are not being honest with Cynical. Please show a siman and s’if in Shulchan Oruch where it says women can’t be Rabbis. Each thing they might do has its own halachos. If it involves visiting the sick in the hospital and getting the title of Chaplain, obviously this is fine. If it involves serving as an eid in a marriage, this is not fine. If it involves making speeches in shul and teaching Torah classes, that is probably fine, as well. There have been numerous educated women such as Beruriah, and Devora, etc. who achieved high levels of learning and even served as communal leaders.

I was very worried, because wouldn’t they have monitored his credit cards and ATM usage? If there was no activity, what would he have been eating, unless he had a lot of cash with him. Furthermore, if he was mentally able to go into stores and buy food, one would have thought he could make a phone call. But if he was confused and going into stores, then certainly a store would have called for medical help. I could not imagine any scenario how he could have survived. This unfortunately confirms our worst fears. I did not want to post these questions in the other thread, earlier, so as not to worry the family.

May the family have a nechama, and know no more tzaar.

Int((t^2), 1, 3^(1/3)) = (t^3)/3, from 1 to 3^(1/3)

= (3/3)-(1/3)=2/3

cos(3pi/9)=cos(pi/3)=cos 60 deg= 1/2

2/3*1/2= 1/3: (Left Hand Side)

ln(e^1/3)=1/3 ln(e)= 1/3 * 1 =1/3: (Right Hand Side)

LHS=RHS => check.

Here, we are debating whether college is a necessity, or whether one can possibly make it with a high school diploma (assuming one is not going into klei kodesh). What is even harder to understand is the shita of the Chareidim in EY, where there is no HS to begin with, and secular studies ends after 7th or 8th grades.

Midwest2, Just because a school gives doctoral degrees doesn’t mean they don’t have good teachers, or that grad students actually teach the complete courses. Where I went to school, you could be fairly sure in most cases that each course was taught by a gadol hador in his field. The grad students may have been teaching assistants who marked homework and taught recitations, but did not give the main lectures.

They have to let some younger professors teach, or they will never learn how. Nevertheless, the level of teaching was tightly monitored.

My main complaint is when they let foreigners teach who can barely speak the language. This is really not fair to the students. In science today, there is such a huge number of foreigners who are filling a large percentage of positions at US universities, and nobody seems to care how poor their English skills are.

In NY unfortunately one can live his life totally anonymously by floating from shul to shul each day and each Shabbos. One never has attachment to a Rav, and often not even to a kehilla and steady group of friends.

Out of town, one goes to the same shul every day, and gets to know each person in the shul. These become his friends and everybody shares in everybody’s simchas.

Out of town is usually much prettier than the frum neighborhoods of NY where you are usually so boxed in among tall buildings that you rarely see the sun or trees and grass. Parking is a nightmare, especially with alternate side of the street. Getting from one end of Boro Park to the other can be 45 minutes for about one mile, total. A person I know once used his GPS to plot a route, and it told him to go through BP, as it was a bit shorter. The delay was unbearable. (He should have gone on Ocean Pkwy to the Belt.)

The quality of life for a secular person is far better out of town than in most frum NY neighborhoods. We only put up with all this because of the shuls, yeshivas and restaurants.

One other thing is that OOT often there is only one school, and kids from all backgrounds learn achdus and become friends without labeling each group. They don’t even know the difference. The warmth is unbelievable.

Tylenol can be extremely toxic to the liver. Make sure you check it out with a physician if you use it a lot.

This works! Woof woof.

Testing, testing, one, two, three.

A simpler way is just to post something outlandish, and you will definitely hear from them.

Sounds like snake oil. Get enough real sleep. Your body heals and strengthens itself while you sleep. Those of us who run probably know that if you run during the day, and don’t get enough sleep afterwards that night, you will wake up with sore muscles the next day, and won’t be able to run. It is clear that sleep helps restore one’s strength (through actual chemical reactions). I doubt there is any way to speed-sleep. Sounds like a gimmick.

If you look at the very end of the Chazon Ish Siman 2, which is Os 28, he quotes from the Ahavas Chessed which I assume is the Chofetz Chaim who brings from Hagaon R”Y Molin who quotes the Maharam Lublin that today there is a mitzva to love reshaim, because the mitzva to hate them is only after one gives them tochacha and they refuse to listen. But today, nobody can give proper tochacha and they remain tinokos shenishbu, so the mitzva to hate them does not apply. Therefore, the Chofetz Chaim and those he quotes are in full agreement with the Chazon Ish, and the Chazon ish is not a daas yochid, as someone posted earlier, but is mainstream.

Maybe he wants people to write down the memories that the menachamim are telling the aveil.

You sound like a very sincere girl. As others said, you need to speak to a Rav, and maybe the Chabad Rabbonim who actually did the conversions may know the most about the situation.

Good luck in everything, and I am sure there is a special boy out there for you.

BTW, in Yeshivish, it is proper to say Shmerel is an Uncle by Berel.

Thanks very much. It must be so much fun to be a Mod.

My mother always thought my 2-year-old daughter thought she owned the world, so she starting calling her the Machatainista.

Very funny, Mod.

I found a site which may have been the paper article I saw years ago:

http://www2.bc.edu/~wilsonc/bakerpunctuation.pdf

This was also helpful:

https://paris.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0073511994/student_view0/brush_up/part_ii-punctuation2/

Mods, can these be posted?

Dear Gradschool, thanks for the kinds words. The truth is that I already finished college and grad school myself, so I went through the same things you are going through, now. There is really nothing that helps writing as much as actually doing it over and over again.

I had a good elementary and HS education which helps, and we spent much time going through all the rules of grammar and punctuation. However, over the years I forgot some of those rules, like how to make the correct plural and possessive forms of words which end in vowels, consonants or, most confusing, in the letter “s”. I sometimes go to online grammar sites to remember.

The best advice that I ever saw was a 2-page guide to writing which somebody put out in my college that reinterpreted the rules of punctuation. Instead of worrying about rules, it showed how each punctuation mark changes your tone of voice. Some whisper, some talk and some shout. You modulate your voice with the appropriate punctuation marks. That system opened my eyes. If I find that anybody has put it online, I will post it, Bli Neder.

But the most important thing is to proofread your work multiple times. I read that even pros do it 4-5 times. You will often catch run-on sentences, or missing punctuation marks that slur words together.

As far as vocabulary goes, the only real way to build it is to read and read. There are some good books I used for the SAT such as Norman Lewis’s Word Power for Better Meaning. These go into the Greek and Latin roots of many words, so you can figure out new words which you have not seen previously. He has good jokes and it is fun to read.

Hatzlacha Rabba with your career.

It is a wonderful camp. We have not heard anything about it closing. We saw an ad in one of the Jewish newspapers recently saying nothing you have liked about it over the years will change, and only improvements will be made, such as the new water activities they added this past summer.

D9, I feel terrible over your predicament. It is a very tough decision. While here I often post that people should learn a parnasa, it seems like your boys are very sincere and self-motivated. I am against Yeshivos forbidding college and secular studies across the board, but think every boy must be treated as an individual. If they truly excel in learning, and can become the next poskim, then maybe they should stay only in learning. However, we do see so many families struggling to pay the bills. It is such a difficult decision and very hard to know what Hashem wants here. They need to think it over very carefully, fully aware of how difficult it is for many families. If they still want to only learn, then maybe they should.

Mdd, the Chazon Ish’s point is gevaldig. Even if one was brought up frum why does that necessarily obligate him to keep mitzvos, if he later had some bad experience, or had other problems with his faith? How is he any different than a public school child, just because somebody told him he should keep Shabbos, or just because he kept it for a few years when he was younger? How does he really know that the mesorah is true?

The Chazon Ish is stating that until we get to see Nevuah with our own eyes, we can’t really be considered to fully know the emes, whether we were brought up frum or not. Once one has actually seen Nevuah, then one cannot deny that the Torah is emes, unless he is a real rasha.

It may be a form of fraud. If one misrepresents himself and conducts a business deal, he is defrauding the other party.

I know in Israel one frum politician was put in jail after he listed having received a doctorate. What he did was he went into the reception room of his department in the university, pulled out a sample thesis that had been written by a graduate years earlier, photocopied it, put on a new title page, and then submitted it.

The main mistake he made was that it was written in the feminine gender (in Hebrew), and he was a male. But aside from that, how could anybody think one can write a thesis without a committee, a proposal, an advisor and constant commmittee meetings all along to formulate an idea and to continually gauge progress during the research and writing phases. What about the defense?

I thought this story was one of the funniest I ever read, but it is true.