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In any event, Popa, how about actually addressing the point I raised, to wit:
Why would the couple need to demonstrate to everyone that the chuppah is not a chuppas niddah? No one else (barring, perhaps, the individuals we’re debating) need to know.
The Wolf
Popa,
Your question doesn’t answer mine. I still don’t see why there should be a need to demonstrate to everyone that it was a chuppas niddah.
In any event, the witnesses for sure need to know, since there can be no true yichud in such a case. As for the mesader kiddushin, probably so that he can instruct the chosson on how to properly give her the ring.
The Wolf
Actually, I think I’ve heard chassidim and perhaps others have a minhag to davka hold hands back from the chuppa to show that it wasn’t a chuppas nidda.
Why? Aside from the mesader kidushin and the witnesses, whose business is it whether it was a chuppas niddah or not?
The Wolf
I was born in the year of my birth very near to the hospital in which I was born.
The Wolf
The Ovdei Avodah Zarah forced something into our holy Torah
Forced? I hardly think so.
Yes, it became convenient as a reference point for disputations, but I don’t think any non-Jewish authorities ever issued a decree saying “When you print your holy books, you must use our chapter/verse numbering system…”
In any event, if you truly feel that this is so abonimable, you’re free to print a Tanach without perek/pasuk references. I don’t see any of the Gedolim calling for the abolition of these references now that we have the ability to print sefarim with impunity in any manner we like.
The Wolf
Are you upset because you’re being asked to do a favor for a stranger or because you’re a newlywed and this has the potential to intrude on your privacy?
The Wolf
As a matter of fact, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner has a website where he publishes SMS questions he receives and answers he gives.
The Wolf
2) Given that the Minhog Yerusholayim is never to leave a “Meis” overnight unburied, so how did Ariel Sharon’s family work it out with the Chevra Kadisha to leave Ariel Sharon’s unburied body in Yerusholayim over 2 entire nites?
What does this have to do with saying Mishnayos for fallen soldiers? If you want to discuss the halachic ramifications of the Sharon family’s funeral plans, open a different thread.
The Wolf
Wolf: That was my (and their) point.
Ah, sorry… I guess I didn’t read carefully enough.
The Wolf
I think that as much as DNA can prove paternity, it can’t absolutely disprove it for a female child. There’s always the rare case of the DNA of the blood being different. Less rare is if the father was a bone marrow recipient in which case if they took the DNA of his blood it will appear that none of his children are his.
To be fair, I was really more thinking about blood typing than DNA.
In any event, even for DNA, it’s really been well-proven. Yes, you may have the oddball case (identical twins, bone marrow recipients [will that overwrite the person’s natural DNA? I wouldn’t think so, but I don’t know for sure] and the like), but for 99.99999% of humanity, it’s proven and unlikely to be overturned in 50, 100 or 1000 years. It’s likely to be refined, but proven wrong? No.
The Wolf
Great advice, so much for kabeid es avicha vees imecha. I think Hashem disagrees slightly.
I’m fairly certain that, when it comes to marriage, one is *not* bound to listen to his/her parents.
The Wolf
GAW: The Tzitz Eliezer has a T’shuvah (in Chelek 14, I think) about using blood type for paternity. He knew the medicine, but rejected it based on the Aggadta that a man gives the white part of the baby (bones and skin) while a woman gives the red (blood), thus blood type can’t prove paternity.
It’s fairly obvious and proven that when the Gemara says that the “red portion” of the blood comes from the mother that it cannot mean blood type. Were that to be the case, then you could never have a case of maternal (or full) siblings with different blood types.
While all of my kids have my wife’s blood type (and not mine), I also know that my sister and I (and we’re full siblings) have different blood types.
R’ Moshe Shternbuch has a T’shuvah (chelek 4 in the middle, I think) that says that blood type and DNA can’t prove paternity because maybe the doctors will realize 50 years from now that this really doesn’t work.
WADR to R. Shternbuch, the possibility of this is highly unlikely, since it’s been proven over and over again.
The Wolf
Normally, a court cannot listen to testimony from a translator, as this has the same status as hearsay (eid mipi eid). So, what is a sanhedrin (specifically a minor sanhedrin, but I don’t see any reason why this shouldn’t apply to the Sanhedrin as well) in a capital case to do when they receive testimony in a language they don’t understand?
The answer (based on the Margaliyas Yam and K’hilos Ya’akov) is that three of them who do understand the language form a bais din on their own and listen to the testimony. The beis din can then issues a p’sak din about the testimony they received. The sanhedrin can then use that p’sak without it being a case of eid mipi eid.
That being said, there was no need for every member of the Sanhedrin to speak all languages. Rather, you simply needed to have at least three speakers of all the languages among the group.
The Wolf
Create a white house petition!!
Why? What do you expect the White House to do? Shut down the NY Post?
The Wolf
FWIW, I got married at 21 years of age.
However, of course, I am not your son. Just because marriage was right for me at that age does not mean that it is right for everyone else (including your son). No one knows your son better than you and his mother. You need to sit down as a group and determine whether or not he is, actually, ready to date.
The Wolf
I did no such thing.
The Wolf
A diploma is an earned title which, once conferred, cannot be retracted. This is customary the world over.
Actually, a diploma (or, more specifically, a degree) can be revoked. Many colleges will revoke a degree if they find that you engaged in academic fraud while obtaining it.
The Wolf
For formalized, ritual prayer, I use Hebrew (except where the text of the prayer goes into Aramaic, of course).
For ad-hoc prayer, I use English.
The Wolf
A good place to start is Ancestry.com. I have a membership there and find stuff there all the time. Of course, it helps that all my grandparents were born in the US. But even if they arrived more recently than the last census that is public (1940), you can still probably find lots of good information.
The Wolf
Odd facts:
Booth saved Lincoln’s life.
In late 1864 or early 1865, Mr. Booth was waiting on a train platform in Washington DC when he noticed Lincoln had fallen into the gap between the platform and the train when the train began to move. Mr. Booth, who was a well-known actor in the famous Booth acting family, pulled Lincoln by his collar and rescued him from being crushed by the train.
The rescuer was Edwin Booth, the brother of the man who would assassinate the President less than a year later. The man who was rescued was Robert Todd Lincoln, the President’s son.
The Story of the Unsinkable Ship.
A book was authored by a man named Morgan Robertson about a luxury ocean liner that was said to be unsinkable. The ship was described as “the longest craft afloat” and “equal to that of a first class hotel” and “unsinkable.”
The ship (called the Titan) in the novel hit an iceberg on an April morning around midnight about 400 miles from Newfoundland and sank. The ship had too few lifeboats for all aboard and, in fact, carried, as few as the law would allow.
You might think that Robertson is just a hack who took the story of the ocean liner Titanic and wrote a story surrounding it. Heck, he couldn’t even be bothered to come up with an original name for the ship! The Titanic did sink 400 miles from Newfoundland on an April morning around midnight. The Titanic was carrying too few lifeboats. It was regarded as one of (if not the) finest luxury liners in the world at the time. So, Robertson simply took the story, didn’t even bother to change the pertinent details, and published a silly book.
Except for one little thing — The Titanic sunk in 1912. Robertson’s book was published in 1897.
Unlucky Twice — and Lived To Tell
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a gentleman who had the unfortunate luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was attending a business conference in the city of Hiroshima, Japan, on the morning of Aug 6, 1945. Of course, that was the day that the atomic bomb fell on the city. Yamaguchi was 3 km away from the blast site. He was temporarily blinded, his eardrums were ruptured and he suffered burns over a good portion of his upper boddy because of the blast. Having survived the blast, he found some shelter and spent the night there.
Since it was unlikely that any business was going to be done in Hiroshima for the foreseeable future, Yamaguchi turned to go home — to Nagasaki.
Despite being badly injured, he managed to not only make it home, but to return to work on the morning of August 9. He was describing the blast to one of his supervisors when the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. While he was, again, 3 km from the blast, this time he was unhurt.
You might think that being at the location of not one, but two atomic blasts, that this guy would have suffered from radiation poisoning. As it turns out, he recovered nicely and survived until 2009, when he died of stomach cancer at age 93.
The Lucky Unlucky Nurse
Violet Jessup worked a stewardess/nurse for the White Star line. The White Star line had three famous Olympic-class liners at the time — Olympic, Titanic and Britanic.
She was working as a stewardess aboard the Olympic when she hit a cruiser on Sep 20, 1911. The ship managed to stay afloat as only two forward compartments flooded.
Afterwards, she boarded the Titanic to serve as a stewardess on that ship. On the morning of Apr 14, 1912, Titanic struck an iceberg and sank. Jessop was eventually ordered onto lifeboat 16 and survived the sinking.
You see where this is going, right?
She was serving about the Olympic (which had been converted into a hospital ship for the war effort) when it struck a mine in the Aegean Sea on Nov 21, 1916. She was sucked under water and hit her head on the keel before being rescued. Thirty people died in the incident, but Jessop survived.
Jessop eventually died of drowning aboard the… no, I’m kidding. She died of heart failure in 1971, on dry land.
The Wolf
You know something? I’m not a tzedoki. Nor do I feel that I have to “prove” it by eating something hot or meaty on Shabbos.
As it turns out, 99% of the time we do so anyway, but for the occasional week where we have cold cuts or the like, I hardly feel that would indicate to anyone that I don’t hold of the halacha that a pre-existing fire cannot be used on Shabbos.
And if you want to infer from it that it does, well then, all I have to say is that you’re a lousy mentalist.
The Wolf
and I fail to see specifically Christian allegories. You find them if you look for them (and that’s incidentally my opinion on literary criticism as well, so if you’re into that then we’re at an impasse here).
Indeed. JK Rowling != CS Lewis.
The Wolf
My brother in law has Crohn’s. His children are all fine and Crohn’s-free.
The Wolf
I’m sorry, what’s the big deal about getting retested? Do they charge a lot for retest?
To me, it sounds like you cannot be retested. From the regulations quoted above (emphasis mine):
Individuals who are engaged, married, already tested, or otherwise aware of their carrier status are not eligible to participate in this program.
The Wolf
All this discussion is nice, but, at the end of the day, a bas Kohen can marry anyone that a “regular” Jewish woman can marry.
The Wolf
For Shabbos this week, I made:
Gefilte fish (no real cooking/baking skill necessary)
Pumpkin pie
Pineapple pie
A kind of meat “loaf”, but significantly moister than most meat loafs (no it won’t hold it’s shape upon serving, but that’s perfectly fine 🙂 ) with french fries on top.
Chocolate cake with chocolate glaze. 🙂
The Wolf
There are no laws regarding who a bas Cohen may not marry*. As for whom she *should* marry, contact your LOR.
The Wolf
* Apart from those that apply to every Jewish woman, of course.
New York, NJ and most other states have Blaine amendments to their constitutions which forbid vouchers to parochial schools (They were written against catholic schools not jewish) and because of the way they were written , it would take a entire re-writing of the New York Constituton to undo it.
To the best of my knowledge, New Jersey does not have a Blaine amendment.
As for amending the Constitution in New York, it would not take an entire re-write, but the amendment process is, at a bare minimum, two years long and unlikely to succeed.
The Wolf
There are no women in Major League Baseball yet there are in Minor League Baseball.
I do not believe that there are, or ever have been, female players in Minor League Baseball*. There were some women who were drafted, but none of them every signed or played.
The Wolf
* By “Minor League Baseball” I mean those leagues that are a part of the minor leagues affiliated with Major League Baseball. Of course, there were professional independent leagues where women played and there may be an independent professional team here or there that has a woman on it.
Would it help if I gave you a b’racha?
The Wolf
Yet somehow, it enables you eat more.
Does it? Or is eating more on Shabbos merely a learned behavior?*
The Wolf
* Example: About ten years ago, I lost a lot of weight. What I discovered was that a lot of my eating wasn’t because I was hungry, but because of learned behaviors. For example, if I was going to sit down and watch TV, I needed a snack — even if I wasn’t hungry. I would literally spend time searching the cabinets for something to eat while watching TV. Learned behaviors can be sneaky — you don’t even realize them until you try to combat them.
What do you think, though, of the get being used as leverage when visitation is being withheld?
That is wrong as well. Just as child support and visitation are two separate issues and should not be conditioned one upon the other, so too a get and visitation.
The Wolf
Considering the fact that the Neshama is a purely spiritual construct that does not rely upon the burning of sugars for energy and sustenance, I fail to see how the NY could possibly use up any extra calories.
The Wolf
Her ex husband refused to pay support, yet insisted on visiting rights.
The two should not be conflated. Visiting rights should not depend on the other spouses payment of child support. A child needs to see his/her father/mother, regardless of their ability/willingness to pay support. If the parent is not making the required support payments, then the custodial parent should take whatever *legal* measures they can to recoup those monies. But they should not be withholding visiting privileges.
A parent has a right to see their child. They also have an obligation to provide support for their children. But the two are not (and should not be) dependent on each other.
Leave the kids out of it. NEVER speak derisively of either parent to them.
My parents had a rather messy divorce. And yet, to this day, I am very appreciative of the fact that both of them took great pains to not put the other one down in front of my sister or I.
The Wolf
Oh no!!! Now what do I do???
Use a synonym for teacup.
Use a different rhyming structure.
Write an different poem.
The Wolf
I personally only believe there were twins, but theoretically it IS possible for there to be another embryo that fails to develop further and is absorbed by the surviving embryo(s).
Of course it’s *possible*. However, we tend to call those kids “twins” not “triplets.”
The Wolf
According to two online rhyming dictionaries I used, there are no rhymes for teacup.
The Wolf
Of course you gain weight on Shabbos. If I eat a pound of chulent, I have gained a pound (minus any fat burned in the activity of chewing, etc.). Does the chulent disappear the moment I swallow it?
The Wolf
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Bottom line, however, is that I don’t believe it. I stand firm in my belief that they were twins and no more.
The Wolf
Takahmamash,
I’m so sorry to hear about this. I have no advice for you, but I offer you my sincerest condolences.
HaMakom Y’nachem Eschem B’Soch Sh’ar Aveili Tziyon V’Y’rushalayim. May you and your family only know of simcha.
The Wolf
i would cook but the one time i tried following a cookbook …… lets just say the cake didnt make it out of the pan in one piece
If you enjoy it, don’t let it stop you.
My family likes to tell the story about how my first attempt at baking (brownies) came out hard as a rock and completely inedible.
It’s all about learning from your mistakes.
The Wolf
I do a fair amount of cooking. In fact, I cooked dinner last night — fried talapia (breaded with my own custom breading), homemade over-baked french fries and brown rice.
I happen to enjoy cooking and don’t really get the chance to do it as often as I’d like.
I remember a certain poster who once posted that it was forbidden for men to cook on a regular basis because of Lo Yilbash. Ah, the good old days of insanity.
The Wolf
Lounge! Rocking! High!
The Wolf
I don’t give my wife a budget. She can spend whatever she wants. I fully trust her to be able to judge whether something can and should be purchased now or if it can or should be pushed off to another time. She is free to spend our money as she likes.
To those of you who say that this isn’t the way a “Torah-true” home is run… well… I guess my home isn’t “Torah-true” then.
The Wolf
Wolf: Just because they can’t find it today does not mean it doesn’t exist. They are constantly finding the existence of people that they did not previously know existed.
Not really. True, there are uncontacted peoples (such as those on the Andaman Islands of India) who are left alone, but for the most part, there aren’t really any undiscovered people left.
But my argument wasn’t on the people, but on the river. In order to prevent the Ten Tribes from returning, the river has to be of a certain size (otherwise, you could just go around it). The odds of finding a river of that size (and with such unusual properties) being undiscovered today (with satellite imagery) is exceedingly unlikely.
Obviously the 10 shevotim exist somewhere too.
As a group? Why is that so obvious? I think it’s just as obvious to say that they eventually intermarried and were lost, just as were the ancient Edomites, Ammonites, Elamites and all the nations of old. Do you have some theological reason for stating that all twelve tribes must exist? If so, you could just as easily posit that representatives of the other tribes lived in Judah and their descendants still exist today (mixed in with the rest of the modern-day Jewish people).
The Wolf
Thanks for that comment, WolfishMusings. Actually now that you refreshed some details in my mind, I think that the two stories I referred to in my first and last paragraph of the OP ARE the same story. Can you please relate the entire story as you know it about the author of Akdamus and why he crossed the river?
That’s about all I remember of it.
Also, who penned the Akdamus and how does that now change the veracity of the story (or at least the veracity of who the protagonist is)?
R. Meir bar Yitzchak of Orleans. I’m not sure that the identity of the author changes anything. Perhaps I spoke a bit too hastily above.
Nonetheless, my other points stand.
The Wolf
I remember as a school child being told a story (repeated by different teachers year-to-year) of an individual who crossed the Sanbatyon over Shabbos (since that is the only day it doesn’t shoot rocks up) due to some pikuach nefesh situation that allowed chillul Shabbos.
I was told this about the author of Akdamus — and that he was not allowed to re-cross, since there was no longer a pickuach-nefesh issue, effectively stranding him on the other side for life.
Of course, we know who penned Akdamus, so that’s not true.
For what it’s worth, it’s obviously either (a) allegorical or (b) historically true, but not so today (for whatever reason).
There is no river in the inhabited world that exhibits this behavior. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that such a river exists that is (a) undiscovered and (b) large enough to create an impediment against going around.
The Wolf
Shana Rishonim????
Oy vey…
The Wolf
Ah, okay. It’s the way to say “Shabbaton” when you are too frum to use such terms.
The Wolf
I got up early to take pictures of the eclipse as well. While I could not get the eclipse (too much cloud cover), I did come away with some nice shots.
The Wolf