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I know several people who had deformed babies after getting chicken pox in pregnancy.
So interesting. My mom grew up in Monsey when it was actually out of town, and now she’s raising kids in a practically in-town place. She much preferred it the way it was- there may be more and nicer restaurants and grocery stores now, but then it was more chilled, more of a congruous community, and less machlokes than there is now.
I’ve been in places in Israel with a truly scary amount of small bonfires, completely unregulated, among the brush in fields surrounded by buildings. Particularly in drought conditions, that’s a massive fire waiting to happen. If there must be a fire, it can be carefully regulated and centralized, but no minhag is worth the potential huge risk of fire.
Also, who are “the learners”? Only the ones who are studying 24/7? What about the hesderniks who spend a significant amount of their army service in yeshiva and are learning as well when they’re on base? Saying “the” lomdei Torah would seem to make them seem like some sort of elite class, not everyone who contributes.
Joe: You asked what the difference was, I mentioned it. The security is top-notch, to the point that until recently it was ISIS’s PMing tool of choice. If you check out their website you’ll see more differences, but that’s the main one.
I have no idea why that would make it more dangerous than WhatsApp. You just asked what the difference was.
smc: What’s so objectionable about what cherrybim said?
I completely agree with simcha, and I made a similar post on another thread. Listening to soldiers talking about their experiences at the Yom HaZikaron tekes at YU last night, I couldn’t have been more thankful that it was not me in firefights in Palestinian villages or pulling wounded comrades out of bombed out houses in Gaza. It takes its own kind of fortitude to do the kinds of jobs nobody else wants to do.
Joseph: Telegram is completely encrypted. Actually, now that I think about it, WhatsApp now is as well.
It’s very different. Yeshiva bochurim learn, but they are engaged in something which (hopefully) gives them pleasure. I was at the YU Yom HaZikaron tekes yesterday, and there was a video presentation and an ex-soldier (current student) who spoke. In both, the message was loud and clear- the army was something they felt was important for them to have done, something that they’re glad they did, but that was difficult both physically and emotionally. The guy who spoke broke down crying as he was describing pulling fellow soldiers’ bodies out of a blown-up house in Gaza. That is not a comparative experience to that of yeshiva bochurim, and requires its own kind of appreciation.
I’ve never really understood this at all. If you have a smartphone, WhatsApp is far from the worst thing you can get on it. Does it override the internet filter or something, maybe?
I like WhatsApp a lot because I like the voice message feature and the group feature, but it is frustrating that it requires internet, so I generally limit my use of it to the groups I’m part of. You don’t need to put up a picture or a status (I haven’t changed either of mine since December) and it’s a tool, like anything else, that can be used well or ill.
There are other reasons given for a woman not being able to be a rabbi, but I can’t remember whether they’re entirely disconnected from this or based on it…
Is there someone in BMG you can talk to about it? I think part of the idea with the BTL is that you don’t necessarily need (many) other courses to get it and that it’s awarded by the yeshiva. (I know someone who is going to Harvard Law with only a BTL from his yeshiva- super rare these days especially, but it does seem to happen.)
For social work, you will probably need to take prereqs before applying/attending, no matter how you get the BTL- check with the grad programs you apply to to find out which.
Often they do have a hashgacha… YU’s cafeterias are certified by the OU, but with all fresh-made food Chalav Yisrael, and there’s a teudah and mashgichim at all times. My high school brought in a restaurant for food and they were obviously certified. While I’m sure some places do rely on the ne’emanus of the cook, others also have a mashgiach who may or may not come from an agency.
zdad: Even according to the rules of normal English pronunciation, Leicester would have no hard C.
NE: Yeah, I think that when he was getting into British football (which, as a lifelong American football fan, he of course calls soccer :P) he liked both of those things.
My dad was marveling about it, but he’s annoyed because they beat out his team, Tottenham Hotspur, to win the Premier League.
(We live in NY, by the way. Have no idea how he got into it.)
(Bernice Sanders? Jeremy Corby?)
The number 10 only applies to a minyan, which is inherently male. It has no significance in this context for women. You only need three.
To put it another way: there is historical knowledge, and then there are the theories that tie the knowledge together into narrative. These theories can change with more evidence or just the same evidence put differently. But here we’re talking about historical evidence itself.
shimen: huh? I’d judge it by the same standards (among others) mentioned above.
Joe: why do you say that? It’s a fact that more and more information is always discovered, and that new historical theories are always advanced, but they don’t always (or even usually) contradict the previous. A large amount of historical narrative is indeed conjecture and theory. This isn’t narrative- this is directly evidence-based. And, for the record, with people like this, as mentioned in the beginning of the cited book, much of the historical evidence used by scholars does indeed come from CONTEMPORARY sefarim, like Rashi. The mechaber discusses how Rashi mentioned R Meir several times, and uses different details to try to deduce when he lived- historians do the same thing.
But saying that a story cited in an apocryphal way (as is very obvious when one reads the ENTIRE introduction, or at least pages 21, 22, 25-27) in a sefer 800+ years post-story, based upon a real historical figure in completely ahistorical context, is more accurate than the historical information the very mechaber of the sefer also lists in context which completely contradicts it just because it’s written in a sefer?
Women don’t answer amen to a men’s zimun? That’s VERY weird.
Okay, I did not say that he is unreliable or that he was telling a lie. I was saying why historically speaking, the story as written in the sefer is not historically considered a valid source. You are correct- I should have searched his name to find out more about him. I don’t think he invented anything. I also don’t see him as having portrayed the story as history- having started from the beginning of the intro to Akdamus (page 21), he mentions many actual historical details about R Meir Sha”tz, in a very historically thorough way, to the extent that the addition of the story seems very much like a nice story he heard, not an essential part of his biography. He never makes a claim of the historicity of the story, which is all I was talking about.
(I’m either getting a minor or second major in Jewish history, which is why I have hangups about things like this. Yes, that only makes it worse that I didn’t look up the mechaber of this sefer.)
Actually, if you want to be really egal about it, it’s a zimun… 🙂
DY: The story is called a “maaseh” given with no source, almost no names, no dates, no geographic location besides a vague “somewhere in Asia” (while R Meir Sha”tz lived in the Rhineland)… and by the looks of it it long postdates the time when the story reportedly took place. (Looking at the title page, apparently by some 800+ years.)
The problem with these sorts of stories is that when they deal with real people they have to stand up to real historical scrutiny. Just being printed in a sefer isn’t enough. It’s reliable if it cites a reliable source, historically speaking. Dunno who wrote the sefer, so I’m not going to start on questioning whether you can think it’s reliable because this guy wrote it- just looking at it from a historical perspective, it doesn’t wash.
(Though it was interesting reading- the version I remember from elementary school had a lot less detail.)
Yep, R Meir Sha”tz was one of the foremost Ashkenazic paytanim and the chazzan of Worms, with no known connection to the Ten Tribes, who lived in the middle-end of the 11th century. Real person. Story probably a legend. (R Amnon of Mainz probably didn’t write Unesaneh Tokef, much less under the conditions of the famous story, either, FWIW.)
To address your second point, the wording is flexible. If you can say it in Yiddish, you can say it in lashon nekevah. I’ve heard of people saying “gevirosai/gevirotai nevarech”- and after that there are no dikduk issues that I can think of.
I don’t personally do it because I’m just not accustomed, but I know people who do it this way. Definitely yesh al mi lismoch for women to do it.
As far as the man’s job thing, women can make kiddush and havdalah as well- depending on the case, sometimes with an absolutely equal chiyuv to that of men which would mean that there is no reason for the man to davka be yotze the woman.
That doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think it goes back as far as the era about which Dr Soloveitchik made his thesis- you wouldn’t need it to explain that. I haven’t read the essay in a while so I don’t remember exactly what he was referring to.
I’ve heard people say that the three hours thing is based on a typo or misreading but I could be mixing that up.
Antipathy on religious Zionism often comes because people associate it with the issues with secular Zionism. Secular Zionism largely has gone the way of the dodo bird. So RZs are left with a lot of the good parts of Zionism (chibas ha’aretz, frumkeit, etc) without the stigma of all of the issues that happened with secular Zionism (good Lord, the FIFTIES…). Not that there aren’t still things about RZ for people to disagree with, but anyone referencing Herzl when talking about RZ is out of touch. (My grandfather was a huge Zionist who lived in Israel in the fifties and even he agreed that the secular Zionist government did some horrible things.)
It was generally the gemara which was brought to other countries first, which meant it was learned first, became prominent before Yerushalmi was brought over, and therefore became preferred.
As in, for example, at least some tosafos had Yerushalmi, but by and large preferred referencing Bavli because many didn’t have access to Yerushalmi and it seemed more “respectable” in a way to reference Bavli which was more “mainstream.”
You can’t tell from DNA testing if someone is ben achar ben from Aharon HaKohen. What they did was examine kohanim and found that a statistically significant percentage came from the same x chromosome line which went back to the days of Aharon HaKohen. People therefore assume that this means they are ben achar ben from Aharon. The only way this would make sense is if a genetic mutation literally happened right at Aharon’s or one of his children’s generation, because he was only a few generation from Yaakov Avinu- so that by general genetic principles his descendants would have the same Y chromosome as all of Yaakov’s descendants- and in between is Levi and his descendants, who do NOT share a Y chromosome in common. The odds of a significant mutation happening davka then and lasting for thousands of years are not impossible but quite small. It could be, though.
That said, DNA evidence isn’t admissible in halacha.
I think that R Lior of Kiryat Arba just paskened that any chocolate made with recognizable cacao beans (so not white chocolate, which is only cocoa butter) is haetz. Don’t know if anyone but him agrees though.
They’re both technically fruit, I believe.
And DON’T TAKE AWAY MY CHOCOLATE.
I do live in Monsey and I basically agree. Legally, if East Ramapo is giving you busing, you have to wait at a corner stop with your neighbors unless the driver is exceptionally nice and doesn’t get caught. It’s the private buses that do house stops because they aren’t bound by rules like this. (Full disclosure- my private high school bus did give me a house stop.) In theory, this is fine, but the problem shows up when buses stop every three feet on INCREDIBLY busy and/or narrow streets like 306 near Maple and the streets off of it (Phyllis, etc) where getting stuck behind a bus can mean fifteen minutes of delays. The house stops also often mean that very young children are running into the street to get their buses, which as a driver I find really scary. (When I had a corner stop on a very quiet block, we were never allowed to walk to the corner without an adult until we were in middle school, but when we had a house stop briefly due to a ridiculously nice driver, my mom was more chilled about it- the difference being that people in apartment houses on 306 are sending their kids onto super busy streets either way.)
Would the campus JLIC people know anything about that sort of thing?
What kind of a seminary would you be interested from a hashkafic perspective?
CTLAWYER: “writersoul
I come from a long line of business and or professional people who went to Yeshiva plus college and graduate schools.
My family arrived in the USA between 1868 and 1872. I’m 5th generation American born and my parents and grandparents all had college degrees. My children do as well.
This didn’t stop us from being frum. BUT, we mostly don’t live in overpopulated frum areas with limited opportunities to earn a good living. You want to stay in that self imposed ghetto? Then opportunities are more limited. BTW>>>when you get away from those areas the Gentile community is much more understanding and accommodating to Shabbos/Yuntif needs and schedules. Note: I said Gentile, not goiysche…treat them with respect and you get respect back. This is not like the antisemites left behind in Europe.”
I literally have no idea what I said to get this comment at me. I can’t boast a pedigree like that (due to life circumstances, only one of my grandparents had a college degree [Master’s in Education]) but I am a college student, and one who believes in the value of higher education. I’m really confused.
I still don’t know what a Harry is.
CTLAWYER: You’re right, I overgeneralized.
newbee: That’s true, but I mean the kind of utopian job mentioned in the OP. Like there are pros and cons to every job, but a perfect job like that would be glutted. For example, my dad works in computers. He got into it when they were programming on cards, but about ten or so years after he started, computers became the hot thing. Everyone saw it as an amazing job where you earned loads with only a bachelor’s degree and had normal hours. So they would fire experienced people in favor of recent college grads who would work for half the money, and then they would fire the college grads in favor of workers in India or the Philippines who would work for a quarter of the money.
Liberal arts colleges are not authorized to offer BSs. They offer BAs in the same subject matter. YU, for example, is a liberal arts research university and only able to grant BAs in math, science, etc. Many colleges are the same. It depends on the accrediting agency. (It’s a reason why YU- and I think Touro’s working on a program for this as well- needs to partner with other universities for engineering degrees- they’re not certified to give BSs in engineering.)
The thing with this question (as GAW kind of mentioned) is that if a job is that good for frum life, it will become saturated- not just with frum people but with people in general, because everyone wants a job like that.
From that perspective, becoming a research scientist/professor would probably be better (besides perhaps for the pay)- that way you don’t have to deal with med school and any stuff that comes with it.
But that’s not a decision people often make- “I don’t know what I want to be, hey, I’ll start the 10-12 year path toward a career as a pathologist because it has good hours.” People often don’t pick their specialties until the last year of med school.
Just saying that maybe it works but it’s a super random suggestion.
Pathologist?
You do know that’s a kind of doctor where you look at dead people, dead or diseased body parts, and/or blood and stool tests all day, right?
Unless you get it in liberal arts, the phrase “a BA” means nothing. It depends on what you major in.
Yep, shopping, what you describe is what goes on at my house. Like, we cook a lot, but cleaning is each of us responsible for our rooms, cleaning out pockets, bags, etc; everyone takes two days to vacuum the whole house, wash the floors in the dining room and kitchen, check cabinets and corners; turn over the kitchen. If my mom wants to do spring cleaning, we do that also, but it’s not a huge deal and not emphasized.
And then we go to the hotel, because I just like to annoy everyone on here. (We’re home for part of Pesach with guests, which is why we turn over the kitchen.)
Besides the above, there’s an air force museum in Beersheva if you go for that sort of thing.
Don’t send anything pesachdig unless it’s totally sealed.
“Because the word was mentioned, from now on it has entered the realm of possibility. It should be unpardonable to say that word.”
You’re right, the Torah totally messed up when it mentioned it.
Mammele, yes, that’s true, but all the other stuff is going to a head as well around this time and I see the whole corruption-busting-in-Monsey thing as one because they all kind of blend together in my head and I have the same basic sentiments about all of them.
As a member of the Monsey community (though I’m not there at the moment), I am glad that hopefully, the FBI may be able to try to fix many of the corruption-related issues in Rockland County. I think that if people have been doing conscious crimes and causing harm for their own financial gain, they should not get off scot free. I hope that the innocent are not impacted as well and that all proceedings occur with real justice, but some of this was really needed. It’s also not just Jews- there are many issues related to town, village and county governments as well which involve many types of people. This has been in the cards for a long time.
The Queen, DY: Like OURTorah, I don’t think any relationships need to last a year before you can get engaged, much less that anyone needs to move in together beforehand either. I do think that the time needs to be taken to have enough of a relationship that each party really knows the other, it’s not just “wow this is a great opportunity, and so much better than it could have been.” Or, really, it should be more than just “wow this is a great guy/girl”- by engagement, there should be more of a connection. (I am 19 years old- not even withered on the vine yet- and I’ve already been talked to about settling, and I don’t mean setting my gaze to someone who’s not a future rosh yeshiva with Artscroll-biography middos and a warm smile.) If making that connection means more than 10 dates, I’ll take more than 10 dates.
And I agree to an extent about the shadchan stuff- having an intermediate for the first date or two is fine (and I definitely don’t think it has to be an “official shadchan”) but I keep on hearing about people who break up after six dates through the shadchan even after they’d officially “dropped the shadchan”- which is both a lack of menschlichkeit and really immature. If you can’t have a big-boy discussion about having to break up, you shouldn’t be looking into big-boy stuff like marriage. (I use a male example because all three examples I have of this situation have been of men doing it to women.)
I also SUPER agree with the women-treated-like-cattlle-or-commodities thing. Call me a starry-eyed teenager, but I think that dealings related to marriage should be a bit less formalistic, pressured and businesslike than they are, where boys are treated like the popular kid’s shiny new tricycle and girls are treated like the other kid’s rusty scooter that he’s trying to trade away but has to throw in other stuff to sweeten the deal.
That doesn’t make that explanation more pshat than the other one. That’s not how pshat works. (See Rashbam.)
Anyway, that would be more of an asmachta than an actual prooftext, no?
After rereading this thread-
who says that the pashut pshat of “kol kvuda bas melech pnima” is that women have to stay indoors any more than it has to do with middos? The “poshut pshat” is “all of the honor of the daughter of the king is within.” Within what? What kind of honor? If my dad works in an office and doesn’t rule anywhere, does it still apply? 😛 The “staying indoors” explanation is just as pshat as the middos and inner glory explanation, really.
(And it’s tehillim. It would be an interesting world if we paskened from tehillim.)
Essentially, while tznius is a wonderful thing, the amount of hateful invective on this thread was actually scary to read.
And yes, I think the drinking is a huge issue as well.
Another vote for doing something fun- at the very least, bring a board game, or like my cousin used to do bring a Taboo deck in your pocket for emergencies. Or a crossword puzzle, though if you think there is anything you’re not “supposed to know,” remember not to fill it in. (This has happened to me, but then again I do have a really disturbingly broad pop culture knowledge that I kind of wish I didn’t.) But if you do know something random, it can lead to interesting conversations.
I vote a museum, personally. It’s formalish enough that nobody’s scandalized about not being in a lounge anymore but also can be a lot of fun.
Or a nice park, especially this time of year, unless you’ve got my allergies in which case snuggle up in a blanket with tissues and wait til July.
Interesting conversation was never inspired by a lounge, unless you’re both the people-watching type, in which case I grant it can be very interesting indeed.
Just here to agree with OURtorah.
squeak: What Sam said, sort of. What I think about Trump is immaterial- it’s the way he’s attracting people, the kind of people he’s attracting, and what the people are hearing and want, that disturbs me more. It’s not whether Trump is a nationalist, it’s that the people he’s attracting are nationalists. Whatever he may believe, he’s espousing populism and people want it and are hearing it.
I think it’s a bit generous to say that he identifies with America so much in such personal terms that those are his motivations… I see it as just him being a forceful person who’s used to wheeling, dealing and getting what he wants. He always gets what he wants and when he’s in charge of America, America will get what it wants because he’ll be the one getting it for us.
I never hated Obama, though I’ve disliked him more and more recently for various reasons, but I think that bombast and political inexperience are not what we need right now. I don’t need the government tied up in order to prove some kind of a point about how Democrats are awful. I can’t stand Cruz for various reasons, but at least he’d just start political battles, like a politician, you know? Life as usual. Trump would be a bull in a china shop and we can’t risk so much breaking. I think there’s a value sometimes in leaving politics to the politicians.
Sam2: That’s fair, about Wallace. It puts it in more American terms.