I am unaware of any rules in the USA that forbid Yidden from learning in Yeshivos, learning Torah, davening, or doing pretty much any standard mitzvah. Can someone enlighten me?

There’s an organization called “Keren HaShviis” that does exactly that.

The author of the article in question is a highly respected Yeshivishe rov who leads and tries to be mekarev a non-frum kehilla. He clearly has been dealing with a lot of these issues for a number of years and he is trying to get people to understand that they won’t just go away if we pretend it doesn’t exist in our community.

@torahvaluesoverparty

You have to think of it like a statistician. Sure more Democrat votes were in the findings than Republican votes, that’s simply because more people voted Democrat than Republican.

Let me explain it this way. Let’s say there were 100 people who voted. 45 voted for Trump and 55 voted for Biden. Biden wins by 10 votes, or about 10%. Then someone comes in and says that a randomly selected batch of twenty votes were bad. 11 of them were for Biden and 9 for Trump. Which makes sense since a random selection will have more Biden votes than Trump votes. Now the final tally is 44 for Biden and 36 for Trump. Biden is still ahead by about 10% of the vote.

That’s what’s happening here. Take the first finding, the Cyber Ninjas wanted to invalidate a batch of 23,344 votes. Out of those, 9,220 went to Biden and 7703 went to Trump. Taking all that into account with the total 2,000,000 votes, Biden will still be ahead by about 2%.

@torahvaluesoverparty The full details of the report I found on a site called azfamily dotcom (“Full Report: Cyber Ninja’s results on election audit”) which links to a document titled “Maricopa County Forensic Election Audit Volume III: Result Details”. It includes exact counts for every single finding which shows a proportional amount of D and R votes in each finding.

And we aren’t going to talk about other counties, because of a comment very early on in this thread:

I know that if the R’s in Maricopa complete the audit to their satisfaction, and come up with nothing, I personally will be far more confident the election overall was secure.

The R’s completed the audit in Maricopa to their satisfaction and came up with nothing. So why aren’t you confident in the security of the election and are now worrying about places that aren’t Maricopa?

@torahvaluesoverparty That’s not how US presidential elections work. If Trump would have lost the county by less votes, he still would have lost the county and the electoral vote still go to Biden. Even though in this hypothetical situation most Arizonians would have voted Trump, the electoral system would still give the state to Biden.

The Cyber Ninjas report showed an exact count of Trump and Biden votes in Maricopa and the result was still a win for Biden by about 45,000 votes.

OK, now on to the voting machines. Now, I know this is going to disappoint a lot of you, @Health in particular, but none of the hacking claims pushed by Lindell and his ilk were mentioned. I think that’s part of the reason why they buried it in the second half of the report with far fewer pretty diagrams and charts.

The major findings focused on missing data, specifically a hard drive that was wiped and a series pictures of scans of ballots that was corrupted and unreadable. Other than that, they had reams of data and devices which they used to pull all sorts of logs and images from. They showed, for instance, that one device attempted to make a connection to Microsoft and Google during the time it was supposed to be used for voting. The report is trying to make the missing data out to be a lot more nefarious than it probably is, “The data is missing so that’s where the proof must be hidden”. They even spend several pages detailing all the devices that they were unable to get access to or devices that were wiped when the got them.

So there’s really no smoking gun. Just a whole lot of literal nothing.

@torahvaluesoverparty Cyber Ninjas is a cyber security group and they structured their report like a cyber security report. Which is great for me since I literally read reports like that for a living.

First let me apologize, I wrote “Biden won by 45,000 votes” before checking the numbers. According to the Cyber Ninjas report, it was Trump 995,665 and Biden 1,040,774. This differs from the initial count by a few hundred votes on either side.

The report details multiple findings that were investigated and ranked them from “Informational” to “Critical”. (In a standard security report, everything other than “High” and “Critical” is usually not considered problematic). The report showed one “Critical” and two “High” findings, totaling around 40,000 votes (of which only around 15,000 were votes for Democrat).

Each finding showed a breakdown of how many votes it affected and what those votes were for. In almost every finding, the votes came out to about the same percentages as the final tally. So even if you would take every single finding super seriously and discount each and every vote that the issue affected, you would be throwing out around nine Republican votes for every ten Democrat votes (plus a few Libertarian and “Other”) . The final tally would be a few tens of thousands of votes less, but Biden would still be ahead.

I haven’t had a chance to read the stuff in the report about the voting machines, so I’ll comment when I get to that.

@rightwriter That’s a good question. I do know that some Sephardim (Syrians in particular I think) are very into using red as an anti-ayin hora device, red string in particular. But I don’t know if this is something based on minhag or halacha, or if it’s just a custom picked up from the goyim.

@ujm The Ukraine Rosh Hashono thing is important for some people to feel a certain d’veykus to Hashem that cannot be accomplished anywhere else. It’s only a heichi timtza for a mitzvah for some people.

I would say it’s like comparing reading a history book to learning Gemara. It’s not bitul to read and understand history, but there’s no specific mitzvah and it’s certainly incomparable to Talmud Torah.

I’m with @SyagLchochma on this one. This is a woman’s issue and should be addressed in the Bais Yaakovs, Seminaries, and women shiurim. I don’t know what constitutes a short skirt in the minds of everyone here and I’m not enough of a Talmid Chacham to say what length is considered halachically tzniyusdik. So I suggest we continue to learn, daven, and set good examples for klal yisroel and, if you’re a woman, continue to dress and act in a way that other woman would want to emulate.

A friend of mine who did the Uman hajj said that the Ukrainian officials weren’t even bothering with most tests, just sticking a clean swab into the testing kit.

Looks like we should of put trigger warnings on this thread, it seems some people are having issues with the information being discussed.

@torahvaluesoverparty See “How do vaccinated people spread Delta? What the science says – Nature” for one example of many. There is clear evidence that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the virus, even the Delta variant.

And this discussion about co-morbidities is dangerous narischkeit. Would you say that a mugger that hits and elderly woman isn’t liable if she dies because she had a heart problem? We are weighing the potential benefits against the risk. You’re merely ignoring the benefits and exaggerating the risks. The benefits are clear, the vaccine protects you and people around you from COVID. The risks are clear, millions of people taking each vaccine less than a few dozen cases of some sort of major issue. And it’s not “we don’t know the risks yet” because we absolutely do. No one should reject a highly beneficial treatment just because it hadn’t yet gone through four generations of testing.

@always_ask_questions

I think it depends on the community. To add to your bullet points, many frum communities have an automatic and intense distrust of the government and this plays into it. Also, I know one community in particular where there is a highly influential member of the Rabbonus who is an anti-vaxxer. Because of this, no Rav wants to be seen as going against this individual, so this community has never had any major kol koirehs or campaigns to get people vaccinated (despite the pleadings of the local doctors, the Chevra Hatzalah, and setting up frum run vaccination centers). I guess they feel that keeping shalom and showing unity is more important.

I find your point about social media interesting. Several anti-vaxx Yeshivish people who don’t have regular internet access I’ve spoken with have said that they “did the research”. Which I’m not sure what it means, as “doing the research” without internet is speaking to local doctors, calling up hospitals and health centers and such. But when asked to clarify they either respond with vague statements (“Many people died from it, you know”) or admit to getting it from weird internet sites(“You can’t trust Google”).

@DaasYochid In several places I’ve seen that only 1 to 2 percent of hospitalizations in 2021 were vaccinated people. I don’t know what percentage already had COVID. When I talk about vaccinations, I mean for people that haven’t had symptomatic COVID in the last year. I haven’t seen the data, but I’m pretty sure that re-catching the virus within the year is as likely as a vaccinated person catching it. After six months the immunity shows signs of lessening and a year is when it starts to seriously wane.

@huju Regarding your “halachic question”. The reason no one gave a proper answer is because it’s not a proper question. It’s an attempt to troll and sow doubt and confusion regarding the COVID vaccine. “If the vaccine sterilizes everyone…. If the sterilization is permanent…” If if if! What if eating challah past 11pm causes a person to grow a bump on their head making them unable to put on teffilin the next day? Halachically, would that man be oiver on an aseh by eating challah at midnight?

See “Covid-19: Study that claimed boys are at increased risk of myocarditis after vaccination is deeply flawed, say critics” in “The BMJ”.

The study used VAERS data to determine the rate of myocarditis in vaccinated teens. VAERS is a terrible data source as it’s all self-reported by people claiming vaccine related injury.

@philosopher “Only a small minority of frum men and women are vaccinated” Maybe in your community. Even in frum places with atrocious vaccination rates (which is perhaps one or two major frum communities in the US), they rarely drop below 40%. I think something like 75% of eligible Chareidim in Eretz Yisroel are vaccinated, only slightly less than the national average.

Also, I’m pretty sure that when tens of thousands of frum people got COVID nebbuch, plenty of them were niftar or left too weak to have children for the time being. Not to mention pregnant women who miscarried.

So despite what you claim, we actually do have enough information to determine that the shema of getting COVID is still far worse than the vadai of getting a vaccine.

@ujm Right now? Pretty likely. Especially if they hadn’t had COVID in over a year and they are in a place with low vaccination rates and don’t socially distance.

Please stop with this misleading hypothetical question narischkeit. No, the vaccine does not effect fertility. Ten months of millions of women taking it has proven that much. It is not “too soon to say”, it’s literally false.

COVID, on the other hand, can potentially impact fertility. So perhaps if someone doesn’t take the vaccine, gets COVID, and now can no longer have babies they’ve been oiver on pru u’revu? Maybe they are also oiver on Lo Sa’amod by convincing someone not to get vaccinated and then watching them get hospitalized?

Yes

I don’t know which direction the sarcasm is going or coming. But for those questioning, the vaccine doesn’t prevent you completely from getting COVID. It helps to prevent it, helps to prevent you from spreading it, and helps to prevent you from getting sick from it. Most fully vaccinated people only know they have COVID because they took a mandatory test, not because they felt sick.

@daas-yochid I’m dismissive of Rabbeinu Bechaye as a source to state that one can, in contemporary times, use gemstones to heal or protect from injury or illness. If you read what is written, he seems to imply that the healing properties are based on the knowledge of the time, and that Teffilah and Torah work better as a medicine. I don’t know of any major poskim, mainstream or otherwise, that promote gemstone healing. If there were, I doubt Or Emunah would be forced to resort to that single shakey “haskamah” I mentioned earlier.

@CHOOSID That, of course, is a gem that has wonderful healing properties.

@ADHD According to the Or Emunah website, the only haskama is from Rav Wosner SHLITA. And it’s not much of a haskama, all it really says is that energy healing isn’t Avodah Zara and it isn’t halachically problematic to do it.

@rightwriter That’s a whole divrei Torah you’re asking for. There’s literally libraries written about the specific significance of every material Hashem told us to use for the Mishkan. Zahav Tahor, Shoham, T’cheiles, Tola’as Shani, Sheis, Argaman, etc. I suggest you look up Rav Hirsch on Shemos, there’s basically a whole sefer about each and every thing in the Mishkan and what it represents.

Absolutely generational. In my workplace mincha you can see a clear age line in who puts in a yarmulka when they come in and who is wearing one already.

In previous generations there was a lot of anti-semitism and anti-frumkeit that people had to deal with. So Chaim Goldberg became clean shaven Harry Gold who is a vegetarian. Baruch Hashem it isn’t nearly as much of an issue today as it used to be. People feel more comfortable being openly frum and aren’t afraid that there will be some form of backlash for it.

@rightwriter Rav Hirsch speaks about the specific stones, as do several other meforshim. I don’t have any seforim in front of me, so I suggest you look it up. I’ve never heard of the stones significance being for healing before reading the Rabbeinu Bechaye quoted in a link above.