YW Moderator-42

That’s not a tayna on R’ Blumenkrantz, he printed what he recommends. The lady herself might want to ask her own LOR about her particular situation. Minhag Yisroel kdoshim, kol kula tzricha b’dika. But yes, there is room to be “meikel” on such things, that’s what LORs are for.

“How much work did he put into it to charge that extra amount? I seriously doubt that much, if any, maybe a few phone calls.”

That particular bag might not have been much work. If he knows a little about how sugar is made and packaged then he might have just made one phone call to determine that it has an OU. But, his entire line of Kosher products does take work. It takes knowledge of kashrus standards.

As I described above, the whole point (in my understanding) of heimish hachsherim are for those who don’t fully understand their own chumras. You want to be machmir (especially for Pesach) but you don’t know enough to know what the chumras are so you outsource the chumras to the Heimish Rav Hamachshir and he makes the decisions. He decides that OU sugar is good but OU widgets are not, he puts his sticker on the OU sugar and you pay extra for it. He did the work, he learned the halachos, he applied the halachos to decide what meets his standards, and he went around putting stickers displaying such, and you are paying him for it.

To some extent the entire kashrus industry is like this. In the old days people would buy a bag of sugar with NO hechsher at all. They understood how it was processed, packaged, etc and therefore understood that it was kosher without even an OU.

Nowadays, with all the random ingredients and machines that go into processed foods, even many knowledgeable people don’t know how to tell if something is Kosher. That is why we pay big money for companies like the OU to pasken for us.

Side note: There are some who still pasken based on ingredients as pointed out at the end of your post:

“There is a infamous web site that is matir almost anything by checking the ingredients.”

There was a thread about this:

There’s a difference. This isn’t chosid shoteh and this isn’t over-paying for nothing.

Fact 1: You want to keep a certain level of kashrus.

Fact 2: Some OU products adhere to that level and some don’t.

Fact 3: You don’t know which OU products adhere to that level.

Fact 4: Rabbi Heimish does.

Fact 5: You pay extra money to buy the OU products that are also certified by Rabbi Heimish.

It might look like Rabbi Heimish is just putting his sticker over the OUs (which he is) but it is more than that- he is certifying that he agrees with the OU about the kashrus of this particular product.

Goq, eat that porcupine very carefully. And continue sticking up for your team.

Why is it silly? Of course he’s not saying that anything with an OU is treif, just that it doesn’t necessarily meet his standards. So he has the Heimish Rav Hamachshir certify that this particular OU product does meet those standards.

There is more chance of a television falling on your head if you own one.

“Isn’t revealing a user’s profile a breach of

trust?”

What trust? As far as I’m concerned, a user’s profile is public and there is no reason that someone should be allowed to hide it. The fact that users such as Joseph and real-brisker have managed to change their display name does not mean that their profiles should be hidden. Either way, real-brisker seems to have multiple profiles which is against the CR rules so why should the mods not be allowed to reveal that, especially when he uses it to play a mean trick on somebody who has gone through enough pain already?

http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/coffeeroom/profile/rbrikser

I have a Mayor in my class too…

squeak, if you are talking about the main YWN siye then you might be correct, Joseph has been around since the blog days. But I recall a thread discussing oldeat CR posters in which I think Joseph pointed out that jphone signed up before him. Either way, they, and you, were among the first batch of posters – back when I was just a lurker and 99 was modding.

How many more weeks of no winners do we need for the jackpot to exceed the national debt?

nope midwesterner, I think we determined that jphone/apashutayis is older than J*****, but close

Welcome back charlie brown, Shticky really can use an ego boost after everyone forgot his cranniversary

Um… That line is from Shlumpy in Marvelous Middos Machine when Dr. Middos first meets him and he sets off a middos alert for being messy.

I replaced “my Mommy” with “ZeesKite’s Mommy”. ZeesKite, is your Mommy named Shaindel Shapiro?

I call it my MiddoPod

Soleik, whether or not a girl feels it on the inside doesn’t change the halacha. The whole point of this thread seems to be for those who do not fully feel it on the inside and therefore need a Rav or Rebbetzin to tell them how long it should be. It might not be l’shma but at least it is l’halacha.

Popa, is Alaska your home town?

I agree with popa. Eisav and Yishmael were the oldest.

PurimMashgiach, why is this a scam? You are speaking Lashon Hara about a great kiruv organization. Oorah sounds like a very Ehrliche organization that does everything Kosher. I think the point in this thread is to show that their monthly mailings are not a waste of money. There is nothing wrong with a legally run auction and nothing wrong with putting it in their monthly mailings.

There’s a story about a chasidishe place that skipped tachanun on every yahrtzeit they could find. They skipped it so often that they had gone a whole year without ever saying the long version of tachanun because every Monday and Thursday was another “yom tov”. Finally one Monday came when there was no known yahrtzeit. The chasidim were so excited that they were finally going to say long tachanun and in their excitement decided to celebrate and declare that day a yom tov. Because of the yom tov – they skipped tachanun.

Yankel won $100 million in the lotto. The reporter asked him, “what will you do with the money?”

Yankel: I’ll pay off my choivos.

Reporter: What about the rest.

Yankel: The rest of the choivos will have to wait…

Anybody have a yossi z. rookie card?

Shea Stadium imploded awhile ago (and so did the team that used to play there)

I would not have bought it anyway so its ok to copy

This is an interesting, but dangerous, heter that people use. This gets into the whole hock about the fact that you are not stealing an actual physical object, but rather intellectual property. So since you wouldn’t have bought it anyway, the producer is not “losing” anything by you copying it.

The problem is, how do you determine that you “wouldn’t have bought it anyway”?

What if you had no music and this was all that’s available, would you buy it? If the underlying reason why you “wouldn’t buy it” is because you have so much (stolen) music already, so you have no need to pay $15 for a CD, then according to that lamdus, you would never pay for any music.

Let’s say you are currently a poor Yeshiva bachur, but 5 years from now you get a job and can afford to buy some music, will you then go and pay for some (or all) of the music you stole 5 years ago?

They are selling the CD for $15 which you won’t pay, but would you pay $0.99 for one song if it was available individually? If so, then perhaps you are stealing because you would have paid $0.99. What if a year from now the price will drop from $15 to $10, and you are willing to pay $10, would you then go and buy it, or once it’s stolen it’s stolen and you feel no achrayus to buy it?

All of these are important questions that if answered in certain ways could mean that you are actually stealing even according to the “I wouldn’t have bought it anyway” heter.

Kol kula tzricha b’dika…

Why would u pay for something that is so easy to get for free plus 99c times 1000 becomes alot of money….

Would you walk into a store and put a candy bar in your pocket without paying 99 cents? Why pay 99 cents when you can easily shoplift it? I eat 100s of candybars so the 99 cents adds up…

In other words, just because it’s easy doesn’t make it muttar or legal…

I tried but I kept mixing up Haman and Mordichai.