Frum Heretic

Intellectual Dishonesty

2011-03-22T20:08:00.004-04:00

One of the many topics that fascinate me is how traditionalists deal with the historical-critical method of Bible study. So I downloaded without hesitation the lecture "Who Wrote the Bible?" by Rabbi Ari Kahn found on YU Torah here. Now I didn't for a minute believe that any lecture with such a title hosted by YU would have as its answer anything but "God". And indeed Kahn stated that people would be disappointed if he gave the answer to the topic as a "one syllable word". Nevertheless, I am interested in all approaches to this topic, from the fundamentalist Chareidi to the minimalist DH adherents.

I initially gave up on the lecture no more than five minutes into it. Why? Because of a statement that Kahn made which was only peripherally related on a content level, yet told me all I needed to know about his approach. Here is an accurate paraphrase of what irritated me so much:

"Have any of you heard of the 2nd theory of thermodynamics? It is the principle that things on their own moves towards entropy, towards disorder. Is that a theory or is that a law? That is a law of physics. On the other hand, evolution - is it a theory or a law? It's a theory. Have any of you noticed that the theory of evolution flies in the face of the laws of physics? Did that occur to anybody till this point? There is a law of physics that things left on their own go from order to disorder. Nonetheless, we are being told that something has developed from complete disorder." He further adds, "the statisticians say the likelihood of this is what we call impossible". (Throwing a bone to the "rationalists", he parenthetically says "please don't misunderstand me. Judaism can absolutely tolerate a theory of evolution.")

OMG. Did he really say that? I screamed at the mp3 player in my car and advanced the playlist to the next selection.

When I calmed down, I reflected as to why this offended me so deeply.

1) Kahn starts off the lecture with attempting to implant the seeds of doubt regarding EVERY academic discipline, not just that of scholarly Biblical criticism. He does this by stating that all fields of study may be guilty of bias (e.g., people in universities who want to protect their positions, people who want to advance...) In fairness, Kahn does state that he has a bias, having been brought up in a religious home. Nevertheless, an honest look at the question "who wrote the Bible" should examine arguments on their own merit, not start off with an insidious attack on individuals engaged in scholarly pursuits.

(Kahn has lectured at Aish Hatorah, and I wonder whether this is where he learned - or perhaps promoted the use of - this technique, as I have experienced it many times with Aish kiruv workers.)

2) Kahn is obviously clueless regarding entropy and evolution since he brings up one of the most laughable arguments that young Earth creationists make: that the "theory" of evolution requires greater order while the second "law" of thermodynamics requires greater disorder. Ai yai yai. I'm not going to discuss the flaws of this assertion here (basically Kahn does not understand the difference between a "closed" and an "open" system); those unacquainted with his inanity are directed to Mark Isaak's Index to Creationist Claims or his Counter-Creationism Handbook.

After I cooled down, I returned to the lecture and was unsurprised to find that Kahn did not redeem himself. Here are some of his other gems.

"Is my starting point going to be that this is a book that God gave to people or that the book is basically a lie... that it was written by others to deceive people".

Don't you just love this false dichotomy and a very polarized one (bordering on a claim that smacks of "good vs evil") at that? (It reminds one of the "Was Jesus Lord, Liar, or Lunatic?" false trichotomy.)

"When I got to University and took undergraduate and graduate courses in the Bible"... and then he adds "specifically I took a course in Bible and the Ancient Near East"

Huh? You took a course??

"I was so disappointed with the level of the questions that were raised because these questions only worked when one's starting point is that the book is not what it claimed to be."

Seriously? You took a college course in Bible and the Ancient Near East and were disappointed because they didn't start off with the belief that God wrote the Bible??

Kahn then sets up a straw-man argument by stating that a cornerstone of the DH theory is that the use of YVHV vs Elohim represents different documents, rather than different relationships between God and man. Obviously he is unaware that DH adherents use the "names of God" as only one of several converging arguments (see Richard Elliot Friedman's "The Bible with Sources Revealed" in which he discusses the seven main arguments.)

And speaking of REF, Kahn goes on to say that "Who Wrote the Bible... was one of the silliest books that I have ever read in my life". He then repeatedly claims that Friedman is intellectually dishonest. Kahn says "His introduction was precious... He writes that according to Jewish tradition, cuz you have to be a little bit honest, the guy's name is Friedman, he really should be honest [chuckles from the audience]..."

WTF is he implying by this foolish statement - that all Jews are honest? But wait, he's only warming up.

"According to Jewish tradition, REF writes, the author of the Bible is Moses. [Kahn pauses to wait for some more chuckles which are soon forthcoming]. And then he has this way of throwing away all Jewish tradition in the next five lines." Supposedly quoting Friedman, 'the Biblical text says that Moses was the most modest man, a very strange modus operandi for a man who is modest... so therefore how could he really be the author and therefore we can now reject the Orthodox Jewish approach.'

I have the book in front of me and Friedman says nothing of the sort! This text is simply not in the Introduction, nor have I been able to find it elsewhere. I am not going to go through the book page by page again, but will note that the word "humblest" is referred to in the index twice, both references being in the Introduction. Regarding the idea that one would not expect the humblest man on earth to point out that he was the humblest man on earth, REF mentions this in the Intro as an historic overview, writing that this was one of the earliest ideas that led people to posit that the text wasn't written by Moses (he specifically names Baruch Spinoza.) Friedman does say that "some of the discoveries [of the last two centuries] challenge traditional belief". But he most definitely does not say that "we can now reject the Orthodox Jewish approach". (Nor did that quote match anything in Google. Well, maybe now it will with this post. Google did reference the book when I tried a couple of other random quotes.) Whether or not this indeed represents Friedman's beliefs is irrelevant; you don't score points for your side by a wholesale fabrication of quotes.

Kahn says that REF "makes a claim that isn't true, attacks the claim, and that's it, now I've dealt with Orthodoxy". That REF took a position that Orthodoxy Jews consider to be a heretical position (that Moses wrote the Torah, not that he only transcribed what God dictated) and claims that is what Orthodox Jews believe.

Oy oy oy. Kahn completely fabricates quotes and then accuses Friedman of being intellectually dishonest?? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Is Kahn an out and out liar, or is he just majorly confused? (Two can play at the dichotomy game!)

Kahn says that archaeological evidence of other ANE cultures show that these cultures had multiple names for their god. And that this essentially "cuts off the leg" of Wellhausen. Uh, you do know, Ari, that Wellhausen died almost 100 years ago and that the theory that he was largely responsible for turning into a serious academic discipline is today much more sophisticated that your seemingly juvenile understanding of it? But perhaps I am being dense since I don't even understand the logic of his assertion.

His arguments against a redactor bring nothing new to the table. The claim is that Bible critics use the word "redactor" rather than "editor" because an editor would have smoothed out the differences and eliminated textual problems and then we wouldn't have the theory of multiple documents. A redactor just "threw everything together". Did the best seller of all time have the worst editor of all time? Kahn claims that he caught Friedman in about "30 places" where his theory breaks down. Kahn especially does not like it when a single verse supposedly has multiple authors and REF answers that "problem" by saying that the redactor did it. At that point, Kahn says he gave up reading the book.

Perhaps Bible critics do overuse the redactor as a solution to perceived problems, but Kahn seems to be suggesting here that such an immensely popular book cannot be as flawed as it appears to be. I would remind him, however, that it is the Christian Bible that is the best seller of all time since it includes the New Testament. Would Kahn claim that the New Testament editors did a bang up job of smoothing out all of the contradictions and mistakes of the New Testament???

Next, Kahn presents his case study, that of Genesis 37-39; specifically the duplicate description of the sale of Joseph in 37 and 39, interrupted by chapter 38 which tells the story about Judah and Tamar. That time period spans 20 years and it doesn't fit into the time frame of the Joseph story in the order presented. The scholars say that the Torah is a history book and that it is a bad history book. A "bad" redactor just threw the Judah story in here. That's proof of multiple sources. Kahn responds, who said that it's a history book?? Rashi's opinion is that the Torah is not necessarily in chronological order. Just like a movie, where interspersed timelines of different characters do not imply that there were two different directors.

In 1975, Robert Alter published a revolutionary essay in Commentary Magazine which resulted in scholars looking at the Bible as literature, without regards to who the author is, an idea that Kahn is "particularly fond of". But Kahn reminds us that such an idea is more than 1500 years old, and Alter would have realized this had he just read the midrash. Kahn then tells us some deeper connections between the Joseph and Yehudah stories which show that there is a skilled writer weaving together the stories.

Here I actually agree with Kahn's premise. I believe that often there is a very real connection between stories that on the surface look completely disconnected. One of the weaknesses of the Documentary Hypothesis in my opinion is that proponents often ignore the interpretative tradition. It often rings true with me (especially after listening to a Rabbi David Fohrman lecture) that sometimes this tradition really does seem to reflect the original intent and that it isn't just a thousand years of skilled rabbis attempting to harmonize disparate texts. But this belief certainly isn't a proof against a multiple document theory.

One often used "proof of Torah" is that only a divine text would speak negatively about its people. Kahn also uses the Joseph story to this end. He says that the Maharal said that "the Bible itself is proof of divine authorship because only an anti-semite would have written these things." Regarding the selling of Joseph, etc, no religion would have written this about themselves. Christians used to read this on Christmas to show how diabolical the Jews were; just like they sold Joseph, so did Judas sell Jesus. Why would a redactor include such negative material about the Jewish people?

I'm sorry, but this argument just doesn't fly. If the purpose of the Torah is to install God-centered, ethical behavior among its followers, then one would expect admonishment and stories of divine punishment for deviant behavior. The claim (which Kahn does not mention, but which is in the same category) that no man-made religion would claim that its people were originally slaves, is equally bogus. To say that a people were redeemed from slavery by God by great signs and wonders makes it a much more uplifting and powerful story.

At the end of the lecture, Kahn says that the book was brilliant and wonderful... wonderful fantasy. He enjoyed it, but it was completely baseless.

Um, I thought that you "gave up" on the book and didn't finish it? Just one more example of you bending the truth?

The Jew and the Other

2010-12-13T15:02:00.002-05:00

It's been a long time since I was so offended by a blog post, but this somewhat recent Torah Musings discussion on blood transfusions really got to me.

Some may find this topic no different from, for example, the claim (popularized by the Baal HaTanya and pretty much accepted in all chassidic circles) that non-Jews possess only an animal soul, with Jews being the sole possessors of a Godly soul. Or the idea (also mentioned in the article) that a non-Jew in danger on Shabbat is saved only for the sake of darchei shalom, preserving the ways of peace. Such concepts need to be seen as having largely developed within a context of historical persecution by gentiles. In that respect, they are perfectly understandable - albeit outdated - beliefs.

What differs about this post is that it is largely talking about contemporary halachic authorities. I'm imagining a theoretical round table discussion in which various rabbinic "sages" are arguing the question whether Jews can donate blood to non-Jews, mustering various halachic precedent both pro and con. And totally missing the point that even posing the question suggests some lack of basic humanity.

After a self-congratulatory intro in which Jews are claimed to be a merciful, bashful and kind people, then touting the great generosity vis a vis charity and Israel's assistance in post-earthquake Haiti, Rabbi Lebowitz states that "Recently, some have questioned the halachic propriety of Jews donating blood in America." He then states what is to be his summary, viz. that "giving blood, while not always obligatory is at a minimum, permissible, and more likely a very great mitzvah."

(As an interesting aside, Lebowitz states that "the Torah [not only] values the good Samaritan who goes out of his way to save a life". He is apparently oblivious to the fact that "good Samaritan" is a phrase that originated in the New Testament (Luke 10) in a parable that derides the bad behavior of a Pharasaic priest and Levite towards a beaten robbery victim.)

First we have Rav Moshe Feinstein who - as with saving a non-Jewish life on Shabbos - states that donating blood to gentiles is necessary to avoid severe anti-semitism.

Then we have a discussion regarding the general permissibility of donating due to possible prohibitions of wounding oneself. This is largely irrelevant regarding the distinction between Jew and non-Jew vis a vis donating blood.

The second issue revolves around a prohibition to give “free gifts” to gentiles. But this isn't a problem for a number of reasons. One is donating to a blood bank and not to a specific gentile. Or that (contrary to the Shulchan Aruch) according to "many great poskim" today's gentiles are not idolators. The bottom line is that there is an assumption of a reciprocal relationship in which Jews will be able to receive blood when needed.

The third issue is that most recipients of blood will be gentiles. But because there are many Jews who may ultimately receive blood we can ignore the majority since it is a matter of life and death (for the Jew). Rabbi Michael Broyde states that there is no mechanism to designate which blood goes where and so Jews should shoulder their fair share of the donations.

Rabbi Menashe Klein has some particularly offensive objections (Jewish blood "crying out" from gentile veins) but I don't want to dwell on such lunacy.

The ultimate conclusion is that donating blood is a kiddush Hashem and refusing to donate has a great potential for chillul Hashem. Also, Orthodox blood drives now have the status of minhag Yisrael and we cannot depart from such a long-standing custom. But at no time is there any suggestion in the article that donating blood - regardless of the recipient - is simply the right thing to do. But, of course, such an assertion would be problematic as it implies that the halachic system is insufficient in framing all ethical and moral considerations.

Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg (the Seridei Eish) suggested that Jews themselves shoulder at least some of the blame for anti-semitism because of their attitude towards the non-Jewish world and the discriminatory laws against gentiles described in the Talmud (and codified in later halachic works.) The Lebowitz article continues this long tradition, the "minhag Yisrael" of "us versus them", the Jew and the Other.

Jacob's Sophie's Choice

2010-11-21T19:27:00.005-05:00

I've always found it puzzling why Jacob divided his camp into two parts so that "If Esau come to the one camp, and smite it, then the camp which is left shall escape." (Gen 32:8-9). This never made sense to me, since when the meeting with Esav is about to transpire, Jacob abandons this strategy. One commentator presumed that the division involved only his servants and property, and not his family. Of course, this creates its own problem, as it suggests that Jacob's primary concern was with preserving his wealth over the safety of his family.

So what is the new strategy? Jacob ranks his wives and children in order of his regard for them! Bilhah and Zilpah with their four sons are most at risk as they go to the front lines, then Leah with her six sons and daughter, and finally Rachel with Joseph (Gen. 33:2) at the rear. We are mostly not privy to the inner psychological world of biblical characters so we are free to assume that Jacob did this with much anguish, and possibly lived afterward with some guilt (probably not too much since everything eventually worked out well.) But just imagine your family having to face a presumed murderous enemy and your father puts you in the front of the line - not because you are the most capable of protecting the family, but because he loves you less than some of your siblings! That was how three of Jacob's wives and eleven (Dinah went in front of Joseph) of his children must have felt.

In general, the author(s) of the Genesis stories generally chose to leave the stories fraught with ambiguity, a style that allows for great embellishment and interpretation by later commentators. Unfortunately, this has often resulted in overly simplistic characterizations of both the villains and the heroes. Esav is looked at as intrinsically evil from birth (indeed even prenatally!), and he ultimately becomes the archetype for all of the historical evil perpetuated against the Jews. On the other hand, Jacob - and most of the "Jewish" heroes (forefathers/foremothers/tribal heads) - are often depicted as perfectly righteous beings on par (or even above) the level of angels. In both cases, apologetics - often as aggadic/midrashic glosses - serve to minimize either the positive qualities of the former (Esav's only redeeming quality - honoring his father - is often mitigated by claims that it was motivated by purely ulterior goals) or to suggest, for the latter, that what seem to be very blatant human flaws are in actuality deeds done for the sake of heaven, and at worst relatively minor mistakes that are judged more severely because of the greatness of the personalities involved. A recent example that comes to mind is Reuven sleeping with Jacob's concubine, Bilhah, which is reinterpreted as an "as if". That is, interfering with Jacob's sleeping arrangements after numero uno wife Rachel died was done to preserve his mother Leah's honor, but is treated by the Torah "as if" he slept with Bilhah. The earliest commentary on this story, however - Jubilees 33 - understood Reuben's misdeed literally.

It seems obvious that Jacob did not learn from the mistakes of his father, Isaac, who preferred Esav the hunter to Jacob the simple. (And it is not unreasonable to presume other family dysfunction in a family headed by a man who was almost sacrificed by his father. There is certainly no indication that he and Abraham had any kind of personal relationship after this event.)

Jacob repeats the mistake by showing preference to one son, Joseph, the first born of the woman he truly loved. (As an aside, note that the Torah suggests that Jacob was initially attracted to Rachel for a very understandable yet superficial reason - basically she was pretty hot!) We are all well aware of the tragic results of this preferential behavior, regardless of the "after-the-fact necessity" for the progression of Jewish history - or at least the mythos that surround it.

Jacob is like the woman who - abused as a child - ends up with an abusive spouse. Both are victims of a traumatic upbringing and caught up in a self-destructive cycle. Jacob doesn't seem to learn this lesson even at the end of his life when he gives preference to the younger child of Joseph.

The Choir Apologia may be singing fortissimo by now, but I find the Torah infinitely more meaningful when the heroes are viewed as having the same strengths and flaws as "ordinary" human beings. And doesn't moral ambiguity make for far more interesting analyses and lively discussions?

What's Not Bothering Rashi?

2010-11-08T00:22:00.002-05:00

Did Abraham or Isaac "name" Beersheva?

Genesis 21: 29-31.

And Avimelech said to Abraham, "What are these seven ewe lambs, which you have placed by themselves?" And he said, "For these seven ewe lambs you shall take from my hand, in order that it be to me for a witness that I dug this well." Therefore, he named that place Beersheva, for there they both swore.

כט. וַיֹּאמֶר אֲבִימֶלֶךְ אֶל אַבְרָהָם מָה הֵנָּה שֶׁבַע כְּבָשֹׂת הָאֵלֶּה אֲשֶׁר הִצַּבְתָּ לְבַדָּנָה

ל. וַיֹּאמֶר כִּי אֶת שֶׁבַע כְּבָשֹׂת תִּקַּח מִיָּדִי בַּעֲבוּר תִּהְיֶה לִּי לְעֵדָה כִּי חָפַרְתִּי אֶת הַבְּאֵר הַזֹּאת

לא. עַל כֵּן קָרָא לַמָּקוֹם הַהוּא בְּאֵר שָׁבַע כִּי שָׁם נִשְׁבְּעוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם

There's a bit of a pun there, since the word "sheva" relates to both the seven lambs and to the oath. Regardless, the Torah states that Abraham was responsible for the name of the place.

A few chapters later we have Isaac in the starring role. After some quarreling over water rights, Isaac goes to Beersheva (so named - anachronistically? - in 26:23) and Avimelech meets him there to make a covenant.

Genesis 26:33:

And he [Isaac] named it Shevah; therefore, the city is named Beersheva until this very day.

לג. וַיִּקְרָא אֹתָהּ שִׁבְעָה עַל כֵּן שֵׁם הָעִיר בְּאֵר שֶׁבַע עַד הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה

This time, Beersheva clearly refers to an "oath at the well".

Each passage claims a different personality as being responsible for the naming of the city. One explanation from the traditionalist camp suggests that Isaac simply reconfirmed a name already given - and possibly forgotten - by his father, Abraham. A very unsatisfying answer that smacks of apologetics. It seems obvious that this is not the intention of the verses. I have highlighted the "therefore" (עַל כֵּן) in both passages since each one states an explicit reason for the origin of the name.

So why isn't Rashi "bothered" by this?

Needless to say, Bible critics love this one.

Modesty and Job Interviews

2010-11-05T16:05:00.002-04:00

A question in "Living the Halachic Process: Questions and Answers for the Modern Jew" and posted on Hirhurim/Torah Musings, with a more realistic response. (Yep, that was an actual question. Really.)

Question: I am a young rabbi, and I have begun looking for rabbinical positions. I have tried to work on my anava [humbleness], but now people advise me to write an impressive resume and stress my talents to potential employers. Wouldn’t doing that make me be leading a double life, or is there some fallacy in my thinking?

Answer: The midda of anava is extremely important and, according to some, is the most important midda. We know that David referred to himself as a worm, Avraham said of himself that he was dust, and Moses referred to himself as nothing. A true anav would not be so chutzpadik as to suggest that he was on the madreiga of these tzaddikim. Therefore, you should imply on your resume that you have really accomplished nothing worthwhile in life except for the effort that you have applied towards your Torah studies (for Torah study is truly the only worthwhile pursuit.) Therefore, I would list your relevant experience, but insinuate that you have been unsuccessful in these various pursuits.

Reply: Thank you Rebbe.

Rebbe: Please come closer before you go. [Slap slap]. Fool! What the hell is wrong with you? Get your head out a gemara for once and think for yourself!

Wordle Madness

2010-11-03T08:18:00.014-04:00

Wordle generates word clouds from text or blog feeds. It is a really fun time waster but also gives one insight into an author's focus. Check it out.

Here's a cloud of all of my 160 blog postings (as with all of the clouds below, I limited them to the top 50 words). Click on any image to view it larger.

The following are the clouds that wordle grabbed on 11/02/2010 when I supplied just a blog name; it then presumably uses only the most recent rss feeds.

Another Frum Heretic cloud (I simply can't view this one - when viewed larger - without seeing it in 3D with three separate layers. Very cool.):

The prolific Mr Dov Bear:

Scandal-monger Failed Messiah (some serendipitous juxtapositions: Rubashkin - FM's obsession - with "intense" and "evil"; Sholom with "mad"; Rabbinical with "molesting"; etc):

Hirhurim/Torah Musings (nothing surprising here):

Rambam takes center stage in Natan Slifkin's Rationalist Judaism (wordle allows one to select a Hebrew font!).

I would have loved to have done clouds for Gideon Slifkin's previous two blogs, but unfortunately XGH's latest - Ortho Moderndox - is pretty ho-hum:

And finally, one from the Jewish Atheist:

Chazal Knew the Number of Stars!

2010-10-26T16:31:00.005-04:00

Here's an oldie but goodie. (I have a lot of 'em, but am slow in cleaning them up for the FH blog.)

Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 32b:

Resh Lakish said: The community of Israel said before the Holy One, blessed be He: Sovereign of the Universe, when a man takes a second wife after his first, he still remembers the deeds of the first. Thou hast both forsaken me and forgotten me! The Holy One, blessed be He, answered her: My daughter, twelve constellations have I created in the firmament, and for each constellation I have created thirty hosts, and for each host I have created thirty legions, and for each legion I have created thirty cohorts, and for each cohort I have created thirty divisions, and for each division I have created thirty camps, and to each camp I have attached three hundred and sixty-five thousands of myriads of stars, corresponding to the days of the solar year, and all of them I have created only for thy sake, and thou sayest, Thou hast forgotten me and forsaken me! Can a woman forsake her sucking child?

I find this piece of aggadah especially fascinating because of what some claim is an amazing correspondence between it and astrophysical reality. I first came across this idea in the Proceedings of the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists (unfortunately I no longer have the article) in which S. Aranoff explains that if one multiplies to the point of "30 camps" one arrives at 2.9 x 10⁸ galaxies in the universe. Multiply to "myriads" and one gets 3.65 x 10⁹ stars per galaxy. Multiplying these numbers gives a value of about 1 x 10¹⁸ for the number of stars in the observable universe.

Let's now compare the Talmud numbers with current (2010) scientific estimates:

Galaxies in the known universe:

Talmud: 2.9 x 10⁸
Science: minimum 8 x ¹⁰
Difference: 2 orders of magnitudes

Stars per galaxy:

Talmud: 3.65 x 10⁹
Science: 4.5 x 10¹¹
Difference: 2 orders of magnitudes

Stars in the known universe:

Talmud: 1 x 10¹⁸
Science: 3-7 x 10²²
Difference: 4 orders of magnitudes

This is astounding! Resh Lakish is from the 3rd century CE, and he is passing on a tradition that is within a few orders of magnitudes from what science has estimated for the number of stars in the known universe. The fact that there was even a conception of such large numbers is absolutely amazing! This passage is used by many kiruv workers to prove that Chazal must have had a God-given mesorah. It is easy to find references on the 'net suggesting this. (When in doubt, check Aish. They claim that Chazal even knew about galactic clusters, estimating it at 30 galaxies per cluster (the Milky Way cluster contains more than 40 galaxies.) They also speculate what other groupings might mean, and suggest that another "30 grouping" might be "megasuperclusters".)

Once again, it is time to be a party-pooper. So let us now deconstruct this amazing "coincidence".

1) There is in this proof an assumption that the Talmudic passage has embedded within it a statement about physical reality. But there is no reason to suspect that this was the intention of Chazal; it is likely that they are just using hyperbole to emphasize how beloved Israel is to God, which - of course - is a major theme in the written and oral law. (As an aside, note that the actual terms used refer to Roman army units.)

2) The ancient Hebrews basically believed in the astronomy (and astrology) as developed by the surrounding cultures in which they lived, such as Assyria and Babylonia and - later - Greece. So perhaps - assuming a very old mesorah - we should give the Assyrians the credit for their understanding of the vastness of the universe??

3) Even if we were to grant the raw numbers (I don't), it works both ways: many more sources show an incorrect knowledge of astronomy. For example, regardless of the feeble attempts of "scientific" OrthoFundies to reconcile the creation story of Genesis with modern science, the much more compelling argument is that those who passed down and eventually wrote down the story believed, like other ancient peoples, that the sky was a solid dome with the Moon, Sun, and stars all embedded in it. And need we mention the myriad of old rabbinic sources (and, embarrassingly, even modern ones such as statements by the last Lubavitcher Rebbe) that insist on a geocentric universe (usually accompanied by some claptrap about relativity proving that geocentricity is "as valid" as heliocentricity.) Other examples in astronomy (and other knowledge disciplines) abound.

4) The twelve constellations are an arbitrary convenience for astronomical observations. The stars in a constellation have no relationship to one another besides an apparent proximity. 30 hosts per constellation is an implied relationship in the proof (but not necessarily the Talmud itself) and is actually a meaningless mathematical relationship. And what is the basis for "multiplying up to camps" to get the number of galaxies? What do hosts, legions, cohorts, and divisions represent, anyway? Some deep, mystical secret that our puny minds are not privy to?

5) Why is God off by even 1 order of magnitude?

6) I've saved the best for last.

From ancient India comes the Lalitavistara Sutra, a Buddhist text that recounts the miraculous deeds of Gautama Buddha. French scholar Georges Ifrah describes in an interview with Robert Krulwich how the Buddha was in a counting contest with a mathematician named Arjuna. One contest consisted of counting the "atoms" (that is, the smallest unit of matter) in a yojana (about 10 km). See the article for the specific formula which - according to mathematician Alex Bellos - shows that the Buddha determined quite accurately the size of a carbon atom! One notable difference from the Talmudic story is that the intention of the Buddhist text is to represent a very large number. (By the way, Indian culture - unlike that of Judaism and the ancient Near East - had actual words for VERY large numbers. They didn't just give up at "10,000"!)

Of course, a true fundie would probably claim that the Indian religions (and its later Buddhist offshoots) were ultimately derived from Judaism anyway and will point to the story of the children of Abraham being sent away to the East (see Rashi to Genesis 25:6). So don't expect that arming yourself with facts will win any arguments with ~~missionaries~~ kiruv maniacs.

Shafran and the Jewish Observer Promote Avodah Zarah in the Frum Community!

2010-10-21T17:40:00.005-04:00

Avi is again getting a lot of blogging press after his recent interview with Baruch Pelta. This particular quote - which refers to an article that Shafran wrote on Moses Mendelssohn for the Jewish Observer - caught my eye:

So they accepted the article, they published it, and I think what made it stick in the craw of a lot of people was the fact that many [frum] people have a visceral, automatic reaction to the name Mendelssohn - for whatever reason. Rabbi Wolpin told me afterward was that he thinks it was a mistake for them to put in a photograph of him [Mendelssohn]. It was in fact a prominent photograph, I think maybe it was facing Rav Hirsch or something like that - there was some sort of a juxtaposition. And a photograph of him altogether - they don't generally put in photographs of people that are not intended to be put up on a wall in a frum house and, you know, venerated.

WOW - it's bad enough that the Jewish Observer would publish a photo of Mendelssohn, but it's simply outrageous that they are willing accomplices in promoting idol worship!

This is Rationalist Judaism?

2010-10-19T23:04:00.002-04:00

R. Natan Slifkin rhetorically asks:

What do the events of the Purim story, the lottery via which the Land of Israel was divided, the survival of the Jewish People over millenia of persecution, the weather in Israel, and the creation of the State of Israel, all have in common?

and then answers:

The answer is that they are all events which secular scientists/historians would attribute to the random, unplanned, circumstantial luck of history, but which religious Jews perceive as being orchestrated by God.

Rabbi Slifkin (whom I have the utmost of respect for), touts the "overwhelming convergence of evidence" when it comes to the theory of evolution. But there is likewise an overwhelming convergence of evidence against the historicity of the Purim story. Secular scientists and historians do not attribute the Purim story to the "luck of history", as they do not believe that it even occurred.

We Lack a Community

2010-10-11T22:39:00.001-04:00

Three Jews' Bruce decries a lack of participation of the younger crowd at his Conservative synagogue.

He states "The result is problematic for several obvious reasons. We lack a community; the families do not regularly see each other at synagogue." Then he goes on to state several causes of the problem.

Seems to me that this causal chain is a bit bass ackwards. There is no participation because there is a lack of community, not the other way around. And the one overriding reason for this? Because more than 50 years ago Conservative Judaism permitted driving on Shabbat. Once that was allowed, there was no compelling reason to live within walking distance of a shul. Orthodox Jews have to live near one another. Voila - Jewish neighborhood. And Jewish community.

Name That Text!

2010-10-06T19:30:00.002-04:00

Read the following sacred text quote and ponder for a brief moment as to what the source is. Don't take the easy way out with a Google search. The answer will be seen shortly.

And Omri was king over Israel for twelve years. And he built an altar to YHVH in Jericho saying "because He has delivered me from all kings, and because He has made me look down on all my enemies." Mesha was the king of Moab, and he oppressed Israel for many days, for YHVH was angry with His land. And his son reigned in his place; and he also said, "I will oppress Israel!" But YHVH has looked down on him and on his house, and Moab has been defeated; it has been defeated forever! And Mesha took possession of the whole land of Jerash, and he lived there in his days and half the days of his son: forty years. But YHVH restored it in Omri's days and he built an altar to YHVH, and a water reservoir next to it. And he built Beit El. And the men of Moab lived in the land of Dibon from ancient times; and the king of Moab built Atarot for himself, and he fought against the city and captured it. And Omri killed all the people of the city as a sacrifice for YHVH and for Israel.

If you don't have a background in the early monarchy period of the Bible, you might not have noticed that this account is totally out of whack. Otherwise you will recognize a clumsy attempt at making something read as if it were a section in Kings or Chronicles. But it isn't. It is the first half of the Mesha Stele (see here), written with the "good guys" and the "bad guys" (and place names) reversed.

Look at things through Moabite eyes. Israel under King Omri and his successors were oppressors of Moab. But why was Israel able to subjugate the mighty nation of Moab? Because Chemosh (Moab's God), was angry at His people. Eventually Chemosh relented and restored Moab's land. The divinely commanded massacres against Israel were carried out dutifully. King Mesha would build altars to Chemosh after these successful military campaigns where people could bring their thanksgiving offerings.

We aren't reading our sacred Moabite stories today because it is the Jewish nation that survived, not the Moabites.

I guess that shows that God really is on our side.

Or perhaps it's just because history belongs to the victor.

What Happens When You Cross the Muppets with Pat Metheny?

2010-09-19T21:05:00.003-04:00

While searching Youtube for the Pat Metheny (one of my favorite musicians and composers; his place in the pantheon of great guitarists is assured, not that he needs my haskamah...) piece "45/8", I came across this bizarre video assemblage using music performed by the Israeli almost a capella group, Coral Vocal Ensemble. (According to their Myspace page, "Coral is the representative vocal ensemble of Tel Aviv Municipality".) This is a strange juxtaposition of Doom (video game) and Muppet characters with (mostly) clever synchronization with the music.

Here's another one of zzaltz's video mixes, which is also quite fun to watch and even more random.

More Moronic Ravings from Avi

2010-09-05T03:07:00.002-04:00

I really don't like ragging on people (and it most certainly isn't a frequent topic on my occasional blog post), but "Rabbi" Avi Shafran is one individual that really gets to me. Not only is he is a knee-jerk apologist for the chareidi lifestyle, but he does not hesitate to trash those who don't live up to his own religious standards. His response to a very workable remedy to prevent future agunot:

Rabbi Avi Shafran, Director of Public Affairs for the Agudath Israel of America, agreed that pre-nuptial agreements are not common in the charedi world. None of his six married children has one, he said. “My understanding of the reason is that detailing what will happen in the event, G-d forbid, of a divorce would start a marriage off on a negative, dangerous note,” Rabbi Shafran explained. “The message a newlywed may take from it, especially in our times, sadly, is that marriage is like any business agreement. Clauses in a contract establishing a legal partnership would understandably deal with the event of the partnership’s dissolution. But a joining of two people into one is qualitatively different, and incomparably important. So, to begin the challenging but holy enterprise of married life amid thoughts of what will transpire at a divorce is neither prudent nor proper.”

Ah yes, the holy enterprise of matrimony cannot at all be sullied by the thought that the woman needs to be protected just in case of divorce. A pre-nup makes a marriage too much like a business transaction.

IDIOT! Isn't a marriage sealed with a business-like transaction (kesef or shtar)?? IDIOT! Isn't a ketubah already a pre-nuptial agreement of sorts, as it stipulates the monetary obligations of the husband in case of divorce??

Shafran's rationalization is BULLSHIT, plain and simple.

One Third of Conservative Republicans (34%) Say Obama is a Muslim

2010-08-20T16:15:00.000-04:00

Idiots.

Women's Suffrage Destroys Domestic Tranquility and Leads to a Deterioration of the Nation

2010-08-18T21:28:00.012-04:00

Happy 80th Birthday Women's Suffrage!

On August 18, 1920, women were granted the right to vote in the USA when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.

This was a time of great political upheaval, and the idea of women's suffrage was being discussed and soon being granted among most European countries. However, "no country in the Mediterranean Basin (Spain, France, Italy, Albania, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Greece), Asia (except Russia), Africa or the Middle East recognized women’s suffrage."

The issue began being discussed in Palestine after the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Many turned to Rav Abraham Ha-Kohen Kook — the Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi of Jerusalem — for his decision. "To the shock of many", he announced his unequivocal opposition to women's suffrage. And this opposition was - he claimed - "the unanimous voice of all Jewish culture and halakhah." To Kook, the idea of suffrage was not only a betrayal of Jewish ideals, but also represented a trend towards accepting European culture which he claimed was defunct in both morality and purity of virtue. Kook supported a boycott by religious Jews in the 1920 elections unless women were barred from the electoral process.

Rav BenZion Meir Uziel - the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Jaffa - composed a responsum in 1920, strongly supported for women’s suffrage for religious, moral and political grounds. "Out of respect for Rav Kook, he never identified his intellectual adversary, but it is clear that much of his teshuvah is a point-by-point rebuttal of arguments Rav Kook had raised in the two letters."

R. Kook's first letter can be summed up with this quote:

Regarding the law, I have nothing to add to the words of the rabbis who came before me. In the Torah, in the Prophets, and in the Writings, in the halakhah and in the aggadah, we hear a single voice: that the duty of fixed public service falls upon men, for “It is a man’s manner to dominate and not a woman’s manner to dominate” (Yevamot 65b), and that roles of office, of judgment, and of testimony are not for her, for “all her honor is within” (Ps. 45:14).

His second letter is even more of a blockbuster and I really have to excerpt a lengthy section of it.

We believe our outlook on the life of society is more delicate and pure than that of the other civilized nations in general. Our family is sacred to us in a much deeper way than it is to all the modern world, and this is the basis of the happiness and dignity of the Woman of Israel. In other nations, the family is not the foundation of the nation, nor is it as stable and deep as it is amidst us. For this reason, they are not so taken aback by the cracks in family life, and the consequences of those breaks will not cause such harm to their national life. The psychological basis for calling for public participation in elections by the name of “women’s rights” arises fundamentally from the unhappy position of the mass of women amidst these nations. If their family situation had been as peaceful and dignified as it is generally in Israel, the women themselves, as well as men of science, morality and high ideals, would not demand what they call “rights” of suffrage for women, in the common fashion, a step that might spoil domestic tranquility (shalom bayit) and ultimately lead to a great deterioration of political and national life in general.

But out of their desperation and bitterness, the result of male coarseness that spoils family life, the women of other nations thought to receive, through some public empowerment, help in ameliorating their wretched situation at home, without regard to the further breaches made thereby, since those breaches are so numerous. We have not descended, and shall not descend, to such a state, and will not want to see our sisters in such a low state. The home for us remains a dwelling place of holiness, and we dare not obliterate the splendor of our sisters’ lives, and embitter them through exposure to the din of opinions and disputation that are characteristic of electoral matters and political questions.

The Israelite woman bases her rights on the refined content of her unique spiritual value, not on measured and limited laws, formed in a mechanical cast, which are for her iron horns, which do not suit at all her psychic refinement and which she is generally, according to her natural character, not strong enough to utilize. They lack the power to repair and are more able to spoil the fundamentals of spiritual relations. These laws govern every arena of life.

The family is for us the foundation of the nation. The house of Jacob (beit Ya`aqov—an allusion to women—ed.) will build the people of Israel. We prepare the building of the nation in a manner consistent with the nature of our psyche. We are always prepared to declare the moral obligation of listening to women’s opinions throughout the house of Israel, including those with reference to general social and political questions. But the accepted opinion must come specifically from the home, from the family in its wholeness; and the one whose duty it is to bring it into the public domain is the man, the father of the family, on whom is placed the obligation of making known the family opinion.

When we demand of the woman that she go out into the political public domain, and become entangled in expressing her opinion on electoral and political questions in general, then one of two things will result: either she will learn through this flattery to flatter the man and to cast her vote according to his, not according to her conscience, thereby spoiling her morality and inner freedom; or raging differences of opinion will destroy domestic tranquility (shalom bayit), and the rifts in the family will fracture the nation. At the same time, we lower our collective dignity in the eyes of the nations by showing the world that we have no original political system stemming from the content of our own spirit, which is revealed through our teachings and holy traditions. These are for us not only symbolic matters, but embody real life values. Instead, we act, at the beginning of our first step toward political life, as lesser disciples of contemporary civilized people who themselves still stand very confused concerning their difficult life issues, especially with regard to their spiritual and moral values in general and with respect to this difficult problem of home and state in particular.

The complete content of R. Kook’s two letters and R. Uziel’s formal responsum are presented here, from which all quotes in this post were taken.

Is it rational to be an atheist?

2010-08-16T21:28:00.002-04:00

So asks Gideon Slifkin. In doing so, he attempts to make an equivalence between string theory and the existence of God:

"The universe we live in is one great mystery. Until that mystery is solved, theorizing God, Strings or refusing to Theorize at all is all about the same. Either way, you are stuck in an absurd mystery, and there's not a lot you can do about it. Except Theorize. Or not. "

One hundred years ago, one might have made a similar statement regarding relativity. But the effects of relativity were soon experimentally verified. Indeed, before Arthur Eddington tested Einstein's theory of general relativity via the bending of star light during a solar eclipse, the latter was asked what he would think if Eddington's measurements failed to support his theory, Einstein replied "Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct."

During subsequent decades one might have made a similar statement regarding quantum mechanics. Yet we can observe many quantum phenomena, such as quantum strangeness (Feynman included the double slit experiment as one example), entanglement (action at a distance), etc.

Relativity and quantum mechanics are still mysterious and non-intuitive, and perhaps will always be. Yet we take for granted practical applications that utilize both of these ideas, such as GPS units and devices that rely on electron tunneling (VLSI chips, microscopes, etc.)

Using string theory is a red herring, since it is a theory in its infancy, is currently untestable, and may in fact have no predictive value!

Gideon's error is that God is simply not a scientific postulate. It is not predictive, nor is it falsifiable. Even the argument "Does God exist?" is framed as an evidence-based argument, for when we use the term "exist" we generally mean something along the lines of "is it testable via scientific means". God is a faith-based idea, and thus a pure materialist has no basis for believing in God.

The Brain of Fundamentalists, The Brain of Skeptics

2010-08-15T09:25:00.004-04:00

The Pew Forum's biannual conference on religion had a fascinating conference a couple of years back on neuroscience and belief. One intriguing point made by Andrew Newberg:

...There have been some studies that have looked at political perspectives, trying to understand what happens in the brain of people who are Republicans and the brains of people who are Democrats. We talked about some of this, and I'd just highlight a couple of interesting studies. One was an fMRI study, which is a magnetic resonance imaging that looks at blood flow and activity in the brain, and it showed that people who scored higher on liberalism tended to be associated with stronger what they called conflict-related anterior cingulate activity. Now, what that means is, you have a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate, which helps you mediate when things are in conflict with the way you already believe.

The researchers then interpreted this, and we can go into all the questions about how should we interpret these studies. People who had greater liberalism seemed to do better or were more sensitive to altering some habitual response pattern, implying that they were more open to change, more open to other ideas, more open to conflict, than people who scored lower on liberalism. Does that mean something about people who consider themselves to be liberals versus conservatives, Republicans versus Democrats?

Of course all people, regardless of what their particular perspectives are, when they're viewing their own candidate, that has a different effect in their brain than when they are viewing a candidate from the opposite party. When you're looking at somebody from the opposite party, or thinking about them, it tends to activate the amygdala, the limbic areas, again, that tend to trigger more of an emotional response, whereas when you're looking at people who are concordant with your views and beliefs, that tends to activate some of the areas of the frontal lobe and also that anterior cingulate that helps you mediate your conflict-resolution powers.

Can one extrapolate from this study to make implications regarding the brains of skeptics versus the brains of religious fundamentalists?

I think it is a fair assumption to suggest that there is a much higher rate of skepticism in the scientific community versus the religious community (bear with me, I realize that this is an oversimplified dichotomy.) Yes, there are exceptions on both sides: folks who reluctantly leave a secular lifestyle for a religious one based on what they believe to be legitimate arguments ("proofs"), as well as "fundamentalist skeptics" (including some fundamentalist atheists) who refuse to consider arguments against their beliefs.

But the advancement of science requires intellectual conflict and challenge; those who resist such conflict are at best relegated to a footnote in science history books. The same can not be said for religious orthodoxy (by definition); in this world, the great leaders always operate within a very constrained a priori belief system. For example, in Judaism it is verboten to challenge the notion of a God given Torah (TMS). Otherwise one is marginalized and branded a heretic.

Interestingly, many OTD ("off the derech", although I prefer OAD - "on another derech") people may have more in common with baalei teshuvah than they would like to admit - both have altered some habitual response pattern possibly because of stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity!

Supporting evidence for my hypothesis is the well-known correlation of conservative politics with the more fundamentalist factions of both Christianity and Judaism.

Shades of Grey

2010-07-22T19:52:00.008-04:00

I'm a big fan of Sinfest.

(P.S. Clicking on the image will take you to Tatsuya Ishida's site for a larger view.)

On This Tisha B'Av...

2010-07-20T19:27:00.002-04:00

...hundreds of thousands of Jews commemorate the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temples and pray for its restoration.

From an old news article:

Saudi court rejects plea to annul 8-year-old girl's marriage to 58-year-old man

A Saudi court has rejected a plea to divorce an eight-year-old girl married off by her father to a man who is 58, saying the case should wait until the girl reaches puberty. The divorce plea was filed in August by the girl's divorced mother with a court at Unayzah, 220 kilometres (135 miles) north of Riyadh just after the marriage contract was signed by the father and the groom.

"She doesn't know yet that she has been married," the lawyer said then of the girl who was about to begin her fourth year at primary school.

Relatives who did not wish to be named told AFP that the marriage had not yet been consummated, and that the girl continued to live with her mother. They said that the father had set a verbal condition by which the marriage is not consummated for another 10 years, when the girl turns 18.

The father had agreed to marry off his daughter for an advance dowry of 30,000 riyals ($8,000), as he was apparently facing financial problems, they said. The father was in court and he remained adamant in favour of the marriage, they added.

The mother's said he was going to appeal the verdict at the court of cassation, the supreme court in the ultraconservative kingdom which applies Islamic Sharia law in its courts.

Arranged marriages involving pre-adolescents are occasionally reported in the Arabian Peninsula, including in Saudi Arabia where the strict conservative Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam holds sway and polygamy is common. In Yemen in April, another girl aged eight was granted a divorce after her unemployed father forced her to marry a man of 28.

OrthoFundie: An arranged marriage of an 8-year-old to a 58-year-old man? Does the girl's mother have no say? Does the girl have no say even when she comes of age? What is it with these strict Wahhabi Muslims?

SkeptoPrax: What's the problem? It seems eminently practical and just!

OrthoFundie: Wha??

SkeptoPrax: Well, you went through tractate Kiddushin. Sound pretty close to the practice of yiud.

OrthoFundie: Sure, based on Shmos [Exodus] 21:7-11 where an impoverished father sells his minor daughter as a maid-servant...

SkeptoPrax: ... and the master has the option of marrying her - or having his son marrying her - when she comes of age at 12-1/2.

OrthoFundie: But she has the right of miyun [refusal], and can refuse to be married at that time!

SkeptoPrax: Sorry, you must have dozed off a bit when learning. I know that those late nights at the yeshiva can really take a toll. First, we have a general presumption that the father is acting as his daughter's agent and is only doing what is in her best interest; therefore his da'as [knowledge, thoughts] becomes a substitute for his daughter's. Second, what 12-year-old girl has the wherewithal to defy her father??

OrthoFundie: OK, granted. But that was a different time. This is no longer an acceptable practice and all of the poskim would agree to that.

SkeptoPrax: Don't you recall the notorious "kedusha ketana" incident in Boro Park a number of years back, in which Israel Goldstein did this as a way of punishing his agunah wife?

OrthoFundie: You can't bring a proof from one wacko. Besides, this was widely condemned by Agudath Israel. R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach invalidated such unions even though he didn't write up the opinion before he died. R. Moshe Sternbuch concurred with this opinion.

SkeptoPrax: But certainly you agree that the law is still "on the books" as it were? And don't you pray three times a day that there is a restoration of a Jewish theocracy? Are you saying that some Torah laws will not be reinstated?

Why I Am Not an Atheist

2010-07-11T13:01:00.003-04:00

I believe that when "set and setting" are rightly aligned, the basic message of the entheogens - that there is another Reality that puts this one in the shade - is true. There is no way that the prevailing view of the human self (which depicts it as an organism in an environment that has evolved purposelessly through naturalistic causes only) can accept that claim, which means that its Procrustean anthropology must go. That it will go, has been the critical (as distinct from constructive) burden of all my writing, for it rests on assumptions that are too arbitrary to escape scrutiny indefinitely.

... I do not see how anyone can deny that the traditional, theomorphic view of the human self which the entheogens endorse is nobler than the one that common sense and modern science (misread) have replaced it with. Whether the theomorphic view is true or not cannot be objectively determined, so all I can ask of the opposition is that it not equate noble views with wishful thinking...

- Huston Smith, in Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemical

I believe that there is a spiritual dimension to reality that we are not normally able to perceive or understand. Call it YHVH, call it BrahmaN, call it Einstein's God, or call it the Great Cosmic Muffin. From the rarest and briefest experiences of "it-ness" (no affirmation or denial of entheogenic catalyzed experiences is implied here!), I have come to believe this as much as I believe anything about existence. I simply cannot agree with the uber-skeptical-materialist-atheist approach that "this is all there is". That there is no purpose to existence beyond what each of us makes our individual purpose. SOMETHING goes beyond all this.

Maybe this belief actually originated subconsciously as a coping mechanism for the existential horror of the void (tho' the belief does not completely immunize me against the random intrusion of thoughts of nothingness, and not in a good Zen-like way.) Maybe it is a very deep need to believe that both for those who commit evil acts and for the victims of evil (including the victims of "Acts of God") it will all eventually make karmic sense. And while this belief is almost certainly not a result of any early childhood influences, maybe it is explainable on a purely physical (biochemical/psychological) level as just an ingrained proto-memory from our collective evolution as self-aware beings. A God gene?

Perhaps.

But it seems that a thinking person can take two (forgive me for creating a false dichotomy of choices here) main approaches when considering what a believer might refer to as "miracles" of the universe. One can consider the so-called anthropic principle ("miracles" of the Planck, gravitational and other physical constants, properties of water), consciousness and other aspects of human-ness (and I must include the experience of music), etcetera, etcetera, and certainly respond "in an infinite of universes anything can happen". And the non-nihilistically inclined may get deep satisfaction at the amazing dance of evolution or experience an almost mystical exhilaration at studying the music of the spheres from the quantum to the cosmic, even in the absence of the belief in any higher power. But this perspective - while appealing - ultimately leaves me wanting.

The other approach - "it makes more sense to me that it's not the luck of the cosmic lottery - that there is some higher power and purpose to it all" - the approach in which one maintains at least one eye focused on God, and being, and purpose, and morality, and what is a meaningful way to live with spiritually infused structure and context, this seems to have the potential of paving a far richer path for the 80 or 120 years that one is (hopefully) privileged to experience during this sojourn upon the planet.

Scientists Admit to a Young Earth

2010-06-08T08:19:00.002-04:00

News Flash! Those anti-religious, God-hating scientists have finally admitted that they were wrong, wrong, wrong about the age of the Earth and the Moon!

Details can be found in this article from Science Daily:

Earth and Moon Formed Later Than Previously Thought, New Research Suggests

Astronomers have theorized that the planet Earth and the Moon were created as the result of a giant collision between two planets the size of Mars and Venus. Until now, the collision was thought to have happened when the solar system was 30 million years old, or approximately 4,537 million years ago. But new research shows that Earth and the Moon must have formed much later -- perhaps up to 150 million years after the formation of the solar system.

OK, so Earth was created not 4.537 billion years ago but perhaps closer to 4.387 billion years ago. Nevertheless, it just goes to show you that the scientific method is fraught with uncertainty and constantly changes at the whim of whatever the latest "research" suggests.

150,000,000 years down, 4,386,994,000 more to go. We'll get to 6000 years, just you wait and see!

Tied to the Whippin' Post

2010-06-02T17:22:00.002-04:00

So some young Afghanis girls get forty lashes by Muslim warlords because they tried to escape forced marriages.

Cruel. Sick. Barbaric.

Yet the greatest hope of OrthoDOX Jews is the restoration of a theocratic monarchy. (I won't presume to suggest that people are not honest in their tefillah, or in the near-unanimous "amen" audience approval of just about every drasha that ends with "the building of the Beis HaMikdash, bimheirah v'yamainu".) And part and parcel of such a monarchy is the administration of capital and corporal punishment in accordance with Torah law. In Judaism, lashings are theoretically given for everything from violation of (non-capital) Torah prohibitions to violation of rabbinic decrees. Although there is some debate as to how lashes are actually administered (and here I am only presenting some of the opinions), malkus d'oraisah (a violation of a Torah decree), consists of up to 39 lashes (13 on each shoulder, 13 on the stomach), with the actual number reduced if the life of the recipient would be endangered. They are administered with full strength. Makos mardus (a violation of a rabbinic decree) are less severe in some respects (not administered with full strength, the victim is fully dressed which lesses the pain), but much more severe where it counts - there is no limit to the number of lashings, even if the individual will die from the wounds!

I qualified my statement above with "theoretically given", because we don't know if a future Torah court would actually administer lashings, since rabbinic law might mitigate such punitive measures by numerous means (and malkus d'orasiash at least has similar constraints regarding witnesses as capital crimes). And, of course, we are ba'alei rachamim, and would seek to avoid such severe penalties without extenuating circumstances, wouldn't we?? But then I think, perhaps, but malkus are "on the books", and indeed corporal punishment (and even capital punishment, albeit indirectly by turning over Jewish criminals to a government authority) was administered by Jewish communities throughout the Middle Ages. Are the present-day gedolim any more enlightened? Doubtful.

I honestly can't say that I'm 100% opposed to the idea of lashings. On the surface, it sounds like an effective deterrence for certain criminal behaviors (perhaps for some non-sexual violent crimes?) But for eating a cheeseburger? For eating matzah on erev Pesach? For not honoring your parents properly? For offending a rabbinical representative? For a woman refusing to cover her hair?

Think about it the next time you say the 11th, 14th, and 15th blessings of Shemoneh Esrei.

What Really Happened on Shavuot?

2010-05-23T10:52:00.006-04:00

Occasionally one is presented with the assertion that the connection of Shavuot with the giving of the Torah is a late innovation with no real historical basis. For example, Rabbi Shael Siegel states:

Upon closer examination it may appear as though there may have been a distortion made by our esteemed sages and rabbis as to the meaning of the holiday. In reality, Shavuot is a national festival celebrating the offering up of the “bikkurim” at the Temple. The holiday is centered on ownership of land and nationhood...

The sages and rabbis in their wisdom, not wanting the holiday to fall by the wayside attributed a new significance to Shavuot as a result of the new reality. Living in the Diaspora it became impossible to fulfill the biblical commandment of bringing the “bikkurim” to the Temple. Without the viability of the command, the holiday would have lost it purpose had the rabbis not made the new connection, the celebration of the giving of the Law.

Such a claim can be made because while the other two of the shalosh regalim are mentioned in conjunction with both historical and agricultural events (Pesach - Ex. 13, Lev 23:10; Sukkot - Ex. 23:16, Lev. 23:39, 43), Shavuot mentions only an agricultural connection (Ex. 23:16, 34:22).

Of course, the traditional point of view accepts unconditionally that the Sinaitic Revelation occurred on Shavuot. Rabbi Menachem Leibtag attempts to demonstrate how one can arrive at 6/7 Sivan for Ma'amad Har Sinai:

In the Mechilta (and in Mesechet Shabbat 86b), Chazal calculate that the Torah was given on either the sixth or seventh of Sivan (see also Rashi on [Exodus] 19:2->19), yet the fact remains that the Torah clearly prefers to obscure the precise date of this event. There is an additional manner by which it is possible to calculate the approximate date of Ma'amad Har Sinai. It is based on the assumption that the specific date of the tenth of Tishrei was chosen as 'Yom Kippur' because it marks the date when Moshe descended from Har Sinai with the second "luchot". If so, then we can calculate 'backwards', using the three sets of 'forty days' as described in the story of chet ha'egel in Devarim chapter 9; thus arriving at the following approximate dates: Forty days - second luchot: 1 Elul -> 10 Tishrei. Forty days - Moshe's prayer: 19 Tamuz -> 29 Av Forty days - first luchot: 6 or 7 Sivan -> 17 Tamuz.

The main problem with such a calculation is that it relies on other assumptions (e.g., the Yom Kippur/2nd Tablets association) and not on any clearly stated textual chronology.

However we do have a very early source (300-400 years earlier than the Mechilta) that explicitly connects Shavuot with an historical event!

For those unacquainted with the fascinating Book of Jubilees, it is the earliest non-(Jewish)-canonical "Biblical book" extant, having been dated to approximately 150 BCE (examples being found among the Dead Sea Scrolls). Jubilees is also known as "Lesser Genesis", since it is a re-working of the books of Genesis and Exodus. Jubilees follows a tradition that is very strict in its approach to halacha. For example, 15:14 states: And the uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin on the eighth day, that soul shall be cut off from his people, for he has broken My covenant. Fortunately, the Pharasaic rabbis either mitigated the severity of an accepted halachic tradition or relied on a different one. But the important point here is that Jubilees records many early Jewish traditions, some of which are found in later midrashic sources (as well as some that are falsely ascribed as being Christian in origin, such as that of fallen angels!)

So what does Jubilees say about Shavuot? 6:15-17 states:

And He gave to Noah and his sons a sign that there should not again be a flood on the earth. He set His bow in the cloud for a sign of the eternal covenant that there should not again be a flood on the earth to destroy it all the days of the earth. For this reason it is ordained and written on the heavenly tables, that they should celebrate the feast of weeks in this month once a year, to renew the covenant every year.

(Shavuot is again mentioned in chapter 22, but in connection with Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael celebrating it as the feast of first fruits.)

So Jubilees associates Shavuot with a quasi-historical event - the covenantal renewal of God's promise not to destroy the earth! But this was a universal promise made to all of mankind rather than a unique covenant made exclusively with the Jewish people. It would surely pale in comparison with the Revelation at Sinai in the eyes of Jews in the 2nd century BCE. If there were a tradition connecting Shavuot to Sinai - THE seminal event of Judaism - surely the authors of Jubilees would have mentioned it.

The Greatness of Shimon Bar Yochai?

2010-05-04T06:14:00.003-04:00

In an attempt to explain why the yartzeit of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai is a day of celebration and festivities, Rabbi Ari Enkin gives this reason (without attribution):

Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai specifically promised that he would advocate in Heaven on behalf of klal yisrael every year on his yartzeit and to have them saved from every trouble and woe. Since we are confident that Rabbi Shimon will certainly be successful in his mission, it is a day worthy of celebration.

Looking at the past 2000 years of Jewish history, can there be a greater case of cognitive dissonance than such a belief? If Rashbi did indeed claim this, why is he not seen as a charlatan?

My One and Only Rubashkin Post

2010-04-27T06:49:00.002-04:00

This blog has never been one for discussing the countless scandals plaguing the Orthodox Jewish world. Indeed, I have never even mentioned the name of Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin before. But I want to comment on one aspect of the case that seems to perturb many folks - the attempt of the Chabad community to muster all of its forces to attempt to mitigate the sentence meted out to Rubashkin. See, for example, the many Failed Messiah posts or this particularly well-written one by Daas Hedyot.

I have a very close friend who is doing serious time in prison. Just before sentencing, many people in the community wrote letters or made personal appearances before the judge to try and reduce the time that he would surely have to serve. Although many folks dropped all contact with this individual as a result of his quite unsavory misdeeds, many others (include myself), acted as characters witnesses and spoke up on his behalf.

This is what family does.

BUT.

What we did not do was to lie to the judge. My friend never denied his serious mistake, nor did the letters that we wrote deny the seriousness of the crime. We did not produce slick videos that glossed over the facts of the case. We did not speak in public alleging anti-Semitic motivations for his arrest. We never once applied the label of pidyon shevuyim, the redemption of captives. We did not bring irrelevant comparisons to sentences meted out to other criminals in completely different circumstances, or in completely different legal venues. The plea was simple: the person contributed much to the community (as indeed he did, and I am not referring to monetary contributions) who had a lapse in judgment which he fully admits and is willing to take responsibility for. Please, judge, have some mercy in your decision.

No, one doesn't just wipe one's hands clean and ignore the plight of a family member, even if that member is guilty of a great chillul Hashem as Sholom Rubashkin certainly is. However, to use lies and deceit to accomplish one's goals is contemptible. And this is why I part company with the Lubavitch community and its many allies in the chareidi and - yes - even Modern Orthodox world.

J.D. Eisenstein on Bible Criticism - Pt. 2

2010-04-14T18:32:00.003-04:00

This continues my summary of Eisenstein's Commentary on the Torah. Part 1, covering chapters 1-3, can be found here.

Again, since my primary purpose here is to document the objections that traditionalists make against Biblical critics, I will refrain from interjecting personal comments in this summary. Readers can judge for themselves the merits of the author's case (as well as the merits of the critics' arguments.)

Chapter 4: Genealogy and Chronology

“The critics find discrepancies in the genealogical connections of the Bible, particularly in Genesis and the first part of Exodus. From this they wish to prove that the Bible (and particularly the Torah) was compiled from various sources in different periods and by many writers. But the contrary is true. The chain of genealogy in the Bible is unbroken and is linked by the events in the historical narratives. Certain explanations in the Talmud, Midrashim, and by authoritative Jewish commentators sustain this viewpoint.

Eisenstein doesn't cover any new ground here; he details the standard chronology through the patriarchs, discusses the 430/400 years of exile (Gen 15), briefly mentions the opinions regarding the age of Jochebed when she gave birth to Moses (130 per Sotah 12a, which Ibn Ezra criticizes and Ramban defends.) Eisenstein calculates that she was actually 83, a "normal" age to give birth "in this period".

Eisenstein takes issue with a number of objections that Spinoza raised regarding the Torah's chronology:

Problem: Ishmael was sixteen years old when he was cast out of Abraham's household. Yet the Torah calls him a yeled, "child" (Gen 21:13-16). Resolution: the word child is used to arouse sympathy, to show Hagar's helplessness her son became ill with thirst. After relief was round. Ishmael is called naar, "lad".

Problem: Jacob was 84 years old when he married Laban's daughters, 93 when Joseph was born, 130 when he stood before Pharaoh. Why didn't Jacob marry sooner? Resolution: Jacob had to travel to Padan Aram, he was in constant fear of Esau, he had to work for Laban before he could marry.

Problem: Judah was 21 at the time of the sale of Joseph, yet during the migration to Egypt he brought down his grandchildren. Resolution: Judah could have been 43 at the time, old enough for grandchildren.

Problem: Dinah was only 7 years old when she was violation by Shechem, who sought to marry her. Simeon and Levi were youngsters and couldn't have killed all of the inhabitants of Shechem. Resolution: Eisenstein calculates that Dinah was about 11, and the brothers about 14. That was old enough for them to "easily overcome the defenseless invalids of Shechem".

Chapter 5: Geography and Demography

The Torah mentions only the countries of Egypt, Canaan, Cush, and Philistia. "If, as the critics, say, the Torah was compiled in the time of Ezra, who lived in the fourth century B.C.E. under Persian rule, how do they account for the omission of these cities and counties? Persia is mentioned frequently in Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and in Chronicles, which was written by Ezra".

Regarding the Garden of Eden place-names - such as the rivers commonly translated as Tigris and Euphrates - Eisenstein says that we cannot identify with surety the translations. "We may be sure that the description of these places was not written in the Babylonian exile or during the Second Commonwealth, for the geography of Babylon and the principal rivers were better known then and could be easily identified. Notwithstanding this conclusive evidence, Jean LeClerc insists that these place-names in the Torah are of late origin."

Eisenstein argues against a number of other place name problems that critics bring up. For brevity, I'll only mention a few examples.

Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb? "According to the Talmud, the different names refer to different ways of describing the effect of Torah upon idolaters (Shabbat 89a). But the critics insist that Sinai and Horeb are separate mountains in different places. They claim that the author of the Torah confused them, and, in order to maintain his idea that Sinai was the site of the Revelation, he used the term Sinai thirty-one times in the Torah and four times in the other books, inserting "Horeb" twelve times in the former and four times in the latter. The critics do not even give the author, or as they call him, the editor, credit for knowing that he could easily have blue-pencilled the word Horeb and avoided this so-called confusion."

"Rachel was buried on the road to Efrat, which is Bethlehem. (Gen. 35:19) Evidently both names were known at the time of Moses, as they have the same connotation. Efrat, from the root parah, means productive, fruitful; and Bethlehem connotes a store-house for bread."

Eisenstein states that a number of other place name problems are simply the result of them being known by multiple names, such as Bela/Zoar, Hebron/Kiryat Arba, the location of Aharon's death, etc.

"Abraham, in his attempt to rescue Lot from his captors, pursued the enemy "as far as Dan." (Gen. 14:14) The critics say that a place called Dan was non-existent in Moses' time; that until the period of the judges it was named Laish (Judges 18 :29). Ibn Ezra (in his commentary on Numb. 13 :23), however, points out that the Dan in Genesis was another place. The Targum Yerushalmi calls it "Dan Caesaria." There are twenty-five cities named Springfield in the United States of America and no critic asks questions about their relationship. [FH: That's why no one knows where the Simpsons live!!] It is equally possible for two cities by the name of Dan to have existed in Canaan."

Beyond the Jordan. A common objection by critics who interpret this phrase in Moses' farewell address (Deut. 1:1) to refer to Transjordan; they therefore felt that the text was written by someone residing in Canaan and not by Moses. However, the term "eber-ha-Jarden" really means "beyond" in either direction... To the one who stands in the east, Trans-Jordan means west of the Jordan, and to the one who is in Canaan, Transjordan means east of it. The text reads "beyond the Jordan in the land of Moab" (Deut. 1:5), which is east of Palestine. Also: "And all the Arabah beyond the Jordan eastward." (ibid. 4:49) Hence "beyond the Jordan" in the land of Moab means west of the Jordan.

Regarding Demography, Eisenstein doesn't discuss the problems of 600,000 adult males (>2 Million total population). He only describes the multiple counts (Ex. 12:37, Num. 1, Num. 26) and supports this large number by the descriptions of King Saul mobilizing armies of 330,000 and 200,000 both of which were confirmed by census (I Sam. 11:8, 15:4).

Chapter 6: Designations of and References to God.

The fallacy of Astruc's theory that relates YHVH and Elohim to the J and E documents can be shown by the admixture and interchangeability of both names in one running story (e.g., the sacrifice of Isaac, the story of Jacob's dream, the Balaam story). This indicates that they emanate from one source.

That the patriarchs knew of God not just as el-Shaddai (Ex. 6:3), is seen in the multiple occurrences that indicate they also knew of YHVH (Gen. 15:2-8; 26:2, 24, 25; 28:16).

The critics say that the name "Israel" was substituted for "Jacob" by J. However, they concede numerous exceptions in Genesis (46:2, 48:8, 11:21, 50:25). Eisenstein also mentions Gen. 31:3 and - curiously - a number of references in the Prophets.

According to the critics, E alludes without offense to a matzevah, J never. Eisenstein shows a number of places where the so-called J author DOES refer to such stone pillars (e.g., Gen. 28:18, 35:20, etc.) which were used for memorials and oil libations.

Before discussing the traditional meaning of the divine names, he mentions Prof. Erdman of Leiden who withdrew from the Graff-Wellhausen school because the divine names were meaningless with regards to authorship. "So the conflict among critics goes merrily along".

Then the discussion of divine names, which is based on the mission or attribute of God represented (Elohim is God as manifested in nature, and can also refer to judges or mighty and powerful men; attribute of judgment. YHVH is the attribute of grace; it is the only name associated with sacrifices. Elohim with YHVH is tiferet - justice tempered with mercy. And so forth.)

The suffix YH is used only once in a proper name in the Torah - Moriah (Gen. 22:2) - but 107 times in other biblical books. Some names ending in EL were changed to YH (e.g., Uzziel to Uzziah), showing that the spelling was changed after the era of Torah. This nullifies the theory that some parts of the Torah were composed at the same time as the Books of Prophets.

Finally, anthropomorphism. Torah uses human attributes in its descriptions of God because that is due to the lower state of civilization among the Israelites in the Wilderness. The prophets utilized anthropomorphism "because of custom", but in a lesser degree. They were eventually eliminated during the Second Commonwealth. This disproves the notion that Torah was written in a later time.

[End of Part 2.]

Ignorance is Bliss

2010-04-12T23:44:00.002-04:00

The length of the Second Temple is known securely to us from the Sages... and it is incumbent on one to remove from himself any doubting thoughts on this matter. Happy is he who has not read the outside books...

- Chazon Ish, Kovetz Iggerot v. 1 #206, as quoted in Jewish History in Conflict.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

- Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

My Approach to Kitniyot

2010-03-31T22:23:00.002-04:00

What's the Deal with Tikvah Layeled?

2010-03-21T19:20:00.002-04:00

I am no "gevier" and thus have to be somewhat selective with my tzedakah money. I generally attempt at least a modicum of due diligence before supporting a charity. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to figure out who the primary recipients of a charity are. For example, many Jewish charities hide behind a "church" status and thus do not have to provide the IRS with 990 reporting information. In addition, strictly Israeli charities do not - of course - have to comply with any US reporting requirements.

Occasionally I have to go with my gut feeling, which is why I contribute to Hazon Yeshaya. But usually I refrain from giving to a charity that does not practice transparency. Nor will I give to one such as Chai Lifeline that has what I consider to be excessive salaries for their officers.

In my current pile of tzedakah envelopes is one for "Tikvah Layeled - The Foundation for Cerebral Palsy Children in Israel". I have contributed to them in the past and decided to update my information. Guidestar did have Form 990 information on them, and I found some curious details there. Here is the top of page 3 :

The first interesting thing is that their stated purpose is "Support of Jewish Religious Education". HUH? I thought I was supporting an organization to help children in Israel that had cerebral palsy! Now take a look at who they are distributing money to. Let's leave the major recipient aside for the moment.

It isn't easy to figure out who the other recipients are, but here is my best information:

Kahal Adas Yereim - Viener shul
Cong. Ner Baruch - congregation in Boro Park?
Gmach Ezer - gemach in Boro Park?
Cong. Kahal Torah Chaim - Viznitz yeshivah ($100,000!)
Tzedakah V'Chesed - too generic to determine
Cong. Givat Shaul - Bialer Rebbe's shul
Cong. Kehillah Yaakov (there's a shul in Cleveland Heights, but I doubt that this is the one)
EMI - not a clue
Kollel Shomrei Hachomos - Edah HaChareidis charity in Israel
The Cheder - too generic

It appears, then, that a substantial amount (almost 40%) goes to various chassidic shuls and yeshivot. Perhaps they give money to these institutions for the benefit of members with disabled children???

And what about the other 60% - $355,000 - that goes to Tikvah Layeled in Israel? There is only a handful of web articles regarding their work with cerebral palsy. The organization was started by Zvi Braitstein, a man with a child afflicted by CP, and the list of endorsers is not your typical hareidi list of rabbonim - it consists of physicians in both the US and Israel. But seeing as the US foundation is apparently not on the up and up with its recipients (that is, their mailing says nothing about these other groups, nor does it state that its goal is "Jewish education"), is it possible that the Israel organization is likewise diverting money to groups that ostensibly have nothing to do with cerebral palsy?

One other tidbit. They are apparently obfuscating their real address. While the mailing says "322 West 52nd Street, PO Box 1097", and a Google street view shows that this is the location of a post office in Manhattan. The 990 form, however, has an address in Boro Park. On it, Zvi Braitstein is listed as a director as "Rabbi Tzvi Braitstein". (At least it says that he - and the other directors - get $0 salary!)

I will be more than happy to post a followup that says that my suspicions are unfounded (as an aside, no one took me up on my similar offer regarding Chai Lifeline!) I'd like to be dan l'kaf zechus, but without going into the sordid details, we all know that there is good reason for cynicism these days.

In the meantime, Tikvah Layeled is on my S*** list!

J.D. Eisenstein on Bible Criticism - Pt. 1

2010-03-18T20:38:00.004-04:00

Eisenstein's Commentary on the Torah was written as a reaction to modern Biblical criticism. It is a “Defense of the Traditional Jewish Viewpoint” (which is also the subtitle of the book) and the author attempts to call into question many of the assertions of Bible critics. Since this is a relatively hard book to find, I am providing a summary of his arguments on a chapter by chapter basis. This post covers only the first three chapters; I hope to continue at a later date. Please note that I have refrained from personal remarks on Eisenstein's commentary (although I may bold or italicize certain portions); what follows are either direct quotes or accurate paraphrasing of the text.

Judah David Eisenstein finished this book in 1952, but he unfortunately passed away (in 1956 at the age of 101) before he could see it published. Of course, many new developments in biblical scholarship and more sophisticated arguments have arisen in the decades after his death, consequently his treatment may seem outdated to some.

Introduction

A summary of biblical criticism, including both non-Jewish and Jewish critics. Among the Jewish critics, Eisenstein mentions one traditional commentator - Ibn Ezra - who suggests that some passages of the Torah may have been written after Moses' death. Brief discussion of Talmudic sources, various translations, and faulty translations. Potent quote:

The Rabbis of the Talmud, who lived in the early centuries of the common era and devoted their lives to the study of the Hebrew Bible, are certainly more qualified to judge the authenticity of the Bible in general and the Torah, upon which the details of the Jewish faith and practices are based, in particular. The Rabbis scrutinized every question raised by apparent variants, contradictions, misplacements, or anachronisms, and introduced certain rules by which these discrepancies might be solved and explained. The early Jewish commentators, following these rules, met and even anticipated every type of criticism advanced by the critics. But the critics do not or cannot read the Hebrew commentators; they rely on their own misinformation and prejudice, and consult only those books which coincide with their views.

Chapter 1: The Creation, Flood, and the Tower of Babel

The creation story is not a scientific presentation, but a religious axiom to stimulate faith in God and in the Mosaic Books.

Experience has shown that there is no basis for the fear that children will rebel against such teachings and rebuke us for indoctrinating them with unsound ideas lacking scientific foundations.

Contradictions between the events of the two creation stories are answered by Rashi or - for example - Chullin 27b. For example, the winged fowl of the fifth day in the 1st chapter are insects, as opposed to the fowl of the air of the sixth day in the 2nd chapter which are birds.

The Flood. Shanaim shanaim are “pair by pair”; the Torah does not limit the number of pairs of clean animals, thus there is no contradiction of one vs. seven pairs of animals in the story. The Flood only inundated Mesopotamia. Noah's ark contained only those animals common to the region. Repetitions in the story are due to differences in the style of ancient Biblical writings vs. modern fiction writers.

Chapter 2: Facts, Legends and Miracles

“The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them with wives whomever they liked. (Gen. 6:2)... is an erroneous translation of the Hebrew. Onkelos of the first century renders “benei Elohim” as powerful or mighty men, not the sons of God, nor angels who cohabited with mortal women. It is not denied that there is some difference between the primeval chapters (Gen. 1-11), and the patriarchal chapters (ibid., 12-50). The former are based on the phenomena of nature and are related to the creation: of the world and its inhabitants in earliest historical times, couched in a language best understood by ordinary people for the purpose of impressing on them the belief in a Supreme being.

A nod to the Kabbalists and a mention of the multiple ways of interpreting the first 11 chapters of Genesis. “The patriarchal chapters, however, are historical facts.” Moses collected the scrolls that the Israelites read while in Egypt, and then wrote Genesis and the first part of Exodus with divine inspiration. He then added his history in Egypt, the deliverance of the people, the rest of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and then Deuteronomy before his death. The miracles of which modern critics are skeptical may be explained in a reasonable way. The Jews passed through the Red Sea at ebb tide, although this does not explain how 600,000 could pass through the sea. The sun standing still by Joshua may be due to the Aurora Borealis. The ravens bringing food to Elijah were actually a family named Oreb (raven). Other phenomena are rhetorical or poetic fancies, such as a the Tower of Babel being expresses as a “tower with its top in the heavens.”

Chapter 3: Script and Language

The Hebrew alphabet was the invention of Hebrews, not the Phoenicians. Archaeological discoveries bear this out: the excavation of Tel ed-Duweir (Lachish?) by Sir Charles Marston shows characters from 1500 BCE which were from early Hebrews. Ras Shamra dates back to 1400-1360 BCE. Phoenician script came into use later, about 1250 BCE during the reign of King Shiram. The Talmudic discussion of what script the Torah was written with (e.g., Sanhedrin 21b, 22a) shows that the rabbis were dealing with a very ancient text, since they no longer knew its original style of writing. Potent quote:

The word sepher mentioned in the Torah does not mean book in the ordinary sense. It was a tablet on which the narrative (sippur) was inscribed with a stylet or with a pointed instrument similar to the modern pen. Jeremiah was the first to mention writing with ink upon a scroll (Jer. 36:16), evidently on parchment. There is an interval of about nine centuries between Moses and Jeremiah. This certainly refutes the theories of the critics, some of whom date the composition of several of the books of Moses later than Jeremiah when inscribing on stones had ceased.

Masoretic corrections. Keri and ketiv notes were made by comparing three copies of the Torah a long time after Moses wrote the Torah. The corrections are found in the margins only, which refutes the theory of the postdating its composition.

Vowels.

Some critics attempt to prove that the talmudists were ignorant of vowels. They quote the story from the Talmud (Baba Batra 21b) that King David censured Joab, his chief of the army, for killing all the males in Edom (I Ki. 11:15), and that Joab’s excuse was that he followed the instruction of his teacher, based on the command of God to Moses, who enjoined Joshua to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek (also known as Edom) from under the heaven.” (Ex. 17 :14) The word “remembrance” in Hebrew is zeker, but his teacher taught him to read zakar, which means males, so he completely wiped out all males in Edom (T. Baba Batra 2lb). This, however, can be accounted for by the fact that the teacher who copied the Torah placed the wrong vowels under the consonants ZKR, or that he read from a copy in which the wrong vowels had been placed by error.

Other examples follow. Jesus quote: Jesus said, “One jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass from the law.” (Matthew 5:18) He referred to the vowels and the accents of the Torah, in existence in his time.

Euphemisms.

Certain corrections of a euphemistic character were made in the Bible by the Soferim or, according to another authority, by the original authors. This opinion appears in the light of certain changes in the text.

Many examples follow, such as “But Abraham stood yet before the Eternal” (Gen. 1-8:22), instead of “The Eternal stood yet before Abraham”.

Foreign Influences. Eisenstein discusses the many foreign loan words in the Torah which “prove the authenticity of the Torah regarding the historical narratives of Israe1’s sojourn in and exodus from Egypt, including the story of Joseph’s experiences in Egypt.” (This is a quote from a Dr A. S. Yahuda, in Language of the Pentateuch. [hey, it's an old book, why isn't there a full view on Google Books??])

Dr. Yahuda points out the inconsistency in the thinking of the German critic, Edward Meyer, who considers the story of Joseph as fiction and who suggests that it was a mere adaptation from an Egyptian story. Meyer was one of those critics who assumed the author of the Joseph narrative to be completely ignorant of Egyptian literature. The fallacy of his theories is readily recognized when the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible is carefully explored.

Names. An explanation of the variations in personal names mentioned in the Bible. E.g., Esau changed the name of wife Mahalat (daughter of Ishmael, mentioned in Gen. 28:9), to Basemat (36:3) in memory of his former wife (26:34) who died childless. Mahalat means “illness”, and this was replaced by Basemat, which means “sweet spices”.

Detailed Descriptions. There are numerous personal narratives which could not have been described in such minute detail in a later period by various writers. Examples include: details on the generations from Adam until Noah, details on the ark, names of the families that went into Egypt, the Tabernacle dimensions and construction, census of tribes and Levites (“it is quite unlikely that an author of a much later period would fictionalize such events and enumerate in so specific and particular a fashion”), detailed itinerary of the Israelites and the names of the camps they established are evidence of their actual sojourn in the Wilderness before entering Canaan.

Forty-two camps are named individually in the itinerary (Num 33). And yet the critics deny the events of this sojourn in the Wilderness. We may ask them, if all these places are myths, what purpose had the later writer in locating all the camps in the Wilderness, when he could have set them in Canaan or elsewhere. Besides, some of these places were unknown during the time when the Israelites were settled in Palestine; they were identified only in recent years.

[End of Part 1.]

End of Discussion

2010-03-15T17:04:00.003-04:00

True conversation. "X" is a well-educated, very intelligent lawyer who prides himself on his rational approach to Judaism. X considers himself Modern Orthodox, and often snickers at what he believes to be silly, naive statements by Chazal.

X: There cannot be any conflict between Torah and Science. And since basic principles of science don't change, any obvious conflicts must require a re-interpretation of Torah.

Me: OK, so what about the Mabul? We know that there wasn't a global flood 4500 years ago, and that all life wasn't destroyed and re-populated from Noah. It's obvious that this is a Mesopotamian flood myth - likely based on the experience of an actual catastrophic event - but the Torah is adapting it to its monotheistic outlook.

X: I agree that the story is mythical, but that God is using this method of discourse to teach us a lesson.

Me: Why would God use a myth to convey a theological message when it could be done without telling a fairy tale?

X: I don't know why God needed to tell a lie [note: he actually used this term], but there must be a reason why He chose to do so.

Me: Isn't it more likely that it isn't God speaking, and that man composed this story?

X: I cannot compromise on my belief that the Torah was given by God to Moses.

I had thought that the conversation began with an intellectual assertion by X, but on later reflection realized that the conversational show-stopper was contained within his very first sentence, and not the eventual explicitly stated unwillingness to compromise his core belief of Torah from Sinai. Really, there was no purpose for engaging in intellectual discourse once "There cannot be any conflict between Torah and Science" was stated - not as premise - but as fact.

Winning the Debate

2010-03-10T09:26:00.003-05:00

In the lecture How to Learn Agadah and Midrash, Rabbi Jesse Horn describes the different approaches towards the origins of midrash (e.g., Har Sinai versus Chazal's derashot) and how it should be learned. For example, Shmuel HaNagid - according to most interpretations - takes a rationalistic approach. Midrash is hashkafah and one has the right to disagree with it. However, Rabbi Dessler in Michtav M'Eliahu says that what Shmuel HaNagid really means is how much time one needs to devote to aggadah. If you don't know what it means, just move on to the more essential halachic discussions. [Dessler feels that this represents a defect in one's understanding, rather than implying anything about the content of the midrash itself.]

Horn then discusses Ramban who says - regarding Midrash Aggadah - that one can choose whether or not one wants to believe them. There is no loss if one rejects all of them. Take it or leave it.

At first glance, this seems to be the non-R. Dessler approach towards understanding aggadah. However, Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky - in his commentary on Bereshis 44:18 - does not accept that Ramban actually believes this. One needs to realize the context in which it was said. The Ramban was in the middle of a public debate with Christian theologians. "The Ramban - if he would have said that he accepted everything in midrash they would never have accepted it - he would have looked silly. Therefore, the Ramban made a trade off. I'm willing to say something that I don't fully subscribe to in order to win the debate."

"Parenthetically, it's worthwhile to note - how much are we willing to deviate from the truth, to shy away from emes in order to win debates?", asks Rabbi Horn.

It's a rhetorical question, for that is not the subject of the lecture. But once again "lying for the sake of heaven" rears its head. Certainly Ramban - if he indeed did not fully accept his own words - was thoroughly justified in preventing any possible danger to the Jewish community. A similar motivation is perhaps why kiruv organizations like Aish Hatorah play fast and loose with the truth. To them, only Orthodoxy represents the correct belief system and anything less than this is a threat to the future of Jewry. Intentional deception and outright lies are simply means justifying the end. Perhaps they are even relying on the examples of "divine deception" found in the Torah itself! Think Yaakov stealing Esav's blessing, or Moshe's request to Pharaoh for a 3-day holiday. Both are examples of lying to save the future of Jewry.

It isn't about emes. It is about "winning the debate".

The Genesis Enigma

2010-02-22T14:53:00.003-05:00

crap-o-la [krap-oh-luh]

1. Slang: Sometimes Vulgar.
a. nonsense; drivel.
b. falsehood, exaggeration, propaganda, or the like.
Synonyms: The Genesis Enigma, by Andrew Parker.

I'm a sucker for punishment. Why else would I pick up the book The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible Is Scientifically Accurate from the library? I admit that I was somewhat intrigued by the back cover blurb, which said that it was "Jaw-dropping... an astounding work which seeks to prove that the ancient Hebrew writers of the book of Genesis knew all about evolution - 3000 years before Darwin." OK, the quote was from the Daily Mail, not a publication known for its rigorous scientific standards, but still...

I first realized what I was in for while reading Chapter 1: Truth: The Old Testament as Factual Record. Parker devotes most of the chapter discussing the early archaeological discoveries in Mesopotamia. He points out things like the Merneptah Stele, the earliest evidence of Israel's existence outside the Bible, and discoveries of Woolley and Lawrence and others (Ur, Nineveh, capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, etc). His conclusion: "Having seen now the weight of archaeological evidence for the historical truth of the Bible... Uh, excuse me, Mr. Parker?? Because you can muster a smattering of archaeological findings that corroborate certain Biblical events, that is enough to say that the "weight of evidence" says that it is historically accurate?? Why did you ignore the weight of evidence that argues against a global flood, against a single language in Bavel (pre-dispersion), against a single couple as the progenitor of all humans less than 6000 years ago? No, a real scientist might say that "archaeological evidence shows that certain passages in the Bible reflect a knowledge of the times", but there is NO way that the weight of evidence shows that it is historically true.

The rest of the book was skimming material after I realized the pattern: devote the vast majority of the material to a discussion of scientific matters, such as the Big Bang, geology, and evolution (and their historical development), and sneak in a paragraph or two about the creation account, making an attempt to correlate the opening chapter of Genesis with our current scientific knowledge. In addition, the author is fond of seemingly irrelevant segues, such as his brief interlude to discuss human-caused ecological destruction in the chapter on birds (he states that one should not think that the Bible will solve this problem, and no amount of prayer will correct out behavior toward the environment.)

To save you the time (and pain) of reading the book, here is how he attempts to correlate the account of creation with modern science:

1) Let there be light. This chapter discusses the history of the geocentric and heliocentric models, Newtonian and Einsteinium physics, and the Big Bang. Parker says that the ancient Israelites behind the Genesis account of creation give an order of events that is surprisingly accurate, scientifically. But, says Parker, beginning the story with the formation of the sun 5 billion years before present (YBP) makes "intuitive sense" and might not seem remarkable.

2) The formation of the seas and the emergence of dry land. Parker gives a brief history regarding various estimates of the age of Earth, the work of geologists Hutton and Lyell, the principle of uniformitarianism, how Fleming struck a blow against the notion of a universal deluge, the gradual acceptance of an ancient earth, and the early geologic history of Earth. The separation of land and sea (approx. 4.2 billion YBP) are found in their correct sequence in Genesis. But again, says Parker, "the story may seem rather predictable so far".

3) Life begins! The earth brings forth grass, herb yielding seed, and fruit trees. Parker discusses Gosse, Darwin and Wallace, then focuses briefly on theories of abiogenesis. Which leads us to the beginning of cyanobacteria 3.6 billion YBP. But cyanobacteria are not mentioned in Genesis, Parker states with wonder! That's because the ancient Israelites would have been oblivious to single-celled life forms. However, plants are photosynthetic just like cyanobacteria - and indeed the former incorporated the latter to do just that. So it is appropriate that plants are mentioned in the third state of creation.

4) Lights to divide day from night. The author of Genesis already covered the appearance of the sun, and so Parker does not accept that this event refers to the sun and the moon as almost all commentators explain (and try to understand.) After discussing at length the emergence of multi-cellular organisms, Parker comes up with a chiddush (novel explanation): this event of Genesis must be referring to the evolution of the eye, which first appeared in trilobites around 521 million YBP! Yes, that is right, the light that divides day from night is actually a reference to the sense of vision. "Why the author of the creation account placed emphasis in his narrative to introduce the eye, cannot be explained." But "he remained on a parallel course with the scientifically correct sequence of events in the history of life".

5) Waters bring forth abundant creatures. Moses ("who may have first spoken [these words]") lived far from the sea and would have known only about land animals, birds and insects who shared his territory. (Parker apparently never looked at a map of Goshen.) A discussion of the Cambrian explosion ensues. Life 580 million YBP was exclusively marine. "Bring forth" corresponds to the evolutionary processes following the evolution of the eye. The author must have "received word that this is the way it really happened." Parker finds this "rather scary".

6) Life unfolds. Great whales and every living creature that moves are brought forth. This corresponds to the great diversity of the Silurian and Devonian ("age of fishes") eras. The author of Genesis is "spot on", as it mentions giant sea monsters. Briefly mentioned here are mammal-like reptiles, dinosaurs (why these giants are not mentioned, Parker doesn't say), and the earliest bird fossils. Then mammals and finally modern humans 160,000 YBP.

7) Winged fowls. Parker doesn't know why birds are singled out, since they are "an exception to the rule of vision, the sense that caused evolution." But he spends considerable time talking about bird feathers. "Birds, evolving late in the history of animals, serve as a message of the power of light and vision on earth today...It was fitting for the author of Genesis to say something special about birds in his creation account".

In general, Parker takes a pretty standard scientific approach towards evolution, geology, etc. He also agrees with the Documentary Hypothesis. But in the chapter God, Parker plunges into theology when he states that "Either the author of Genesis was directed by divine intervention, or he made a lucky guess." In presenting this false dilemma, he doesn't consider that he is fitting the account of creation to his own theory. The Bible clearly says that "the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; and the stars" are created after the plants; but that doesn't jive with his thesis. He ignores the obvious (sun, moon, and stars) and creates a general category that he equates with the "evolution of vision". Gimmeabreak! He likewise ignores other anomalies, such as fruit trees (actually all flowering plants) developing very late, after mammals and birds, completely at odds with the order in Genesis. Birds likewise evolved relatively late, and again the order in Genesis is inconsistent with the scientific understanding, but for Parker birds are "an exception"!

Parker also says that the Bible is the greatest inconvenience to atheists. The stronger our belief in God, the higher our morale. (Yeah, the Crusaders did have high morale, it just that they weren't very moral!) He hints that he agrees with the Catholic Church of Scotland's 2005 guide to the Bible which - while arguing for a symbolic interpretation of the text - accepts that it is a divine revelation to Moses.

I think that one can sum up the book by looking at this quote in the chapter on birds: "When the biblical text is taken literally, it is left in the wake of an advancing science. But when it is read figuratively, as here in the case of birds, it becomes a great unknown in the way it keeps pace with modern science". In other words, "I will interpret the text in such a manner as to agree with my thesis, and ignore the obvious problems with a literal reading."

The Case for a Return to Biblical Slavery

2010-02-14T09:35:00.004-05:00

In this very brief talk on Parsha Mishpatim, Rabbi Sroy Levitansky discusses the benefits of the Jewish system of indentured servitude versus the American system of incarceration (although nowadays, compensation to the victim is also often required by the court). Of course, this "Sage of St. Louis" restricts his discussion to that of a Jewish thief, and conveniently ignores the halachic parameters surrounding the non-Jewish slave. The latter remains a slave forever, and it is permissible to abuse him (within limits), even though Rambam, for example, strongly cautions the slave-owner to act in a compassionate manner. So does Levitansky want a return to all forms of Biblical slavery? Does he want to allow (or perhaps force) a Jewish male servant (I hesitate to call him a "slave") to marry a non-Jewish female slave and produce children that are slaves forever?

And how about a return to other Biblical laws mentioned in the same parsha: does he want the death penalty for a child that curses (even a dead) parent? Would he prefer that his (virgin) 12-year old daughter marry her rapist, or would he rather take monetary compensation?

The Jewish Nation - For Men Only

2010-02-11T21:57:00.004-05:00

In preparation for the revelation at Sinai, Moses tells the people not to go near (i.e., have relations with) women for three days. It is therefore obvious from the context that the people, הָעָם, the nation, excludes women. Does this suggest that when הָעָם is used in the passages immediately adjacent to v. 15, that women are also excluded? Did the women not prepare and wash their garments (v. 14)? Did only the men shudder (v. 16)? Did only the men stand at the foot of the mountain (v. 17)? Etcetera.

14. So Moses descended from the mountain to the people, and he prepared the people, and they washed their garments.
יד. וַיֵּרֶד מֹשֶׁה מִן הָהָר אֶל הָעָם וַיְקַדֵּשׁ אֶת הָעָם וַיְכַבְּסוּ שִׂמְלֹתָם:

15. He said to the people, "Be ready for three days; do not go near a woman."
טו. וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל הָעָם הֱיוּ נְכֹנִים לִשְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים אַל תִּגְּשׁוּ אֶל אִשָּׁה:

16. It came to pass on the third day when it was morning, that there were thunder claps and lightning flashes, and a thick cloud was upon the mountain, and a very powerful blast of a shofar, and the entire nation that was in the camp shuddered.
טז. וַיְהִי בַיּוֹם הַשְּׁלִישִׁי בִּהְיֹת הַבֹּקֶר וַיְהִי קֹלֹת וּבְרָקִים וְעָנָן כָּבֵד עַל הָהָר וְקֹל שֹׁפָר חָזָק מְאֹד וַיֶּחֱרַד כָּל הָעָם אֲשֶׁר בַּמַּחֲנֶה:

17. Moses brought the people out toward God from the camp, and they stood at the bottom of the mountain.
יז. וַיּוֹצֵא מֹשֶׁה אֶת הָעָם לִקְרַאת הָאֱ־לֹהִים מִן הַמַּחֲנֶה וַיִּתְיַצְּבוּ בְּתַחְתִּית הָהָר:

I could not find any meforshim that discuss this problem. Is there no commentator that is troubled by the exclusionary wording of Exodus 19:15?

The Rebbe's Omniscience

2010-02-06T21:21:00.002-05:00

From Noah Efron's Real Jews: Secular Versus Ultra-Orthodox: The Struggle for Jewish Identity in Israel (p. 177):

[Journalist Shahar] Ilan recounted that use of amulets and blessings as electoral assets was pioneered in 1988 by representatives of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, working to enlist votes for Israel’s Agudat Yisrael party. Aryeh Deri, the former leader of Shas who was imprisoned for financial irregularities and breach of trust (which I will soon describe), explained the modus operandi of the Lubavitchers, from which he would learn important lessons for the elections that followed:

They would have a person sign a letter to the Lubavitcher rebbe, in which they committed to voting for the Agudah. The next day, someone would call the same person, presenting himself as a pollster for a public opinion research center, asking how the person planned to vote. If he answered with some other party, they would later call him again, this time in the name of the Lubavitchers, and say, “We sent your name by fax to the Rebbe in New York, and we received a reply that you’re unreliable."

This tactic combined spiritual carrot and stick: blessings for compliance, and the Rebbe’s omniscient wrath for noncompliance. For people who care about this sort of thing, it was powerful incentive to vote the way the Rebbe (or, at least, his representatives) wished.

News Flash - All Judges in Jerusalem Fired Except for Single Justice!

2010-02-04T21:22:00.006-05:00

Jerusalem eliminates all judicial appointments except for a lone judge. Gentile priest attempts to intervene and proclaims "one justice is simply not enough".

Supposedly there were 600,000 adult men during the sojourn in the desert, greater than the current Jewish population of Jerusalem. Yet until Jethro comes up with his brilliant idea of setting up a court system, Moses as sole judge of every dispute - no matter how minor - has to stay up morning till night to accomplish his task.

Just another of many examples why a literal interpretation of 600,000 is quite absurd...

Cognitive Dissonance Trilogy

2010-02-03T10:11:00.002-05:00

The Lancet retracts a 1998 research paper linking childhood vaccines with autism, finding Dr. Andrew Wakefield - the original researcher - to have been deceptive and guilty of ethical violations. Jim Moody, a director of SafeMinds, a parents’ group that advances the notion the vaccines cause autism, said the retraction would strengthen Dr. Wakefield’s credibility with many parents.“Attacking scientists and attacking doctors is dangerous,” he said. “This is about suppressing research, and it will fuel the controversy by bringing it all up again.”

Dayan Fisher's segulah for difficult births doesn't work. If it had, it would have (supposedly) endangered the baby. That it didn't work proves that it is a miracle!

Man emphatically states that he isn't the messiah. Followers claim that "only the true Messiah denies his divinity!"

The Lies Shall Set You Free

2010-01-25T20:41:00.002-05:00

Rabbi Shoshana Hantman of the Reconstructionist Group of Southern Westchester, on justifying what is almost certainly a contrived provenance for the sefer Torah that she purchased from Menachem Youlus:

When Hantman hears about the mystically multiplying Torahs, she pauses and says she has to gather her thoughts: "I hope you've read 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' At the end, a truth is concealed for the better good of the community. ... If there is any deception going on ... also think about what he's done that's good." She wrestles with what she has heard. "Destroying this man, if he is guilty of what you suspect, may very well be in service of the truth but in disservice of a greater truth," Hantman says. What, for Hantman, is the greater truth? "The Jewish reverence for the past, for heritage and for those who suffered and died because of the Nazis."

I recently re-read Terry Pratchett's novel Small Gods and was struck by how much her statement reminded me of this one by Vorbis (head Quisitioner):

"And so it is with truth," said Vorbis. "There are some things which appear to be the truth, which have all the hallmarks of truth, but which are not the real truth. The real truth must sometimes be protected by a labyrinth of lies."

Of course, Vorbis' "real truth" are actually lies while Hartman's "greater truth" are honorable pursuits, but both Hantman and Vorbis consider it proper that deception may be in the service of the greater truth. Both would make great kiruv workers.

Full article on Youlus here.

(By the way, Pratchett is always amazing, but this novel is particularly ripe with passages that will hit home with any religious skeptic. Expect more quotables here!)

Madcap Mikvah Madams

2010-01-25T16:03:00.003-05:00

Installing automatic payment machines at mikvaot in Jerusalem has resulted in a 20% increase in revenue. It appears that many mikvah ladies are not such great tzadekot (?) since it is presumed that they were pocketing quite a bit of shekels!

Source here. (Sad, but funny at the same time, is the story about an obese woman who got stuck in the new revolving door of a mikvah. She was stuck for 15 minutes, and it took another ten minutes to free her. Since this was the only entrance, there was a long line of women waiting to get in and many just gave up and went home.)

The Science of Kashrus

2010-01-24T10:09:00.003-05:00

Cooking milk and meat dishes (or kosher and non-kosher dishes) in the same oven creates a number of problems vis a vis the laws of kashrus. The biggest problem is when this is done simultaneously and there is the possibility of direct transfer of material from one pot to another. Most problematic is when one pot is above another, or when one is touching another. But even without direct transfer of actual food substance from one dish to another, there are two issues that one must be concerned: aroma and steam. Aroma (reicha milsa) is considered significant under certain circumstances. Thus, one may not cook a fatty meat in a small oven, unventilated oven at the same time as a dairy dish, even if the pots are not touching each other. This is due to transfer of aroma. The prohibition is a priori (l'chatchila), however. If done ex post facto (bedieved) it may be permitted (ask your LOR.)

Steam (zeiah) is a more interesting issue, in my opinion, for the steam of a liquid has the same status as the food from which it was derived. This has implications for not only cooking milk and meat dishes separately, but when cooking one after the other. Thus, the steam from a meat dish will rise up to the roof of the over and make it fleishig. Afterward, if one cooks an uncovered milk dish in the over, the steam will rise up, absorb the meat taste from the roof, and drip back into the milk dish. Uh oh, basar v'chalav - treif!!! So, if one does not have separate ovens for milk and meat, one should "designate" the oven for - say - meat, and ensure that when cooking milk the pot is always covered.

Obviously, this is an oversimplification, since there are issues like bitul, nosem taam lifgam, etc. Again, ask your LOR. (Or Rabbi Abadi, who says that there is no such thing as a "fleishig oven".)

But let's come back to a sentence which should have made you pause. The steam of a liquid has the same status as the food from which it was derived. If you just glossed over it, here is what it is saying: if one distills water from milk, the water is considered milchig. If one distills water from chicken soup, the water is considered fleishig. Now, for those who don't remember their elementary school science, distilled water contains nothing but water. Distilled water from milk is indistinguishable from distilled water from chicken soup, or from dog soup, or from industrial waste.

According to wiki, the knowledge of distillation was known in Mesopotamia at least back to the 2nd millenium BCE. So why don't the poskim (who rely on the Rosh who relies on a mishnah in Machshirim) seem to know about this??

Addendum! I should have done a search on this topic before posting it, but please also refer to this entry by Orthoprax, posted over three years ago.

Gedolei haDor - Bereft of Knowledge

2010-01-17T18:55:00.004-05:00

Rabbi Mark Angel, in Maimonides, Spinoza and Us: Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism, pulls no punches in his disdain for how superstition and anti-intellectualism has permeated the Hareidi Orthodox world. Not even such gedolim as the Vilna Gaon (whose words are "shocking examples of a defective, superstitious world view") and the Hazon Ish (whose obscurantist geocentric belief was somewhat mitigated by his "liberal" outlook in which heliocentrists are not to be considered heretics) are immune from Angel's derision, since they were so influential in promulgating irrational beliefs that persist to this day.

Although Angel expresses admiration for Spinoza's faith in reason, he does question the philosopher's overall approach to religion since Spinoza rejects "divine revelation, miracles, and providence." This, to Angel, means that Spinoza cannot "give the Bible an objective reading"! Strange logic, no? I guess that similarly, Angel cannot give the "New Testament" an objective reading since he rejects the resurrection!

One could, of course, argue that Angel has inscribed the pentagram of reason around himself while casting out others who similarly rely on faith-based notions: after all, Angel obviously accepts "divine revelation, miracles, and providence" which many believe to be nothing more than superstition and fairy tales. Nor is it likely that he would honestly confront whether his fundamental beliefs are, in fact, ultimately based on myth. Probably he would rely on one of his axioms regarding the limits of human reason, such as this prize winning one of fuzzy logic: Spinoza's "trust in reason ultimately is itself based on 'faith' and not on reason". Unfortunately, this and similar statements (such as the superficial "there can be no proof that the laws of science are eternal") only serve to blur the boundaries of science from those of faith. And, ironically, are often relied upon by the very people who Angel is most at odds with both religiously and philosophically (k'vitel toting Kupat Hair-niks, young earth creationists, red-string Kabbalah devotees, Meshichist Rebbe worshipers...)

Regardless of the above criticism (and this is anything but a comprehensive book review!), the following quote was worth the price of admission:

How could any thinking person have respect for the opinions of "Gedolei haDor" who are not only bereft of scientific and philosophical knowledge, but whose very worldview precludes an open and intellectually sound approach to the attainment of knowledge?"

Donation for the Haiti Tragedy

2010-01-13T19:55:00.002-05:00

I made one via Oxfam America. These folks know what they're doing in disaster areas and get very high marks when charitable organizations are rated.

ADDENDUM:

Addendum: anonymous and some emailers didn't like Oxfam because of their anti-Israel stance. I did some additional research, and the following organizations are rated the highest by both Charity Navigator and Charity Watch:

Action Against Hunger-USA
AmeriCares
American Jewish World Service
Doctors Without Borders, USA
Medical Teams International
Operation USA
Oxfam America

I removed from the list the following organizations due to their very high salaries ($360K plus to their CEOs): CARE, International Rescue Committee, and Save the Children. I also removed the United Methodist Committee on Relief (their motto: "Connecting the Church in Mission". No thanks.)

Your Simple Guide to Prostate Health

2010-01-10T10:48:00.002-05:00

1) Drink lots of coffee
2) Have frequent ejaculations

Donkey drivers, camel drivers and sailors (Ketubot 61B) - as well as single and gay men - at high risk for prostate cancer should consult a halachic authority regarding permissible means of effectuating the second preventative method.

How Do You Know That It's Shabbat in Tel Aviv?

2010-01-01T10:49:00.002-05:00

Simple: "You feel it only because the best gay parties are on Shabbat evening, are on Friday night, so that's how we know if Shabbat arrived."

From the NPR piece, Tale Of Two Cities Illustrates Battle For Israel's Soul. Check it out here.

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, nose for a nose, ear for an ear...

2009-12-22T09:43:00.003-05:00

Monetary compensation?? Those namby-pamby rabbis just didn't have the nerve to be literal. Here's how it's really done!

Pakistan court orders brothers' noses, ears cut off
LAHORE, Pakistan
Tue Dec 22, 2009 7:55am EST

LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - A Pakistani court has ordered that two brothers should have their noses and ears cut off after they were found guilty of doing the same to a woman who refused to marry one of them, a government prosecutor said on Tuesday.

The judge at an anti-terrorism court in the eastern city of Lahore handed down the sentences on Monday in line with the Islamic law of Qisas.

Full article here.

Criteria for a Divine Text - Part Deux

2009-12-09T17:58:00.013-05:00

The following post, with my comments (in italics), is from a Jerusalem Post article by Yocheved Miriam Russo, published on Dec. 3, 2009.

Mere coincidence or divine truth?

A niggling curiosity about colors started the whole thing. "For many years, I found myself idly wondering if the name value of colors mentioned in the Bible had any relationship to their wave frequency," says Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Professor Haim Shore.

"In the scheme of things, that's an outrageous suggestion - why would anyone think that the Hebrew name for colors mentioned in the Bible - red, green, yellow - would bear any relationship to the wave frequency of the color itself?" he asks. "Finally, just for fun, I checked it out. When I saw the results, I was stunned. It was a heck of a coincidence, but the two were linearly related."

"The Hebrew word for the color actually matched the color's wave frequency," Shore says. "How could that be?"

Shore's methodology was relatively simple. He took the Hebrew names of five colors that appear in the Bible - red (adom), yellow (tzahov), green (yerakon), blue (tchelet) and purple or magenta (argaman) - and calculated a numerical value for each word by adding the total values of the letters, with aleph as one, bet as two, etc. Then he plotted them on a graph. The vertical axis charted the colors' wave frequencies, which are scientifically established, while along the horizontal axis, the 'CNV', Color Name Value, appeared. When it was complete, "I was astonished," Shore recalls.

"The five points on the graph formed a straight line - which means that the names of the colors related directly to their established wave frequencies." It was a straight-out statistical analysis, Shore says. "I didn't manipulate a single number in doing the analysis."

"I didn't plot anything at all until I had all the data," he says. "But when I saw it, I was like a lion in a cage, pacing around. I couldn't believe it. Then I went on to other words in the Hebrew Bible, plotting the value of the letters against known scientific data. The whole thing blew me away."

I had to try this out. It's been many years (sigh) since I had to do statistical analysis, so I just bothered with basic scatter plots. Also note that each color is represented by a range of frequencies, and I used the high end for each. (Click on any of the images for a larger, more legible view.)

Certainly this does not display any frequency/gematria correlation. Violet/argaman really throws things off. Something must be amiss, I thought. At first, I decided to play with the numbers; the Mispar Gadol method of gematria (which gives a value of 700 for the Nun Sofit of argaman, rather than 50) gave a little better fit, but still not great. So I did some additional digging and finally found the values that Shore used. This required a number of modifications to my original assumptions. First, he says that "green" (ירוק in modern Hebrew) isn't found in the Bible (contrary to what is stated above!) So for some reason he decided to use ירקון, which is found in Jeremiah 30:6. Mechon Mamre translates this as "paleness" as in "all faces are turned into paleness". Shore states that it is common usage to use paleness for green, such as in English where someone might say “his face turned green” to mean "paleness". UH OH, we are starting to get into major fudge factor territory here, folks! The second change is that he opts to call "argaman" magenta, rather than purple. This means that I had to change the frequency to correlate against argaman. The problem is that magenta is a mixture of red and blue and thus has no discrete frequency! Most sources use a range midway between red and blue, or 500-530 Thz. Shore uses 546 which is actually in the green range. Finally, he omits the vav for yellow (spelling it צהב) but claims that this has no effect on the statistics. Here is a graph with his values:

And here is the resultant graph:

Now I understand that the visual representation of a relationship can be deceiving (for example, the line looks much straighter if one way increases the range of values on the Y-axis), but I just don't see the "straight line" correlation that Shore claims. Statisticians feel free to jump in.

One final important note here, is that the preceding exercise is suspect to begin with, since it is difficult - if not impossible - to state what each color term corresponds to in the spectrum. For example, according to R. Shimson Raphael Hirsch (Collected Writings), yarok represents both yellow and green, while techeiles represents both blue and violet! For interesting discussions on colors in the Hebrew language, refer to these Balashon archives.

Continuing...

"What I found is that there's an astonishing number of 'coincidences' in which the Hebrew name for some 'entity' in the Bible relates directly to that entity's scientifically established physical property," Shore continues. "I began recording it all, and finally published it in a book which contains about 20 different analyses - statistical, scientifically verifiable findings."

"I have no intention of trying to tell anyone what this means, or how this information should be interpreted. All I did was publish what I found," he says. "As a scientist, as a matter of integrity, I felt compelled to offer what I'd found for discussion."

Shore's book Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew offers dozens of incidents in which the Hebrew words in the Bible offer hidden information about the objects or people they represent, information which, in many cases, couldn't have been known or measured until modern times.

"This is not gematria," Shore says. "Gematria, adopted by rabbis and Jewish Bible interpreters, suggests that if two Hebrew words share the same numerical value, there's then a 'secret' that binds them together. By contrast, the Hebrew word, 'heraion' (pregnancy) has the same numerical value as the duration of human pregnancy, 271 days."

"That is not gematria," he insists, "nor is this a 'Bible Code' sort of thing, with overtones of prophecy. What I have attempted to do, with as plain and non-technical means as possible, was to offer several quantitative analyses that demonstrate that major physical properties are probably reflected in the numerical values of Hebrew words."

No, it actually IS gematria, regardless of his pseudo-scientific term "color numeric value". Shore is just applying it in a novel fashion. And regardless of his assertion, it is quite similar to Bible Codes since it will almost certainly be used by the same group of kiruv workers that use codes to "prove" the divinity of Torah.

Colors were one thing. Celestial objects were another - moon, earth and sun. "It is well known from Kabbalistic literature that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet were created first, and that thereafter, by use of these letters, God created all the worlds. Ancient Jewish sources repeatedly stress that idea," he says.

"Could there be a linkage between numerical values of biblical words and certain physical properties, as demonstrated by the heraion example?" Shore asks. "In Hebrew, yareach is moon, eretz is earth, and shemesh is sun. One thing that distinguishes the three bodies is their size, expressed by the diameters. I used their diameters as listed by NASA, and plotted them on a graph, just as I did with the colors.

"On the horizontal axis is the numerical value of the Hebrew word, on the vertical axis is the planetary diameters from NASA (on a log scale)," he continues. "To my astonishment, the phenomenon repeated itself. The three points aligned themselves on a straight line - an exact mathematical relationship would have given a linear correlation of '1,' whereas these three points had a linear correlation of 0.999. Again I thought, 'What an amazing coincidence!'"

Here is the graph that I plotted:

Pretty cool, huh? (Yes, the log scale is critical due to the diameter of Sol being two orders of magnitude greater than Earth.) So I guess that Babylonians were really onto something when they named their sun god "shamash" (this goes back to at least 2600 BCE, more than 1000 years before the traditional dating of the Torah)...

IT'S NOT as though the Tiberias-born Shore was intellectually primed to believe what he was seeing. "My research has been in the areas of statistical modeling and quality and reliability engineering," he says. "I graduated from the Technion in Industrial Engineering and Management, received a Masters in Operations Research, plus a BA in Philosophy and Psychology, then a PhD in Statistics from Bar Ilan. I've worked as a management consultant, taught at Tel Aviv University, then came to BGU in 1996. But beyond that, I'm an engineer. I don't accept anything as true unless there is quantitative analysis - without that, everything is debatable."

"But not this," Shore says. "It's a universal principle of engineering that if you have two sets of data, you put them in ascending order, plot one set on a horizontal axis and the other on a vertical axis and they fall on a straight line, that means both data sets are measuring the same thing, only on different scales."

Nor did he start out believing what the Sages had written, that within the Hebrew words lay an additional layer of information, hidden to us, which can be exposed by relating to the numerical value of the word.

"Not at all," he says. "For many years I was utterly convinced all that was based on superstition - pure myth, no different from those provided by any number of other religions and cultures. But what I was seeing made me think twice about what was written in the Talmud, like in Midrash Rabba, where it says, 'Thus was God observing the Torah and creating the universe,' and in Berachot, 'Bezalel knew how to assemble letters with which Heaven and Earth had been created.'"

This seems like a phony statement. Shore says that he was convinced that it was all superstition and myth, so why would these far-out claims in the Midrash and Talmud make him "think twice"??

Shore's postulations don't amount to scientific evidence, he says, but he's now moved beyond terming the multitude of correlations he found as mere "coincidences."

"Initially, I related to these incidents as curiosities, things that had no scientific basis. But over the years, I've come to see these 'coincidences' evolve into something more," he says. "By 2006 I'd reached the conclusion that the number of instances I'd assembled had reached a critical mass, which justified putting some of it into print."

One of the things that fascinates Shore is how modern science and technology reflects or reinforces Biblical terminology. "The word 'year' - in Hebrew shana - is numerically equivalent to 355, which happens to be the average duration of the lunar (moon-based) Hebrew year," Shore explains. "Or ozen which means 'ear' in Hebrew, which comes from the same root as the Hebrew word for 'balance.' That's curious, because it was only at the end of the 19th Century that we discovered that the mechanism responsible for the body balance resides in the ear."

The length of a lunar year is closer to 354 days. But that's ok, since with gematrias you can always be "off by 1"! Regardless, wouldn't it be more reasonable to speculate that the word "shana" was derived from observing a lunar year?

Another curiosity relates to the name of the Biblical character, Laban, one of the more menacing personalities in Genesis. A passage in the Passover Haggada reads, "Go and realize what Laban the Aramean wished to inflict on Jacob our Patriarch. Pharaoh decreed against the males only, however Laban wished to uproot all."

"Laban represents a total loss of Jewish identity," Shore says. "He wanted everything mixed up, with no one, or no culture, having any distinguishing features. He mixed his children, his wives, his religious faith, his language and his property. He idealized the 'everything goes' maxim - the 'global village, as we'd say today - where everyone and everything is just alike."

"As every Hebrew school kid knows, the name 'Laban' means 'white' - which is extraordinary," he continues. "'Laban' is the only personal name in the Bible that's also the name of a color. Up until 1666, when Isaac Newton came along, every scientist since Aristotle believed that white was a single basic color. Not until Newton passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism did anyone recognize the spectrum of colors. White, Newton argued, is really a mixture of many different types of rays that are refracted at slightly different angles, with each ray producing a different color. White, then, is a mixture of all colors."

"Isn't that bizarre, if it's just a coincidence? That in the Bible, Laban, the man who mixed everything up, should be named 'white'?" Shore asks.

Lavan wanted to "mix up" everthing. Lavan is White. Ergo, the Torah knew that White is a mixture of all the colors. Is he serious?? It's a fun Shabbos drasha, but it is neither bizarre nor a coincidence. However it is one of the lamest "Torah science" claims that I've ever seen!

THE BOOK of Genesis, especially the creation story, comes in for special treatment. Together with Prof. Yehuda Radday, Shore analyzed Genesis and published a book in 1985.

"Prof. Radday, who passed away on Sept. 11, 2001, was one of my closest friends. We first met when I was a teaching assistant back in the 1970s and he was affiliated with the Technion doing statistical analysis of Biblical texts," Shore recalls. "At that time, the theories of German-born Julius Wellhausen were in vogue, and we set out to statistically test Wellhausen's theory that there were multiple authors for Genesis."

Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) was a German Bible scholar who argued that the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, were not written by Moses but rather resulted from oral traditions that evolved from a nomadic culture which, relatively recently, had been pieced together. Wellhausen named the four sources "J", "E", "D" and "P" distinguishing individual verses and segments on the basis of terminology and by perceived differences in philosophy. For many decades, Wellhausen's theories enjoyed general acceptance among Biblical scholars.

"Yehuda and I published our research - which statistically affirmed the position that the book of Genesis was homogenous with respect to authorship (namely, a single author) - in several research papers and ultimately in a book published by the Biblical Institute Press in Rome (Romae E Pontificio Instituto Biblico) of the Vatican," he tells. "So when I began looking at the book of Genesis again, I already had considerable background."

I can't provide sources off-hand, but I seem to recall that this study suggesting a unitary nature of Bereshit was been widely criticized for its methodology, and remains convincing only to those are already convinced!

One of the elements Shore analyzed was the Biblical timeline of creation. In the Genesis story, the universe was created in six "days," whereas in modern day cosmology, it's measured in billions of years, which sets off the faith vs. science debate.

"I started by taking the events of the first chapter of Genesis - just the facts as given, no interpretation. 'Light' was created on the first day; on the second - the sky; on the fourth - the sun and the moon were set in place; on the fifth - marine and bird life; and on the sixth day, according to oral Torah, Adam and Eve were created at the end of the 14th hour," he says.

"I took the six points and correlated each Biblical day - '1 day,' '2 day' - with the scientifically established time period. For example, science has established that galaxies started to be formed about 11.8 billion years ago, the sun and the moon, 4.5 billion years ago, etc. I plotted the cosmological age on the vertical axis and the Biblical timeline (day - one through six) on the horizontal axis. I found them to be arranged in a straight line," Shore says.

"Is that possible that the two sets of data, the biblical and the scientific, represent the same 'timeline,' just expressed in different time scales?" he asks.

"Statistical analysis shows that the probability that would happen by chance alone is less than 0.0021%," he continues. "If you take out day 2 and day 5 - there's scientific debate about when life as we know it came into existence, or when exactly large scale structures had appeared in the early universe - you can plot just four points. The probability of those four points aligning themselves on a straight line, the way they did, by chance alone is still less than 0.0165%."

The flaw in his reasoning is really apparent with this example. The account in Genesis is:

Day 1: light
Day 2: firmament ("sky" according to Shore)
Day 3: Earth, seas, grass
Day 4: Sun, Moon, stars
Day 5: sea creatures, birds
Day 6: land creatures, human

One doesn't have to resort to any plot to know that there is no way that the scientific ages will correlate with the biblical days. Earth comes before the Sun and stars? Grass comes before Sun, Moon, and stars? The Earth and the Sun both date to the creation of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. The oldest star in the Milky Way is more than 13 billions years old. If we are liberal with the definition of grasses and just stick with "earliest plants" (Cyanobacteria), those date to about 3.5 billion years before present.

He throws out day 2 (?) and day 5, ostensibly because "there's scientific debate about when life as we know it came into existence, or when exactly large scale structures had appeared in the early universe". This is silly and smacks of discarding data that he didn't like.

Shore now believes he might have used a word other than 'coincidences' in the book title. "The title reflected my attitude towards many of the examples given in the book. But during the short span of about two or three months when I feverishly wrote it all down, something changed. I'd now say it's highly probable that hidden information in biblical words supplements the exposed information submitted."

What did Shore hope to gain by publishing his findings? "I knew very well I was putting my reputation on the line with this book," he says. "What I hoped would happen is that it would start a discussion, that people would begin to talk about it."

"That hasn't happened so far, probably because I've been reluctant to publicize it," Shore admits. "I finally went ahead because the data is significant. Everyone can figure out for himself what it all means - I'm not saying anything here about God or the Bible or biblical Hebrew. But there's something here that should be discussed and analyzed further."

Several more 'coincidences' have helped shape Shore's life. At present, he is statistically processing data received from a web-based feedback survey, conducted at the end of the 18th Maccabiah. "We're measuring participants' satisfaction, which involves analyzing questionnaires submitted by e-mail to athletes, delegation officials and Maccabiah staff," he says.

"The Maccabiah is special to me because in 1932, my father, Daniel, came to Tel Aviv to participate in the first Maccabiah as a member of the Polish football team. Once here, he stayed - which meant that he escaped the Holocaust (most of his family did not). Because of that, I told the Maccabiah Organizing Committee, who had approached me with a request to conduct this feedback survey, that I would conduct the survey and analyze its results free of charge, on a voluntary basis only," Shore recalls.

Then, too, Shore was stunned to find that he wasn't the first Shore to write a book on Genesis. "My father's grandfather, Baruch Schorr, was a famous cantor in Lemberg, called Lvov today," he says. "He wrote two books, one about Ecclesiastes and another about Genesis that he named Bechor Schorr. I only learned about Baruch's book of Genesis - which was published in Lemberg in 1873 - long after my book about Genesis, with Prof. Radday, was published."

"That's just one more coincidence," Shore adds.

Although I have not (yet) read Shore's book, a table of contents preview shows that he has many more examples. Although skeptical, I'm still intrigued and will eventually get my hands on a copy. For those who want to check it out, it is available on Amazon: Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

Criteria for a Divine Text?

2009-11-26T18:01:00.005-05:00

On a recent Hirhurim post "anon" responded to the question "Is there any way that G-d could have written the Bible so that it would be clear that no one other than G-d could have written it? The answer is plainly no.":

Errmm, the answer is plainly yes. It would just have had to include predictions for each year of the next few thousand. And make it meteorological predictions to avoid self fulfilling prophecies. Also, if it had contained detailed instructions on how to build a space ship rather than a mishcan.

Now I'm assuming that the space ship comment was written tongue-in-cheek. But if not, I would discount this as a "proof from God". After all, if the raison d'etre of Torah is to be an "instruction book for living", why would God include such things that were irrelevant for such a purpose? Yes, a blueprint for some advanced technology would argue for a superior life form, but a rationalist/skeptic would likely claim that it was the product of an alien author rather than the Creator of the Universe! [As an aside, the intentional inclusion of scientific data now known to be erroneous is one of the main reasons that we know the Urantia Book was fabricated by a human author(s) who relied on the science of his time. Oh wait, the Torah also includes the "science" of its time (e.g., the Creation story and the Flood story) that we now know are not scientifically true. Dang! Well at least we can allegorize the Torah stories or rely on "non-overlapping magisteria"...]

But let's grant anon's assumption and disregard the question of why God would include material whose only function were a proof of His authorship. Besides, a midrashic tradition would certainly produce a rich corpus and apply ethical teachings to such proof-texts. Let us also ignore Clarke's 3rd Law (any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) and assume that most folks would default to the God explanation rather than that of a super advanced culture. So posit that the Torah is exactly the same as we have it now, but with the addition of a very long Parashat Mezeg Avir (whose reading would be on a Yom Tov with either fasting or plenty of shnapps!) that contains meteorological predictions for each year of the next few thousand years.

At first, I thought that writing the Torah so that it was undeniably written by God would violate a core principle of Judaism, that of the imperative for free-will. After all, if folks KNEW with 100% certainty that God wrote the book, they'd be so much more likely to follow it. However, even leaving aside the rebellion stories (Golden Calf, Korach...) that some like to point to in countering this assertion, I realized that nothing would really change from what we have today. The difference would be in the details.

Tanach would be filled with stories written by "meteorological neviim". The influence of the priestly caste - with their claim to exclusive use of divine weather instruments (wind gauges, crude thermometers) - would wither after the destruction of the Second Temple. They would be supplanted by the Pharasaic rabbinic tradition who would use hermeneutic principles to expound the many faces of Torah behind each weather prediction. An unbroken chain of tradition would eventually give rise to gedolim who were well-versed in cloud formations, but also involved with creating tznius patrols to dictate the color and length of foul weather gear, and proclaiming bans on books (the Modern Orthodox Farmer's Almanac) and TV (the Reform Weather Channel.)

Of course, Judaism would still be a minority religion since the "offshoot religions" of Christianity and Islam would accept that the "Old Weather Testament" was God-given, but that its proscriptions were supplanted by later and more-perfect revelations. The former would give rise to many climate sects (the Temperates, The Tropical Evangelicals) and various end-of-day messianic cults (we'd be close to the end of the 3000 years of weather predictions so there would be plenty of 2012-type wackos).

We'd still have OrthoFundies that believed every word was from God and was literally true. Countering them would be adherents of the JEPDW Documentary Hypothesis (the "W" being the "Weather Document".) We would also have some Orthodox scholars (sorry, I mean Orthopraxic Heretics) a la James Kugel that would argue for a prophetic tradition mediated by a lesser divinity like Af-Bri!

In one of my earliest posts I asked, "if you consider yourself an atheist or agnostic what would be sufficient proof to you for the existence of God?" In a similar vein, what would be sufficient proof to you for the existence of a God-given document?

On Saturday, Rabbi-to-Be Eats Pork

2009-11-15T11:56:00.002-05:00

Oh, sorry, my mistake. On Saturday this Rabbi-to-Be punches other folks in the head in an attempt to rattle their brain inside their skull in order to knock them unconscious.

This last Shabbos, Yuri Foreman defeated Daniel Santos of Puerto Rico in an upset match to capture the World Boxing Association’s 154-pound championship.

Then there's Dmitriy Salita, an Orthodox Jew with an undefeated record in over 26 career bouts.

Regardless of such rationalizations (mentioned in the Salita article above) that "It's not really true that in order to win you have to damage the other person or beat them up... it's really about scoring more points than your opponent, and that's not unlike chess.", boxing is a brutal sport that frequently results in dementia pugilistica (similar to Alzheimer's dementia), Parkinson's disease, and other neuro-degenerative diseases. Whether it's "deracheha darchei noam" (the ways of Torah are pleasant), or prohibitions of "sakonos nefashos" (danger to life), or the many possible Shabbos restrictions such as creating a wound, this occupation is completely anathema to Jewish ideals.

Chabadnik Dov Ber Pinson is the rabbi who is studying with Foreman. The fact that a so-called rabbi would consider granting semicha to a student with such an occupation is unconscionable. It should be no different than if the student said, "I want to be a rabbi, but also want to eat pork on Yom Kippur."

The Great Sin of a Dying Man

2009-11-06T08:23:00.004-05:00

I usually enjoy Rabbi Michael J. Broyde's halachic analyses, although I didn't find that his long post on women and halacha in this Hirhurim post added to the topic in any meaningful way. It really could have been reduced to this single sentence that he included: "is this conduct a mitzvah, mutar or assur?", possibly with the addition of "End of discussion."

But I found his footnote #1 quite troubling:

Recently, I entered the hospital room of a dying person who was intensely davening shacharit (he was in the middle of birchot keriat shema when I arrived) but the time of the day was after chatzot. This conduct was sinful, but I chose not to say anything, even when he asked me if he was doing something wrong, in the view that a sincere person like this can maybe rely the view of the Rambam that birchot keriat shema can be said all day, as the Peri Chadash accepts le’halacha, or maybe simply this was not the time and place to explain the issue.

WOW! The guy is on his deathbed. He is intensely praying what may be his last shacharit, and Rabbi Broyde's first thought is that this was a sinful practice? I can just picture the heavenly court now: "hmmm, what should we do? He's a beinoni - his mitzvot are in perfect balance with his aveirot?" "Wait!", says another ministering angel - "we just realized that he was davening after chatzot and he isn't a hassid. Send him to gehinnom!"

My Daughter, the Not So Virginal

2009-10-13T18:05:00.003-04:00

In the post My Daughter, the Virgin, I mentioned the prevalent custom of including the phrase "the praise-worthy virgin bride" on chareidi wedding invitations. So what is a poor girl to do if she strayed before marriage and doesn't want the chosson to know? It's Gigimo to the rescue with their Artificial Virginity Hymen! "When your lover penetrate, it will ooze out a liquid that look like blood not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groans, you will pass through undetectable." [sic] Made in Japan, the world leader in sex toys.

Conservatives in Egypt are apparently up in arms about this device, as it is "an assault on Islamic and Arab values."

No word yet from our gedolim.

Why Are You Testing Me, God?

2009-10-06T18:04:00.003-04:00

Moshe Bernstein discussing Biblical Scholarship*:

What if anything would cause me to say, well maybe I'm wrong? So the answer is if somebody showed me a piece of J from the 8th century BCE and there was no P with it, and I was convinced that it was from the 8th century and that this was an individual thing... and I believed that, so I'd look up and I'd say, HaKadosh Baruch Hu, why are you testing me? ... If it's a question of emunah, I am perfectly willing to be a fundamentalist... and to say that those are the parameters within which I operate. I may push the envelope as far as I can, I may choose to operate in a broader way than many others whom I know, but that's where I draw the line.

A true OrthoFundie can never be challenged with facts that contradicts his beliefs. Regardless of how overwhelming the evidence is, one can always brush it aside as a test of one's faith. And this, of course, is true of any fundamentalist, regardless of religion.

*Unfortunately, I cannot find the original web source for this audio lecture. I believe that it was from YUTorah.org, but if so, it is no longer available there.

Find the Jew...

2009-10-02T10:44:00.005-04:00

Doonesbury from 9/27/09:

Here is a closer look at the panel in question:

Not only does it appear that Trudeau added a couple of "Jewish graves" as an afterthought, but he apparently doesn't even know how to draw a 6-sided Magen David!

"It doesn't damage my faith in any way."

2009-09-24T08:03:00.004-04:00

The death of another sacred cow?

"Genetic researchers have revised an earlier hypothesis that members of the Jewish priestly caste, the Cohanim, can trace their paternal lineage to a single progenitor, perhaps the biblical Aaron, brother of Moses."

"Additional Y chromosome lineages that are distinct from that defined by the extended Cohen Modal Haplotype, but also shared among Cohanim from different Jewish communities, reveal that the priesthood was established by several unrelated male lines."

"I think it's still sort of amazing that there is a genetic marker. The question of whether it was one progenitor or was it four or five, it doesn't damage my faith in any way." said Sam Cohon, rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Tucson.

Will Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman now add a chapter to his book consisting of only "Never mind."? Nah, expect OrthoFundies to put an interesting spin on this latest research, mitigating its significance.

An interesting side note: opponents of the Documentary Hypothesis have long been critical of the claim that in addition to the Ahronite priestly line there was also a rival "Mushite" priestly lineage that originated with Moses. It seems that the latest research suggests that such a claim, rather than being baseless, turns out to be quite a conservative suggestion!

News articles here and here, scientific abstract here.

Why Believe in Prophecy?

2009-08-25T22:23:00.001-04:00

Of all of Rambam's 13 Principles of Faith, only one or two can theoretically be empirically verified. These have to do with prophecy, to wit #6 (prophecy in general) and #7 (Moses as the most exalted of prophets.)

[A brief digression is in order regarding Principle #8, the idea that the entire Torah that we now have is that which was given to Moses, although my purpose here is not to argue for or against the various claims made by multiple source document advocates. Leaving aside such quibbles as chasair and yosair (missing and additional vowels that don't change the meaning of a word) as well as the last eight sentences relating to Moses' death (and even then, one tradition says that Moses wrote this with tears), it is highly unlikely that any ancient "J/P/E/D" documents will ever surface to "falsify" the idea of the unity of the Torah. This has nothing to do with whether they once existed and everything to do with such concepts as the longevity of parchment and what documents would be promulgated by professional scribes once a particular textual tradition was officially or unofficially canonized. But even if they were to surface, fundamentalists can always claim that such documents were the product of non-mainstream sects, similar to what some claim for certain Dead Sea Scroll texts or apocryphal and pseudo-epigraphical books. So this is largely an argument between traditionalists and scholars who start off with very different assumptions. The former accepts a priori a God-given cryptic text that requires the oral tradition and various principles of hermeneutics to be properly understood while the latter makes no such assumptions and relies on textual evidence alone. Indeed, the subject of this post - prophecy - is something that scholars simply cannot accept in their study of scripture and which traditionalists often rely upon to understand problematic text.]

Prophecy is - according to Rambam - a principle of faith. However, prophecy is also by its very nature something that can be tested. Indeed, the Torah tells us in Deuteronomy 18:21-22:

וְכִי תֹאמַר, בִּלְבָבֶךָ: אֵיכָה נֵדַע אֶת-הַדָּבָר, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-דִבְּרוֹ יְהוָה. אֲשֶׁר יְדַבֵּר הַנָּבִיא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָה, וְלֹא-יִהְיֶה הַדָּבָר וְלֹא יָבֹא--הוּא הַדָּבָר, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-דִבְּרוֹ יְהוָה: בְּזָדוֹן דִּבְּרוֹ הַנָּבִיא, לֹא תָגוּר מִמֶּנּוּ.

Now if you say to yourself, "How will we know the word that the Lord did not speak?" If the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, and the thing does not occur and does not come about, that is the thing the Lord did not speak. The prophet has spoken it wantonly; you shall not be afraid of him.

So a prophecy either comes to pass or doesn't. And even if a prediction does come to fruition, Rambam states that it can't be a one-shot deal. Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 10:1-2:

א כל נביא שיעמוד לנו ויאמר שה' שלחו, אינו צריך לעשות אות כאחד מאותות משה רבנו או כאותות אלייהו ואלישע, שיש בהן שינוי מנהגו של עולם; אלא האות שלו שיאמר דברים העתידין להיות בעולם, וייאמנו דבריו, שנאמר "וכי תאמר, בלבבך: איכה נדע את הדבר . . ." (דברים יח,כא).

ב לפיכך כשיבוא אדם הראוי לנבואה במלאכות ה', ולא יבוא להוסיף ולא לגרוע, אלא לעבוד את ה' במצוות התורה--אין אומרין לו קרע לנו את הים או החיה מת וכיוצא באלו, ואחר כך נאמין בך. אלא אומרין לו, אם נביא אתה, אמור לנו דברים העתידין להיות; והוא אומר, ואנו מחכים לו לראות היבואו דבריו: אם לא יבואו, ואפילו נפל דבר אחד קטן--בידוע שהוא נביא שקר.

Any prophet who arises and tells us that God has sent him does not have to [prove himself by] performing wonders like those performed by Moses, our teacher, or like the wonders of Elijah or Elisha, which altered the natural order. Rather, the sign of [the truth of his prophecy] will be the fulfillment of his prediction of future events, as [implied by Deuteronomy 18:21]: "How shall we recognize that a prophecy was not spoken by God?..."

Therefore, if a person whose [progress] in the service of God makes him worthy of prophecy arises [and claims to be a prophet] - if he does not intend to add [to] or diminish [the Torah], but rather to serve God through the mitzvot of the Torah - we do not tell him: "Split the sea for us, revive the dead, or the like, and then we will believe in you." Instead, we tell him, "If you are a prophet, tell us what will happen in the future." He makes his statements, and we wait to see whether [his "prophecy"] comes to fruition or not. Should even a minute particular of his "prophecy" not materialize, he is surely a false prophet. If his entire prophecy materializes, we should consider him a true [prophet].

We should test him many times. If all of his statements prove true, he should be considered to be a true prophet, as [I Samuel 3:20] states concerning Samuel, "And all of Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, knew that Samuel had been proven to be a prophet unto God."

Rambam later explains that a prophet arises for the sole purpose of telling us the future events which will transpire in the world, whether there will be plenty or famine, war or peace, and so forth. And after the words of a prophet have been proven true time after time (or if another proven prophet declares the person to be prophet), it is forbidden to doubt him or to question the truth of his prophecy.

Jewish tradition states that there are no longer prophets that would allow us to test the veracity of a prophetic statement in particular and prophecy in general. "R. Yochanan said, since the Temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from prophets and given to fools and children" (Bava Basra 12b). Thus we must rely on prophecies that have already been recorded. But herein lies the rub: prophecy is never specific, either in the nature of the prediction or the time period in which it is supposed to occur. A prophecy means whatever the interpreter wants it to mean. Thus we are left with a situation where there is little difference between the prophecies contained in the Bible and those of Nostradamus! A corollary to this is that a Jewish interpreter of prophetic scripture often can make no greater claim to authenticity than a Christian one. Thus, for example, the Christian fundamentalist will "clearly" demonstrate how the seventy weeks of Daniel 9 is a perfect prediction referring to Jesus. The Jewish traditionalist will respond that the Christian is manipulating dates, is erroneously using a 360 day year, is misunderstanding the term 'moshiach', is breaking up the passage incorrectly, and so forth. He may point to Rashi, who says that the 490 years refers to 70 years of exile after the destruction of the First Temple plus 420 years of the Second Temple. The Christian will counter-punch and explain why their way of breaking up the weeks is superior to that of Rashi, will show Biblical references to a 30-day month, and so on.

And let's be honest folks: One clear advantage to many Christian interpretations of Biblical passages - including this one - is that there is a single interpretation that is agreed upon (sometimes with relatively minor variations, such as recalculating Daniel based on a 365-day solar year.) This doesn't mean that a Christian interpretation is a superior one, only that a single voice often allows better refinement of rejoinders. Jewish parshanim frequently vehemently disagree on passages that seem to be fairly unambiguous, all the more so when it comes to cryptic passages such as are found in Daniel! Can one look at the passages carefully and truly say that Rashi's explanation is a satisfying one?

In either case, however, believers are guilty of a tautology: people may argue about the interpretative details of Daniel, but they believe it to be a prophesy about an actual event that came to pass because they believe that Daniel is prophesying!

Of course, the scholar may simply point out that the passage in Daniel is a re-interpretation of Jeremiah (chapters 25 and 29) who promised the restoration of the Temple after 70 years. Jeremiah got it wrong, and so the author of Daniel (dated to the 2nd century BCE, not the traditional date more than 200 years earlier) extended the prophecy to 70 groups of 7 years so that it would refer to Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He'll buttress his claim by pointing to similarities with another 490 year interpretation found in the Prophetic Apocryphon Dead Sea Scroll (4Q387) which uses a 10 groups of 49 years (Jubilee cycles) to describe a reign of apostasy that would eventually give way to the Kingdom of Heaven (see The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation.)

Kiruv workers and other OrthoFundies are fond of using prophetic texts to prove that the Torah is from heaven. One of the most frequently quoted prophetic passages - Deuteronomy 30 - describes how the Jews will be scattered among the nations only to eventually return to Israel. How could the Torah predict such a thing unless it were divine? This indeed seems to be a very powerful argument. But let's look at the passage more closely.

And it will be, when all these things come upon you the blessing and the curse which I have set before you that you will consider in your heart, among all the nations where the Lord your God has banished you, and you will return to the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, and you will listen to His voice according to all that I am commanding you this day you and your children, hen, the Lord, your God, will bring back your exiles, and He will have mercy upon you. He will once again gather you from all the nations, where the Lord, your God, had dispersed you. Even if your exiles are at the end of the heavens, the Lord, your God, will gather you from there, and He will take you from there. And the Lord, your God, will bring you to the land which your forefathers possessed, and you [too] will take possession of it, and He will do good to you, and He will make you more numerous than your forefathers. And the Lord, your God, will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, [so that you may] love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, for the sake of your life. And the Lord, your God, will place all these curses upon your enemies and upon your adversaries, who pursued you. And you will return and listen to the voice of the Lord, and fulfill all His commandments, which I command you this day. And the Lord, your God, will make you abundant for good in all the work of your hands, in the fruit of your womb, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your soil. For the Lord will once again rejoice over you for good, as He rejoiced over your forefathers, when you obey the Lord, your God, to observe His commandments and His statutes written in this Torah scroll, [and] when you return to the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul.

Now ask yourself? Has this prophecy come true as described? Did the Jews "hearken to God's voice" - a precondition to the in-gathering? Aish even says that the return to God is a prediction of the "Baal Teshuva Movement" (hmmm, do you think that Aish has a vested interest in making such a claim? Nah, that would be intellectually dishonest!)

Au contraire mon frere, it was largely secular Zionists who led the movement to return to Israel and were responsible for building up the land. And Aish-holes conveniently ignore the simple fact that the Baal Teshuvah movement developed long after the return to Israel.

Have all of the curses been put on the enemies of Jews? Ahmadinejad and his sympathizers around the world laugh at such a suggestion. Remember, that Rambam says that a prophecy has to be true in all of its detail.

No, only by carefully picking and choosing, or by separating the prophecy into two (or more) distinct time periods contrary to what the passage implies, or by taking passages out of order, can this be said to be an "accurate" prophecy. All three of these techniques are exactly what Jewish anti-missionary workers and publications accuse Christian missionaries of doing!! I cringe inside whenever the rabbi at my shul speaks about the incredible prophecies of Deuteronomy having come to pass.

Prophecy is supposedly subject to rational, scientific analysis and individual prophecies are theoretically falsifiable. But the absence of modern-day prophets doesn't allow us to properly test the prophecy hypothesis. And thus all we are left with are flimsy attempts at proving it via creative interpretation of Biblical passages. There simply is no good reason to believe in the historical existence of prophecy and in the end the believer must accept it as a matter of faith.

My Daughter, the Virgin

2009-08-18T19:33:00.006-04:00

Selection from a typical Chassidic wedding invitation:

If you are unacquainted with this phrase, it means "the praise-worthy virgin bride".

I've always found this almost universal custom not only anachronistic (after all, the family is not also parading around the bloody tokens of her deflowering, are they?) but also somewhat offensive. It seems no different from saying (albeit more crudely), "Hey everyone, our wonderful daughter hasn't been shtupped yet!" Yeah, it's implicitly understood, so why do people feel the need to publicize it? (Note also that in these circles it is likely that the chassan is also a virgin, but it isn't so praiseworthy that it needs to be advertised.)

Publicizing their daughter's sexual status - sheesh, haven't these people heard about tznius?

A Jesus Prophecy in the Torah

2009-08-13T17:55:00.007-04:00

In the post Why specifically the son of your mother?, Parshablog discusses why the pasuk in Deuteronomy 13:7 "seems to suggest that it is specifically your maternal brother who will try to tempt you to serve idols."

ז. כִּי יְסִיתְךָ אָחִיךָ בֶן אִמֶּךָ אוֹ בִנְךָ אוֹ בִתְּךָ אוֹ אֵשֶׁת חֵיקֶךָ אוֹ רֵעֲךָ אֲשֶׁר כְּנַפְשְׁךָ בַּסֵּתֶר לֵאמֹר נֵלְכָה וְנַעַבְדָה אֱ־לֹהִים אֲחֵרִים אֲשֶׁר לֹא יָדַעְתָּ אַתָּה וַאֲבֹתֶיךָ: ח. מֵאֱלֹהֵי הָעַמִּים אֲשֶׁר סְבִיבֹתֵיכֶם הַקְּרֹבִים אֵלֶיךָ אוֹ הָרְחֹקִים מִמֶּךָּ מִקְצֵה הָאָרֶץ וְעַד קְצֵה הָאָרֶץ: ט. לֹא תֹאבֶה לוֹ וְלֹא תִשְׁמַע אֵלָיו וְלֹא תָחוֹס עֵינְךָ עָלָיו וְלֹא תַחְמֹל וְלֹא תְכַסֶּה עָלָיו: י. כִּי הָרֹג תַּהַרְגֶנּוּ יָדְךָ תִּהְיֶה בּוֹ בָרִאשׁוֹנָה לַהֲמִיתוֹ וְיַד כָּל הָעָם בָּאַחֲרֹנָה: יא. וּסְקַלְתּוֹ בָאֲבָנִים וָמֵת כִּי בִקֵּשׁ לְהַדִּיחֲךָ מֵעַל יְ־הֹוָ־ה אֱלֹהֶיךָ הַמּוֹצִיאֲךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים: יב. וְכָל יִשְׂרָאֵל יִשְׁמְעוּ וְיִרָאוּן וְלֹא יוֹסִפוּ לַעֲשׂוֹת כַּדָּבָר הָרָע הַזֶּה בְּקִרְבֶּךָ:

7. If your brother, the son of your mother, tempts you in secret or your son, or your daughter, or the wife of your embrace, or your friend, who is as your own soul saying, "Let us go and worship other gods, which neither you, nor your forefathers have known." 8. Of the gods of the peoples around you, [whether] near to you or far from you, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth; 9. You shall not desire him, and you shall not hearken to him; neither shall you pity him, have mercy upon him, nor shield him. 10. But you shall surely kill him, your hand shall be the first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. 11. And you shall stone him with stones so that he dies, because he sought to lead you astray from the Lord, your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. 12. And all Israel shall listen and fear, and they shall no longer do any evil such as this in your midst.

Josh Waxman, as usual, does a bang-up scholarly job in his discussion of ibn Ezra's approach (not to mention his far superior formatting of text!) However, I'd like to share an unusual explanation that a Chassidic rav once told us in yeshivah.

The pasukim are actually a prophetic reference to Jesus. What did Jesus do? He led fellow Jews astray, and for that he was chayiv misah (The fact that the Romans killed him via crucifixion is not really relevant here. But according to John 10, Jews did attempt to stone Jesus.)

But more importantly, Jesus was the "son of your mother" simply because he supposedly had no father!

We laughed at the time at this cute little drasha, and many years later I like to think that he was just having a bit of fun. But in the back of my mind there is still a nagging feeling that he was being perfectly serious and truly believed this explanation.

Warm Kugel

2009-08-11T08:55:00.002-04:00

It would have been Hot Kugel, but his book The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible is a few years old now:

...Neighboring civilizations can, of course, influence one another, sometimes quite unconsciously, and this influence may extend to matters of religion. Indeed, scholars are familiar with the phenomenon known as syncretism, whereby the god of religion X is identified with another god from religion Y; or X’s god is worshiped in some ceremony derived from religion Y. This happened a great deal in the ancient world, and items such as the “Hanukkah bush,” adopted by some American Jews in imitation of the Christmas tree, or the recent espousal of a very Christian-style messianism by a group of Hasidic Jews, show that syncretism is not dead in our own time.

OUCH!

Barack Obama is Moshiach!

2009-08-05T21:52:00.006-04:00

Pack your bags and get ready to move to the Holy Land! World peace and the building of the Third Temple are close at hand! I can say this in all certainty because it is obvious that President Barack Obama is the messiah!

I understand that I am late to the game here, and that other prophets have also made such a claim (see here and here, the latter being the source from which I ripped off the above image). But for the skeptics among you here is undeniable scientific proof of this assertion.

The gematria of משיח‎ - moshiach - is 40+300+10+8=358.

Barack - ברק - is 2+200+100=302
Obama - אובמה - is 1+6+2+40+5=54
So Barack Obama = 356. Add 1 for each name (a common technique in gematriot) or spell his last name אובאמה as some are wont to do and add 1 for the full name. You get 358.

משיח=ברק אובמה ‎

BARACK OBAMA = MOSHIACH!

Can there be any greater proof than this???

Is this any more ridiculous than the moronic drivel promulgated by Dreaming of Moshiach? Or the apocalyptic ravings of Torah code "researchers" Gallis and Wolf"? Or the vitriol spewed by Lazer Brody?

I think not.

Living Up To The Truth

2009-07-26T11:38:00.004-04:00

Is religion, or in our case historical Traditional Judaism, relevant? Yes, of course it is. Historical Traditional Judaism is relevant because, given the concerns that people typically have, the Torah has a very good track record of producing results.

...

Everyone wants to live with as little crime as possible. Again, Jewish Tradition is very proud that within Torah communities, crime, violent crime in particular, is almost unknown. Imagine interviewing the presiding police officer in a precinct in Williamsburg, Borough Park, Flatbush, Monsey, Monroe, or any place where you have large concentrations of Traditional Jews. Ask him how many times he is called out on a murder charge, rape, assault and battery, mugging, child abuse, etc. The incidence of these sort of crimes in Orthodox communities is very low.

It is fortunate that Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb limited his list of crimes to violent ones. That way he doesn't have to worry about removing money-laundering, tax evasion, organ trafficking, child labor violations, identity theft, bank fraud, immigration violations, etc., from the next edition of his booklet "Living Up To The Truth" (although he probably should delete child abuse from the list of "almost unknown" crimes.)

(As readers of my sporadic blog may know, Gottlieb's writings generally rank very high on the bogometer, as described more fully in God is a Mafia Boss. But if you are ready for some more Gottlieb-style logic that allows him to conclude his thesis with "Therefore, Judaism is the only justified way to live.", you may view the booklet in its entirety here.)

Chabad - Moon Landing Shows That Mortal Intellect is Worthless

2009-07-19T21:24:00.004-04:00

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing - July 20, 1969. I found this fascinating Chabad perspective that dates back to the landing.

Spiritual "spaceship danger"

This year marked an extraordinary event, the landing on the moon.

We can perceive two ideas from the moon landing: There formerly was scientific proof that it is not possible to land on the moon, since it was thought that it was impossible to achieve the necessary takeoff velocity without breaking or burning up the rocket, and the like. From this we see that mortal intellect is worthless and unreliable, given that whatever man thinks today may very well be proved erroneous tomorrow.

So one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history - the landing on the moon - actually proves that humankind's intellect is "worthless and unreliable"! What a skewed (not to mention logically nonsensical) perspective!

The article is not attributed, but its attitude - which essentially denigrates scientific discovery and achievement - is certainly in keeping with other positions of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, including his beliefs in geocentricity and young earth creationism.

Losing One's Share in The World to Come

2009-07-07T18:18:00.003-04:00

The Sages say that for three transgressions one forfeits his portion in the World to Come: murder, adultery, and idol worship, and that lashon hara is equivalent to all three. (B. Erchin 15b)

The following have no portion therein: he who maintains that resurrection is not a biblical doctrine, the Torah was not divinely revealed,and an epikoros. R. Akiva added: one who reads non-canonical books. Rav and R. Hanina both taught that an epikorus is one who insults a scholar. R. Yochanan and R. Joshua b. Levi maintained that it is one who insults his neighbor in the presence of a scholar. A Tanna explains that when R. Akiva says "non-canonical books", he is speaking about books of the Sadducees. R. Yosef says that it is also forbidden to read the book of Ben Sira. (Sanhedrin 90a)

One who talks during the repetition of the amidah is called "a sinner whose sin is too great to be forgiven. (Mishnah Berurah 124:27.)

One who converses during Krias ha-Torah is called "a sinner whose sin is too great to be forgiven." (Bieur Halachah 146:2)

R. Eleazar of Modin said: One who profanes things sacred, and one who slights the festivals, and one who embarrasses his fellow-man in public, and one who nullifies the covenant of our father Abraham, and one who exhibits impudence towards the Torah contrary to halacha, even though he has to his credit Torah and good deeds, he has not a share in the world to come. (Avot 3:11 or 3:15)

Among those who lose their share in the World to Come are those who treat Chol Hamoed disrespectfully, as any other weekday (Rashi to above mishna in Avot.)

Hillel used to say: He who makes worldly use of the crown of the Torah shall perish. Thus you may infer that any one who exploits the words of the Torah removes himself from the world of life. (Avot 4:7)

Anybody who undertakes to learn Torah all the time, not work, and support himself from charity is desecrating God's Name, disgracing the Torah, extinguishes his Jewish spark, causes bad to befall him and destroys his life in the World To Come, for it is forbidden to benefit from Torah matters in this world. (Rambam Hilchot Talmud Torah 3:10; see also his laundry list in Hilchot Teshuvah.)

I don't for a minute believe that these are anything more than rabbinic hyperbole, but the next time you are accused of being an apikorus destined for Gehinnom, feel free to respond to your accuser with the appropriate passage. (The two "talking" quotes are perfect for your typical Young Israel, and the last quote is ideal as a response to kollel kanoim!)

Chumash Is More Meaningful If The Stories Didn't Happen - Menachem Leibtag

2009-06-22T16:34:00.002-04:00

The following is a transcription of Rabbi Menachem Leibtag's closing remarks in a Torah In Motion lecture entitled Interpreting the Bible: The Relationship between Peshat and Derash. This brief lecture discusses a number of textual "problems" found in the Pentateuch (mostly related to its non-chronological order and seeming disorganized structure), but that these are intentional so that one will actively engage in the interpretative process when learning Chumash. By the way, R. Leibtag is a wonderful teacher of Chumash (I highly recommend his weekly parsha shiur), but his speaking style is somewhat stilted at times. So while it may appear that there are typos in my transcription, I have rechecked it against the lecture and it is very accurate.

Taking a story literally or not, when I read a story in Chumash - again, believing everything is coming from God - whether or not that story actually happened has nothing to do with its message. Do you understand my point? If someone believes, it's like the flood story, so there's an argument - it happened or didn't happen - or the story of creation. It's not a question of when you study it, it's not coming to tell you this happened. Chumash is using that story to give you a message. Now it could be the story did happen. But even if it didn't happen, that only makes the story even more meaningful. It's a tricky point, but it's really important. Meaning, if you believe in God, if you believe in nevuah, if you believe this work is coming from God, if God makes up a story to teach you a lesson that doesn't make the story any less meaningful. In fact, it makes it more meaningful...

Do we keep Shabbat because God created in seven days, or does God create a creation story so that we would keep Shabbat in a meaningful way. Do you follow? The second approach is much more meaningful, it makes much more sense. It could be that it did take 7 days, but even if it didn't it wouldn't make any difference. The message you get from Sefer Bereshit, the meaning that you gain from studying the creation story in depth, and looking at schematics and the way it's setup, it's said so beautifully and so much depth to the story and this deep message with man's relationship with God. That message has nothing do with what happened in physics. Big bang, small bang, middle bang. It has nothing to do with it. That message is eternal. And if someone can prove to you that it didn't take six or seven days, so what? It doesn't mean a thing. And if God gives you that story to teach you a message, then it's only more meaningful if it didn't happen. Understand? So therefore that whole argument of whether something happened or not is trivial.

Now, the danger of that approach is where do you draw the line? You get fundamental fundamentalism where maybe that didn't happen, or maybe the avot didn't exist, maybe yetzias mitzrayim didn't happen, maybe I don't exist. Do you follow? You go on and on and you can't draw the line and therefore what usually happens is because I don't know where to draw the line you don't draw it at all. That's also dangerous.

Of course, Rabbi Leibtag starts with the belief that God wrote the Torah in its entirety, so I guess with this a priori assumption his point is valid. But at the same time, it seems to be nothing more than clever stretchin' and kvetchin'. His assertion can be used for apologists when encountering any piece of evidence - no matter how compelling - that the Torah may be a compilation of multiple source documents.

So whaddya think?

Fake Fur Streimels - Coming Soon?

2009-06-21T10:13:00.007-04:00

An article in Jewish World discusses recent legislation in Israel that may ultimately affect the importation of fur used for shtreimels.

According to the motion to amend the Cruelty to Animals law, which was submitted by Kadima MK Ronit Tirosh, the importation from East Asia (and mainly China) of fur or textile products made out of the hair of dogs, cats or rabbits will be banned and punishable by a one-year prison sentence.

Tirosh wrote that about 2 million animals are slaughtered each year for the sole purpose of skinning them for their fur and they sometimes get skinned alive. "We as a society must try and prevent this unnecessary murder," the motion stated.

Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon, whose office is in charge of implementing the law, even recommended expanding the bill to include fur of wild and domesticated animals from around the world.

What I find most curious is how people are so quick to condemn the Chassidic minhag of shtreimels. Both in the Jewish World article and in the recent FailedMessiah post - A Haredi 'History' Lesson - that covered this topic, you can see how many people are opposed to the custom. Now I can understand such a point of view if one is a radical vegan of the Peta-ilk, but otherwise what is really behind the opposition to shtreimels? So what if it's a custom that goes back "only" a few hundred years or so? The only issue that folks should have (again, other than radical animal rights adherents) is whether the animals were killed humanely. You have problems with shtreimels, fur coats, leather shoes, meat-eating? Fine, don't use them or eat meat. And feel free to try and respectfully convince others not to. But the bottom line is that humans have used animals for food and clothing for tens of thousands of years and will continue to do so for a long time to come.

Although I truly believe that Peta is an evil ~~organization~~ cult, they have brought the issue of animal cruelty to the forefront. And that's a good thing. To those folks who want to forbid shtreimels or fur products (one absurd comment on FailedMessiah was from Michael who said "Shtreimels are clearly forbidden d'oraita"), I would first ask "are you a vegan"? If not, you may want to take a close look at the lives of chickens used for meat and (especially) eggs. See where animal suffering occurs on a truly grand scale.

I suspect that most of the opposition to shtreimels does not stem from a specific aversion to the use of fur, but a more visceral contempt for Chassidim because of their rejection of much of the trappings of modernity. Shtreimels, vasa zocken (white socks with knickers), long peyot, etc., are only the most outward signs of this rejection.

Cucumber Craving

2009-06-15T18:11:00.003-04:00

And the mixed multitude that was among them cultivated a craving; and the Children of Israel also turned and they wept and said: 'Who will feed us meat? We remember the fish that we would eat in Egypt free of charge; the cucumbers, and the melons, leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our life is parched, there is nothing; we have nothing before our eyes but the manna! - Numbers 11:4-6

What's so great about cucumbers anyway? Well I'll tell you!

The Egyptians made a drink from cucumber. When it was ripe, a hole was cut at the end. Then a small stick was inserted into the hole. After much stirring and squashing, the hole was plugged and the veggie was buried in the ground for a few days. When it was unearthed, the fermented pulp inside made for a powerful cocktail.

(See the cool things that you can learn from Uncle John's All-Purpose Extra-Strength Bathroom Reader?)

Yum! How could a monotonous diet of honey wafers (what manna tasted like) compete with a cheap and easy cucumber buzz? Perhaps the memories of the smashing good times that the Jews had in Egypt eventually led to their pre-eminence in the wine and liquor business?

Anachronistic Prayers Part 1 or The Crow of the Cock

2009-06-10T08:25:00.002-04:00

When he hears the cock crowing he should say: 'Blessed is He who has given to the cock understanding to distinguish between day and night'. (Berachot 60b)

The ArtScroll siddur quotes Rabbenu Asher ben Yechiel, the Rosh, who interprets "sekhvi" as "the heart" (see Iyov 8:36), thus making the morning beracha

Blessed is He who has given the heart understanding to distinguish between day and night.

It is clear from the Talmud that this late interpretation has nothing to do with the original intention of the composer of the blessing. In a time when there were no alarm clocks, one would wake up to the crowing of the rooster. Indeed, Tehillat Hashem (the Nusach Ari / Chabad siddur) in its halachic note to the blessing states "if he was awake all night and heard the crow of the rooster after midnight, he may recite the berachah."

The Rosh lived from ca. 1250 to 1328. Wiki mentions an interesting contemporaneous fact in its article on clocks: "Between 1280 and 1320, there is an increase in the number of references to clocks and horologes in church records, and this probably indicates that a new type of clock mechanism had been devised. Existing clock mechanisms that used water power were being adapted to take their driving power from falling weights. This power was controlled by some form of oscillating mechanism, probably derived from existing bell-ringing or alarm devices. This controlled release of power - the escapement - marks the beginning of the true mechanical clock." A speculative thought is that the Rosh's reformulation arose out of his prescient awareness that the need for the rooster alarm clock would soon eliminated.

This blessing was at one time a very practical one. Today, however, it has no meaning to us without the creative rendering of Rabbenu Asher.

Once I Was Young

2009-06-03T22:37:00.013-04:00

Rabbi Gil Student, in his post Once I Was Young And Now I Am Old, recalls that as a child in summer camp, some campers (but apparently not him) were bothered by the last section of Grace After Meals, "Once I was young, and now I am old, yet I have never watched a righteous man forsaken or his children begging for bread." He then quotes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who apparently explains this passage to Gil's satisfaction. Interestingly, he also references Alan Dershowitz's book Chutzpah in the comments section, in which Dershowitz states (p. 130ff):

From the time I was in elementary school, I recited in Hebrew the following verse from the Thirty-seventh Psalm several times each day, as part of the prayer after meals: "I was a child and then grew old, but I never saw a righteous person abandoned or his children asking for food." I recall raising questions in class about what these perplexing words could possibly mean. Surely they did not accurately describe reality. The remnants of the Holocaust were all around me - classmates with numbers tattooed on their arms, teachers who had lost entire families, friends who had experienced the displaced persons camps. Righteous people had been abandoned and their children left wanting.

My yeshiva rabbis made heroic efforts to explain this passage. Perhaps those who were abandoned were not really righteous in their souls. An insulting and denigrating rationalization! Surely some of the abandoned were truly righteous — at least more righteous than many who were not abandoned. How dare the commentators, I remember thinking, sit in smug collective judgment of all who were abandoned. Perhaps, the rabbis said, the passage refers to being abandoned by God in the hereafter and not by fallible fellow men on earth. That won't work either, I thought, since the obviously human author ("I was a child and then grew old") is describing what he has "seen," and one does not see the hereafter. Maybe the passage reflects the hope that the righteous will no longer be abandoned, my teachers suggested. Maybe, but that is not what it says. Other proffered explanations fell equally short.

To my mind, the best and simplest explanation is that the passage is wrong. It is pretty poetry but ugly philosophy. There is in fact no relationship between righteousness and good fortune, or unrighteousness and bad fortune. If there was ever any doubt about this sad reality — and I don’t believe there ever was — all such doubt was permanently erased by the Holocaust.

Indeed, the Holocaust, and the world’s reaction to it, make it demonstrably clear not only that the observation is factually false, but also that it is morally unacceptable. The psalm implies, at the very least, that human beings are morally responsible for their misfortunes; had they been righteous, they would not have been slaughtered in the Holocaust, struck down by disease, or devastated by natural catastrophe. This is an obnoxious principle that gives rise to the kind of "naturalistic fallacy" underlying the doctrines of some fundamentalist religions, which declare disasters to be the fault of the victims. Some bigots even blame the Holocaust on the Jews. A religious doctrine capable of such moral mischief must be unacceptable to Jews, especially after the Holocaust.

To be sure, there may be an obscure interpretation that would be entirely acceptable. but even if that were to be so, I would still conclude that the homily is objectionable, since its obvious meaning — the one accepted by millions who daily recite it — is so fundamentally immoral…

To me it's no big deal; either find an acceptable interpretation that resonates with you or omit the passage if it offends you. You've already fulfilled your bentching obligation. Of course, if you are at a Shabbos table where everyone is singing the entire Birkat HaMazon together, you may have a little problem with appearances, but I'm sure that you can find a way to be creative in the commission of your omission.

But even when folks don't sing together, it is quite common to do so for the first bracha. And this one is a much bigger problem for me.

Blessed is The Lord our God, Sovereign of the universe, who sustains the entire world with goodness, kindness and mercy. God gives food to all creatures, for God’s mercy is everlasting. Through God’s abundant goodness we have not lacked sustenance, and may we not lack sustenance forever, for the sake of God’s great name. God sustains all, does good to all, and provides food for all the creatures whom God has created. Blessed is The Lord our God, who provides food for all.

Gives food to all creatures? Provides food for all?

Let's see what Professor Wiki has to say:

On the average, a person dies every second as a result of hunger - 4000 every hour - 100,000 each day - 36 million each year - 58% of all deaths (2001-2004 estimates). On the average, a child dies every 5 seconds as a result of hunger - 700 every hour - 16,000 each day - 6 million each year - 60% of all child deaths (2002-2008 estimates).

A friend of mine insists that this bracha makes a valid assertion since mankind produces enough food to feed everyone (indeed, a source in the wiki article on starvation claims that we could feed double the current world population of 6 billion people.) That the blessing should serve as a constant reminder of our responsibilities to those less fortunate than us.

It's a nice thought, but it is clearly not the intent of the bracha. Such a flawed exegesis also implies that the blessing was not true for pre-industrial history (unless one says that the earth has always had the potential to feed everyone, but that is really stretching things.) And it is humankind's refusal to sit back and say "God will provide" that has made possible the advancement of modern agricultural techniques - fertilizers, pesticides, mechanized equipment, and other crop management techniques.

God does not provide food for all. It is a patently false assertion that becomes absurd to the extreme when one looks at "all creatures", and considers the countless species over geologic history that are now extinct for lack of sustenance, whether via disruptions such as climate change, or competitive exclusion for the same environmental niche. The struggle for survival is mostly the struggle for food.

Of course, one is only supposed to say the blessing after being satiated with bread, so the passage "we have not lacked substance" does have a logical sense of immediacy. And certainly we all hope that "may we not lack sustenance forever." But to make the statement that God provides food for all creatures? It is not true, plain and simple. (I'm not addressing the theodicy issue of "does good to all" with a 10-foot pole.*)

Malcolm Gladwell, in his latest book Outliers: The Story of Success, describes an essential difference between rice growing cultures of Asia and Western farming cultures. Growing rice is incredibly complex and labor intensive. Increasing rice yields requires constant and close attention to a myriad of diverse tasks. A successful rice farmer works hard every day of the year in managing his tiny rice paddy. Contrast this with 18th century European farmers. They typically worked only between late spring and early summer, essentially bedding down to preserve food and energy during the long winter months. The former worked up to 3000 hours a year, while the latter worked approximately 1200 hours! This also explains why China and Japan could not develop the oppressive feudal landlord system so common to Europe. Rice farming is too complex to coerce farmers into maintaining paddies. As a result, it was much easier for a landlord to charge a fixed rent and let the tenant farmer reap the rewards of hard work.

Gladwell then quotes the historian David Arkush who compared Russian and Chinese peasant proverbs. A typical Russian proverb:

If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it.

Such a proverb reflects an attitude of "pessimism and fatalism typical of a repressive feudal system where peasants have no reason to believe in the efficacy of their own work." On the other hand, a penniless Chinese peasant would typically say,

Don't depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.

Readers should immediately recognize that the Russian aphorism is similar to sentiment expressed in Deuteronomy 8:17:

כֹּחִי וְעֹצֶם יָדִי, עָשָׂה לִי אֶת-הַחַיִל הַזֶּה

[Beware lest you forget the LORD your God] and you say in your heart: 'My power and the might of my hand has given me this wealth'.

The passage implies that the well-off have the greatest difficulty in recognizing - or more accurately, believing in - the hand of God. Yes, the ones that truly believe the admonishment of Deuteronomy are usually those that depend on charity for their survival such as the impoverished kollel and chareidi families with a dozen kids who live in poverty and rely on welfare checks and tzedaka, as well as unfortunate "victims of circumstance". But I think it is more likely that the vast majority of us moderns are simply too far removed from the European peasant cultures and fatalistic Islamic regimes under which most of ancestors have lived over the past 1000 years. I suspect that most of us pay only lip service to "kochi yadi" while avoiding the heretical implications of our disbelief by relying on Ben Franklin's "God helps those who help themselves." Our psychology is largely informed from viewing the world around us, and the world around us seems much more in tune with the aphorisms of the Chinese rice farmer.

Regardless of how the world seems to work, our knowledge of the deep underpinnings of reality is mostly non-existent (and that's true even if you're a radical materialist!) So there is plenty of room for emunah whether discussing concepts of "kochi yadi", or "tzadik v'ra lo" (*ok, a five-foot pole), or many other difficult religious topics. But emunah can only go so far. It isn't something that suffices to explain away a clearly observable fact of nature. If Moses did indeed write the first blessing to Birkat HaMazon, he may have been expressing a desire as to how he would like the world to work, but an honest person cannot recite it in its current form as a statement of how the world works in actuality. God does not provide for all creatures.

More Segulah Stupidity...

2009-05-27T20:49:00.004-04:00

Guess I'm behind the curve because this is the first time I've heard of this nonsense, but if you also have not previously heard about the challah segulah here goes:

If you are baking challah between after Sh'kiya on Wednesday and before Shavuos, and are making enough to make the bracha "hafrashas challah", please email me so that you can be part of the 40 women segulah.

No other explanation was given in the email, but a quick web search turned up an essay by Chabad-nik Rav Yitchak Ginsburgh, gematria extraordinaire. Apparently, the mitzvah of challah is the primary rectification for the nation of Israel abandoning the Land of Israel as a result of the sin of the spies. Since they wandered for 40 years in the desert, I guess having 40 women baking somehow helps to correct that sin. Plus, the gematria of Rachel = 40 when you use the ordinal count of each letter (there is almost always a way to get what you want with gematriot if you are creative enough!), and the mitzvah of challah relates specifically to Rachel.

The amount of superstition that has permeated mainstream RW Orthodoxy is absolutely astounding. But occasionally this obsession with segulot gives birth to a gem of an idea: Rav Ginsburgh suggests that they open up a bakery inside Rachel's tomb!

Reb Yoel - "Just Lucky"

2009-05-20T18:19:00.002-04:00

R. Itamar Rosenbaum, the progenitor of Nadvorna chassidim ("Ha’admor Hazaken MiNadvorna"), and his very frank opinion of the Satmar Rebbe, R. Yoel Teitelbaum:

When a hasid of Satmar told him that Reb Yoel was the messiah he retorted: "If you were to say that R. Yoel is a great scholar, I would agree. I would also endorse the view that he is a tzadik, a giant among men. But to assert that he is the Messiah, this is ridiculous and preposterous. How could we face the world with him as the messiah?"

He then explained the influence by which R. Yoel wielded such power over such large masses of chassidim in this way: "The owner of a 5th Avenue store is not necessarily superior intellectually to a shopkeeper in the Bronx. The former was just lucky and fortune smiled upon him."

He found it incomprehensible that the Rebbe of Satmar forbade his followers to visit the Western Wall. "If he lived in Israel," said R. Itamar, "he would visit the Wall. Only in heaven is it known who is a genuine rabbi."

I was originally going to make this a "name this quote" contest (complete with a real, honest-to-goodness prize - a hagiography from CIS Publishers.) But I waited too long to post and Google Books has since made available a preview of the book wherein this is found.

Source: Hasidism in Israel: A History of the Hasidic Movement and Its Masters in the Holy Land by Tzvi M. Rabinowicz.

Torah - The Repository of All Scientific Knowledge

2009-05-17T10:05:00.006-04:00

"The myriads of petrified Remains which are disclosed by the researches of Geology all tend to prove that our Planet has been occupied in times preceding the Creation of the Human Race, by extinct species of Animals and Vegetables, made up, like living Organic Bodies, of "Clusters of Contrivances," which demonstrate the exercise of stupendous Intelligence and Power. They further show that these extinct forms of Organic Life were so closely allied, by Unity in the principles of their construction, to Classes, Orders, and Families, which make up the existing Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, that they not only afford an argument of surpassing force, against the doctrines of the Atheist and Polytheist; but supply a chain of connected evidence, amounting to demonstration, of the continuous Being, and of many of the highest Attributes of the One Living and True God."

So says Reverend William Buckland in his introduction to Treatise VI of The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God As Manifested in the Creation. The title of this treatise is "Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology", written in 1836. Buckland was an English geologist and a proponent of creationism, but he was an Old Earth Creationist. Even at a time when geology was in its infancy, he rejected so-called "Flood Geology", recognized that large scale extinctions had occurred many times in the past, and was the first person to describe in depth a dinosaur fossil - Megalosaurus. In short, he was an early Gadol Hador of Geology. (As an aside, one of his hobbies was zoophagy, and he claimed to have eaten his way through the entire animal kingdom - he found mole particularly disgusting!)

What is especially fascinating about Buckland's attempt to reconcile geology and religion, is that it clearly demonstrates that the science of stratigraphy and its correlation with fossil assemblages was not invented by Darwinian dogmatists in an attempt to prove their case. In fact, Buckland shows quite the opposite: many of the early naturalists interpreted what they clearly saw as legitimate scientific observations in such a manner as to support theological beliefs. But Buckland and others did not take the intellectually dishonest approach that many modern day anti-evolutionists are guilty of - claiming that scientists have resorted to a kind of circular reasoning whereby the fossils date the rocks and the rocks date the fossils. Google, for example, evolution OR stratigraphy "circular reasoning" and you'll see that such ludicrous claims are common amongst the Intelligent Design/Creationist propagandists.

Buckland continues:

It may seem just matter of surprise, that many learned and religious men should regard with jealousy and suspicion the study of any natural phenomena, which abound with proofs of some of the highest attributes of the Deity; and should receive with distrust, or total incredulity, the announcement of conclusions, which the geologist deduces from careful and patient investigations of the facts which it is his province to explore. These doubts and difficulties result from the disclosures made by geology, respecting the lapse of very long periods of time before the creation of man. Minds which have long been accustomed to date the origin of the universe, as well as that of the human race from an era of about six thousand years ago, receive reluctantly any information, which if true, demands some new modification of their present ideas of cosmogony; and, as in this respect, Geology has shared the fate of other infant sciences, in being for a while considered hostile to revealed religion; so like them, when fully understood, it will be found a potent and consistent auxiliary to it, exalting our conviction of the Power, end Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator.

Throughout the book, Buckland recognizes the immature state of the science of his day, yet this is never a reason to doubt its findings. He also repeatedly states that no longer is it appropriate to date the origin of the human race - much less the universe itself - to 6000 years ago. And that it is foolish to look to the Bible for matters of science.

The disappointment of those who look for a detailed account of geological phenomena in the Bible, rests on a gratuitous expectation of finding therein historical information, respecting all the operations of the Creator in times and places with which the human race has no concern; as reasonably might we object that the Mosaic history is imperfect, because it makes no specific mention of the satellites of Jupiter, or the rings of Saturn, as feel disappointment at not finding in it the history of geological phenomena, the details of which may be fit matter for an encyclopedia of science, but are foreign to the objects of a volume intended only to be a guide of religious belief and moral conduct.

Some extreme fideists like to reference such sources as Ben Bag Bag's aphorism in Pirke Avot 5:22: "Turn it, and turn it, for everything is in it." or Bereshit Rabbah / Zohar: "God looked into the Torah and created the world" to claim that yes, all knowledge - including all scientific knowledge - is indeed in the Torah, but hidden and/or encoded. This would include many adherents of Jewish mystical traditions, such as Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as well as some Torah-code advocates. A prime example of those who promulgate an expansive interpretation of "everything is in the Torah" is the radical OrthoFundie that runs FrumTeens, an expert at handpicking quotes from select rabbanim to support his viewpoint to the exclusion of all other legitimate interpretations within Orthodoxy. When it comes to demonstrating the veracity of such a claim with specific examples, however, such individuals can only come up with very generalized and often vague statements from sages of yore (typical lame one: eretz means "running" so the Torah clearly knew that the Earth rotates and revolves around the sun. Although FrumTeens is so wacky that he doesn't even admit to this and falls back on the bogus "The earth revolving around the sun is only relative" claim.) In this they are no different from those who use the same technique in an attempt to prove the divinity of the Koran.

Let us close with the following passage of Buckland's. Rather than twisting the overwhelming evidence that fundamentalists find contrary to their deeply held beliefs, those who believe the Bible to be the inerrant, infallible word of God would do well to consider it.

We may fairly ask of those persons who consider physical science a fit subject for revelation, what point they can imagine short of a communication of Omniscience, at which such a revelation might have stopped, without imperfections of omission, less in degree, but similar in kind, to that which they impute to the existing narrative of Moses ? A revelation of so much only of astronomy, as was known to Copernicus, would have seemed imperfect after the discoveries of Newton; and a revelation of the science of Newton would have appeared defective to La Place: a revelation of all the chemical knowledge of the eighteenth century would have been as deficient in comparison with the information of the present day, as what is now known in this science will probably appear before the termination of another age; in the whole circle of sciences, there is not one to which this argument may not be extended, until we should require from revelation a full developement of all the mysterious agencies that uphold the mechanism of the material world. Such a revelation might indeed be suited to beings of a more exalted order than mankind, and the attainment of such knowledge of the works as well as of the ways of God, may perhaps form some part of our happiness in a future state; but unless human nature had been constituted otherwise than it is, the above supposed communication of omniscience would have been imparted to creatures, utterly incapable of receiving it, under any past or present moral or physical condition of the human race; and would have been also at variance with the design of all God's other disclosures of himself, the end of which has uniformly been, not to impart intellectual but moral knowledge.

The full on-line text of Volume I of Buckland's work can be found here. Volume II, which consists primarily of fossil illustrations and descriptions can be found here.

Evolution - Jesus the Ape God?

2009-05-04T18:06:00.005-04:00

"The problem with the Christian church was, if God became man, man can't be a monkey. If man can be God, then man cannot possibly descend from the ape. For that betrays the concept of man worthy of deification. We have no problem with that. We are unhappy to announce that it is quite possible for man to be an animal, and we know that by looking into the behavior of the Christian church."

So says Rabbi Moshe Tendler in a mostly unremarkable - though entertaining - lecture on evolution given a number of years ago. Actually a more appropriate word for the lecture would be schizophrenic. For example, he claims that we are not Bible belt fundamentalists, and that we know how to learn pshat and not take everything in the Torah literally, yet most of the lecture is spent going over the same tired arguments that those same Bible belt fundamentalists employ against the theory of evolution (he seems to be a particular fan of irreducible complexity.) Then he states that he would be able to defend the claim that earth was 5742 years old [planted evidence??] only to say a few sentences later that the rational mind says that the earth is very old. And although he denigrates Darwin by asserting that "with almost no exception, whatever he said was false, whatever he said proved not to be true" (although the examples he gives relate primarily to the fact that there was no science of genetics at the time), he also tosses Darwin a bone by saying that he deserves a hakoras hatov (appreciative thanks) because he recognized the common denominator between man and animal which made possible the many advances of modern medical science.

While spending the majority of his 1-1/2 talk pointing out the supposed problems with the TOE, he states that there is much merit in the theory (but restricted to micro-evolution and not for macro) and nothing in it poses a religious problem to Judaism, except if one claims that evolution is "random", with God removed from the world. Natural selection is a mechanistic approach that doesn't need God. We believe that God is involved in the affairs of man.

Rabbi Tendler states more than once that the world is not 5742 years old, but that OUR world is 5742 (that is, the history of the Jewish people begins with Adam). He pays special attention to the Drush Or HaChaim by Tiferes Yisroel (1782-1860) which discussed a recently discovered mastodon, and which claimed that science finally realized what Jewish commentators had said for a long time - that there were worlds before this one, and each successive world had more advanced species. And Tendler concludes by saying that the one God that gave us the Torah gave us the truths of science and that there is nothing that science discovers that can be in opposition to Torah. We can defend the Torah from any scientific onslaught, but that we should not deny that the onslaught exists. But ultimately the only conflict is in the hearts of people, whether to accept God or not. Our role in life is not just to believe in God, but to act in such a way that others will learn to love God from our love of God.

But the purpose of this post is not to examine the merits or flaws of Rabbi Tendler's argument (yes, all the preceding was a long-winded introduction!), rather it is to examine the quote that I started with. His point was that in the 1800s there was "never a tumult" in the Jewish world regarding the TOE. He neglects to say that this claim holds true today primarily for the Modern Orthodox of which Tendler is a spokesman, for the leaders in the Chareidi / Yeshivah world are almost always as vehemently opposed to the TOE as any Christian fundamentalist. Tendler even admits that some of our schools take a razor blade to excise passages from science texts, though he neglects to add that this was an approach that his father-in-law, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, advocated since he claimed that belief in evolution is heretical.

Rabbi Tendler asserts that the Christian church has the most fundamental problem with the theory of evolution because of what it implies regarding the divinity of Jesus. And for many years I took this assertion as fact. After all, did not Spain ban the study of science in 1305 because of the fear that the nascent Renaissance (largely a result of the Christian world encountering the vastly superior Islamic culture during the Crusades) would set mens minds free from religious dogma (to paraphrase Max Dimont's Jews Gods & History)? Wasn't it well known how the Church treated the astronomical findings of Copernicus which proved that the Earth was not the center of the universe, culminating in the heresy trial of Galileo? So it was certainly reasonable to take R. Tendler's statement at face value.

I recently wrote on Francisco Ayala in the post The Christian Man's Evolution or God the Abortionist. To recap, he is an esteemed geneticist and evolutionary biologist as well as an Dominican priest, and is a proselytizer for Darwinian evolution. One curious belief of Ayala is that Darwin solved the problem of evil in the world, since natural selection explains the ruthlessness of nature which would otherwise require an intentional act of free will. (Of course, this only covers "natural evil", and not "moral evil" committed by man.) Baal Habos and Orthoprax objected to this as a valid Judeo-Christian religious claim, since it presumes a hands-off deity that left creation to its own devices. Unfortunately, I neglected to include one sentence in the original article: "He refers to science-savvy Christian theologians who present a God that is continuously engaged in the creative process through undirected natural selection." This clarifies his premise but really doesn't answer their valid objection as it seems internally contradictory. How can a deity be "continuously engaged" in an "undirected" process?

I said that I'd look into Ayala's works to see if he developed this notion in greater detail and addressed the paradox seemingly inherent in it. To date, I have only been able to check out one book of his (inter library loan is being very slow), a thin one called "Darwin and Intelligent Design". In it, he discusses the notion but does not address the obvious dilemma. So I have no answer from Ayala yet. I will, however, actually present a Jewish solution to this problem at a later time.

Nevertheless, the book does clearly demonstrate that Rabbi Tendler is as wrong in his assertions regarding the Church's objection as he is with many other erroneous claims made throughout the lecture. Examples that Ayala quotes include:

Gregory of Nyssa, a 4th century Church father, maintained that many plant and animal species were not created directly by God. Rather, only their potentiality was created and that natural processes later brought about their emergence.
Theologians in the middle ages considered the possibility of species changing via natural processes, such as Thomas Aquinas who believed that spontaneous generation was not incompatible with Christian faith.
19th century Protestant theologians such as Charles Hodge (1874) claimed that denial of design in nature is denial of God (and not for the reason that Tendler suggests). Yet others granted evolution as a mechanism of divine intelligence.
Of course, the 20th century has seen the widest acceptance of the theory of evolution by prominent Catholic Church authorities, including the big kahunas. Pope Pius XII acknowledged the compatibility of evolution with the Christian faith, and John Paul II in 1996 objected to people using the Bible as containing scientific statements adding that evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis but a theory with significant arguments.

Aubrey Moore, in 1891, wrote that "Darwinism appeared, and under the guise of a foe, did the work of a friend". Wiki describes him as "the clergyman who more than any other man was responsible for breaking down the antagonisms towards Evolution then widely felt in the English Church". So while there was some antagonism towards the theory, it appears that Rabbi Tendler is 100 years out of date in his claims.

But there can be no debate regarding Tendler's statement that the history of the Christian Church shows us that man can indeed be an animal. After the audience laughter had subsided, Rabbi Tendler next words were "I say that under the roof that houses the holocaust center."

Molech - Part II

2009-04-27T18:21:00.002-04:00

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

- Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" , part II. Full text here.

Molech - Part I

2009-04-27T08:10:00.005-04:00

And you shall not give any of your seed to set them apart to Molech, neither shall you profane the name of your God: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 18:21)

The Molech that we know and love...

Devourer of children, worshipers of this deity would heat this idol up with fire and place their newborn babies in its arms, watch them burn to death. Rabbinic tradition says that the idol was made of brass, and that the child was placed in one of seven compartments along with animal and meal offerings. More details here and here.

The Moloch Machine from Metropolis

Fritz Lang, a Jew by birth but whose parents embraced Christianity, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after being offered the head position of the German film industry by Goebbels. For an interesting essay that discusses the numerous Christological references in Metropolis, see this essay by David Michael Wharton. (Note: the video linked to here was due to its high quality, but it is a pretty good re-score as well.)

Moloch horridus

An Australian lizard that is only about 19 centimeters long. Named by John Gray in 1841, he had in mind Milton's Moloch, a lieutenant angel of Satan "besmeared with blood, of human sacrifice, and parents' tears." David Attenborough says that it is "as inoffensive and enchanting a reptile as you are likely to find" (Life in Cold Blood, p 150). Instead of a devourer of children, this moloch sits beside a trail of ants and gulps them down one at a time, up to 2000 or so in a single session. More info here.

Bad Proofs of Torah #1 - The Burden of Mitzvot

2009-04-21T19:51:00.003-04:00

The "Acceptance Of A Burden On Themselves And Their Prodigy [sic]" proof is the first of Gottlieb's "10 Proofs of Torah" (hey kids, collect 'em all!) in his book, The Inescapable Truth - a Sound Approach to Genuine Religion. Here is the opening paragraph:

The first proof is, that unless G-d Himself intervened and visibly prevailed upon the people to receive this unique G-dly Law from Him, the people of Israel, or for that matter any other people, would never have accepted this kind of a set of laws from anybody else. If the whole nation of Israel actually did not receive this particular set of laws the way it is claimed by the promulgator of this law, then this law could not have been perpetuated even for one generation. For no father would ever earnestly and consciously mislead his son to believe in a complete falsehood even temporarily, let alone hand it down to him for the rest of his life, and generations after him. It is especially true when the falsity and lie imposes special burdens, hardships, and serious obligations and duties on the son throughout his life. Thus, as far as Judaism is concerned—and I refer to Torah-true Judaism, with its six hundred and thirteen commandments to be observed in the strictest way and minutest details every day of our lives—it is inconceivable that all of these commandments would be handed down to us by each one of our fathers as the explicit words of G-d if they were not convinced and had not actually heard, seen, and witnessed by themselves its true occurrence.

The refutation: just read Da'as Hedyot's insightful observation in his post Finding Religion in College!

Ramban - A Vampire Sympathizer?

2009-04-19T21:06:00.002-04:00

Newsflash! New material has surfaced that Rabbi Moses ben Nachman was a card-carrying member of the VCLU - the Vampire Civil Liberties Union! Although disguised as a commentary on the Torah, Leviticus 11, this excerpt is proof positive that Ramban was both a vampire and a ghoul sympathizer!

THESE MAY YE EAT. "But not an unclean animal. Has it not already been forbidden by means of a negative commandment? But [this verse is stated] so that [if he eats of it] he transgresses both a positive and a negative commandment." This is Rashi's language, and so it is found in the Torath Kohanim.

Now Rabbi Moshe [ben Maimon] said that this verse is in order to forbid human flesh -— "these may ye eat, but not human flesh. Thus the flesh and the milk are forbidden by means of a positive commandment." But we have not found such an interpretation by our Rabbis. Perhaps he [Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon] thought this to be the case because of that which we have learned there in the Torath Kohanim: "I might think that the flesh of those that walk on two legs and the milk of those that walk on two legs should also be forbidden to be eaten by means of a negative commandment? Therefore Scripture says: These ye shall not eat — these are forbidden to be eaten by means of a negative commandment, but the flesh of those that walk on two legs and the milk of those that walk on two legs are not forbidden to be eaten by means of a negative commandment". From this text the Rabbi [Moshe ben Maimon] may have deduced that they are not forbidden by means of a negative commandment, but are forbidden by means of a positive commandment, and he derived it from the verse: these may ye eat.

But the matter is not so. For our Rabbis have clearly said in connection with the blood of those that walk on two legs and the milk of those that walk on two legs that there is not even a commandment to abstain from eating them by Rabbinical enactment. If the flesh thereof would be prohibited [by Scriptural law], then [the blood and milk thereof would also be prohibited in accordance with the general rule]: "anything that comes out of that which is impure, is also impure." The blood of crawling reptiles and that of human beings the Sages have excluded from the prohibition against blood, and they have said: "The blood of the crawling reptile is like its flesh, and one incurs whipping for eating a crawling reptile," meaning that it is not forbidden as blood [for the wanton violation of which one incurs excision]; thus they made it like flesh [but we find no such statement in connection with human blood]. Rather, when they said that there is no negative commandment against eating them, they meant to say that you cannot exclude them on the basis of it [i.e., on the basis of a specific Scriptural verse], and they are thus permitted. According to my opinion, however, this only applies to flesh [or blood] of a live person [which can not be prohibited on the basis of a definitive verse and hence if a person’s teeth are bleeding he may suck the blood thereof and not be afraid of having committed a sin]. However, the Rabbis have learned in connection with a corpse by means of an analogous use of words found when speaking of it and of the heifer whose neck is broken that it is forbidden to have any benefit from it.

Vampires who make sure to imbibe only small amounts from any one individual can therefore rest assured that they are fully within the daled amot of halacha. Ghouls, of course, will have to ensure that their victims are fully compensated for the five types of damages that they might incur. The news is still bad for ghouls of the H.P. Lovecraft persuasion who feast on corpses, since they would be in violation of a Torah prohibition of deriving benefit from a dead body.

(Ramban translation by Charles B. Chavel, which is an anagram for "SHH Clever Cabal". Coincidence? I think not!)

Bad Proofs of Torah - Was Moses a Zoologist?

2009-04-19T12:44:00.001-04:00

Nevertheless you shall not eat of them that only chew the cud, or of them that only are cloven-footed: the camel, because it chews the cud but doesn't have a cloven-hoof, it is unclean to you. And the shafan, because it chews the cud but doesn't have a cloven-hoof, it is unclean to you. And the arneves, because it chews the cud but doesn't have a cloven-hoof, it is unclean to you. And the swine, because it has a cloven-hoof, but doesn't chew its cud, it is unclean unto you.
- Leviticus 11

"The Torah is informing us that these are the only existing examples of animals with one sign without the other... How could any human, at the time the Torah was written, have known this?" That's the "proof" in a nutshell, as made by Aish.com in the section of an article on Parashat Shemini called Evidence Of Divinity Of Torah.

I have refrained until now from discussing this so-called proof of the divinity of the Torah as it has been discussed in depth by many others. The most definitive treatment of this zoological issue is, of the course, Rabbi Slifkin's (unfortunately out of print) book The Camel, the Hare, and the Hyrax. It is somewhat surprising that the "proof" is still being used by OrthoFundies, since its assertions have long been shown to be seriously flawed. Indeed, the attempt to use this as a proof is so untenable that it has been turned on its head to prove the exact opposite by those seeking to show the fallibility of the Torah! (R. Slifkin unfairly calls those critics "atheists".)

Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness in my ongoing posts on "Bad Proofs of Torah" - and in the spirit of Parashat Shemini - here is my terse summary of why this is a bogus argument:

To assert that the shafan and arneves are maaleh gerah, one must extend "chewing the cud" to animals that are not true ruminants. But then one must accept that many other animals not mentioned in the Torah also chew the cud. And to claim that these other animals are from the same "min" and are somehow included in the category of shafan and arneves is to make the idea of min so wide-ranging as to render the word meaningless.

How to Recognize a Jew

2009-04-13T01:20:00.005-04:00

Perhaps it's only a matter of persistence, but it always seemed to me that Lubavitchers have an uncanny ability for sleuthing out a Jew in crowd in their attempt to get someone to don a pair of tefillin. For a while I thought that they had some mystical way of determining those with a nefesh elokus from those with only a nefesh beheimah (per the Tanya) but then I discovered that they must be relying on something more mundane. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is rather a simple matter to distinguish a Jew from other common folk. Just refer to this checklist which describes the physical characteristics of the Jew:

Restless suspicious eyes
Curved nose and nostrils
Ill-shapen ears of great size like those of a bat
Thick lips and sharp rat's teeth
Round knees
Low brow
Long clammy fingers
Flat feet
Repulsive rear view

Here is a handy picture to assist you with your search:

For more details, see The American Jew and The Original Mr. Jacobs, both by Telemachus Thomas Timayenis. These startling exposés date to the late 1800s, and are available in their entirety courtesy of Google Books.

ADDENDUM: Timayenis (1853-1918) was a Greek immigrant who was a champion of oppressed Greek peddlers in Boston. "Telemachus Thomas Timayenis is an extremely problematic figure in Greek-American history. Before his death in Boston Timayenis was involved in a long stream of legal battles and would commit what we know today as ‘hate crimes.’" For more, see here.

Sheep Worship in Ancient Egypt

2009-03-31T22:47:00.003-04:00

Apropos to the upcoming Pesach holiday, a recent guest post on DovBear asked the question "why was a sheep chosen for the Passover sacrifice?" I wanted to explore a bit some relevant passages in the Torah, not to answer this question per se (and thus I will not be discussing the important passages in Ex. 8:22 and Ex. 12 - especially 12:46 with regards to the prohibition to break the bones of the pascal lamb) but to look at some of the descriptions and commentaries related to sheep worship and shepherding in Egypt.

Rashi explains in the Joseph story as to why Egyptians found it distasteful to eat with Hebrews:

And Joseph made haste for his compassion towards his brothers had been stirred and he wanted to weep; so he entered his chamber, and wept there. And he washed his face, and came out; and he restrained himself, and said: 'Set out bread.' And they set for him by himself, and for them by themselves, for the Egyptians could not bear to eat bread with the Hebrews; for it is an abomination to the Egyptians. (Gen. 43:30-32).

Rashi comments only that Onkelos gives a reason for this behavior. The Artscroll Sapirstein mentions that there are two variants of Onkelos; one of which renders the targum as "For the animal that the Egyptians worship the Hebrews eat". There are two major problems with this interpretation. First, it is not implied by the text at all. The plain rendering is simply that the Egyptians found it offensive to eat with Hebrews (Hertz takes this approach here). Such behavior would be typical of any xenophobic culture, and for millennia the people of Egypt believed themselves to be far superior to all of the surrounding nations.

The second problem is that the Egyptians themselves ate meat of animals that they worshiped (although saying that they actually worshiped animals is an oversimplification. It is more accurate to say that animals were symbolic of universal cosmic principles and manifestations of gods, rather than being worshiped as gods in their own right.) Although meat was a delicacy in ancient Egypt and was mostly eaten by nobility, even the common people would feast on domesticated animals - such as sheep and goat - during festivals. Even pork - associated with the malevolent god Set - was eaten (the Jews in Goshen would have been well aware of this, for pig was widely consumed in Lower Egypt during the New Kingdom.) Probably the most well-known animal used by the Ancient Egyptians in religious ceremony was the Apis Bull, yet the upper classes would eat cattle meat as well.

The first passage that explicitly indicates that the Egyptians had a particular abhorrence towards shepherds is found in chapter 46 after Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. He tells them that he will make especial mention of their occupation as shepherds:

And Joseph said to his brothers, and to his father's household: I will go up, and tell Pharaoh, and will say to him: 'My brothers and my father's household who were in the land of Canaan have come to me; and the men are shepherds, for they have been keepers of cattle; and they have brought their flocks, and their herds, and all that they have.' (46:31-32)

Joseph then coaches them with instructions to tell Pharaoh a similar story when they are summoned before him:

And it shall come to pass, when Pharaoh shall call you, and shall say: 'What is your occupation?' then you will say 'Your servants have been keepers of cattle from our youth even until now, both we, and our forefathers'; so that you may dwell in the land of Goshen; for every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians. (46:33-34)

There are some discrepancies between the two passages, notably the omission of the mentioning of flocks of sheep. (But more interestingly, and as an aside, note the use of "father's household" in 46:31; there were obviously other family members present besides the brothers to whom Joseph was speaking!)

Rashi now explains that shepherds are an abomination to Egyptians because sheep are a deity to them. (Why he only hinted at this earlier by referencing Onkelos I don't know.) The Sapirstein edition notes that either "abomination" is a euphemism for "pagan deity" per the Zohar, or because shepherds are considered abominable because they lack respect for the sheep, a pagan god of the Egyptians.

Returning to the text, Joseph then tells Pharaoh:

Then Joseph went in and told Pharaoh, and said: 'My father and my brothers, and their flocks, and their herds, and all that they have, have come out of the land of Canaan; and, behold, they are in the land of Goshen.' (47:1)

Joseph presents five of the brothers to Pharaoh who asks them what their occupation is. They respond:

Your servants are shepherds [of sheep], both we, and our forefathers. And they said to Pharaoh: 'We have come to sojourn in the land since there is no pasture for your servants' flocks, for the famine is severe in the land of Canaan. Now therefore, we pray thee, allow your servants to dwell in the land of Goshen.' (47:3-4)

To which Pharaoh responds:

And Pharaoh spoke to Joseph, saying: 'Your father and your brothers have come to you; the land of Egypt is before you - in the best of the land settle your father and your brothers; in the land of Goshen let them settle. And if you know any able men among them, then make them rulers over my livestock.' (47:5-6)

Again we have a discrepancy with the implication that shepherding was an objectionable livelihood to the Egyptians. Pharaoh obviously considered this a critical enough occupation to make mention of his need for skilled sheepherders to Joseph! Many people kept sheep in Egypt, but this would have been on very small-scale since appropriate pasture land was scarce (thus the scarcity of sheepherders and the particular attraction of Goshen for the Jews.)

An additional problem with the biblical insistence on an abhorrence towards shepherds is the fact that Osiris, god of the underworld and primary deity for much of ancient Egyptian history, is often depicted carry a shepherd's crook. The linking of Pharaoh with Osiris meant that he, too, would carry a crook as a symbol of his office, as it "symbolizes his role as the shepherd of his people." (wiki). The crook was thus one of the most important items associated with Pharaoh, often used during coronation and other ceremonial occasions. (Indeed, I probably don't even need to link to a picture of King Tut's sarcophagus as the image of his golden coffin with crook and flail is likely indelibly inscribed in your memory! But here it is anyway.)

To explain the supposed dislike for shepherds, one (religious) online commentary states that perhaps this "is a consequence of the Hyksos oppression, in which case these references in Genesis would be powerful arguments for a late date for the time of the Exodus". The writer is referring to the common translation of Hyksos as "shepherd kings". (Interestingly, Hertz uses the same translation - typical of this time period - but he also assumes that the Hyksos were in power at this time and that they "inherited" the dislike of shepherds from the Egyptians.) But this is a misnomer and indeed much of the "proof" for the Torah's claim is based on a mistranslation! "The Jewish historian, Josephus, in his Contra Apionem, claims that Manetho was the first to use the Greek term, Hyksos, incorrectly translated as "shepherd-kings". Contemporary Egyptians during the Hyksos invasion designated them as hikau khausut, which meant "rulers of foreign countries", a term that originally only referred to the ruling caste of the invaders." Source.

There are many indications that the "Israel in Egypt" stories accurately describe some details of Egyptian life and culture and likely reflect a first-person experience there (as Kenneth Kitchen, James Hoffmeier, and others loudly proclaim). Certainly any multi-source document theory regarding the Torah's origins must admit to this. A trivial (but admittedly weak) example is that the author(s) of the Torah apparently knew about a "sheep god". Quite possibly this recalls Amun, one of the most important deities of ancient Egypt. Amun took on many forms, and as god of Thebes he was depicted as ram-headed. His worshipers sacrificed a ram once a year at which time its fleece would be used as clothing for a ram-headed idol. Another Egyptian ram-headed god was Banebdjed, associated with Osiris (see above), who wore a crown with ram's horns.

Yet it does seem that there is some confused narrative as well, as witnessed by the descriptions of the Egyptian attitudes towards shepherds and the implied abhorrence towards eating meat from animals that worshiped. Perhaps one could make the argument that there was a different set of rules for foreigners regarding the latter, but I have never seen such a reference in any other historical document. Someone with greater knowledge in ancient Egyptian culture and/or archaeology is welcome to convince me otherwise.

The Limits of Rational Orthodox Theology?

2009-03-25T23:45:00.001-04:00

Rabbi Natan Slifkin has started a new blog, Rationalist Judaism. He's already faced considerable opposition from the OrthoFundie crowd, and I expect that he will eventually encounter an onslaught of challenges from the SkeptiYid world as well. It will be quite interesting to see how far he can take rationalism and still remain firmly entrenched in the Doxic world.

The Resurrection According to Bizarro

2009-03-23T09:05:00.003-04:00

Is Dan Piraro a closet Lubavitcher? Apparently he holds according to the opinion of the AriZal that the resurrection of the dead is the final state of perfection (after the Messianic Era.) Thus we see his depiction of a tzaddik in the World of Souls getting his body parts back in preparation for Olam HaBah (Olam HaTechiyah.)

Speaking of which, don't you just love people trying to sound intelligent regarding the logistics of techiyas hameisim? Witness these reader comments (scroll to the bottom) where folks attempt to understand what happens during resurrection if a man or woman had been married more than once.

The Christian Man's Evolution or God the Abortionist

2009-03-18T19:30:00.004-04:00

Francisco J. Ayala is an esteemed geneticist and evolutionary biologist who teaches at University of California. He's also ordained as a Dominican priest and has been proselytizing about evolution to Christian believers for the past 30 years. Ayala is dismayed that "despite outreach efforts by scientists and constitutional rulings against them, creationists and intelligent design advocates are not getting weaker. If anything, they’re more visible."

A common assertion by both OrthoFundies and Uber-Skeptics is that one must choose between Darwin or God. How many have lost their faith because of this false dilemma?

Ayala thinks that scientists who attack religion and ridicule the faithful — most notably, Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford — are making a mistake. It is destructive and gives fodder to the preachers who insist followers must choose either Darwin or God. Often students in Ayala’s introductory biology class tell him that they will answer test questions as he wishes, but in truth they reject evolution because of their Christian beliefs. Then, a couple of years later, when they have learned more science, they decide to abandon their religion. The two, students seem to think, are incompatible.

One suggestion of Ayala's that I find particular fascinating is how Darwin solved the problem of evil in the world by introducing the concept of (undirected) natural selection!

Ayala... would like believers to reconcile their faith with science. Drawing on five years of study in preparation for ordination as a Dominican priest, Ayala uses evolution to help answer a central paradox of Christianity — namely, how can a loving, all-knowing God allow evil and suffering?

Nature is poorly designed—with oddities such as blind spots built into the human eye and an excess of teeth jammed into our jaws. Parasites are sadists. Predators are cruel. Natural selection can explain the ruthlessness of nature, Ayala argues, and remove the "evil" — requiring an intentional act of free will — from the living world. "Darwin solved the problem," Ayala concludes. He refers to science-savvy Christian theologians who present a God that is continuously engaged in the creative process through undirected natural selection. By addressing religious people on their own terms, Ayala aims to offer a better answer than intelligent design or creationism.

I took some liberties with the title (the original is called "The Christian Man's Evolution: How Darwinism and Faith Can Coexist") based on one of Ayala's favorite shock tactics:

One out of five pregnancies ends in spontaneous miscarriage, he often reminds audiences. Next he will pointedly ask, as in an interview with U.S. Catholic magazine last year, "If God explicitly designed the human reproductive system, is God the biggest abortionist of them all?" Through such examples, he explains, "I want to turn around their arguments."

The full article from the October 2008 issue of Scientific American (written by Sally Lehrman) can be found here.

An OU Pesach Leniency

2009-03-15T19:36:00.003-04:00

Is the OU moving towards the dark-side?

Well, no, not really. But check out their 2009 Guide to Passover in which they state:

To kasher a dishwasher, one should wait twenty four hours, make sure that the dishwasher is clean, and then run two cycles. If the dishwasher is plastic, there is a debate as to whether one may kasher it, and an Orthodox rabbi should be consulted.

Not only do they state that there are opinions that plastic can be kashered, but there is no mention of any problem with the racks, which are often rubber-coated metal.

I couldn't find last year's OU guide, but here is a 2007 link to an OU-affiliated shul which references oupassover.org and which clearly states "Dishwashers may not be kashered for Pesach".

This is similar to the Star-K's opinion, which states "One may not kasher a dishwasher from treif to kosher, from chometz to Pesach, from meat to milk or from milk to meat. This is true even if the interior is stainless steel, since all the hoses, fittings, pumps, etc. cannot be kashered."

Chicago's CRC similarly holds - based on a Rema - that dishwashers cannot be kashered, classifying them with sieves and other utensils that cannot be made perfectly clean before kashering.

Sephardim are generally more lenient in their approach to this issue. For example, "Gateway to Halacha" states that one simply needs to "clean away any tangible Chametz and run through one cycle empty. Some recommend replacing the racks for Pesah."

The most lenient opinion from a respected posek is that of Rabbi Yitzchak Abadi who states: "Any dishwasher can be used for dairy and then immediately afterwards for meat & vice-versa. And the same goes for Passover and non-Passover uses one after the next."

(BTW, if you are unacquainted with kashrut.org, browse through some of answers R. Abadi has given to various questions on kashrut - you will be quite surprised! Unfortunately, halachic sources are not included in the vast majority of answers, although one interesting post left by Marc Shapiro provides some sources for an important shitah of R. Abadi: that one can rely on intentional bitul by a non-Jew and basically just read the ingredients of a product to determine its kosher status!)

The 70 Most Difficult Questions (and some stupid answers)

2009-03-11T21:44:00.010-04:00

Listening to MP3 lectures has mostly supplanted my music and NPR listening while driving. So I'm constantly on the lookout for interesting podcasts from a whole gamut of topics, but with a focus on religion and science (quick plug for Radio Lab.) A particularly interesting lecture is usually fodder for a blog post (The Fast of the 9th of Tevet), but so is a particularly awful one (God is a Mafia Boss!). Now I don't go looking for the bad ones just so that I can trash it here, but occasionally I come across such supremely atrocious lectures that I simply need to vent! And so, I bring you The 70 Most Difficult Questions in Judaism, which should be more appropriately titled Stupid Answers to Questions That Aren't So Difficult. This lecture series is really ripe for fisking, but I'll be somewhat spare with the comments and briefly cover the few that I listened to. Truth be told, I couldn't actually listen to the majority of each lecture in the car, because I had a hard time simultaneously driving and screaming like an insane person at the voice coming from my car speakers. But my sanity was preserved by listening at home after loading them into Audacity and increasing the tempo to reduce the total playing time.

Puretorah.com seems to feel that one can prove the truth of Torah. In that it is a kindred spirit with kiruv organizations such as Aish HaTorah, both of whom rely on bogus proofs such as Torah codes. If they were intellectually honest, they would admit that codes are useless for their purposes because 1) Torah codes can be used to "prove" ideas anathema to Orthodoxy, such as Jesus being the fulfillment of the Jewish messiah (examples abound, such as here) and 2) similar codes are found in secular literature.

Here are a few of the outlandish statements made by Rabbi Eliyahu Kin (a Young Earth Creationist) in the lecture, Did dinosaurs ever exist and what happened to them? link

"You will have to face those that attempt to attack Judaism from different angles. One angle is... the age of the Earth, the millions of years according to scientists, and they say so based on all sorts of theories, nothing concrete, no real proof".

(Note especially his sneering tone almost every time he uses the words "theories", even though he obviously hasn't a clue as to what the word actually means.)

"Science only reinforces what the Torah says, as long as we're dealing with real facts, facts that can be proven, sound information, that which has been proven beyond any doubt. That which is still theory, or is just an opinion, of course is not worth anything".

"The most accurate method of measuring the age of the earth is Carbon-14 dating, and that also has a limitation of about 50,000 years".

"These animals that existed once upon a time did co-exist with human beings. And I'm really hoping that one of these days they will find a human skeleton together with a dinosaur skeleton. The problem is that the die-hard scientists are gonna say that somebody in the middle of the night snuck up and buried that human skeleton next to the dinosaur."

Kin then tells us about creatures such as the shamir, the tachash, the adnei hasadeh, and the mermaid ("it's mentioned in the gemara, it's not just a myth. People have seen it off the coast of Massachusetts in the 1800s. It's not just a fairy tale."). Anyone want to send him a copy of Slifkin's Sacred Monsters?

How did the dinosaurs become extinct? Disease or over-hunting may have been contributing factors, but in Kin's humble opinion it was due to three floods (according to the midrash): one in the time of Enosh (which covered 1/3 of the Earth), one during the generation of dispersion (which covered 2/3 of the Earth), and the "Noah Mabul".

Kin has an impressive knowledge of geology: "All the scientists clearly admit that the Grand Canyon did not come about by itself... Something very very big happened to bring this about." He tells us why there are fish skeletons found up on the hills of Malibu ("that's where they landed" after the flood. "Ample proof all over that there was a Mabul".) In Genesis, there was only one continent. All of this continental drift occurred because of the Mabul. This also contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Man, oh man, I had to stop halfway through the lecture. Sorry.

Now it's time learn What Are Ufos? link

Kin tells us that the lecture is really about the paranormal. Interestingly, he begins by discussing Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") although he doesn't attribute it as such. If you were to tell someone about the telephone in the 1800s, no one would believe you - it would be magic. "So because we got used to it, we take things for granted. In those days they also were aware about certain things that existed that for us may be very unusual today because we are not used to it."

"You may heard or seen someone bending a spoon. There are all sorts of individuals that have done many incredible things. Some are true, some are tricks. It is possible to do things like that using concentration of the mind using psychokinetic abilities. Science does not want to accept any of this. Science only accepts that which can be proven in a laboratory." Later, he states that he cannot tell us where Uri Geller gets his powers from. It could be fakery, witchcraft, or a gift from God.

Astrology: "certain people from certain months of the year, that have certain elements - fire, water, air, or earth - are attracted to each other like magnets".

Palmistry: "there are those who can read the lines in the hand. The palm contains lines that are not there by accident. How could this be? Obviously, the One who created man, created these lines too. To predict what's going to happen to a baby when he's 55 years old? That takes a greater knowledge [than weather forecasting]."

Chochma haPartzuf [phrenology]: some people can "look at a person's face and forehead and be able to detect certain illness and sins. Addition proof that there is knowledge that cannot be explained in physical terms."

Let's say that a paranormal expert makes a mistake. What can you conclude? [lots of chiming in from the audience, some of whom are probably buying all of this BS]. The skeptic will say it's totally not true. But actually, it's probably because the person is not such an expert.

Lecture highlight: After about 35 minutes, he starts to talk about UFOs. We know that there isn't life on other planets (discussed in another lecture), and claims of seeing UFOs fall into three categories: 1) lies 2) sightings of non-paranormal phenomena and 3)DEMONS! Yep, that's right, there are "real" UFOs and they are actually demons! Apparently some French researchers have analyzed "the real testimony of people who have actually observed something" and have come to the same conclusion. We know that they are real demons, because demons poke fun at humans and they can change form. They appear in deserts, rural places, and at night, appear to single individuals at a time, they fly in the air, and occasionally kidnap people. Just like UFOs. Other people didn't come to this conclusion because they are either close minded or don't understand that they exist. Demons have existed in all cultures and they are not a myth.

Uh oh, can there be a skeptic in the audience (41:30)? He says "seeing is believing" in response to Kin's claims. So Kin asks what if Skeptic were to see a human with chicken feet? Skeptic replies: probably someone with a birth defect. Kin answers: that's because you weren't exposed to the stories in the gemara, the zohar, etc.

At this point I'm thinking that Rabbi Kin is not just an OrthoFundie, but that he's completely bonkers. Can I really listen to any more of his ravings? Sure, a few more minutes.

The Bermuda Triangle may be due to a magnetic force that cannot tolerate metals at some places in the ocean. Or it may be the sitra achra, since demons have certain places where they congregate, like the North Pole. The Bermuda Triangle may be another place that demons hang out.

Demons procreate amongst themselves, they eat and die, they become visible to humans when they want to be seen. One should not give shalom to just anybody at night because you might be shaking hands with a demon. Typical advice about not completely closing off an opening in one's house, and making sure that your mezuzot are in good shape.

Kin says to let him know if you need to drive away demons from your home.

Sheesh.

Now let's do an easy for fun. How do we know that the Torah is Divine? link

Up to about 200 years ago, it was obvious that the Torah was from heaven. Everyone was more or less observant. When the Conservative and Reform movements came about, people began to have doubts and now it takes more than tradition to convince people. Those that attempt to challenge the Torah's veracity have an agenda, "just like scientists that set out to discover what they have already made up their mind what they want to believe."

Many people can trace their rabbis all the way back to Moses. Thus there were no interruptions and Torah was not changed. Those that claim that the Torah was a result of a committee need to go through all of it: the entire Torah, Talmud, and Kabbalah, and they will be convinced otherwise. If one is honest and sincere, then hopefully this will be convincing enough. A person has to be very arrogant to claim that they are more knowledgeable than their parents, grandparents, the Rambam.

Proofs (I'm not going to bother here with the counters to these so-called proofs):

Kuzari. Nobody else can make the claim that God spoke to 3 million people, performed miracles for them, etc. People wouldn't lie to their kids that this happened. Nor would a stubborn people make up such difficult obligations.
3 pilgrimage holidays. One can leave the wife and kids to go to Jerusalem, even in border towns, and the Torah makes a promise that no one will invade at that time. This promise was always kept.
Shmittah. No human can make the promise of a bumper crop in the 6th year.
Torah criticizes its own leaders. Even Moses. So that proves it is not man-made.
Torah codes.
Nothing in archaeology disproves the Torah. Everything they've found so far just strengthens the Torah's record. (He also references Ipuwer, claiming that it is an account of the makot.)
Prophecies. (Doesn't specifically state which ones in this lecture.)
Moses was not a biologist. There are only 3 animals that chew cud and don't have split hooves. (Kin acknowledges chewing cud is not technical, lagomorphy of rabbits satisfies criteria. BTW, Kin states that one can reliably eat any non-pig animal that has split-hooves, which implies that there is no need for a mesorah.)
Zohar says that the world is round like a ball.
Zohar says that one's appearance is affected by the climate. Kin states that if you move to China, your great grandchild will have slanty eyes. This has been proven!!!
Zohar says that there is one place on earth where most of the day is light.
Prophecies and codes that Jews will return to Israel at the end of days.

Sorry that there was nothing new in the proofs, but at least I've saved you the time of listening to this lecture.

And finally, How does Judaism deal with the Theory of Evolution?
link

I'll just mention a few highlights from this lecture.

To us [the idea of creation] may be simple, either because we grew up it or because we are very logical and we don't have to think of something else that doesn't make much sense.
"Before you know it, you have a monkey becoming a human being".
"Hashem did not create Adam HaRishon with slanted eyes, that I can assure you." He agrees that micro-evolution occurs within a species and repeats the idea (see above) that if you move to China, your great grandchildren will look Chinese. But if a white man moves to Africa, their descendants will look darker but will not become Black. He'll explain in another lecture how the "Black race" originated.)
"Does everybody know what a fossil is?" [who is his audience, anyway?]
Geologists determined the age of strata based on circular reasoning. They determined the age of an organism by where it was found in the rock strata. And they determined the age of the strata by what kind of organism they found there.

That's the introduction. Now for a few problems with evolution (again, only the humorous highlights.)

Fossils are all over the world but we have never found the missing link between ape and man.
What came first, the mouth or the stomach or the rectum? They had to have been created together.
No primitive cell can become through mutation so complex as a human being. It is statistically impossible. Evolutionists say that given enough time, anything is possible and it's only a problem for creationists because believe in a young earth. "They have the answer for almost everything".
Ask an evolutionist where the first cell came from. No one has an answer for this. "If that you don't know that, then why don't you just say you don't know anything about everything else.
Some evolutionists have admitted that it is impossible to explain the complexity of the human being without introducing a divine entity.
All the fossils that have been found are fragments and you can't prove anything about it. Plus there are sometimes hoaxes.
Sometimes they find human fossils with dinosaurs (contradicting his dinosaurs lecture above), sometimes below dinosaurs. But they are hiding this information from you because they don't want you to know the truth. So when they found human footprints next to a dinosaur in a river bed in Texas, you know what they said? That someone came in the middle of the night and chiseled the human footprint. Why? Because they have already made up their mind that it can't be.
People believe in evolution only because they don't want to believe in the alternative. Kin then goes off on a tangent to discuss the psychology of atheists follows. People become atheists only because they want to follow their desires. Nobody leaves religion because they investigated it and found it not to be true. Anybody who investigates religion will become a baal teshuvah.

[Note: the lecture is corrupted because it unexpectedly ends there and then repeats the beginning 15 minutes of the lecture.]

One quick question before I go: What would you say about someone who takes a strict literalist approach to not only the Bible but to apparently every supernatural story told in the Talmud and Kabbalah, who believes that UFOs are really demons, who believes in everything from mermaids to spoon-bending to palmistry, and who has an utter disdain for science and scientists and believes they are covering up information that man and dinosaurs were contemporaneous?

Menachem Leibtag on Megillat Esther

2009-03-09T00:55:00.003-04:00

One of my weekly rituals before Shabbos is to print out Menachem Leibtag's analysis of the parsha. Rabbi Leibtag obviously has studied all of the meforshim in depth and his shiurim are quite enlightening (the "Virtual Classroom" on the web site also works quite well.) I always learn something new about the chiastic subtleties of a parsha, the thematic connections between different parts of Tanach, and the historical context of the stories. R. Leibtag also has a very open "give and take" approach to teaching, so if you have the opportunity to hear him in person please do so.

His recent lecture Megillat Esther and its Hidden Message is quite interesting, as it points out many of the metaphorical qualities of that sefer. The story takes place after the Babylonian exile when the Jews - under Koresh (Cyrus) and later Daryavesh (Darius) - had the opportunity to return to the land of Israel. R. Leibtag is somewhat schizophrenic in this matter, because he quotes Seder Olam - the majority opinion in Chazal [and which today only OrthoFundies believe is accurate regarding the Persian period] - "that Achashverosh was the Persian King immediately after Koresh, but before Daryavesh", but his thesis seems to focus primarily on what the majority of historians believe (and a minority opinion in Chazal), that Achashverosh [Xerxes] succeeded Darius. Thus the story of the Megilla takes place some forty years after the Second Temple was built, after Chagai & Zecharia's plea to return and fulfill the potential of the Temple.

Achashverosh reigned after Yirhimyahu's prophecy of seventy years of exile had been completed. However, as mentioned in Ezra/Nechemiah, only about forty thousand Jews returned and the majority stayed in Bavel. Because they did not take heed to Zechariah's message, the later generations were found scattered all over the Persian Empire in the Megillah story. The story is written as a "satire" that shows how the Jews of Persian had replaced the Temple with Shushan. Some of the points that R. Leibtag musters to support this theme:

- the "ish yehudi" should have been in the "bira" in Yerushalayim, making God's Name known to other nations; instead, the Megilla opens as an ish yehudi in the bira of Achashverosh in Shushan, ironically with the name of a foreign god (Mordechai=Marduk).

- Vashti refuses to appear before the King who therefore becomes angry; similarly the Jewish people did not respond to its divine call and so God becomes angry (the Jewish nation is often compared to God's wife)

- the Jews replace the bet ha-mikdash with the palace of Achashverosh. Examples:

the word bira is used to describe Shushan. The only other time in Tanach where this word is mentioned, bira describes specifically the bet ha-mikdash (Divrei Hayamim).
the Jews at the party are using the vessels of the Temple according to Chazal.
the gemara (Megilla 12a) claims that Achashverosh donned the garments of the kohen gadol at his party.
entry to the inner chamber of the king's palace is forbidden under threat of death; this parallels the Holy of Holies in the mikdash (Purim / kippurim).
the 'waiting area' outside the inner chamber is called the chatzer ha-chitzona where those close to the King - like Haman himself - are allowed to enter freely; this parallels the kodesh where kohanim are permitted to enter.
in front of the palace is gate of the palace where people like Mordechai are permitted to stand; this parallels the azara in the Temple.

- the 6th month party followed by a 7-day celebration parallels the six months that it took to build the mishkan (from Yom Kippur till Rosh Chodesh Nissan) followed by the seven-day milu'im ceremony

- Haman's petition to Achashverosh to destroy Am Yisrael echoes God's threat in Shirat Ha'azinu to destroy the Jewish people for not keeping His laws

- Israel's salvation from Haman's decree comes only after a three day fast during the holiday of Pesach, a holiday that represents freedom from subjugation to a foreign nation

- special mitzvot are instituted to respond to Zecharya's messages of helping the needy (matanot le'evyonim) and acting properly towards one's neighbors (mishloach manot).

R. Leibtag then shows a connection between Yirmiyahu's prophecy of seventy years and the 70 days between the sending of the original decree calling for the destruction of the Jews and the one calling for its repeal. "During these seventy days, the Jews throughout the Persian empire thought their doom inevitable, an ironic reminder that they had not heeded Yirmiyahu's prophecy of what he expected from Bnei Yisrael once the seventy years had expired."

I encourage you to read the entire shiur as R. Leibtag develops these ideas in much greater detail.

For me, one of the most interesting parts of the shiur is this parenthetical statement: "Before we continue, it is important to clarify a problematic issue. We are about to relate many elements in the story of the Megilla to a satiric commentary on Persian Jewry. This does not mean that these events did not actually occur. The story of the Megilla is true and based on historic facts. However, its prophetic message is conveyed through the use of literary tools, such as satire and irony."

I don't believe that R. Leibtag can muster any evidence whatsoever for his statement that the story "is true and based on historic facts" other than the oft-used claim of last resort - "we have a mesorah!" But his compelling analysis does give us a greater understanding for why this inspiring, yet largely fictional, story was written.

David Forhman on Megillat Esther - Two Thumbs UP

2009-03-06T00:04:00.003-05:00

No need to reiterate my skepticism related to the historicity of the Purim story; readers are referred to the posts 10000 Talents of Silver and
The Ahistorical Nature of Megillat Esther. These touch on only a few of the many problems with the accuracy of such a story; the interested reader is referred to the considerable body of scholarly literature available on both the web and in print (one of my favorites is Michael V. Fox's Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther.)

But historical skepticism doesn't imply that there is no value to the telling of the story. Nor does it matter whether its multi-layered intricacy was intentional or primarily the product of later interpreters. The author(s) of Megillat Esther has (have) woven together a fascinating saga with a timeless message for the Jewish people.

I recently listened to a wonderful lecture by Rabbi David Forhman available on YUTorah: The Queen You Thought You Knew: The Hidden Heroism of Esther. Forhman begins by elaborating nine bothersome problems regarding the Megillah (it's too long - the climax seems to occur in chapter 7 yet it goes on for three more long chapters; Esther's puzzling strategy; emphasis on the grandeur of Mordechai; why does Haman point out that the Jews are scattered; why does the king want to display Vashti; etc.) and then weaves together a very compelling narrative that neatly answers all of the problems. (Much of it relies on the complex political interplay of the characters; see also the post My Last Words on Purim). The lecture is a pleasure to listen to and has my highest recommendation; if you have an hour to spare, please check it out before Purim - I guarantee that you will gain a new appreciation for the Megillah reading. Even if you are a skeptic like yours truly!

Online Source Critical Bible

2009-03-03T08:23:00.002-05:00

As mentioned on the blog Serving the Word, the first source-critical Bible is now online here.

It's a great idea, but I find the site mostly unusable. Not only is it unfriendly to the eyes, but all content is primarily in chapter-by-chapter downloadable .doc files accessed via a poorly designed, cumbersome javascript menu.

Hopefully this valuable resource will be improved upon in a later incarnation.

News Flash - Rabbis Rely on C-14 Dating!!

2009-03-01T09:30:00.002-05:00

This is pretty cool news - apparently a Torah scroll dating from the 13th-14th century has been discovered. But what is even more interesting is that the scribe who acquired it relied on Carbon-14 dating to determine its age!

Maybe radiocarbon dating only works for up to one-half life, which is also the age of the earth??

Kol Isha Apologetics

2009-02-28T20:49:00.003-05:00

[And Barzilai said to the King]: I am eighty years old this day, can I discern between good and bad? or can your servant taste what I eat and drink? or can I still listen to the voice of singers and songstresses? - 2 Samuel 19:36

Judaica Press commentary:

songstresses - While hearing a female singing voice is considered an impropriety (Talmud Berachot 24a), Targum Jonathan Ben Uziel seems to indicate that these female entertainers did not actually sing but only played musical instruments. See Talmud Succah 51a where it is indicated that the term "mishorer" applies not only to one who sings but also to one who plays a musical instrument. D. Cohen, in his "Notes on II Samuel" (Hadorom, Nisan 5732), suggests that perhaps these songstresses were pre-menstruate, when their voices were not yet considered sexually stimulating. See also Responsa of Seridei Eish, v. II. [I believe that R. Weinberg's responsa permitted mixed singing due to the inability of distinguishing male & female voices, and felt that leniencies should be made as a response to inroads made by the Reform movement. - FH]

For additional biblical references to women singing in the presence of men see here. Not surprisingly, exegetes universally rely on extreme stretch & kvetch apologetics rather than admit to the obvious - that the prohibition of kol isha was a much later rabbinic decree rather than a precept based on biblical sources.

A Shabbes Klopper Schmendrick Nudnik??

2009-02-24T08:19:00.004-05:00

Rat has learned that Yiddish is the best language in the world for hurling insults. Pastis' ideas usually don't last for many strips, but it starts here.

(Unfortunately, the image is embedded and may come out truncated with the blogger template I use. Click on the image or the link to the comics.com page.)

Don't Bug Me, Man

2009-02-23T19:31:00.003-05:00

I just received an email blurb touting PestCatch, a small pest detection kit apparently designed for the kosher consumer who wants to reduce their insect consumption.

I'm somewhat puzzled by the marketing of this product. On their benefits page (which looks like it was composed by someone with a poor command of English), they suggest that PestCatch is suitable for large agricultural operations ("check large quantities of produce", "spot-monitor crops to save money on unnecessary pesticide treatments"), but it is obvious that it is a modest product that is really designed for small-scale, home use.

Here's what you get for your 45 smackeroos:

One metal colander
One pot
Two filters
One 10x magnifying glass

Personally, I'm waiting for a higher end model to be made available. One that comes with a 1000x microscope. One can never be too careful with those little critters!

Heaven forfend that I be seen as belittling the need for the kosher consumer to check for insects. Although the average person consumes one to two pounds of flies, maggots and mites per year, most of it is presumably bits and pieces, which is much less of a concern from a kashrut perspective than eating a complete bug or insect. The OK veggie checking guide states that eating an insect violates seven Torah prohibitions (they neglect to mention that this is only for a whole, winged insect). But let's be reasonable, folks! If you are afraid that your broccoli may be infested, give it a good washing in a bowl, then pour the water through a paper towel or coffee filter. If you can't see bugs on the paper using the naked eye, enjoy your veggies! (And feel free to send me some of money that you saved by not buying PestCatch or a Star-K approved light table.)

One of the biggest scams related to this is the certification of bagged salad greens. It's amazing how many kosher consumers feel that they have to buy bagged salad with a hechsher! I have NEVER found a bug in non-certified bagged greens. This stuff is really washed well, and I challenge anyone to find a significant difference between certified and uncertified greens. Companies are always watching the bottom line, and they can't risk the consumer uproar that would result if they were to sell infested bags of salad. Besides, the kashrut agencies operate largely by chazakah with bagged salad, inspecting only samples. Ask yourself - what added benefit do these agencies provide (other than to their bottom line)?

On the other hand, I almost always find bugs on romaine, and therefore check it carefully. (As an aside, the most infested batch of romaine that I ever had was ironically from Alei Katif; supposedly it is insect free, having been grown in hermetically sealed greenhouses. I mistakenly thought that I'd be saving a ton of time inspecting the maror for the seder. The upside is that I now save money buying generic romaine.) Other fresh fruits & veggies that the OK says to check, but for which I have never, ever seen a bug (at least after a light rinsing) include celery, mushrooms (except when I gather them wild), blueberries, strawberries, sprouts, and most others.

Either my experience is anomalous or the kashrut organizations search out infested crops for their scare tactics - and the more folks they scare, the more demand there is for their hech$her.

Technical Interlude - Arguing from Ignorance

2009-02-22T09:12:00.003-05:00

Recently I had a discussion with a Chabadnik who parroted the Lubavitcher "young earth creationist" viewpoint (a literal 6000-year-old age of the universe). This concept is almost universally held by Chabad because it was the viewpoint of the last rebbe, M.M. Schneerson, and God forbid (or "Rebbe Forbid" for some of their more extreme adherents) that he was wrong in his views! This individual raised issues concerning the validity of Carbon-14 (aka C-14 or radiocarbon) dating, reflecting basic misunderstandings that are quite common among folks that have not only a meager scientific background but a propagandized one at that. A somewhat recent post on Lubabnomore featuring a video by Ronen Segal made similar claims. As I mentioned in my comment there, the video contains nothing new in the meager arsenal that OrthoFundies wield when they argue against scientific theories such as evolution or the age of the universe.

Although I find it quite irksome when assertions are made that reflect a gross misunderstanding of scientific principles, this post should be considered more of a public service announcement for those who are guilty of one of the more egregious errors, so that they won't embarrass themselves in the future. After all, in Jewish thought embarrassing someone is a very serious matter and is often said to be equivalent to murder. Therefore saving someone from embarrassing oneself is analogous to preventing someone from committing suicide!

I want to make a few points concerning the C-14 radiometric dating technique. The technical nitty-gritty is beyond the scope of this post, so refer to the Wiki article if you are so inclined.

Radiocarbon dating is only one of a number of dating techniques, each of which is useful for specific materials and/or environments. Most importantly, C-14 can only be used on organic materials (only living organisms take up C-14) which are younger than approximately 10 half-lives. Since the half-life of C-14 is about 5700 years (coincidentally very close to the age of the universe, heh heh), it can be used to date objects - at most - up to approximately 60,000 years old. The upper-age limits usually require special enrichment techniques and are therefore less accurate because problems such as sample contamination (always a concern) become increasingly problematic at such low levels of remaining C-14.

Somewhat unintuitively, very young samples are also not usually suitable for dating simply because so much fossil fuel carbon has been released into the atmosphere by humans over the last couple hundred years. Such carbon is very old and thus has negligible C-14, so the initial C-14/C-12 ratio (the critical factor in dating) taken up by organisms is too low to provide meaningful decay data.

Finally, note that radiometric dates are always given as "plus or minus" dates, reflecting the level of certainty of the measurement (unless otherwise stated, usually a 68% confidence level is given, i.e., one standard deviation.)

So, Chabadniks, Dovid Gottlieb-ists, and other young earth creationists, to avoid peoples' BS meters from going off the scale, please do not:

use the terms "age-of-the-earth" and C-14 in the same sentence or talk about using C-14 to date "rocks"
assert that C-14 dating of dinosaur bones proves that dinosaurs and man were contemporaneous (refer to The Great Dinosaur Mystery) - scientists simply do not use C-14 for determining the age of dinosaurs.
point out anomalous dating determinations for very young specimens in an attempt to discredit the validity of C-14 dating
suggest that dating uncertainties demonstrates a flaw in the technique itself

Somewhat more sophisticated fundies (that is, they have memorized more sophisticated sounding talking points) may point to other types of anomalous readings or discarded data, or claim circular reasoning in the dating of samples, or assert that C-14 calibrations (adjusting the original C14/C12 ratio) are nothing more than "fudge factors" to arrive at a desired date. Suffice it to say that scientists are well aware of when it is appropriate to use radiocarbon dating and the statistical models are well-established. Nor are calibrations "fudge factors"; on the contrary, they strengthen the model by using independent dating methods "such as examination of tree growth rings (dendrochronology), deep ocean sediment cores, lake sediment varves, coral samples, and speleothems (cave deposits)."

Yes, that last sentence was a direct wiki quote, and no, that is not the limit of my knowledge in the area. Although it has admittedly been many years, I have grad-school level experience in the field.

RIP Baron Lister

2009-02-10T08:11:00.004-05:00

For three transgressions do women die in childbirth: because they were not careful to observe the laws of family purity, [separating] challah, and of lighting the [Shabbat] lamp. (Mishnah Shabbat 2:6)

Because the claims of this mishnah are outlandish to the modern thinker/heretic, contemporary commentators often feel the need to see it as a metaphor (see here for one example.) However it is clear from the Gemara (Shabbat 31b-32a) and classical commentators that this mishnah was meant literally. The ArtScroll siddur summarizes the reason: "These three mitzvot are assigned to women, therefore they bear great responsibility for neglecting them" and that "punishments are most likely in time of danger."

Wikipedia states that "The historical level of maternal deaths is probably around 1 in 100 births. Mortality rates reached horrible proportions in maternity institutions in the 1800s, sometimes climbing to 40 percent of birthgiving women. At the beginning of the 1900s, maternal death rates were around 1 in 100 for live births. The number today in the United States is 11 in 100,000, a decline by orders of magnitude."

Although we don't have reliable records prior to the mid-1800s, the death rate for women giving birth plummeted worldwide in the late 1930s. It is reasonable to presume that this also includes the death rate among Jewish women. We can also state with certainty there was no concomitant radical increase in the observance of taharat hamishpacha (laws of family purity) during this time; indeed, the great increase in numbers of secular and non-Orthodox Jews resulted in a corresponding decrease in such observance.

Today, February 10th, is the yahrzeit of Joseph Lister, the First Baron Lister (d. 1912), an English surgeon who promoted the idea of sterile surgery, using carbolic acid to sterilize surgical instruments, dressings and to clean wounds. He required that all surgeons wear clean gloves and insisted that they wash their hands before and after operations. Some consider Lister "the father of modern antisepsis." Although Ignaz Semmelweis is sometimes credited as having introduced handwashing in obstetrics, and indeed by this technique drastically reduced puerperal fever some 20 years earlier than Lister, his attempts to publicize his well-documented findings fell on deaf ears within the medical community.

OrthoFundies can always fall back on "nishtaneh hateva", that nature has changed and we are no longer "privileged" to be on the spiritual level where our physical health is directly connected to our alacrity in performing mitzvot (this party line is almost universally claimed as the reason why we no longer have "tzaraas", the mystery malady often translated as leprosy). The rest of us can give thanks to folks like Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis.

Modern Biblical Scholarship - Two Warnings

2009-02-04T08:36:00.005-05:00

"Does Exodus VI, 3, Support the Higher Critical Theory?" So asks Rabbi J.H. Hertz in the Hertz Pentatuech (Additional Notes section of Exodus), written in 1936. Of course, the question is rhetorical, for his purpose is to debunk such a notion, but note how he starts off the essay: "This query, as well as the answer to it, may have little meaning and no interest to the general reader. In that case, he will be well advised to skip the appropriate sections."

Translation: If you study the Higher Critical Theory in depth, you may find my answers unsatisfactory.

Fast forward 70 years to James Kugel, who writes in his introduction to How to Read the Bible (p. xiv): "WARNING: ... there is one group of readers who must be cautioned against its contents. Precisely because this book deals with modern biblical scholarship, many of the things it discusses contradict the accepted teachings of Judaism and Christianity and may thus be disturbing to people of traditional faith... It is up to them to decide whether or not to continue."

Translation: If you study modern biblical scholarship, you'll end up (like me) rejecting fundamental tenets of your faith.

In both cases: I don't want to be responsible for your kefirah.

A Disproportionate Response

2009-02-01T20:36:00.003-05:00

Exodus 7:21: And the fish that were in the river died; and the river became foul, and the Egyptians could not drink water from the river; and the blood was throughout ALL the land of Egypt.

Exodus 8:13: ...and Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth, and there were gnats upon man, and upon beast; all the dust of the earth became gnats throughout ALL the land of Egypt.

Exodus 8:20: ...and in ALL the land of Egypt the land was ruined by reason of the swarms of flies.

Exodus 9:6: And the LORD did that thing on the morrow, and ALL the cattle of Egypt died; but of the cattle of the children of Israel died not one.

Exodus 9:6: And it shall become small dust over all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man and upon beast, throughout ALL the land of Egypt.

Exodus 9:25: And the hail smote throughout ALL the land of Egypt all that was in the field, both man and beast; and the hail smote every herb of the field, and broke every tree of the field.

Exodus 10:14: And the locusts went up over ALL the land of Egypt, and rested in ALL the borders of Egypt

Exodus 10:22: And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven; and there was a thick darkness in ALL the land of Egypt three days

Exodus 12:29: And it came to pass at midnight, that the LORD smote ALL the firstborn in the land of Egypt

Let's consider the geography of Egypt. Goshen is in the the northeast section of Egypt. All of the Jews are concentrated there. The central government of the 19th Dynasty (roughly contemporaneous with the Exodus story) is in Avaris & Pi-Ramesse just to the east of Goshen. Close by is another major population center, Tanis, and a bit farther are the cities of Heliopolis and Giza (site of the Great Pyramid & the Sphinx.) As one travels south into Upper Egypt, major population centers include Memphis (home to Elvis), Amarna, Abydos, and Elephantine, and finally Abu Simbel, located more than 600 km from Pi-Ramesse (upstream) via the Nile, or about 500 km as the crow flies. Some maximum traveling comparison times estimated by Eerdman's Dictionary of the Bible: armies 24 km/day; foot journey - 32 km/day; horseback 40-50 km/day; chariot 72 km/day; couriers 95 km/day.

Now it is easy to justify a massive conflagration against the people in Lower Egypt, since the oppression of the Jewish people would have required the cooperation of a multitude of Egyptians there. But does anyone really believe that the population centers of the more southern cities had any clue as to what was going on in the north? They likely had no clue as to the situation with the Jews in Goshen, and certainly had no part in their subjugation. It was a long and arduous journey to the north and they probably had only sporadic news reports about the construction of various government projects. Of course it was taken for granted that a slave labor force would be employed, that was typical in the Ancient Near East . (Myth quashing digression: the great pyramids were built 1000 years earlier in the 4th Dynasty, approximately 2500 BCE, and slave labor was NOT used.) Let's face it, most of the population consisted of poor farmers eking out a living. There is no way that they could have been complicit in the brutality towards the Jews of Goshen, yet God punishes them as harshly as the northerners!

Note in particular the "advanced warning" that Moses gives the Egyptians in the plague of hail. Exodus 9:18 ff: "Behold, tomorrow about this time I will cause it to rain a very grievous hail, such as hath not been in Egypt since the day it was founded even until now. Now therefore send, hasten in thy cattle and all that thou hast in the field; for every man and beast that shall be found in the field, and shall not be brought home, the hail shall come down upon them, and they shall die.' He that feared the word of the LORD among the servants of Pharaoh made his servants and his cattle flee into the houses; and he that regarded not the word of the LORD left his servants and his cattle in the field." It's obvious that only those able to take heed of the warning were so forewarned (the servants of Pharaoh). There is no suggestion that all of the people of Egypt were warned, and yet the hail devastated ALL of Egypt!

Of course, this would not be first nor last time that God was the architect of a disproportionate response according to a literal reading of the Torah. But, just as the annihilation of the Canaanite people never really occurred, I would like to think that these plagues were very localized and did not affect the entire land of Egypt as the Torah states. (Even a naturalistic explanation of the plagues - which I am quite fond of - would suggest this.) What we have here is hyperbole, folks, and the Torah is chock full of this literary technique. Get used to it.

Chazal, Galen and Nishtaneh haTeva

2009-01-28T17:01:00.006-05:00

The concept of nishtaneh hatevah - that the nature of physical reality has changed (see Tosafot, Moed Katan 11a) - is commonly proposed by the most extreme OrthoFundies as a last resort when they cannot reconcile the current state of scientific knowledge with statements of chazal. This idea can encompass the range of everything from a relatively reasonable assertion (although still without any scientific evidence) such as a purely morphological change (cannot jive the shiur of a k'beitzah or a k'zayit with the size of an egg or olive? The size of eggs and olives have gotten (much) smaller in the last 2000 years!) to the wackiest claims of relating to astronomical phenomena (geocentrism, spheres around the earth). Lice reproduce via spontaneous generation (so that we can kill them on Shabbat)? Well they must have done so 1500 years ago when the Talmud was written down! A seven month old fetus is more viable than an eighth month fetus? Eating fish and meat together are a danger? Can't rely on the medical cures of the Talmud any longer? Nishtaneh hatevah.

But my purpose here is not to beat a dead horse. You've seen many postings over the years discussing the absurdity of such a notion, and are well aware that Rabbi Natan Slifkin's books were banned by some gedolim - in part - for suggesting that chazal relied on the science of the time and were thus often wrong in their beliefs regarding the nature of physical reality, a notion anathema to some folks.

I recently came across a fascinating parallel idea taken from the annals of the history of medicine, as described in Bill Schutt's book, Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures. (Warning: don't read if the nitty gritty details about bed bugs creep you out!)

The medical theories of Roman physician, Galen of Pergamum (CE 129 – 200, contemporaneous with Rabbi Yehudah haNasi, the redactor of the Mishnah) dominated Western medical science for more than 1300 years. Although he proved that “blood, not pneuma (an airlike spiritual essence dreamed up by the ancient Greeks), traveled through arteries”, he also “had no real concept of blood circulation. He believed that blood ebbed and flowed like the tides, with venous blood originating from and returning to the liver… Galen's deeply flawed concepts of human anatomy and physiology would have a serious and long-lasting effect on the field of medicine— especially with regard to the circulatory system. As previously mentioned, Galen's overarching ideas on the human body were generally extensions of those proposed by the ancient Greeks, and these mistake-laden views came to completely dominate the field of medicine. Not only did Galen's take on medicine and anatomy remain pervasive for fifteen hundred years, it remained unchallenged. According to Bill Hayes, the author of Five Quarts—A Personal and Natural History of Blood, "In the early Middle Ages, church leaders declared his work to have been divinely inspired and thus infallible." Rather than experimenting or dissecting specimens (and thereby bringing down upon themselves the serious and often deadly wrath of the church), the disciples of "Galen the Divine" simply deferred to their long-deceased master and his stance on any given medical topic. Anything else would have been blasphemous…”

“One of those responsible for attempting to revive experimental medicine was Andreas Vesalius. Born into a family of Belgian physicians, Vesalius received his doctorate in 1537 from the University of Padua, where he soon became the chair of surgery and anatomy… Rather than blindly accepting Galen's well-worn teachings, Vesalius took a new and dangerous approach. He employed dissection in his classroom and preached a hands-on approach to his students… The young anatomist not only studied their anatomy but also produced a set of remarkable and highly detailed anatomical diagrams, which were included in his seven-volume On the Fabric of the Human Body. It was his master-work and it hammered Galen's inaccurate and erroneous views on anatomy into the ground like so many tent pegs. Using cadavers, Vesalius disproved Galen's concept of invisible pores in the heart. He also demonstrated that the human heart had four chambers (not three) and that half of the body's major blood vessels did not originate in the liver (as described by Galen)...”

“Understandably, Vesalius (who was not yet thirty) upset many of the Galen faithful by dismantling so many of their master's long-held claims. One outraged Galenite went so far as to publish a paper in which he asserted that the work of Vesalius didn't prove Galen wrong, it simply indicated that the human body had changed since Galen's time.”

14. So Moses descended from the mountain to the people, and he prepared the people, and they washed their garments.		יד. וַיֵּרֶד מֹשֶׁה מִן הָהָר אֶל הָעָם וַיְקַדֵּשׁ אֶת הָעָם וַיְכַבְּסוּ שִׂמְלֹתָם:
15. He said to the people, "Be ready for three days; do not go near a woman."		טו. וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל הָעָם הֱיוּ נְכֹנִים לִשְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים אַל תִּגְּשׁוּ אֶל אִשָּׁה:
16. It came to pass on the third day when it was morning, that there were thunder claps and lightning flashes, and a thick cloud was upon the mountain, and a very powerful blast of a shofar, and the entire nation that was in the camp shuddered.		טז. וַיְהִי בַיּוֹם הַשְּׁלִישִׁי בִּהְיֹת הַבֹּקֶר וַיְהִי קֹלֹת וּבְרָקִים וְעָנָן כָּבֵד עַל הָהָר וְקֹל שֹׁפָר חָזָק מְאֹד וַיֶּחֱרַד כָּל הָעָם אֲשֶׁר בַּמַּחֲנֶה:
17. Moses brought the people out toward God from the camp, and they stood at the bottom of the mountain.		יז. וַיּוֹצֵא מֹשֶׁה אֶת הָעָם לִקְרַאת הָאֱ־לֹהִים מִן הַמַּחֲנֶה וַיִּתְיַצְּבוּ בְּתַחְתִּית הָהָר: