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11 Apr 2004 — The scary thing is, my wife and I can understand most of it

I have in my possession a remarkable book called The Kuntrus: A Yeshiva Bochur’s Handbook (by Rabbi Benzion Klatzko, Moznaim Publishing Corp., 1999). The book is remarkable not so much for its contents (it’s an advice book for yeshiva high-school students in the black-hat community), but because it provides me with a written corpus of Yeshivish, the Yiddish/Hebrew/English collision that is spoken in some parts of the frum world. You may have seen parodies like the Pledge of Allegiance in Yeshivish, but this is the genuine article:

We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have them. The mussar seforim say that they actually serve a very important purpose. If you didn’t feel low when thing[s] were going shvach, you wouldn’t experience the gevaldiga aliya necessary for true growth. It’s like a roller coaster. Sometimes you have to go downhill in order to speed back up to the top.

First things first. In order to get out of a shvacha tekufa, you have to realize that you are in one.

There are three ways of discovering this. One is by searching your soul to see if you are tzufrieden with yourself. If you don’t feel like you are making steady progress in ruchnious, you probably are in a shvacha tekufa. Meaning, if you feel in your heart that something is not right, it probably isn’t. Torah makes a mensch feel good about himself. (Even if other people tell you that you’re learning geshmak, don’t be fooled. You know yourself and what you are capable of, the best.)

The second way to tell is, even if you are not feeling down at the moment, if you remember yourself shteiging much more in the past, you probably are in a shvacha tekufa. The reason you don’t feel it is that, most likely, you’ve been shvach for a while already and you have grown numb to your matzav.

The third way of knowing, is by going over to someone whom you can trust, someone you can be very open with, and ask him to tell you what he notices about your davening and learning. Tell him not to worry about your feelings, to hit you between the eyes. He’ll probably tell you what you already know, but this confirmation will make it more l’maaseh. Of course you have to be willing to be mekabel.

As I mentioned before, sometimes a yeridah precedes a tremendous aliyah. As it happens, a chochom who understands this can use it as a powerful weapon against the Yetzer Horoh. Feeling low, goofa, can spur on the chizuk that you seek. It will help you be machlit to become even better than you were before the shvacha tekufa began. You can then be mekabel new things to help you shteig. And the bren that you feel when your aliyah begins to take hold, will life you to all-time heights. Soon the Yetzer Horoh will have charotah that he ever started up with you! I think you all know the feeling I’m talking about.

Words that we all can live by….

09 Apr 2004 — An announcement you don’t hear over the PA every day, and really would rather never hear at all

“If anyone has an epi pen, would you please bring it to the reception desk.”

I was afraid to ask.

08 Apr 2004 — The mighty hand, the great hand, and the little finger

The Haggadah contains this well-known paragraph:

Rabbi Yose the Galilean said: How do we know that the Egyptians … were struck by fifty plagues at the sea? In Egypt, this is what it says: “And the magicians said to Pharoah, ‘this is the finger of God’” (Exodus 8:15), and at the sea, this is what it says: “And Israel saw the great hand that God used against Egypt, and the nation was in awe of the Eternal, and they believed in the Eternal and in his servant Moses” (Exodus 14:31).

When we were reading that on Tuesday night, one of our Seder guests said, hey, wait a second! A few paragraphs back, another plague was compared to a hand, not a finger:

With a mighty hand: This refers to the plague. As Scripture says: Behold, the hand of the Eternal will be against the flocks that are in the fields, against the horses, the donkeys, the camels, the cattle and the sheep, a very heavy plague.

(OK, all together now: “Dang, I’ve been reading the Haggadah for all these years, and I never noticed that! I’ve got to switch to grape juice for the first cup.”)

Fortunately for us, the Ritva asked the same question, answering it thusly:

…[T]he written verses here are only a support, and the Kabbalah is the fundamental thing. And it is known that “His burning anger” is nothing but the little finger of the hand, and this is also the strong hand, but “the great hand” has five of the small fingers, and this is a mystery.

Our guest believed that the Ritva is alluding to a statement in the Mechilta, that at the crossing of the Red Sea, even the Jewish serving women saw a greater revelation of God’s presence than Ezekiel saw in his prophecy.

08 Apr 2004 — Otherwise, it would be a very very long seven days

At the end of last week’s parshah, Moses tells Aaron and his sons “you shall stay at the opening of the Tent of Meeting, day and night, for seven days” (Leviticus 5:35). On reading that, my wife asked: so if they were eating all of those sacrifices as part of the inauguration service, and they had to stay in front of the tent for a week, how did they go to the bathroom?

Fortunately for us, Ibn Ezra asked the same question (s.v. 5:33), answering it thusly:

There are those who say that they did not leave for seven days, and they attended to their bodily functions at night. But the proper reading, in my opinion, is that they went out at whatever they needed, day and night. A great scholar said that they dug a latrine in the courtyard of the Tent of Meeting, but this is distant [this reading of the text is far from reasonable, or this latrine would have to be far from the tent? —sethg]. Scripture says, “The children of Israel wept for Moses [after his death] for thirty days” (Deuteronomy 34:8), as if there were no minute in which they were not crying [which is obviously not the case], but Scripture [in the parsha before us] says that they were staying at the opening of the Tent of Meeting day and night, meaning that they did not become preoccupied with anything, and they did not go to another place. Likewise “he shall not leave the Temple” (Leviticus 21:12), as I shall explain [in my commentary there].

05 Apr 2004 — Legal notice

All leavened products and all leavening agents which I have in my possession,

• whether I know about them or not,
• whether I have seen them or not,
• and whether I have annulled them or not,

are hereby annulled and placed in the public domain, like the dust of the earth.

01 Apr 2004 — Bush to privatize national debt

WASHINGTON, April 1 (AFP)—President Bush unveiled a plan today to eliminate the entire national debt by distributing it to the American public.

In a Rose Garden speech this afternoon, he explained: “When I ran for President four years ago, I told the American people, you deserve a tax cut, because it’s your money, not the government’s money. Well, the same thing is true for the national debt. The debt belongs to you, not some bureaucrat in Washington, and you deserve control over how it gets paid back.”

Under the plan, everyone who loaned money to the United States would have their debt transferred from the government to a randomly chosen private citizen. Since the current national debt is slightly over four trillion dollars, and the US population is about 300 million, every American will be responsible for paying back about $14,000, and the federal government itself will be debt-free.

When asked about people who can’t afford to make payments on a $14,000 debt, the President said, “That’s why it’s so important for Congress to authorize another round of tax cuts.”

see also Bush’s earlier plan to outsource the debt

29 Mar 2004 — Shorter Thomas Friedman II

Until the facts correspond with my imagination, I don’t need to pay attention to the facts.

original

28 Mar 2004 — Penitence 101

This is quite a week for teshuvah. On Wednesday, Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s former counterterrorism coordinator, shocked the audience at the 9/11 commission hearings by, of all things, apologizing:

[Y]our government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter because we failed.

And for that failure, I would ask — once all the facts are out — for your understanding and for your forgiveness.

In today’s parsha, we read the laws (Leviticus 4–5) for the various kinds of offerings that people bring for expiation of various kinds of sin. Isaiah, in this week’s haftorah, continues on this theme: “I have erased your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like a mist; return to Me, because I have redeemed you” (Isaiah 44:22).

And finally, on Wednesday night, it will be the 10th day of Nissan — that is, exactly six months between the last Yom Kippur and the next.

In the rules for sin-offerings, a pattern stands out. For almost every one of these offerings, the text explicitly says that the sacrifice is brought when the sinner finds out about the sin. Knowledge of what you did wrong, not merely a vague suspicion that you are falling short of the mark, is an essential part of the process for teshuvah.

This rule contrasts with Job’s practice of bringing sacrifices on his sons’ behalf, saying “perhaps they have sinned, and cursed God in their thoughts” (Job 1:5). There’s no indication there that his sons believed themselves to be sinning, or that Job did anything to encourage them to be more careful. He acts like a parent making the minimum monthly payment on a son’s credit card without ever looking at the bill. Repentance, however, is not a bill that we owe God; it’s a process of self-improvement that we owe to ourselves. Job’s attitude is not far removed from Paul of Tarsus, one of the founders of Christian doctrine, who claimed that it’s impossible to fulfill halakha, and therefore we need the alleged sacrifice of Jesus to substitute for even attempting to observe the law. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

In modern times, we see a new way to evade the obligation to know our own sins: the political non-apology of “I’m sorry if I have offended anybody.” When a politician says this, it’s easy to translate: “I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong, or at least I’m not going to admit any guilt in a way that would make my lawyer’s job harder, but I regret that certain hypersensitive people have made a big deal about my behavior.” But some Jews make a similar error when they approach their neighbors in the days leading to Yom Kippur and say, “Please forgive me for anything I may have done to you last year.” OK, if you want to give blanket forgiveness to everyone around you, good for you. But asking forgiveness in this way puts the person you ask in a difficult position. If you’ve done this in the past, you have six months to come up with a better strategy.

25 Mar 2004 — What is “an integral part of the operating system?”

Kevin Drum, commenting on Brad deLong’s lament for the days of browser competition, asks the legal question that is central to all the hand-wringing about Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” strategy:

And yet … there’s a critical piece that’s missing here. It’s an argument Microsoft makes all the time, but that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong (although it’s surely tempting to think so): should judges be the ones to decide which components should be core pieces of an operating system and which ones shouldn’t?

There’s a minimalist view that an operating system should basically serve up files and not do much of anything else. Virtually no one holds that view anymore, though, and modern operating systems all include sophisticated UIs, loads of network functionality, drivers for a vast array of devices, email, backup utilities, etc. etc. etc. The list grows at a dizzying rate.

So: is it reasonable for a web browser to be a core part of an operating system? How about a media player? Both, after all, can be thought of merely as ways of controlling and viewing files, albeit rather sophisticated files served up via the internet.

I don’t really have a good answer for this, but it’s definitely a question worth taking seriously. Regulating general business practices (bundling, for example) is one thing, but directly regulating what can and cannot be part of an operating system is quite another. It’s a real headscratcher.

Mr. Drum, and anyone else wondering about this question, should read Professor Lee A. Hollar’s amicus brief in US v. Microsoft. A judge who is unfamiliar with how modern operating systems work might have a hard time figuring out when a combination of two programs really does give consumers a benefit that they wouldn’t get if the programs were sold separately, and when the antitrust defendant is just blowing smoke. (“See, if you delete this file, the whole system stops working. That proves that the browser is an integral part of the operating system. Can we all go home now?”) Hollar’s brief gives both the technical information and a proposed fact-finding procedure to help a court resolve this kind of question.

25 Mar 2004 — Shorter Thomas Friedman

Sometimes terrorists set off bombs before elections because they want the government to be more right-wing. Sometimes terrorists set off bombs before elections because they want the government to be more left-wing. In either case, the government should do the exact opposite of what the terrorists want.

original

24 Mar 2004 — New and improved link list, in tasty HTML and RSS flavors

I’ve set up an account with del.icio.us, a “social bookmarks manager,” and set up the blog to include my most recent del.icio.us postings in the upper right. When I have enough of those, I’ll comment out the code for my old sideblog.

The good part of this service: del.icio.us generates an RSS feed for my list-o’-links, so I don’t have to hack the sideblog module to add that feature. The bad part: there’s no support for a “via” link to give credit to someone else for finding a page, and the fellow running the site seems philosophically opposed to adding that feature. But until I write my own PipeDreamBlog software to include every feature I think is important for a weblog to have, this should serve me nicely.

If you have your own del.icio.us account, or are inspired to create one (it’s free!), please let me know about it, so I can add its feed to my own aggregator.

23 Mar 2004 — Visualizing the Mishkan

If you can read the engineering instructions in Exodus 25–31, as well as the descriptions of how the Mishkan was constructed in Exodus 36–38, without your eyes glazing over, you are a far, far better person than I am. Fortunately, almost everyone who publishes a translation of the Chumash takes pity on their readers, and includes some helpful diagrams to show (one or more interpretations of) how these things looked when they were built. There’s even a coffee-table book, whose title escapes me now, that has photographs of a scale model.

One thing that isn’t captured in any of the diagrams I’ve seen, however, is the light. Neither the Mishkan (a.k.a. the “Tabernacle”) nor the courtyard around it had any windows. The Mishkan had two layers of fabric covering its roof and three walls, and some of that fabric draped over the east wall. Inside the Mishkan, there was the Menorah and the incense altar. The courtyard surrounding the Mishkan had no roof and was surrounded by fabric walls, 50% higher than the walls of the Mishkan itself. The sacrificial altar is in front of the entrance to the Mishkan.

So when the Cohanim were performing services inside the Mishkan during the daytime, how was the interior of the tent illuminated? Was there plenty of indirect sunlight through the doorway in the east? Or did the Cohanim eat their showbread in the shadows, lit by the flickering flames of the Menorah and the two altars?

The second option is, of course, more dramatic and provides better drash-fodder, but after a fifteenth look at some diagrams, I’m not sure if it’s correct.

16 Mar 2004 — Pitch for a new reality TV show

It’s like Joan of Arcadia meets Joe Millionaire. You’ve got twelve people at a retreat center, out in the woods somewhere. Six of them are looking for some kind of spiritual direction in their lives, but aren’t sure what religion to follow. Six of them are spiritual guides representing a variety of religions: one Catholic priest, one Baptist, one Chassidic rabbi, and so on.

But here’s the catch: three of the six spiritual guides are atheists pretending to be religious. At the end of the series, each one of our lost souls has to choose which religion, out of the six represented by the guides, he or she wants to investigate further. Every atheist whose pretended religion gets picked wins a million dollars for each soul he or she wins over.

15 Mar 2004 — Whose nation is this, anyway?

After the calf is made, God tells Moses “go down, because your nation that you brought up from the land of Egypt has become corrupt” (32:7). Moses, trying to convince God not to toast the entire nation, says, “Why should the Eternal’s anger be aroused against your nation that you brought out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm?” (32:11). After the most severe sinners in the calf incident are either executed by the Levites or fall victim to the plague, God tells Moses, “Go up from here, you and the nation that you brought up from the land of Egypt” (33:1).

Sociologists have pointed out that there’s no such thing as a completely free gift: when you give something to someone else, a relationship is created or maintained. This, I would venture to say, is why both God and Moses refer to the Israelites as “your nation.”

God tells Moses to “go down” because of the actions of “your nation that you brought up,” but then declares His intention to destroy the whole people and make a new nation from Moses alone. If Moses is going to be the only one left standing, why should he go anywhere? Why not stay on Mt. Sinai until the smoke clears? Because God is saying, in effect, “you contributed to making this mess, so you have to participate in cleaning it up.”

15 Mar 2004 — The bells, bells, bells, bells, bells

I generally take a positivist attitude to the mitzvot. For example, some people will look at the commandment against combining meat and milk, and adduce some Deep and Significant Reason for the commandment, e.g., it’s a symbol of the distinction between life and death. I say we can’t mix milk and meat because God prohibited it, and prohibiting things for reasons we don’t understand is part of God’s job description, His ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts, etc.

However, sometimes the Torah, in the course of issuing a specific commandment, provides a specific reason alongside it. For example, in the week-before-yesterday’s parsha, there are detailed descriptions for the vestments of the priests. In the middle of all these engineering instructions, one phrase stands out: after describing the bells to be tied to the hem of the High Priest’s robe, the text says (Exodus 28:35) “…and their sound will be heard when he goes into the sanctuary before the Eternal and when he goes out, so he will not die.”

There are a variety of interpretations of that “so he will not die” part, but since we read this parsha on the day before Purim, Nachmanides’ comment seems apropos: “…He said that He commanded regarding [the bells] so that they be heard in the Sanctuary, [and the High Priest] would enter before his Master as if with permission, because one who enters the courtyard of the king suddenly has committed a capital offense against protocol, as in the case of Achasuerus (Esther 4:11).”

Later posts / Earlier posts