Shabbos (11a) And Rava bar Meḥasseya said that Rav Ḥama bar Gurya said that Rav said: Even if all the seas would be ink, and the reeds that grow near swamps would be quills, and the heavens would be parchment upon which the words would be written, and all the people would be scribes; all of these are insufficient to write the unquantifiable space of governmental authority, i.e., all the considerations with which a government must concern itself and deal. Rav Mesharshiya said: What is the verse that alludes to this? “The Heavens on High and the land to the depth and the heart of kings are unsearchable” (Proverbs 25:3).
Thursday, November 12, 2026
Servitude
Shabbos (11a) And Rava bar Meḥasseya said that Rav Ḥama bar Gurya said that Rav said: It is preferable to be under the yoke of Ishmael and not under the yoke of a stranger, the Romans; under a stranger and not under a Ḥabar, a Persian Zoroastrian fire priest; under a Ḥabar and not under a Torah scholar, as if one offends a Torah scholar who is greater than he, the scholar will be exacting with him and he will be punished at the hand of Heaven; under a Torah scholar and not under an orphan or a widow, as they are easily insulted and God promised to hear their cries and punish those who offend them.
The man standing in the way of a government with the haredim isn't even in the Knesset
The ultra-Orthodox parties are gazing at Lieberman's oasis and wondering: Can it be? Is the most ruthless politician of them all really offering us everything we want? They would welcome a unity government, but their efforts are focused in the wrong direction, and an unexpected figure could yet dash their hopes.
The ultra-Orthodox political operatives want power. As in Likud, the higher up the party hierarchy you go, the less affection there is for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The rank and file, however, would find it hard to stomach a prolonged partnership with a Reform rabbi, Yair Golan, Bennett and the center-left in general.
The Madness of Therapy Culture
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-madness-of-therapy-culture/
Somewhere along the way, the boundaries between mental health and mental illness had become blurred until the former meant the latter.
Well, not everyone. Even as we are all being told we belong somewhere on the “mental health” spectrum, the World Health Organization is calling for an end to “coercive practices in mental health.” The UN Disability Committee is urging states to pursue “the abolition of substitute decision-making regimes” in favor of “supported” alternatives for those we once called “mentally ill,” but who are now variously “people with mental health conditions” or “psychosocial disabilities.” These are people whose suffering often expressly means they are unable to make decisions for themselves. The rest of us are presumed fragile, but the psychotic is increasingly presumed sovereign. As deBoer writes, it has become “our transcendent obligation to pretend that a man in the grip of psychosis [is] somehow still free.”
DeBoer and Liu both show that attempts to flatten out the experience of suffering, disability, and mental illness fail to accomplish their purported aims, such as “destigmatizing” and expanding access to care. This is because reality, whether in the form of the severity of impairment or of social class, eventually asserts itself, with the consequences falling on those least able to bear them.
Contradicting Trump, Netanyahu’s office says Israel will ‘gradually’ move off US military aid
In his second statement on the issue since US President Donald Trump said that American military aid to Israel would end this year, caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Wednesday said Jerusalem will “phase out” assistance from Washington.
“In 1996, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel would gradually phase out American economic assistance, which stood at $1.2 billion,” said his office. “He followed through on that commitment.”
“Thirty years later, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel’s economy is strong enough to gradually phase out American military assistance as well,” the premier’s office continued.
Wednesday, November 11, 2026
House Republicans Block Hegseth Impeachment, but Democrats Could Revive Effort in January
https://time.com/article/2026/11/10/hegseth-impeachment-procedural-vote-house/
The House voted 211-204 to defeat a resolution brought by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Republican who has repeatedly clashed with Trump, preventing lawmakers from considering eight articles of impeachment accusing Hegseth of violating the Constitution, conducting unauthorized military operations, and abusing the powers of his office.
With a Democratic majority in the House, impeachment articles would stand a substantially greater chance of passage. Unlike a Senate conviction, which requires support of a two-thirds majority, impeachment in the House requires only a simple majority. Democrats could therefore approve articles without Republican support if enough of their members backed the effort.
Such a vote would make Hegseth only the third Cabinet secretary in American history to be impeached, following William Belknap, President Ulysses S. Grant's secretary of war, in 1876, and Alejandro Mayorkas, President Joe Biden's homeland security secretary, in 2024. It would also raise the prospect of a Senate trial soon after Democrats take control of the chamber, forcing lawmakers in both parties to confront allegations of unlawful military conduct at a time when the Iran war has become a major political liability for the White House.
How Canada Inflicted Maximum Midterms Pain on Trump
Ottawa spent a decade trying to appease, match and outlast Trump. This year, it read the electoral map.
If any state was primed for a fight over tariffs, it was Michigan, home to one of the country’s most fiercely contested Senate races. In the summer of 2025, two entrepreneurial political consultants — one Democrat, one Republican — had joined forces to create the Michigan Trade Smart Alliance with the hopes of drafting the state’s top business groups. At the time, corporate leaders nationwide were wary of publicly challenging Trump’s policy out of a fear that they would draw his wrath. But as trade negotiators from the two countries remained deadlocked over an end to the trade war, the association’s membership began to balloon.
“The linkage between cost of living for Americans and tariffs on the world, and specifically on Canada, broke through,” Kirsten Hillman, who served as Canada’s ambassador to Washington from 2019 to early 2026, said two days after the election. “And that is something that we have been trying as a country, not just the government, but Canadian businesses, to really get into the U.S. discourse for two years.”
Learning Gemara in English: The Steinsaltz Talmud Translation
https://traditiononline.org/learning-gemara-in-english-the-steinsaltz-talmud-translation/
A careful examination of many sections of the volume leads this reviewer to the unavoidable conclusion that the beauty of the Steinsaltz Talmud is skin-deep. Where a straightforward translation is required, an excellent job is done. However, once it ventures into the deeper waters of clarifying the subtleties of Talmudic discourse and of its commentators, it runs out of strength and begins to flounder.
Specifically, the work is marred by an extraordinary number of inaccuracies stemming primarily from misreadings of the sources; it fails to explain those diffcult passages which the reader would expect it to explain; and it confuses him with notes which are often irrelevant, incomprehensible and contradictory. The major criticism so far registered against the Steinsaltz English Talmud has been that of Leon Wieseltier in The New York Times Book Review: it fails to transmit the true flavor of "learning" Gemara. This can be explained only by the fact that few if any of the reviewers to date have attempted to probe beneath the external aspects of the translation-the merit of translating the Talmud, the format and the graphics. They have not dealt with the actual "learning" of the Talmudic text, and it is in this cardinal aspect that this work is deficient. Furthermore, since two-thirds of the deficiencies cited in this article are to be found in the original Steinsaltz Talmud, i those dedicated to the integrity of the Talmudic process might well want to reexamine the Hebrew Steinsaltz with an eye towards its scholarly usefulness for the serious student.
Response of Steinsaltz
In "a careful examination of many sections" of "The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition," Rabbi Aharon Feldman (Tradition, 25:4, Summer 1991) calls the work "bold in its conception and ambitious in its scope"; "it meets well the formidable challenge" of translating and explaining theTalmud in a manner that is "highly readable, clear and most important, patient with the beginning student"; it is, moreover, a work in which "a great amount of resources, effort and publicity, as well as good writing," have been invested.However, having said this, Rabbi Feldman spends the rest of his reviewdetailing a total of fourteen passages to which he objects. Of these objections, two are well taken, one can charitably be explained as a lack of clarity on our part, one is an accreditation error, one is an instance where reasonable people may disagree, and nine are totally unfounded.
Tuesday, November 10, 2026
‘Israelis don’t understand how bad things are for Israel in the US’
https://www.ynetnews.com/jewish-world/article/ry00mepergl
For decades, American Jews largely saw no contradiction between their Jewish identity and their place in the United States. Today, however, growing political polarization, changing attitudes toward Israel and rising antisemitism are making that relationship increasingly complicated.
Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, co-president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, has lived in New York for the past 17 years with his wife, Stephanie Ives, and their three children. He says American Jewish identity developed differently from that of Jewish communities elsewhere in the Diaspora because Jews in the United States built an identity that did not force them to choose between being Jewish and being American.
“Over the past 100 years, American Jews built this identity around liberal democratic values,” Kurtzer told ynet. “That enabled us to integrate into American society and not be Jewish only at home, but also in the public sphere. Jews are partners in every area of American life. We developed a very strong Jewish identity that says I can be Jewish and also fully part of American society.”
For decades, support for Israel was broadly bipartisan. Kurtzer argues that this has changed dramatically as Israel has become part of the wider polarization dividing American politics, leaving Jewish Americans caught between parties that increasingly use Israel and antisemitism as weapons against one another.
Trump’s ‘Status Quo’ With Iran Is an Admission of Defeat
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-iran-status-quo-admission-defeat-12694638
Donald Trump said America was "keeping it the status quo" with Iran and declared the war with Tehran was "militarily, effectively over" in comments to the press on Monday.
If, by status quo, the president means the circumstances of the past few months, then he’d be referring to a Strait of Hormuz that remains heavily restricted, intermittent attacks on oil tankers, the indefinite presence of American aircraft carriers and warships in the Middle East, and a naval
America’s war aims in Iran have never exactly been crystal clear, but, by almost any measure, the status quo looks suspiciously like failure. If you could go back to February and tell U.S. lawmakers—or indeed any American—that this is where we’d be after eight months, would anyone have considered it a price worth paying?
Netanyahu: Israel will soon face pressure to accept nuclear Iran, must form unity gov't
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-914488
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in his address to the Knesset on Tuesday that Iran is working to renew its nuclear threat, and that "the only way to permanently remove this existential threat is through the downfall of the Ayatollah regime."
Netanyahu also warned that Israel will imminently face international pressure to accept Iran as a nuclear power and "to tolerate the terrifying regime seeking its destruction."
He also added that Israel can be expected to be pressured to "retreat from its monumental achievements and from the major progress made regarding security zones."
Deborah Lipstadt: Is Israel really the cause of surging antisemitism?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/deborah-lipstadt-is-israel-really-the-cause-of-surging-antisemitism/
In a no-holds-barred conversation, Lipstadt assesses the nature of contemporary Jew-hatred and weighs in on whether Israel’s actions indeed may be contributing to its rise.
We hear her thoughts on whether “anti-Zionism” is a new form of antisemitism or its own distinct hatred and what the proverbial Venn diagram looks like.
But to start with, we return to 1967, when university student Lipstadt was here in Jerusalem during the Six Day War and hear her firsthand account of life in the newly unified capital.
On Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: The controversy over his Talmud translation and books on Tanach
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/285242
In 1983, on the 7th of Iyar, the renowned Gaon Rav Moshe Feinstein zt”l gave a letter of approval, known as a haskama, to the Gemorah, naming Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. But, if one carefully looked at the text of Rav Feinstein’s letter, it seems possible that he did not review all aspects of the Steinsaltz Gemorah. Some of the explanations went against traditional understandings of the text in order to explain it. For example, the Talmud tells us that a woman cannot conceive immediately subsequent to the first instance of intimacy. Medical opinion today says otherwise and Rabbi Steinsaltz comes up with a psychological explanation which solves the problem. That is one example. There are many more.
In the haredi world, Rav Shach’s animadversions expressed in 1989,were concerned with maintaining a different type of order. He felt that Rabbi Steinsaltz’s writings represented a danger to the system of the traditional Lithuanian style Yeshivah, in general, and to the traditional method of learning – specifically. It all began with a book published by Rabbi Steinsaltz entitled “Dmuyot Min HaMikrah – Biblical Images” (1980),which Rabbi Steinsaltz had intended to use as a kiruv tool – to bring the masses of Israeli society back to a respect for and deeper understanding of the biblical personalities who appear in Tanach.
Around 78% of Britons view Israel as a serious threat to world peace, survey finds
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-914381
Around four in five Britons view Israel as a serious threat to world peace, according to a new survey by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), published last week.
A total of 78% of respondents said they view Israel as a serious threat, compared with 48% 20 years ago. The percentage has also increased a full 10% in the last year.
The number of respondents who said they view the US as a serious threat to world peace was similar to the number for Israel, at 74%. This had doubled in just two years, with the same question receiving 35% in 2024.
Monday, November 9, 2026
Jewish belonging should not require a police escort
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/435909
The November 8 “Boycott Ride" targeted six restaurants around Rittenhouse Square: Mac Mart, K’Far Cafe, Huda, Goldie, Dizengoff, and Schlesinger’s. The organizers insisted they opposed the owners’ support for Israel and rejected accusations of antisemitism. Their demand nevertheless made belonging in Philadelphia conditional on an acceptable position concerning the Jewish state.
Philadelphia illustrated a division they must face. While Democratic officeholders condemned the campaign, the local Democratic Socialists of America defended the boycott and accused officials of conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism.
For Jewish Americans, that argument has practical consequences. Can a restaurateur openly support Israel’s existence without facing demands that his business disappear? Must a Jewish shopkeeper submit to questioning about a foreign government before being accepted as a neighbor?
Ambassador to US suggests NY Times Gaza coverage preparing ‘next genocide’ of Jews
Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, on Sunday suggested The New York Times published a “blood libel” about IDF actions in Gaza “to prepare the next genocide” of Jews.
“There is no difference between what is being done to us today and what was done to our grandparents in the ghettos of Europe 800 years ago,” Leiter said.
Leiter made the comments at the closing ceremony of Chabad’s Kinus Hashluchim, the annual gathering of the Hasidic sect’s thousands of emissaries from around the world, in Edison, New Jersey.
The Unity of Science
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-unity/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Unity of Science
The topic of unity in the sciences can be explored through questions such as the following: Is unity a feature of reality or of our modes of cognition? Is there one privileged, most basic or fundamental concept or kind of thing and, if not, how are the different concepts or kinds of things in the universe related? Can the various natural sciences (e.g., physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology) be unified into a single overarching theory, and can theories within a single science (e.g., general relativity and quantum theory in physics, or models of evolution and development in biology) be unified? How are the so-called human sciences related to the natural ones? Are theories or models the relevant connected units? What other connected or connecting units are there? Does the unification of these parts of science involve only matters of fact or are matters of value involved as well? What about matters of method, material, institutional, ethical and other aspects of intellectual cooperation? Moreover, what kinds of unity, not just units, in the sciences are there? And is the relation of unification one of reduction, translation, explanation, logical inference, collaboration or something else? What roles can unification play in scientific practices, their development, application and evaluation? Are those expressions of more general cognitive activities? How are all these questions to be investigated? Is unification an aim of inquiry or a guiding idea at the service of ulterior aims? Is it a question for philosophy, e.g., for metaphysics or epistemology? If so, how can examining scientific practices help? Or is philosophy, rather, a resource for understanding science?
Over the last four decades much historical and philosophical scholarship has challenged the ideals of monism and reductionism and pursued a growing critical interest in pluralism and interdisciplinary collaboration (see below). Along the way, the distinction between the historical human sciences and ahistorical natural sciences has received much critical and productive attention. One outcome has been the application and development of concepts and accounts in philosophy of history in understanding different human and natural sciences as historical, with a special focus on the epistemic role of unifying narratives and standards and problems in disciplines such as archeology, geology, cosmology and paleontology (see, for instance, Morgan and Wise 2017; Currie 2019). Another outcome has been a renewed critique of the autonomy of the social sciences. One concern is, for instance, the raising social and economic value of the natural sciences and their influence on the models and methods of the social sciences; another is the influence on both of certain particular political and economic views. Other related concerns are the role of the social sciences in political life and the assumption that humans are unique and superior to animals and emerging technologies (see, for instance, van Bouwel 2009b; Kincaid and van Bouwel 2023).
At the end of the day, one should not lose sight of the larger context that sustains problems and projects in most disciplines and practices. We are as free to pursue them as Kant’s dove is free to fly, that is, not without the surrounding air resistance to flap its wings upon and against. Philosophy was once thought to stand for the systematic unity of the sciences. The foundational character of unity became the distinctive project of philosophy, in which conceptual unity played the role of the standard of intelligibility. In addition, the ideal of unity, frequently under the guise of harmony, has long been a standard of aesthetic virtue, although this image has been eloquently challenged by, for instance, John Bailey and Iris Murdoch (Bailey 1976; Murdoch 1992). Unities and unifications help us meet cognitive and practical demands upon our life as well as cultural demands upon our self-images that are both cosmic and earthly. It is not surprising that talk of the many meanings and levels of unity—the fundamental level, unification, system, organization, universality, simplicity, atomism, reduction, harmony, complexity or totality—can place an urgent grip on our intellectual imagination.
Torah Study must be According to the Individual
quote from "The Spiritual Revolution of Rav Kook" by Schwartz, Ari Ze'ev -
"Many people have left religion because in their learning and spiritual perfection, they betrayed their unique personalities. For example, a person may be naturally talented in matters of aggadah1 and be unsuited to constant immersion in matters of halachah.2 Yet because he does not recognize his unique talents, he occupies himself in matters of Gemara and its commentaries, since he sees that this is customary in the religious world today. But deep inside his soul he feels a hatred toward the material he is learning, since constant involvement in it does not suit his unique natural gifts. However, if he were to find the specific type of Torah that fits his unique talents and immerse himself in it, he would then immediately recognize that the nauseating feeling he experienced when involved in matters of halachah was not coming from any flaw in that holy and important type of learning. It was rather his soul expressing its desire to be absorbed in another type of Torah. This person would then stay truly faithful to the Torah and become an expert in the type of Torah that is unique to him. In fact, he would even be able to help those who are more talented in halachah by showing them the inner peace of aggadah, poetry, and emotions. Unfortunately, because this person does not recognize the true reason for his feelings of nausea toward halachah, he forcefully ignores his nature. And as soon as the path of a non-Torah way of life opens up to him, he breaks out and then hates and becomes an enemy of Torah and religion. He will go from one sin to another. It is from these types of people that haters of our people are created. They try to proclaim a new vision and blind the eyes of the world. There is a great diversity of wisdom that expands even greater than this. One may be strongly attracted to a certain secular wisdom. Such a person must also follow his unique talents, while setting aside fixed times for learning Torah. If he does this, then he will succeed in both, because “Torah together with the way of the world is beautiful” (Pirkei Avot 2:2). And the Gemara at the end of Yoma discusses how to find the right balance of priorities for such people. In general, this whole issue is dependent on each person’s unique soul. (KYK 1, Pinkas Acharon b’Boisk, 52)"
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