Advice & appeal for R' Tropper and his opponent

I wish to offer some gratuitious advice to both sides of what looks like an awesome battle of attrition with terrible waste of time, effort and opportunity for both sides. I speak as someone who admires both of you but at the same time has been viewed as an enemy by both of you. Thus I view myself as a neutral observer.

I wish to commend R' Tropper for the change of tone and/or commentators who are defending him. It certainly makes a much more positive and convincing impression than the previous.

As you are aware this blog is carefully monitored by both sides of the dispute. And thus you are able to get a feel for the arguments your opponent will likely use in court as well as a chance to test your own.

R' Tropper your previously posting was typified by arrogant rage i.e., you lost it. It clearly was to your detriment. Why you used that approach - despite having access to the top people in public relations is a real puzzle. Hopefully the current postive change will be permanent and we can respectfully talk and agree and disagree.

On the other hand, a word of free advice to the plaintiff. You are not doing yourself any good by your video's and photo spreads showing you associating with major Jewish icons and themes - while at the same time there is an equal number of video's and photo spreads showing what an outsider with money is capable of getting. You also severely damaged yourself by threatening to sue me in civil court for merely allowing discussion of the issues - despite the fact that the vast majority of posts were very positive. It wasn't consistent with the image of a sweet hearted do gooder that you have tried to cultivate. It was the steel fist without a velvet glove

You can't be an outsider and insider simultaneously. In sum your public relations department needs to be more reality oriented and be concerned with producing an authentic public image for you - instead of the caricature that they have succeeded.

Please remember what you acknowledged to me - that you have surrounded yourself with people whose main concern is to maintain influence over you and profit from you - not necessarily to do what is in your best interests.

What is occuring is that neither side has real supporters - the major concern of most is to watch the spectacle in the sense of Roman gladiators fighting each other to the death before a crowd of excited on lookers. It isn't too late to change the situation and to back off from confrontations in court - whether beis din or secular. Perhaps you can get a panel of arbitrators. There will be not be a clear winner in this dispute - but the Jewish people will clearly be losers. Instead of devoting both your enormous energies and talents to helping others - your energy is are being directed to destroy your hated opponent.

Schooling should not be started to soon

ספר החינוך מצוה תיט

מדיני המצוה מה שאמרו זכרונם לברכה [סוכה מ"ב ע"א], מאימתי מתחיל האב ללמד את בנו תורה, משיתחיל לדבר מלמדו תורה צוה לנו משה [דברים ל"ג, ד'], ופסוק ראשון מקריאת שמע שהוא שמע ישראל [שם ו', ד']. ואחר כך מלמדו מעט מעט מפסוקי התורה עד שיהא בן שש או בן שבע שמוליכו אצל מלמדי תינוקות. וראוי לכל בן דעת שיתן לבו שלא להכביד עול הילד בלימוד בעודנו רך האברים ורך הלבב, עד שיגדל ויתחזק כח לבו ותוקף אבריו, ועצמותיו ימלאו מוח, ויוכל לסבול יגיעת הלימוד ולא יקרנו חולי ההתעלפות בסיבת היגיעה רבה עליו, ואולם אחר התחזק כוחו ויאורו עיניו להבין לקול מוריו, אז ראוי וכשר הדבר ומחוייב להביא צוארו בעולה של תורה ולא ירפוהו ממנה אפילו כחוט השערה, ישקוהו תמיד מיין רקחה ויאכילוהו מדבשה.

Killing rapists to stop attack:R' Aviner

YNet

Fight off your attacker: Women attacked by rapists are permitted to kill them to ward off the attack, Beit El Chief Rabbi Shlomo Aviner ruled in a newsletter published Saturday.

“In either word or deed, fight him off. Yell out loud so that everyone can hear you. If he touches you, slap him. If he attempts to do worse, and there is no other choice, you can kill him…yes, kill him,” Rabbi Aviner wrote.

The rabbi also noted in his article that his advice falls well within the guidelines of Israeli law, which is also on his side. ”A young man broke into a woman’s apartment and wanted to have his way with her. She killed him and the court ruled that in this instance she had the right to use reasonable force in order to defend herself, and that her actions were justified.”

In an article entitled “Don’t Let Men Harass You” the Rabbi urges women to resist all forms of sexual harassment, either in word or deed, and advises women “to not allow men to treat them like an object for their own use and pleasure.” [...]

Rav Sternbuch warned against demonizing Hadassah

מכות ואלימות באמבולנס שפינה את הרב רוזנברגר

update

A billionaire's Sukkos celebrations

http://www.bhol.co.il/news_read.asp?id=12656&cat_id=1

Justice - Harvard Prof Michael Sandel #2

Abuse - Statuatory rape is taken more seriously

NYTimes

At the end of "Manhattan," the celebrated movie romance from 1979, a teenager played by Mariel Hemingway delivers some good news to the 42-year-old television writer, portrayed by Woody Allen, with whom she has had a long-running sexual affair.

"Guess what, I turned 18 the other day," said Ms. Hemingway, in what was framed as a poignant encounter. "I'm legal, but I'm still a kid."

That was then.

Roman Polanski's arrest on Sept. 26 to face a decades-old charge of having sex with a 13-year-old girl stirred global furor over both Mr. Polanski's original misdeed and the way the authorities have handled it — along with some sharp reminders that, when it comes to adult sex with the under age, things have changed.

Manners, mores and law enforcement have become far less forgiving of sex crimes involving minors in the 31 years since Mr. Polanski was charged with both rape and sodomy involving drugs. He fled rather than face what was to have been a 48-day sentence after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. [...]

Shabbos elevators: Rav Meir Triebitz's Teshuva

NYTimes

Tangible things occupy the days of most building managers in New York City. Hot water, floods, bugs, rent checks and so on.

But last week, newly added to the tenant issues facing building managers like Harold M. Jacob, who runs a co-op on the Lower East Side where Orthodox Jews inhabit a substantial portion of the 2,500 apartments, was this almost ontological question:

Does that elevator "know" how many people are on it?

The question is at the core of a ruling issued by a group of prominent rabbis in Israel on Sept. 29 that seems to ban the use of many so-called Shabbos elevators: elevators fixed to stop on every floor from Friday evening until Saturday evening so that observant Jews do not have to press any buttons.[...]

YNet discussion of the recent ruling YNet new developments

The issue of Shabbos elevators - after the acceptance of the view of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach as a tolerated leniency for many years - has recently been brought into crises by a ruling by leading chareidi rabbis saying that there is now no basis for being lenient. The following is a teshuva written by Rav Meir Triebitz which addresses their concerns. It has been carefully reviewed by Rav Moshe Sternbuch. Rav Sternbuch has personally sent it to those who recently prohibited the Shabbos elevators. This does not mean of course that Rav Sternbuch necessarily agrees with the conclusions but only that the teshuva is worthwhile considering.

Afikei Torah 5 R Triebetz Elevator

Astor's conviction: Deterrent to abuse of the elderly

NYTimes

During the long months of testimony in the Astor trial, as the courtroom emptied of spectators and the headlines shrunk, prosecutors and other professionals involved in elder abuse cases were still paying close attention. In fact, some were biting their fingernails, especially as the jury's deliberations grew heated and stretched to 12 days.

"I've been very worried about it," confessed Lori Stiegel, senior attorney at the American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging. If the prosecutors, including the head of the Manhattan District Attorney's pioneering elder abuse unit, had failed to win a conviction, she said, "it could have been perceived as reinforcing the notion that these cases are just too difficult to bring and that juries will have trouble understanding the issues."

Around the country, a growing number of district attorneys' offices — Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Brooklyn — have set up elder abuse units on the theory that specialization can help them uncover and fight these particularly thorny cases. (Manhattan's unit, dating to 1992, is among the oldest.)[...]

Jewish Billionaire sues Prominent US Rabbi

Arutz Sheva

(IsraelNN.com) Energy industrialist and billionaire Guma Aguiar has filed a suit in the Jerusalem Rabbinical Court against prominent U.S. Rabbi Leib Tropper claiming that he misallocated funds intended for institutions and poor people in Israel. Rabbi Tropper's American attorney, Glenn Waldman, told Israel National News that his client categorically denies the charges. [...]

R' Haskel Lookstein's critque of conversions

The Jewish Week - Interview

The Jewish Week - Corrections to interview

False sex-abuse charges dropped by judge

LoHud.com

NEW CITY — Prosecutors this morning dropped all charges against a Monsey man and a fired Ramapo police officer who had been accused of sexually abusing a Rockland woman.

Rockland prosecutor James Mellion told acting Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bartlett that the charges against former office Andrew Dale and Monsey resident Zalman Silber were being dropped "in the interest of justice."[...]

The Anxious Mind - innate temperament

NYTimes

Jerome Kagan's "Aha!" moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive.

No high-reactors among the first 18. They gazed calmly at things that were unfamiliar. But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty — new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells — and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new.

Baby 19 grew up true to her temperament. This past summer, Kagan showed me a video of her from 2004, when she was 15. We sat in a screening room in Harvard's William James Hall — a building named, coincidentally, for the 19th-century psychologist who described his own struggles with anxiety as "a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach ... a sense of the insecurity of life." Kagan is elfin and spry, balding and bespectacled. He neither looks nor acts his age, which is 80. He is one of the most influential developmental psychologists of the 20th century.[...]

Death & psychotherapy - Learning & teaching

NYTimes

Some years ago I was consulted by a psychologist, a man in his 60s who wanted help with relationships and in thinking about his life, which was threatened by heart disease. At the time I was in my 70s, and his condition had special resonance for me: my father had died of congestive heart failure, and I have feared I will die in the same way.

"Do I want to work with a man who may die, and who may be closer to death than I am?" I reflected. If we have a good relationship, I will have to experience grief. If I do not come to care about him, the therapy will not be helpful. On the other hand, I might not outlive him, and losing a therapist is painful. Should he be subjected to that loss too?

But I liked the new patient and thought that in his situation, I would want someone to have the courage to be with me. So we began meeting from time to time.[...]