Steven Pinker & Rebecca Goldstein: The long reach of reason

Lonna Kin Divorce: Unwilling to Allow His Wife a Divorce, He Marries Another

NY Times   The wedding was a modest affair, held in a reception hall overlooking an artificial lake tucked behind a suburban strip. But just minutes after it ended, the bride and groom hurriedly scurried past dozens of protesters here who were chanting “Bigamist!” and “Shame on you!” [...]

Meir Kin, the new husband, has been divorced for more than seven years, under California’s civil law. But he has refused to give his previous wife the document known as a “get,” as required by Orthodox Jewish law to end a marriage. In the eyes of religious authorities, the woman he married in 2000 is what is called an agunah — Hebrew for chained wife. Without the get, the woman, Lonna Kin, is forbidden under Jewish law to remarry. [...]

Ms. Kin, who runs a real estate company, and her supporters say that Mr. Kin, a physician assistant, is demanding $500,000 and full custody of their 12-year-old son in exchange for the divorce. And they cast doubt on whether he really has the support of 100 rabbis. Reached at his Las Vegas home on Thursday, as a photographer took pictures of him and his bride in the driveway, Mr. Kin declined to comment. [...]

Instead, Mr. Kin, who in recent years moved to Las Vegas, has repeatedly insisted that Ms. Kin agree to binding arbitration from one particular religious court based in Monsey that is controversial and has been widely denounced by rabbinical authorities in the United States and Israel. Several leading rabbis, including the chief rabbinical office of Israel, have said they would not accept a divorce document signed by this particular court. Mr. Kin has said that the head of the beit din, Rabbi Tzvi Dov Abraham of Monsey, granted him dispensation to marry again. [....]

Mr. Kin, according to several members of the small Las Vegas Orthodox community, has worshiped at two synagogues affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, which is known for welcoming a broad array of Jews. The rabbis at those synagogues do not count him toward a quorum needed for prayer because of the controversy over his divorce case, but they have declined to publicly rebuke him or force him out, according to Rabbi Shea Harlig, the head of Chabad of southern Nevada.[...]

New Drugs May Transform Down Syndrome

Scientific American   People born with Down syndrome have always been considered to be incurably developmentally delayed—until now. In the past few years a number of laboratories have uncovered critical drug targets within disabled chemical pathways in the brain that might be restored with medication. At least two clinical trials are currently studying the effects of such treatments on people with Down syndrome. Now geneticist Roger Reeves of Johns Hopkins University may have stumbled on another drug target—this one with the potential to correct the learning and memory deficits so central to the condition.[...]

Reeves's team injected newborn Down mice with a chemical that stimulates an important neurodevelopmental pathway that, among other things, orchestrates cerebellum growth. “We were not in fact surprised that we fixed the cerebellum. That was our working hypothesis,” Reeves says. Yet he had not anticipated that three months after treatment the mice with a restored cerebellum would be able to learn their way around a water maze—a function of learning and memory thought to be controlled by another part of the brain, the hippocampus. The researchers do not yet know whether they inadvertently repaired the hippocampus or whether the cerebellum might be responsible for more learning and memory functions than previously realized.

In fact, other investigational treatments for Down syndrome target the hippocampus—but none target this particular chemical pathway. Reeves's study, published recently in Science Translational Medicine, may point to a pharmaceutical intervention that could allow those with Down syndrome to live more independent lives. “The possibility of actually giving Down syndrome people the ability to improve learning and memory significantly—that's something I never thought I'd see in my entire career,” he says. “And it's now happening. The game has changed.

Schlesinger Twins: The Vienna community suffers from deafness and a stone heart

Help Beth writes

Over the past 3 years, the inboxes of the leaders of the Viennese Jewish community have been flooded with emails of requests and emotional pleas to intervene to help relieve the continued suffering of Samuel and Benjamin. And yet the so-called leaders continue to bury their heads and refuse to take responsibility for this tragedy happening on their doorsteps while the rest of the world looks on in horror and disbelief, desperately doing all they can to help.

With the writers’ permission to publish them, here are two of the most significant letters that fell on deaf ears:

===================================================

From: Jonathan Arkush
Date: Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 6:47 PM
Subject: Alexander custody decision
To: Beth Alexander; Rabbi Schlomo Hofmeister; Chief Rabbi Paul Eisenberg ; Raimund Fastenbauer; Ariel Muzicant; Oskar Deutsch
Cc: “‘President’ of British Board of Deputies“

 Dear Colleagues and Rabbonim,

I am deeply troubled by the judgment, having been given its key points by a German speaking relative who read the full decision.  While I am an English rather than an Austrian lawyer, I do not believe our family law in this area to be dissimilar.  I continue to be at a loss to understand why the Court did not take as its starting position that the custody of young children should be with their mother.

As I understand matters, the Court stated in the judgment that it disregarded all suggestions made by the father that the mother was suffering from any mental  illness or should be unfit in any other way.  The basis of the decision was simply that, after two years in the father’s custody, it was in their best interests that this continued.  This seems to me to be a very inadequate foundation for the decision that leaves these young children in the custody of the father, which in effect means child-minders for much of the day, and the mother with such restricted access.  The position is made worse by the father’s tendency to cancel access visits by the mother.

I hope that I have not misrepresented the Court’s decision, as I have not yet seen a full translation.

I would like to express on behalf of the British Jewish community deep disquiet and strong reservations about this latest decision.

May I ask my colleagues who lead the Jewish community of Austria to make any suggestions as to what might be done to bring this deeply regrettable state of affairs to a just conclusion?

I realise that the Court has made a decision, but is it too late even at this stage to persuade the father to agree to a community-supported mediation ?  I can assure you that we in England would do all in our power to assist the process if such mediation could be arranged.

With cordial regards

Jonathan Arkush Jonathan Arkush
Vice President
Board of Deputies of British Jews

 ========================================

 From: Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag
Sent: 10 June 2012 22:42
To: Chief Rabbi Eisenberg,Rabbi Josef Pardes, Chabad Rabbi Jacob Biderman
Cc: Mag Raimund Fastenbauer (Secretary General of Board of Jewish Community Vienna)
Subject: Beth nee Alexander

 בס’ד

נחום נתן גוטנטג

רב דק”ק ווייטפילד

Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag

Whitefield, Manchester
M45 7PD
UK

10^th June 2012
20^th Sivan 5772

Chief Rabbi Chaim Eisenberg
Rabbi Yosef Pardes
Chabad Rabbi Jacob Biderman

Vienna

Kvod Harabbonim hachashuvim shlita

Please pardon me for intervening like this from the outside, but as you know the case of Beth nee Alexander formerly of Manchester is causing anxiety.

From our perspective we can see a young lady living far away from her parents and family, having gone to get married in a foreign country and community, with that marriage broken down, now deprived of custody of and access to her children. She finds herself now set against a former spouse who has the advantage of local family support, natural community affinity, and knowledge of the civic law situation. Through the involvement of the civil authorities the mother has lost custody of her children and is now being deprived of access to them.

It would appear that justification is being made for this situation, based inter alia on some allegations that there is mental health problem with Beth or her family.

To an outsider these sound like biased accusations that would tend to get made in aggravated break down of a marriage. But they are simply not fair nor just. My wife taught Beth at Yavneh Girls High school in Manchester . She remembers her as a kindly, quiet and very fine student. Family Alexander in Manchester is a family with a good name for solidity and communal involvement. I believe that it is simply an unworthy slur for Beth and her family to be characterised in a manner that I understand that they are being portrayed, and most unfair. There are always two sides in any situation, and one would expect a kehilla and its leadership to ensure that reasonably fair play is being maintained. From what it appears in this situation, however, and for whatever reason, there is an unfairness and an injustice being perpetrated against Beth, a single woman in a foreign country, without proper support – pitted against a family, in a community with all the connections naturally available to them.

I believe that you as the rabbinic leadership of the Vienna kehilla have it within your power to provide fairness to the situation and relief to Beth and her family. I write to you collectively dear honoured rabbonim, to appeal to you – please do that which is in your power to have this matter sorted in a manner which will reflect fairness and justice and uphold the good name of the esteemed Vienna kehilla.

The hanhogo of a kehilla is in the joint hands of rabbonim and baaley battim, and for that reason you will I am sure agree that it is correct and appropriate for me to write at the same time to the lay leadership of the kehilla, which as you can I have done.

With many thanks

Bevirkos kol tov

Jonathan Guttentag

Chasam Sofer: Seek truth - don't be concerned to please others and win their approval

Rabbi Simcha Friedman (Emunat Hakhmim in Tradition 27:4): ... I model myself upon what I have learned from R. Moshe  Sofer in a responsum written after R. Zevi Hirsch Chajes had presented him  with a copy of his book, Torat ha-Nevi'im. In his introduction, R. Chajes ex­pressed the fear that critics will reproach him with the argument that he had innovated nothing new, and therefore there seemed no purpose in his writ­ing what he did. The Hatam Sofer, however, encouraged him to publish his  book, for his intention is to increase Torah knowledge. He found support  for his position in an incident involving R. Abba (Beitzah 38a-b). Prior to his aliyah to the Land of Israel, R. Abba uttered the prayer: "May it be Thy will  that I say things which are acceptable to the Sages of the Land of Israel. "  The Talmud explains, however, that his prayer went unanswered, for during  course of a certain encounter in a bet midrash in Israel, R. Abba was ridiculed for a particular proof he had brought. The Hatam Sofer drew a comparison between R. Abba's prayer which went unanswered and a simi­lar prayer of R. Nehunya ben ha-Kanah (Berakhot 28b), who also requested, prior to teaching Torah, that he not stumble in matters of halakhah and that  felIow scholars rejoice in him and which was granted. The Hatam Sofer exlained the difference between the two in the fact that R. Abba sought to  find favor on the part of those who would hear him and was therefore un­successful, while R. Nehunya ben Ha-Kanah prayed simply to be guided  toward the truth of the halacha, but was not concerned with the approval of his listeners – and therefore succeeded. The Hatam Sofer inferred from this that as long as the intention of the disputants is to determine the truth of their views, there is a chance that each side will act with intellectual honesty in order to clarify the matter. However, once their aim is purely to convince the other party of the validity of their position, the desire to win the argument is likely to result in the lack of objective judtgment and therefore they will be unsuccessful.[Chasam Sofer #208]

Schlesinger Twins: Why am I reminded of the Emperor's new clothes?

Wikipedia. The phrase "emperor's new clothes" has become an idiom about logical fallacies.^[28] The story may be explained by pluralistic ignorance.^[29] The story is about a situation where "no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes. Or alternatively, everyone is ignorant to whether the Emperor has clothes on or not, but believes that everyone else is not ignorant."^[30]

How Science Mimics Faith

Scientific American   Religion provides a sense of meaning and comfort for believers, and studies show that such beliefs intensify during threatening situations. Now research suggests that some people's faith in science may serve the same role.

Miguel Farias and other researchers at the University of Oxford and Yale University investigated whether it is belief in religion that is beneficial or in fact any belief about the world's order and our place in it. In two related experiments published in November 2013 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the scientists developed a scale to measure belief in science—the view that scientific inquiry offers a superior guide to reality. As expected, belief in science was inversely correlated with religious beliefs. Next the researchers assessed whether belief in science increased in threatening situations.. [...]

“It is likely that some people use their ideas about science to make sense of the world and for emotional compensation in difficult situations in the same way that religious people use their supernatural beliefs,” Farias says. “Our findings suggest that it may be belief itself, regardless of its content, that helps people deal with adverse situations.”

The New York Asifa by Rabbi Yair Hoffman

update: Rabbi Hoffman's rebuttal of Rabbi Slifkin's comments

update Rabbi Slifkin sent me this rebuttal

Five Towns Jewish Time   This is a response to my good friend Reb Barry Jacobson’s remarks on the Asifa this past Sunday in Manhattan.  It also addresses his inquiry printed in the Five Towns Jewish Times about Torah sources regarding Bnei Torah continuing to study rather than serving in the army.  There is no question, of course, that the soldiers who are protecting the nation against the enemies of the Jewish people are fulfilling a remarkable task and a holy role.  Certainly, all of us who are beneficiaries of their bravery and dedication should express our sincere hakaras haTov and pray for their welfare and well-being.

The leading sages of America, Degel HaTorah, Agudah in Eretz Yisroel and the sages of Shas – the Sefardic Torah organization had all signed on for the call to join in the mass gathering in the Wall Street area.  The mass gathering was to show solidarity with the Torah community in Israel that is facing the unprecedented law in the state of Israel’s history to draft Yeshiva students into the armed forces.

This response is an explanation and a historical overview about the confluence of army service and Torah study.   Not everyone will agree with the explanations and positions set forth here.  However, those that do not agree must realize that they do come from a very different socio-religious milieu than those in the Chareido world who have been brought up with and raised with a deep appreciation of Torah being the only definition of true life.

Serious-minded Chareidi Jews do not merely recite the words of the blessings of the Shma perfunctorily.  No.  When they recite the words, “Ki haim chayeinu – for they are our life – v’orech yameinu and the pathways of our life..” – they truly mean it. [...]

What is missing in all this, however, is the realization that we are all children of the same mother and father.  We are all parts of the same body and we should treat each other with the respect and love that we must have for our family members – even if we do disagree as to what approach should be emphasized or adopted.   Recently, we have seen two conflicting PR Youtube videos to a song entitled “Anu Mashkimim v’haim Mashkimim.”  The song explains how we awaken early for the right purposes, they awaken early for useless purposes.  The song was used by both sides of the debate to denigrate the other side.  Both uses of the song are wrong.  We stand now in the month of Adar.  The Manos HaLevi, Rav Shlomo Alkabetz, explains that the concept of Shalach Manos is to further brotherly love and ahavas Yisroel among ourselves.  It is to counter the statement of Haman that the Jewish nation is Mefuzar and Mefurad throughout the nations because of their lack of unity.  The month of Adar should counter the spirit of disunity and contribute to family love.

May Hashem speedily grant mutual respect and unity among us.  Amain!

Schlesinger Twins: Dr. Schlesinger refuses to let Chief Rabbi hand twins to mother

This is documentation that Dr. Schlesinger refuses to let the Chief Rabbi hand over the twins to their mother for free. He insists that she continue paying 50 euros to a government agent to do the same. See further information here

Schlesinger twins: Documentation of Dr. Schlesinger canceling a visit

A number of Dr. Schlesinger's supporters have denied that he has canceled Beth's visits with her children and have demanded documentary evidence. Here is an email from the latest cancellation.

========================

From: Christine Schlotter
Date: 2014-03-09 19:08 GMT+01:00
Subject: AW: Besuchscafe Aneli mj. schlesinger
To: Beth Alexander

Sehr geehrte Frau Schlesinger,

ich bin nicht sicher, ob ich Ihnen schon gesagt habe:

Herr Schlesinger kann die Kinder am 16.3.2014 nicht bringen.

Nächster Termin ist 23.3.2014 9:00 Uhr.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Christine Schlotter

==================================

translation

Dear Mrs Schlesinger,

I an not sure if I already told you:

Mr Schlesinger cannot bring the children on 16. 3.2014.

The next appointment is 23.3.2014 at 9am,

Kind Regards,

Christine Schlotter

Beth Schlesinger: Purim is not just about external enemies

 Guest Post by Beth Schlesinger

This Purim, like last year, I will not be spending with my children. My Sunday visit is cancelled. This year, like last year, I have no idea how Sammy and Benji will celebrate, if they even have a costume or if they will even be taken to a Purim party to be with all the other children. I sincerely hope so. Even if they can't celebrate this joyous day with their mother, I wish them all the fun, laughter and happiness in the world.  

As I think about my own personal tragedy, I reflect on the story of Purim and try to find new meaning behind the traditional and superficial story we tell our children. 

Since my boys attend the Chabad kindergarden, where better to look for a Purim lesson than in their teachings?

I found the following:

Purim teaches us that in a time of crisis, faced with a ruthless enemy like Haman, we must turn all the more tenaciously to our source of strength, and show that we are “the People of Mordechai, who would not kneel nor bow down” to anything that is contrary to Yiddishkeit.

As a child and even into adulthood, I was always taught and naively believed that our enemies are external; dangerously lurking on the other side of the fence ready to pounce, while we stand united with our Jewish brethren, smugly secure within the tightly protected confines of our communities. It is only now, as an adult after tasting the bitter pill of reality that I realise how childishly simplistic the story is told. Haman versus Mordechai, Vashti versus Esther. The goodies pitted squarely against the baddies, neatly delineated into 2 camps: Haman the evil gentile who tried to destroy us, the good and innocent Jewish victims. But we, the chosen People, stood together as one and defeated the menacing enemy. Everyone celebrated and was happy until the next existential threat rose up to conquer us once again.

But what happens when there is a Haman within our midst? When not everyone in the Jewish community is a Mordechai or Queen Esther? When elements within our own camp seek to mercilessly destroy us and rejoice over our downfall just like Haman tried and failed to do. What do you do when the lines blur so that you can no longer be sure who are your enemies and who are your supporters?

Kol Yisroel areivim zeh bazeh. All of Israel are responsible for one another, we are told. If only more people were to realize this dictum and take heed. 

Purim is an elusive festival. It is a story wrapped in disguise, hidden behind a costume, concealed behind a mask. While it may appear frivolous merry making from the outside, behind the costumes and spiels, a meta-story unfolds.  Just when Haman arrogantly believed his plot was all sewn up, everything suddenly turned on its head. Instead of destroying, he was the one destroyed. He tried to inspire hatred for the Jews but instead, he emerged as the hated one. 

 

Purim is traditionally associated with childish fun but there is also a serious adult message to take home.The word Purim comes from 'Pur;' the lots which Haman drew to murder the Jews but it is also related to the Hebrew word `porer, ' which means to dismantle, break, destroy, break into crumbs.  It is perhaps at times we assume we are most in control that we can be so wrong. Hashem may unexpectedly reveal His hidden hand at any moment and that is why even in the depths of darkness and despair, we must cling on to our faith and not lose hope. 

Purim Sameach

The gender-free revolution crashes on the rock of reality

Time     This week marks the 40^th anniversary of an event close to the hearts of gender activists everywhere. On March 11, 1974, ABC aired Marlo Thomas’ “Free to Be…You and Me” — a musical program celebrating gender-free children. Thomas and her fellow co-neutralists envisioned a world where the sex distinction would melt away. Instead of “males” and “females,” there would be mutually respectful, non-gendered human persons. The project resulted in a platinum LP, a best-selling book, and an Emmy. More than that, the idea of gender liberation entered the national zeitgeist. Parents everywhere began giving their daughters trucks and sons baby dolls. Like so many dream boats floating on the utopian sea, this one crashed and sank when it hit the rocks of reality.

In one “Free to Be” song, two babies discuss their life goals: the female wants to be a fireman; the male, a cocktail waitress. Another tells about a girl who liked to say, “Ladies First” — only to wind up being the first to be eaten by tigers. The songs drive home the idea that we are all androgynous beings unfairly constrained by social stereotypes. “William‘s Doll” is memorable. “A doll, said William, is what I need. To wash and clean and dress and feed.” In the end his kindly grandmother buys him the coveted toy.[...]

In 2009, David Geary, a University of Missouri psychologist, published the second edition of Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences. This thorough, fair-minded, and comprehensive survey of the literature includes more than 50 pages of footnotes citing studies by neuroscientists, endocrinologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and psychologists showing a strong biological basis for many gender differences. And, as Geary recently told me, “One of the largest and most persistent differences between the sexes is children’s play preferences.” The female preference for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-and-tumble hold cross-culturally and even cross-species. Researchers have found, for example, that female vervet monkeys play with dolls much more than their brothers, who prefer balls and toy cars. Nor can human reality be tossed aside. In all known societies, women tend to be the nurturers and men the warriors. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points to the absurdity of ascribing these universal differences to socialization: “It would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way.” [...]

The writer Andrew Sullivan is right when he describes the sex difference as “so obvious no one really doubted it until very recently, when the blank-slate left emerged, merging self-righteousness with empirical delusion.” That delusion was jumpstarted in 1974 with the advent of “Free To Be… You and Me.” Today, an army of gender scholars and activists is marching in support of the genderless ideal. But these warriors forget that ignoring differences between boys and girls can be just as damaging as creating differences where none exist. “Free to Be” is a cautionary example of how an idealistic social fantasy can turn into a blueprint for repression.

Science and Objective Reality: "Is It Solipsistic in Here, or Is It Just Me?"

Scientific American     The book, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, is the story of my 17-year journey with my father to figure out the nature of ultimate reality and what we discovered, quite frankly, is not what any marketing team wants to hear. Quantum mechanics, relativity, black hole physics, cosmology and string theory all point to the same radical, paradigm-shifting conclusion: every observer’s reference frame defines its own universe, singular and complete, and even though any reference frame is as good as any other, we can only speak about one at a time. [...]

My belief in this cosmic solipsism is a sad lesson in irony, really, because this whole thing – my career, my universe, my book—began with a conversation. I was fifteen years old, having dinner in a Chinese restaurant, when my father leaned over and asked, “How would you define nothing?” He told me that he was trying to understand how you can get something from nothing, how a universe could be born. [...]

Our first major breakthrough came when we realized that physics can pin down what’s real and what isn’t. It’s one of those things that’s somehow stupidly obvious and yet deeply profound: something is real if it’s invariant. That is, something is real if it remains unchanged from one reference frame to the next. Just look at a rainbow. You’ll see one in the sky if you’re in just the right reference frame with the Sun shining in from behind you, and droplets of water in the atmosphere refracting the light. It’s pretty, but good luck trying to grab it. A rainbow is not a physical object stapled to the sky. It’s a product of your reference frame. Which is to say, it’s not real.

Ok, so what is real? Space? Time? Particles? Forces? Well Einstein showed that space and time aren’t real– they change from one reference frame to another. However, something remains invariant in the process: a unified, four-dimensional spacetime. “Space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality,” the mathematician Hermann Minkowski declared.

And the thing my father and I learned is that ever since Einstein, theoretical physics has been one long death march for invariants. With his infamous discovery that black holes radiate, Stephen Hawking declared particles observer-dependent (along with fields and the quantum vacuum to boot). String theory did away with the invariance of dimensions and M-theory did away with the invariance of strings. By studying what happens when stuff falls into a black hole, Leonard Susskind discovered that the unified spacetime Einstein had left unscathed is itself observer-dependent. As for nature’s four fundamental forces, Einstein did away with gravity (“We are able to ‘produce’ a gravitational field merely by changing the system of coordinates,” he wrote) while the development of gauge theory took care of the other three. Every last one of the so-called fundamental ingredients of nature has turned out to be a shadow. Unreal.[...]

The death of the last remaining invariants is a new development in physics, but the specter of solipsism has been looming for decades, ever since the first generation of quantum physicists struggled to understand what the theory meant. “It is conceivable we must give up on any ‘one-world’ view of physics,” the legendary physicist John Archibald Wheeler scrawled in his journal as he wrestled with the mystery of the quantum. Quantum theory seems to go haywire when you assume that multiple observers occupy the same universe. I might open Schrodinger’s box to find a dead cat, but what if the cat, the box, and I are sitting inside an even bigger box, one that some other observer—my father, perhaps— hasn’t opened yet? To me, that cat is dead, but to my father it’s simultaneously dead and alive, and so am I. If there’s only one reality, which one is it? Quantum mechanics is just boxes within boxes – unless you stipulate that there’s only one box, in which case the whole issue of writing books becomes a little thorny.[...]

Advice for turning a manuscript into a published book

I thought the following description of the process of turning a manuscript into a book would be helpful to motivate some of you want to publish but really had no idea of how to do it. This is not to be construed as an endorsement of the services of Moshe Cohen as I have never used his services.

Guest post by Moshe Cohen

Before you publish...

Books distribute in two general paths:

1. A publisher thinks your book is a money maker and distributes it. Sometimes they even fund publishing. 2. The author or his agent does so, on his own dime.

A publisher or distributor will take a sefer only if he gauges it a winner. He can probably tell just from a sample. One person you might want to contact is Mr Yoni Posen of Y'fei Nof. He will give you his honest opinion on if your sefer is profitable. Most seforim are not.

On the other hand, although most books are not popular best-sellers, that does not mean they ought not be printed. Why?

• People publish a book to establish themselves as an expert. An author is instantly an expert. Often, that turns into more clients.
  
  
• A therapist will sell his client a workbook to cement their commitment, or to add another product to their service. In place of therapy alone, they offer a book too.
  
  
• Speakers often sell their books from a small table in the back of the lecture room. 
  
  
• People write to impact or inspire others - they want to get their message out.
  
  
• Writing itself is often the goal. For some it spurs their growth - writing a book is an excellent focuser. For others its therapeutic, healing and enlightening.

Profit is nice, but not always essential. And besides, books can sell online too, cutting out the need for extensive distribution or printing many copies. So although most people dream of Feldheim, Gitler, Yfei Nof or Artscroll distributing their book, perhaps that focus is misplaced. (The publisher/distributor will often take three quarters of all profits. It may still be worthwhile, but be aware of this.) 

How to start:

Stage 1: Type the book. Hand written notes cannot be published. Type it out yourself, or give a typist your manuscript or audio. Typing is usually charged per character, expect to pay $2 for each thousand characters, meaning that a normal page is about $4.50, either Hebrew or English.

Stage 2: After the typing, edit. Rearrange the content into the most logical sequence, add or subtract material and add a table of contents and index. Do it yourself or get a pro. Anywhere between $10 and $30 an hour is reasonable.

Stage 3: Proofreading: check for mistakes and typos. Again, can be hired out.

Stage 4: Typesetting, or layout is $2 to $5 per page, depending on if its a single text, or multi-text, such as a main text and a perush or footnotes. This will also furnish that professional look a real sefer has, with its varied fonts and typefaces.

At this point you can admire your finished, handsome, print-ready pdf file.

Stage 5: Cover design. This is for a pro, unless you have something really plain in mind. Graphics for a sefer run $200 to $500

Stage 6: Printing. What paper are you using? How many pages? Oh well. Ballpark, printing can be $4 to $9 each book.

Comment:

Often graphics are incorporated in the sefer [not just the cover]. Allocate pages for haskomos, iluy nishmas, divider pages between chapters and so on. Just saying...

You will notice that each stage can be done alone. It can be done part by part, as your time and resources permit. Do take note of that, for many worthwhile seforim went unwritten because the author thought its all or nothing. (It was Nothing...)

What are some bear-traps and problems to look out for?

When you come to an agreement with an editor, take pains to ensure that the agreement is understood the same way on both sides. Did you intend that your editor would recast the text, but he thought to skim over it with a light hand, only taking out obvious errors? Well, you are heading for a misunderstanding and disappointment.

When you are making a cover, you surely have some picture in mind. Does your graphic artist share that picture. Are you SURE? When one of you speak English and the other Hebrew, please double check everything. Yes, it does seem redundant.... until you receive the wrong color imprint for your cover!!!! (Actually happened to us!)

Ok, thats pretty much it. With so much time and resources needed, sometimes Yiush sets in, and the bustle of life blocks this worthwhile endeavor. There are people who specialize in all this hachanah l'dfus, and do explore using them. They are working with editors, typesetters and printers regularly, and can often save you much time, money and effort!

About the author: Moshe Cohen prepares books and seforim for print and looks forward to working with you. Contact him at moshe @ wedoseforim.com. His website is www.wedoseforim.com