Prenup protest: Additional rabbis join with Rav Sternbuch

Ezra Sheinberg - one of his alleged victims

New study: Transfats kill - saturated fats don't

Time

Traditionally people have been advised to reduce animal fats, but the biggest-ever study has shown they do not increase the risk of stroke, heart disease or diabetes.

However, transfats, found in processed foods such as margarine, raise the risk of death by 34% in less than a decade. [...]

Transfats have no health benefits and pose a significant risk for heart disease, but the case for saturated fat is less clear.

Saturated fats come mainly from animal products such as butter, milk, meat, and egg yolks, and some products such as chocolate and palm oil.

Trans unsaturated fats - or transfats - are produced industrially from plant oils for use in margarine, snack foods and packaged goods. [...]

However, the new research, which looked at 50 studies involving more than one million people, found there was no evidence that saturated fat was bad for health.

Africa Marks Polio-free Year - the Importance of vaccinations

Voice of America

Africa has marked a full year since its last recorded case of polio, a key step in the future eradication of the disease.

The last recorded case of polio in the continent was in Somalia last year, following an outbreak in the Horn of Africa region two years ago that left more than 200 people paralyzed.

The Somali government is not yet declaring the disease completely eradicated from the country.

"The chance for re-emergence is there, but we will be vigilant," Dr. Abdiqani Omar, director general of Somalia's Health Ministry, said in an interview with VOA's Somali service.

Omar says health workers have not been able vaccinate or spread awareness campaigns to areas controlled by the al-Shabab militant group.

Experts warn that continued success in the battle against polio depends on the continuation of vaccination campaigns and the close monitoring of suspected cases. [...]

Fair Terms for Divorce: A Halachic Right by Rabbi Oliver

  Fair Terms for Divorce: A Halachic Right by  Rabby Yehoishophot Oliver

Rav Dovid Eidensohn "Wars Between Rabbis" Telephone conference EH #15 Wed night 9:30 Aug 12

Wars Between Rabbis Make: Mamzerim, Doubtful Mamzerim, and Laaz about Mamzeruth

 – Call 605-562-3130 then enter code 411161#

The rabbinical world is split. The major Gedolim stay with the Shulchan Aruch, but others break with it. They want to help “Agunoth” by coercing husbands to divorce their wives even when not permitted by the Shulchan Aruch. Some states in America and Canada have passed laws forcing husbands to give  their wives a GET when the wife demands it. Major rabbis consider this GET invalid and the children born from it to be mamzerim or doubtful mamzerim.  But some rabbis are silent or feel that pressuring the husband is a good deed, in defiance of the Shulchan Aruch Poskim and Gedolei HaDor.

In the recent trial of rabbis who tortured husbands to force them to give a GET, the defense was that some rabbis felt that torturing a husband to force a GET is a mitzvah. But they had no source for this to violate the Shulchan Aruch and the major Poskim and Gedolim

Thus, in the next generation, people from Torah and Haredi homes will become engaged, and somebody will find out about the GET the mother had;  then people will decide if they want to marry somebody considered to be a mamzer by Gedolei HaDor who stick with the Shulchan Aruch, such as Rav Chaim Kanievsky and Rav  Shmuel HaLevi Wosner, or maybe they should allow the marriage that will produce more mamzerim, generation after generation.

A few notes about LOVE in marriage and friendship

Guest Post Mr. Ploni from a comment to this post  A Man should love his wife like his tefillin

I just wanted to add a few personal reflections concerning this extremely important thread about LOVE, which I don’t think have been dealt with adequately yet.

We need to DEFINE love.

Once we define love, I think the intent of the sources Rabbi Eidensohn mentions becomes much clearer and; it becomes possible to understand the wisdom of their approach and the relevance even in this day and age.

Allow me to mention a fascinating Rambam in Pirkei Avos 1:6. The Mishna says עשה לך רב וקנה לךחבר, and the Rambam cites Aristotle’s three definitions of love as אוהב התועלת, אוהב המנוחה, אוהב המעלה and he further breaks down the second type – אוהב המנוחה – into two subcategories: אוהב ההנאה, אוהב הבטחון

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Here’s his לשון, I found it to be a real eye-opener:

ומה טוב מאמר אריסטוטלוס, האוהב אחד הוא והאוהבים ג' מינים: אוהב תועלת אוהב מנוחה ואוהב מעלה. ואמנם אוהב תועלת כאהבת השותפים ואהבת המלך ומחנהו. ואמנם אוהב מנוחה היא שני מינים אוהב הנאה ואוהב בטחון. אמנם אוהב הנאה כאהבת הזכרים לנקבות וכיוצא בהם. ואמנם אוהב בטחון הוא שיהי' לאדם אוהב תבטח נפשו בו לא ישמר ממנו לא במעשה ולא בדבור ויודיעהו כל עניניו הטוב מהם והמגונה מבלתי שיירא ממנו שישיגהו בכל זה חסרון לא אצלו ולא אצל זולתו כי כשיגיע לאדם בטחון באיש זה השעור ימצא מנוחה גדולה בדבריו ובאהבתו הרבה. ואוהב מעלה הוא שיהיה תאות שניהם וכונתם לדבר אחד והוא הטוב וירצה כל אחד להעזר בחברו בהגיע הטוב ההוא לשניהם יחד וזהו האוהב אשר צוה לקנותו והוא כאהבת הרב לתלמיד והתלמיד לרב.

Note that the Rambam ends his comments by saying that type #3, namely שניהם כוונתם לדבר אחד והוא הטוב ... בהגיע הטוב ההוא לשניהם יחד is the האוהב אשר צוה לקנותו.

I think that it’s fair to say that he isn’t only referring to ONE specific good friend, but rather that ALL our important relationships should be based on a COMMON DENOMINATOR which unites all parties – reaching טוב-GOODNESS, or becoming a “good person”.

The concept of “goodness” is something that Aristotle espouses and positive psychologists today expound upon, as “flourishing”: A sense of joy and wellbeing that emanates from striving to live a moral and ethical life. This is exactly what Chazal constantly tell us to do in מצוות בין אדם למקום ובין אדם לחבירו, and something that the נביאים constantly exhorted Kllal Yisroel to do. This is the essence of the mitzvah of והלכת בדרכיו ... מה הוא רחום וכו'.

Freudian psychologists would probably consider such behaviors “mature defense mechanisms”, such as altruism, sublimation, etc.

I think some commentators here may have inadvertently be making one of two mistakes:

1) The first mistake: Some commentators seem to assume that all the sources cited by Rabbi Eidensohn preclude the physical attraction of love (Rambam’s type #2 subcategory #1). Their understanding is that the sources mentioned demand that spouses pretty much despise each other from a physical standpoint. This is incorrect, as we see in Baba Kama 82.

עזרא תיקן ... שיהו רוכלין חזירין בעיירות, פרש"י: בשמים לנשים להתקשט בהם.

This halacha is brought in Shulcahn Aruch חו"מ ס' קנ"ו ס"ו. Why would Chazal want women to wear בשמים if we’re supposed to despise them? Still, the same S”A also tells us to avoid hedonistic desire (as R”E quoted from או"ח ס' רל"א).

Surely, the S”A doesn’t contradict himself. I believe the explanation lies in separating ENDS from MEANS. The S”A, warns us against hedonistic ENDS and simultaneously ENCOURAGES sensory MEANS (as necessary), towards reaching a higher level of love. This higher level is the Rambam’s type #3: Mutual striving towards GOODNESS.

2) The second mistake: Some might assume that where physical attraction is non-existent, the WHOLE of the relationship is a very weak one. After all, if physical attraction isn’t present, very often marriages end up being utilitarian partnerships & matters of convenience (along the lines of type #1 in the Rambam) that therefore offer very little that binds them together when better opportunities present themselves. Had the assumption been correct, the criticism would indeed be quite valid. However I believe that the assumption is based on ignorance concerning the existence of – and superior benefits of – type #3 of love that the Rambam mentions; אוהב מעלה. In practical terms, this is love formed through an overarching desire where BOTH parties benefit from striving TOGETHER towards a common goal of “goodness”.

These very worthy sources are exhorting us against seeing hedonistic love as an ENDS. They have no need to expound on the need to build a solid base of love based on mutual striving towards the “good life” of flourishing, because should be the basis of ALL relationships, from a Torah perspective. They never meant to leave a void in “love”, rather to warn against the corrosive and readily apparent dangers of hedonism.

Such an approach is also extremely pragmatic. 1) As we all know, hedonistic love ages quickly. In most cases, the lust of youth turns into the dirty laundry of middle age. 2) Love Types #1 & #2 are often "scarce commodities". Since each party has a "taking" goal, there is a real possibility nfor the balance to become or perceived as becoming, unfair. #3 is also a "giving" (agape) love, as the לשון הרמבם בהגיע הטוב ההוא לשניהם יחדת.

If we heed Chazal’s words of wisdom. I believe that countless marriages and Parent-Child relationships would be much, much more better off. If only our culture didn’t habitually discount the Rambam’s קנה לך חבר!

PS: The Ramabam's category #2/2 is the best source so far that I've found for most of today's popular expressive-supportive therapy. As he mentions ימצא מנוחה גדולה, etc. Still, he mentions that it isn't enough. Besides the fact that trust isn't isn't easy to attain and מנוחה pales in comparison to reaching goodness, very often the therapist’s ulterior financial motives of type#1 are laid bare. But that’s another discussion…

Satanic Child Abuse Hysteria in the 1980s - Book Review

NY Times   From 1987 to 1990, in the longest criminal trial in American history, prosecutors tried to prove that Virginia McMartin, who owned a preschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and other school employees, including her daughter and grandson, had raped or abused 13 children, taken pornographic pictures of them and forced them to watch the mutilation of animals.[...]

“60 Minutes” and “20/20” ran segments, magazines ran cover stories, and the case fueled a national fear of day care centers — and Satanism and child abduction. (Remember the milk cartons?) Numerous preschools closed. In Chicago, a janitor at a child-care center was accused of boiling and eating a baby. In North Carolina, children said that teachers had tried to feed them to sharks. Elsewhere, children said they had been taken to graveyards to kill baby tigers or to dig up and stab corpses. Before the panic subsided, approximately 190 people nationwide were charged with the ritual abuse of children, often in day care settings. Eighty-three were convicted.

Yet, as Richard Beck writes in “We Believe the Children,” his intellectually nimble history of the satanic ritual abuse scare, or S.R.A. in the shorthand of the time, no “pornography, no blood, no semen, no weapons, no mutilated corpses, no sharks, and no satanic altars or robes were ever found.” The McMartin case resulted in no convictions. It began when a mother, who proved to be mentally ill, said that her 2-year-old son, who was having painful bowel movements, had been sodomized by Raymond Buckey, Ms. McMartin’s grandson, who worked at the school. The police sent a letter to families of 200 students and former students, asking if their children had been victimized. In the ensuing panic, hundreds of suggestible children were interrogated. Some offered stories that — it’s now widely agreed — were planted by well-meaning investigators. By the end of the trial, charges had been dropped against five of the seven original defendants, including Ms. McMartin.

Meanwhile, the social workers, therapists and law enforcement agents who worked on the McMartin case and others were consulted by colleagues throughout the country. In February 1985, Kenneth Lanning, an F.B.I. agent, held a four-day seminar titled “Day Care Center and Satanic Cult Sexual Exploitation of Children,” attended by police officers, lawyers, social workers and academics from across the country. One pamphlet told investigators to look for signs of cultic abuse including “candles” and “jewelry.” One handout listed 400 “occult organizations,” rather loosely defined: a collective of feminist astrologers in Minnesota made the list.

Why were so many police officials and parents willing, even eager, to believe that such abuse was widespread? Other authors have put forward theories. Lawrence Wright, in “Remembering Satan” (1994), focused on fundamentalist Christianity’s fear of a literal Satan stalking the earth. Elaine Showalter, in “Hystories” (1997), showed how the psychological establishment, and feminists within it, intrigued by trauma theory, so-called multiple personalities and a new belief in recovered memories, was primed to believe outlandish stories of abuse, especially from women. Believing the victim became nonnegotiable — with adult female patients, then with children and even toddlers. [..]

Feminists had been early advocates for abused children, but it wasn’t their primary focus. “In the 1970s feminists had talked much more about rape than about child abuse,” Mr. Beck writes. But by 1980 or so, legislators no longer wanted to hear about the role of race and class in sexual violence. “What legislators and pundits were still willing to hear, to the exclusion of almost everything else on the feminist agenda, was that the country’s children were at risk.” Mr. Beck believes that an unholy alliance between anti-pornography feminists, like Andrea Dworkin, and the Christian right fostered the overly fearful climate in which schoolchildren were lectured about “good touch” versus “bad touch,” and adults could be easily accused of the latter. [...]

Mr. Beck concludes with a bit of Freudian psychology of his own. “Recovered memory and the day care and ritual abuse hysteria,” he writes, “drove the social repression of two ideas. First, the nuclear family was dying. Second, people mostly did not want to save it.” Far easier to redirect our anxiety about changing mores toward Satan, or his minions on earth, than to rescind no-fault divorce laws or convince women to quit their jobs. The “middle-class nuclear family will not be restored to its former place, nor do most people want it to be,” he continues. “To imagine otherwise can only perpetuate this series of costly and destructive fantasies.” [...]

US blessing for British first Jewish priestesses

Jewish Chronicle Two women have become the first Britons to be formally ordained as Jewish priestesses.

Rachel Rose Reid, one of the country’s top storytellers, and Brighton-born Rabbi Sarah Bracha Gershuny, who now leads a Jewish Renewal community in Boulder, Colorado, are among this year’s graduates from the Kohenet (priestess) Institute in Connecticut, in the United States.

Rabbi Jill Hammer, co-founder of the institute in 2006, said that “with the ordination of Kohenet Rachel Rose Reid, Kohenet now has a base in the UK from which to grow, and we are excited to see what the future holds”.[...]

The institute was set up to train Jewish women as “facilitators of spiritual experience”.

It draws on stories of women in the Bible and Talmud, forgotten or suppressed traditions of women’s involvement in sacred rites and mystical ideas such as the Shechinah, the Presence of God, which the kabbalists portrayed as the feminine aspect of the divine.[...]

Police kill a white teen, and the silence raises questions

Washington Post     Many of us are just hearing about the police shooting that claimed the life of 19-year-old Zachary Hammond on July 26.

The news lands with that familiar, convulsive ache that the death of young people brings. That a year of police-involved killings has given us.

The teenager, on a first date, was stopped in the parking lot of a Seneca, S.C., Hardee’s during a drug bust, and the officer contends he fired in self-defense as Hammond tried to run him over. His 23-year-old date was charged with possession of 10 grams (.35 ounces) of marijuana. And it feels like a life gone over so much nothing.

Yet Hammond’s killing, under cloudy circumstances — a police report never mentions the fatal gunshots — has not sparked national protests. It has not pricked us the way Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Brandon Jones, Eric Harris and Freddie Gray did. The way the killing of Samuel DuBose most recently and under the most similar circumstances did. (DuBose was also behind the wheel; the Cincinnati officer who shot him alleged that DuBose was dragging him as he was taking off.)

Hammond’s family contends that the unequal outrage is because Hammond is white. [...]

Soul-Searching in Israel After Bias Attacks on Gays and Arabs

NY Times   On one edge of the Zion Square gathering, an Orthodox yeshiva student was in heated debate with a secular couple over the hierarchy of sin. On the other, young men wearing skullcaps rocked back and forth, reciting the evening prayer. In between, people sat cross-legged on the cobblestones amid an array of memorial candles and banners decrying violence, promoting love, demanding change.

The focal point was a black cloth with simple white chalk Hebrew letters spelling out “Ali Saad Dawabsheh” and “Shira Banki,” the Palestinian toddler burned to death in his West Bank home and the 16-year-old Jewish girl fatally stabbed at a gay pride march in Jerusalem. The back-to-back attacks a week ago, attributed to religious fanatics, set off a national outcry and reflection, with hundreds flocking here each night for a mixture of mourning and protest. [...]

This is a time of deep questioning across Israel, after two deaths that underscored both the endless conflict with the Palestinians and its own internal struggle to balance a rising religiosity with civil rights. Have government policies and rabbinical authorities inspired or at least allowed a radical fringe to reach new depths of depravity? Who interprets Jewish law and Jewish values for the Jewish state? How did it come to this? [...]

For days now, there has been an outpouring of outrage: Israel’s chief rabbis published a newspaper ad declaring, “Violence is not the way of our holy Torah.” Sheikhs and rabbis, as well as politicians from opposing camps, made joint pilgrimages to visit Ali’s badly burned mother and 4-year-old brother in the hospital. Security forces have also reinvigorated their pursuit of right-wing radicals.

There has also been a backlash. The leader of a group that harasses gays and Jewish-Arab couples was recorded declaring that “churches must be burned.” Posters honoring the man arrested after stabbing six people at the pride march — “We pray that all of God’s nation were as filled with awe as you” — appeared in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, where many consider homosexuality an affront to God. Death threats against the right-wing leaders who vowed vengeance against the arsonists have been posted on social media sites.

And there has been blame. Palestinians and leftist Israelis argue that Israel’s nearly half-century occupation of the West Bank and impunity for settler vandals inevitably led to Friday’s firebombing of the Dawabsheh home. Gay rights advocates cannot understand how the police failed to stop the man accused in the knife attacks, Yishai Schissel, who had recently been released from prison for a similar attack at the 2005 pride march and had declared his intention to repeat it. [...]

The Lost Key Documentary Film - The Universal Secret of Jewish Sexuality Revealed

The Daily Beast   A new documentary, featuring sex advice gleaned from the Torah and Kabbalah, turns out to be anti-gay, anti-women, and bizarrely contradictory.

Audiences watching The Lost Key will not likely be surprised to see a bearded, traditional Orthodox rabbi telling them that missionary-style with a man on top, a woman on the bottom, in near total darkness within the confines of marriage, is the “right” way to have sex.

But they may be surprised when the rabbi claims that this position will lead to a heightened, perhaps even holy, intimacy and that this and other lessons from the Torah can “usher in a new era of sexual relations,” as the press release (PDF) for The Lost Key boasts.

The documentary, which hits U.S. theaters on August 12, promises to reveal to audiences “how a sexual relationship can go beyond mere physical pleasure and become a spiritual experience where two become One.”

Drawing from the Torah and Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism, The Lost Key sets out to prove that the lessons of traditional, Orthodox Judaism can lead to better sex by showing couples how to create a heightened sense of intimacy.

Oneness is the “highest form of physical intimacy,” director Ricardo Adler writes in his director’s statement.

Rabbi Manis Friedman, the author of Doesn’t Anyone Blush Anymore? Reclaiming Modesty, Intimacy, and Sexuality, serves as the leader on this journey to intimacy. [...]

The Lost Key bills itself as offering a “revolutionary way” for couples to improve their sense of connection. It is cocksure in its instructions, and it leaves little room for deviation. [...]

Why does Friedman think this style of relationship works above all others? “We’re talking about 5,000 years of history,” he says.

He and The Lost Key never acknowledge that those 5,000 years (longer, really) are filled with not only unhappy marriages, but physical and sexually abused women, a subjugated LGBT population, and a sexual culture of restriction and shame.

There is zero mention of same-sex relations at all in the entirety of The Lost Key, which is nothing short of shameful and absurd in 2015.

Not only is it factually lacking, it implies homosexual couples cannot achieve this highest intimacy. [...]

Whether it’s the existence of homosexuality or the value of sexual pleasure, the failure to acknowledge certain aspects of human sexuality detracts from The Lost Key and Rabbi Friedman’s messages.

That’s a shame because there are certainly some valuable insights contained in The Lost Key.

Perhaps the most compelling is the argument that our notion of romantic love is too flimsy to sustain a long-term relationship.[...]

I never thought I’d connect the words of Rabbi Freidman to Amy Schumer, but it just shows that The Lost Key does offer lessons that can be attractive and useful for those of us navigating the modern dating world.

They are also lessons that can apply to many types of relationships: gay, straight, open, ring or no ring. It’s a shame that so many of these people are effectively turned away before they can glean this insight.[...]

Gay Pride Stabber was known to be a paranoid schizophrenic - police did nothing to protect public

Arutz 7   Two-time gay pride parade stabber Yishai Shlissel suffered "a psychotic incident," Israeli news revealed Wednesday - and police still did not take this into account when he was released last month.

In 2005, Shlissel stabbed a number of marchers at the Jerusalem gay pride parade, and was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in early July - just weeks before he did it again.

Shlissel may not be fit to stand trial, a Jerusalem Magistrates Court judge ruled earlier Wednesday, after he repeatedly refused to participate in legal proceedings despite being approached by the public defender's office. 

He has had a past history of psychotic episodes, as well, Channel 10 revealed Wednesday night. In March 2009, Shlissel was transferred to psychiatric care from prison, where he was then treated for a month and a half after being diagnosed as a paranoid psychotic.[...]

Even before the parade, Shlissel was labelled by intelligence as a "danger to the event," the investigation also revealed. However, he was never summoned to report to police before or during the march and was never questioned before the fact regarding his intentions. [...]

Last week's stabbing spree injured five people and fatally wounded 16 year-old Shira Banki. Banki was laid to rest Monday in an emotional ceremony with thousands of people in attendance. 

Haredi men order woman to move to back of one bus - but she sits next to haredi men on second bus

YNET   A Foreign Ministry worker in her 50s was forced to get off a bus in Jerusalem on Sunday after ultra-Orthodox men demanded that she move to the back side of the vehicle.  

Anna Schulkin, a resident of the Gilo neighborhood, got on Egged bus No. 36 in Jerusalem's Ramot neighborhood on Sunday afternoon. As there were no other vacant seats, she sat in the front part of the bus opposite a teenage haredi boy.

"To my surprise, the boy got up, turned his back on me, tapped his fingers as if he were addressing a dog and said to me: 'Go backwards, that's where you belong,'" she later told Ynet. [...]

As the atmosphere heated up, Schulkin decided to get off the bus and share her experience in an angry Facebook post. "I got off fast, not before I took as many pictures as possible," she wrote. "Our home is on fire. We are burning each other."[...]

The driver's passivity and the passengers' fiery behavior, she says, made her realize that there was no one there to defend her rights. "I decided that I didn’t want to flex the muscles I don’t have, and got off the bus."  [...]

Schulkin says she got on another bus in which she sat next to three haredi men, and none of them said anything or insulted her. "I told them what had happened to me and said, 'I can't believe you're letting me sit here. God bless you.' It's important to know that not all people are the same."