I can ‘do Jewish’ on just $40,000 a year

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/i-can-do-jewish-for-40000/

Last year, I was a 45-year-old married father of four children, a member of a large American Modern Orthodox Jewish community, and I didn’t have a penny saved in the bank. I decided to get serious about my finances and sit down with a financial planner. He told me that in order for me to be able to pay for my four children to go to college, and to have any semblance of a retirement for myself and my wife, we would need to save 50 percent of our net income for the next 20 years. We began to itemize my family’s major expenses:

• Day school tuition – approximately $80,000 post tax dollars a year. Currently consuming nearly 50% of our post tax annual take home pay.
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• Housing and utilities – near a synagogue, walking distance, big enough for 4 kids, another large sum of money.
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• Health insurance – my employer only plays 50 percent, leaving me with almost $900 a month to pay to cover the family
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• 2 cars
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• Jewish Summer camp – with 4 kids in various combinations of summer camps, both home and away, plus all associated flights and gear, approx $20,000.
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• Kosher food – At times coming to more than $1,000 a month
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• Additional outlays: to Jewish charities, synagogue dues + building fund, and more, as well as life insurance, tolls, and random other surprises.
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• Dollars left for savings, investment, college tuition, wealth building: Zero
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• We reviewed this short list of items and my advisor said, “You realize the greatest expense to your life is your religion. It is consuming over half of your post tax take home pay. You are paying almost $150,000 a year to ‘do Jewish.’”

And that’s when I realized I had forgotten to include Passover on the list.

I’m not alone
This was the wakeup call of the century for me. I was raised to believe that religion came first; that everything was ‘holy’ and a ‘mitzvah’; that the more you spent on your Judaism the better it was in God’s eyes. And I now realized I had been completely neglecting the financial health and future of my family.

The first thing I did was to ask around how other people were managing it. Word on the street was that to do everything on my list in a “second tier” community, not something in the greater New York area, one would have to earn more than $500,000 a year. Now I work very hard and I do pretty well, but I will most likely never make half a million dollars a year. Granted, some people in the community do, but not many.

What I saw was far more people who were – if they were willing to admit it – getting steady monthly checks from their parents to survive. Adult children 50 years old still living off handouts from their parents in order to “do Jewish.” Some parents had large fortunes and were easily able to afford to help several adult children, but some were slowly being bled dry. I had one grandmother tell me, “It’s wrong that the day schools are now trying to fund themselves off the backs of the grandparents, now that they have already broken the parents.”

Even more concerning, were the large number of families, doctors, lawyers, investment professionals, who, when asked in confidence, replied that they don’t have two pennies to rub together. And that was before their children were setting off to years in Israel and very expensive college in New York.

The day I left the synagogue forever was the Saturday the rabbi preached that day school tuition does not fulfill the obligation to give 10 percent of one’s income to charity — and that from a rabbi making $350,000 a year, along with free tuition, free housing, and free food expenses. As I angrily began to walk out of there for the last time, my neighbor grabbed my tallis and told me “The day the rabbis pay full tuition is the day that the tuition crisis will be solved.”

‘You’re in or you’re out’
Let’s spend a little more time on the tuition crisis in Modern Orthodox day schools, since this was the greatest expense for me. With four kids in school and an upper middle class income, I was told I had to pay full tuition for all four kids with no sibling discounts (and no reprieve from constant fundraising calls).

At one point, I went to the school president, a major donor (independently wealthy) to the school. I explained that keeping all my kids in the school would mean never saving a penny for retirement or college, and asked if there was any plan for helping working middle class parents, such as capping tuition at a percentage of income, or providing a sibling discount. His reply: “You’re in or you’re out.”

So I took myself out.

I enrolled my kids in an excellent private secular school for a third the cost of the “excellent” Jewish day school. And now, a year later, you know what I’ve found? That my kids are not running a year behind public school in their education; That kids actually have discipline and respect for their teachers; And even more importantly, that all children who misbehave are handled in the same manner, instead of letting the children of the wealthy supporters get away with murder. And even more interesting, this amazing secular school had all of…drumroll…one principal — the Day School I left had five. Enough said.

In hindsight, I remember when a Muslim I worked with asked me one day why I was so stressed out. I said because I have to make so much money to pay for my kids to go to school. He asked me how much tuition I was paying per kid and when I answered $20,000, he said, “Wow, you’re getting screwed. We in the Muslim school are paying only $5,000.” Of course their school also had only one principal.

I had now left day school and synagogue, and my life was only getting better. Not just financially, but emotionally as well. I actually didn’t have to work as hard, and started to have more time with my family. I knew fathers working five jobs to pay the Jewish bills, or taking jobs out of town, showing up for weekends at home, or even putting their families in Israel and flying back one week a month. This is no recipe for ‘Shalom Bayit.’

Kosher food came next. I set a $200 a month limit for my wife on spending in the local Kosher butcher shop. Some chicken breast, some wings. There is no health benefit to eating meat more than maybe twice a month. Now that I look at the prices, I am actually shocked the communities have not simply boycotted these establishments en masse.

Passover? Forget about it. We just do it at home now. I toss that one up there as a luxury on par with buying a country club membership or a small yacht.

Summer camp? Chabad. In fact, we have been getting more involved with Chabad. At least they don’t make Judaism all about the money. Sure, they also need community support to exist, but in return they provide full-service Judaism at a reasonable price. That in my opinion, will effectively position Chabad as the ‘last man standing’ of US Jewish Orthodoxy, as the far right Jewish communities become increasingly impoverished due to the failure to educate their kids for the workforce, and as the Modern Orthodox numbers continue to dwindle under lack of commitment, unbearable costs and attrition in the college years and beyond.

Time for a revolution
Over the past year, our family has rewritten our financial future. We now live on half of our income and invest and save the rest. And thanks to this new president, the financial markets have been doing great. We pulled our kids out of Jewish day school and they are getting a better education in a better environment, and we supplement their Jewish education via Chabad. I am now able to comfortably “do Jewish” for $40,000 a year, the sum my financial planner told me needed to be our limit. You know what, we may even be able to go away next year for Passover!

The overpriced balloon of the Modern Orthodox experience rests on three core flaws:

Jewish organizations are too top heavy, with too many positions filled by wives and cronies, and with amply-paid rabbis who are out of touch with the financial woes of their congregants.

There are too many very wealthy board members controlling too much of the decision-making for the wider Jewish community. It’s time to get some working class and even poor people on the boards of schools and JCCs.

Too many sheep just go right along, with their heads buried in the rear end of the sheep in front of them. It’s time for a revolution.

What kind of revolution?

How about launching a month-long community boycott of all neighborhood kosher markets? (Start two weeks before Passover.) Or pulling the kids out of day school, demanding charter schools, and insisting that the local rabbis earn their fat salaries by holding lowcost Jewish after-school programs in the synagogue.

As we gear up for the High Holidays – by the way, my Chabad doesn’t charge mandatory ticket fees – it’s time to take an honest look at where Modern Orthodox Judaism is going. For me it was a $150,000 a year post tax commitment, a sum of money that most people never even come close to earning.

Religious leaders have no right to complain about intermarriage rates in the US when the religion is being priced out of affordability. And don’t even get me started on the shidduch crisis, although if you look honestly at the problems of matchmaking and failure to find a mate, there too you find that much of the problem also comes back to who has the most money. It’s time to take back our religion, to make it more accessible to Jews of all financial situations.

Those who stand in the way of this progress should be expelled from the community. The legacy rabbinate and top-heavy institutions are not sustainable in the long term. They’ve bankrupted the parents. They are now trying to bankrupt the grandparents. That was never the way this religion was supposed to be.

Campaign against neighbors Get refusal results in large fine

http://m.takdin.co.il/pages/article.aspx?artid=5783318

שכנה שניהלה קמפיין נגד "סרבן גט" ללא הכרזתו ככזה בבי"ד חויבה בפיצוי חריג בגבהו

http://www.takdin.co.il/pages/article.aspx?artid=5783318

תושבת השומרון טענה כי היא ניסתה לעזור לשכנה במצוקה ועודדה את תושבי היישוב להחרים את בעלה שלטענתה סירב לתת לה גט ולהדיר רגליהם מהפיצרייה שבבעלותו. הפיצוי שנפסק היה גבוה מאד ביחס לתביעות לשון הרע

תושב השומרון שנאלץ לעזוב את הישוב ולסגור את הפיצרייה בבעלותו בעקבות מסע הכפשות שניהלה חברתה של אשתו לשעבר, שכינתה אותו סרבן גט ועודדה את חברי הקהילה להחרימו, יקבל פיצוי בסך של 300 אלף שקל בגין לשון הרע. ביהמ"ש לא חסך בביקורת על הנתבעת והבהיר: אין אמת בפרסום, אין עניין ציבורי ואין חובה מוסרית לפרסם.

התובע, לשעבר תושב ישוב בשומרון, התגרש מאשתו בשנת 2013. עד הגירושים, ניהל התובע עסק של פיצרייה, שהיתה היחידה בישוב, אולם לאחר שעזב את בית המגורים המשותף פתחה אשתו עסק פיצה מתחרה מתוך ביתם.

בתביעה שהגיש באמצעות עורך הדין אורן אליעז, טען התובע כי הנתבעת, תחקירנית בערוץ טלוויזיה שהתגוררה בסמוך והיתה מיודדת עם אשתו, ביקשה לסייע לה בגירושיה ולשם כך הפיצה נגדו פרסומים באמצעי מדיה שונים, לרבות עלונים לתיבות הדואר ומייל לתושבי היישוב. בנוסף, התייצבה הנתבעת בפתח הפיצרייה שלו עם מגשי פיצות וקראה ללקוחות שלא להיכנס לפיצרייה, תוך שהיא מציעה להם פיצות מהמגשים שבידיה ומציגה את התובע כסרבן גט. לטענת התובע, כתוצאה ממעשיה של הנתבעת, הוא נאלץ למכור את הפיצרייה שלו ולעזוב את הישוב.

עוד טען התובע כי הנתבעת החלה להפיץ לכל תושבי היישוב כי הוא סרבן גט ודרשה מהתושבים לפעול ליצירת לחץ קהילתי כדי להביא לקבלת הגט, ואף הביאה את בעלה – גבאי בית הכנסת – לסרב להעלות אותו לתורה, גם בשבת בר המצווה של בנו, תוך השפלתו וביזויו.

התובע טען כי הנתבעת פעלה מבלי לדעת את העובדות הנכונות, מתוך כוונה ברורה לפגוע בשמו הטוב, ועשתה יד אחת עם האישה כדי לפגוע בו ולהשיג לאשתו את מבוקשה. לטענתו, לאור מעשיה של הנתבעת, הוא נשבר ומכר את הפיצרייה שלו, וכן עזב את הישוב לבית הוריו שבצפון.

הנתבעת טענה מנגד כי מדובר בתביעת סרק טורדנית וכי התובע פועל בשיטת "מצליח" ויורה לכל הכוונים ללא כל בסיס. הנתבעת הכחישה את הפצת העלונים לתיבות הדואר בישוב וטענה כי היא גילתה אזרחות טובה וניסיון לסייע לחברה במצוקה, שלא קיבלה גט מזה כשנתיים, ועל כן מדובר באמת בפרסום ובפרסום שנעשה בתום לב מתוך חובה מוסרית.

השופט אריאל ברגנר קיבל את התביעה וציין כי אף שלא הוכח שהנתבעת פרסמה את העלונים, היא הודתה במשלוח המייל בתפוצה רחבה ביישוב, ובסופו של דבר הודתה גם בשני הביקורים בפיצרייה, שבהם טענה כי התובע ממרר את החיים לאשתו ולילדים וכי הוא מסרב לתת גט לאשתו.

השופט דחה את טענת הנתבעת כי היא מעולם לא כינתה את התובע "סרבן גט", והבהיר כי אין כל הבדל בין סרבן גט לבין מי שמסרב לתת גט לאשתו, וכל ניסיון לפרשנות אחרת הוא משחק מילים והיתממות חסרת בסיס.

עוד הבהיר השופט כי על מנת שאדם ייקרא סרבן גט, חייבים להתמלא שני תנאים מצטברים: ניתן פסק דין של בית הדין הרבני לגירושין, ואותו אדם אינו מקיים את פסק הדין. במקרה זה, לעומת זאת, אין חולק כי בעת הפרסומים לא ניתן עדיין פסק דין לגירושין, וכי כשבוע לאחר מתן פסק הדין ניתן הגט. השופט ציין עוד כי בית הדין הרבני נדרש להבהיר את המצב המשפטי והודיע חד משמעית כי התובע לא היה סרבן גט, כי הוא הסכים להתגרש ואף היה זה שביקש את הגירושים. נוכח האמור, קבע השופט כי לא עומדת לנתבעת הגנת אמת דיברתי, וממילא לא ניתן לטעון במקרה זה לעניין ציבורי בפרסום, הנוגע להליכים חסויים של מעמד אישי הנדונים בדלתיים סגורות.

עוד נדחתה טענת הנתבעת כי הפרסום נבע מחובה מוסרית וחברתית לעזור לחברה שהגיעה לפת לחם ומוחזקת כבת ערובה על ידי התובע. השופט ברגנר ציין כי אינטרס שמירת הסודיות והחיסיון של ההליכים בבית הדין הרבני גוברים על אינטרס מקומי של הנתבעת או תושבים אחרים בישוב לפרסם את דבר היות התובע "מסרב גט", על מנת להפעיל עליו לחץ. "לא יכולה לקום כל חובה חברתית או מוסרית אשר תתמוך ותוביל הפעלת לחץ חיצוני חברתי על אדם כדי להשפיע עליו בהליך משפטי אותו הוא מנהל", קבע השופט. "מדובר בלחץ פסול הבא כדי להפריע להליך המשפטי ומנסה שלא כדין למנוע מהתובע 'הליך הוגן' בביה"ד הרבני".

השופט הוסיף כי הנתבעת חרגה ועברה כל גבול אפשרי מהתנהלות סבירה להגנת אותו ערך חברתי נטען של סיוע לחברה במצוקה, וקבע כי אין מדובר בפרסום שנעשה בתום לב. השופט הבהיר כי אין כל רלוונטיות לאמונתה הסובייקטיבית של הנתבעת בנכונות הפרסום ומתח ביקורת על הנתבעת, המבקשת לחסות בצילה של ההגנה על הבעת דעה וביקורת על פעולה פומבית של הנפגע. זאת, שכן כל הליכי המעמד האישי וההליכים בבית הדין הרבני הם חסויים ומתנהלים בדלתיים סגורות, והנתבעת לא נקטה כל אמצעי סביר כלשהו על מנת להיווכח אם טענותיה הן אמת.

בפסיקת הפיצוי התחשב השופט בהתנהלותה של הנתבעת, שהמשיכה לדבוק בעמדתה ולפגוע בתובע במהלך כל המשפט, גם לאחר שהתבררה עמדת בית הדין הרבני כי התובע אינו סרבן גט. השופט הוסיף כי נוכח תפוצת הפרסום והפגיעה הקשה והזדונית בתובע יש מקום לפסיקת כפל פיצוי ללא הוכחת נזק. הפרסום במייל לתושבי הישוב ושני הביקורים בפיצרייה מזכים את התובע בפיצוי של 50 אלף שקל כל אחד, ועל כן כפל הפיצוי יעמוד על סך של 300 אלף שקל.

ת"א 19650-05-15

FRACTURED LANDS: HOW THE ARAB WORLD CAME APART

nytimes

Before driving into northern Iraq, Dr. Azar Mirkhan changed from his Western clothes into the traditional dress of a Kurdish pesh merga warrior: a tightfitting short woolen jacket over his shirt, baggy pantaloons and a wide cummerbund. He also thought to bring along certain accessories. These included a combat knife, tucked neatly into the waist of his cummerbund, as well as sniper binoculars and a loaded .45 semiautomatic. Should matters turn particularly ticklish, an M-4 assault rifle lay within easy reach on the back seat, with extra clips in the foot well. The doctor shrugged. “It’s a bad neighborhood.”

Our destination that day in May 2015 was the place of Azar’s greatest sorrow, one that haunted him still. The previous year, ISIS gunmen had cut a murderous swath through northern Iraq, brushing away an Iraqi Army vastly greater in size, and then turning their attention to the Kurds. Azar had divined precisely where the ISIS killers were about to strike, knew that tens of thousands of civilians stood helpless in their path, but had been unable to get anyone to heed his warnings. In desperation, he had loaded up his car with guns and raced to the scene, only to come to a spot in the road where he saw he was just hours too late. “It was obvious,” Azar said, “so obvious. But no one wanted to listen.” On that day, we were returning to the place where the fabled Kurdish warriors of northern Iraq had been outmaneuvered and put to flight, where Dr. Azar Mirkhan had failed to avert a colossal tragedy — and where, for many more months to come, he would continue to battle ISIS.

Azar is a practicing urologist, but even without the firepower and warrior get-up, the 41-year-old would exude the aura of a hunter. He walks with a curious loping gait that produces little sound, and in conversation has a tendency to tuck his chin and stare from beneath heavy-lidded eyes, rather as if he were sighting down a gun. With his prominent nose and jet black pompadour, he bears a passing resemblance to a young Johnny Cash.

The weaponry also complemented the doctor’s personal philosophy, as expressed in a scene from one of his favorite movies, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” when a bathing Eli Wallach is caught off guard by a man seeking to kill him. Rather than immediately shoot Wallach, the would-be assassin goes into a triumphant soliloquy, allowing Wallach to kill him first.

“When you have to shoot, shoot; don’t talk,” Azar quoted from the movie. “That is us Kurds now. This is not the time to talk, but to shoot.”

Azar is one of six people whose lives are chronicled in these pages. The six are from different regions, different cities, different tribes, different families, but they share, along with millions of other people in and from the Middle East, an experience of profound unraveling. Their lives have been forever altered by upheavals that began in 2003 with the American invasion of Iraq, and then accelerated with the series of revolutions and insurrections that have collectively become known in the West as the Arab Spring. They continue today with the depredations of ISIS, with terrorist attacks and with failing states.

AI that can determine a person’s sexuality from photos shows the dark side of the data age

tech crunch

We count on machine learning systems for everything from creating playlists to driving cars, but like any tool, they can be bent toward dangerous and unethical purposes, as well. Today’s illustration of this fact is a new paper from Stanford researchers, who have created a machine learning system that they claim can tell from a few pictures whether a person is gay or straight.

The research is as surprising as it is disconcerting. In addition to exposing an already vulnerable population to a new form of systematized abuse, it strikes directly at the egalitarian notion that we can’t (and shouldn’t) judge a person by their appearance, nor guess at something as private as sexual orientation from something as simple as a snapshot or two. But the accuracy of the system reported in the paper seems to leave no room for mistake: this is not only possible, it has been achieved.

It relies on cues apparently more subtle than most can perceive — cues many would suggest do not exist. And it demonstrates, as it is intended to, a class of threat to privacy that is entirely unique to the imminent era of ubiquitous computer vision.
Before discussing the system itself, it should be made clear that this research was by all indications done with good intentions. In an extensive set of authors’ notes that anyone commenting on the topic ought to read, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang address a variety of objections and questions. Most relevant are perhaps their remarks as to why the paper was released at all:

We were really disturbed by these results and spent much time considering whether they should be made public at all. We did not want to enable the very risks that we are warning against. The ability to control when and to whom to reveal one’s sexual orientation is crucial not only for one’s well-being, but also for one’s safety.

We felt that there is an urgent need to make policymakers and LGBTQ communities aware of the risks that they are facing. We did not create a privacy-invading tool, but rather showed that basic and widely used methods pose serious privacy threats.

Certainly this is only one of many systematized attempts to derive secret information such as sexuality, emotional state or medical conditions. But it is a particularly concerning one, for several reasons.

Seeing what we can’t (or won’t)

The paper, due to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, details a rather ordinary supervised-learning approach to addressing the possibility of identifying people as gay or straight from their faces alone. (Note: the paper is still in draft form.)

Using a database of facial imagery (from a dating site that makes its data public), the researchers collected 35,326 images of 14,776 people, with (self-identified) gay and straight men and women all equally represented. Their facial features were extracted and quantified: everything from nose and eyebrow shape to facial hair and expression.

A deep learning network crunched through all these features, finding which tended to be associated with individuals of a given sexual orientation. The researchers didn’t “seed” this with any preconceived notions of how gay or straight people look; the system merely correlated certain features with sexuality and identified patterns.

AYIN Harah or mechilah

When I was involved  in the tropper scandal Rav Sternbuch told me to go to Bdatz and have Beis Din remove aiyin harah

Asked him again now if I should go, he said no, there is no issue of aiyin harah in the present case.
He was asked about asking mechila, he said no, because I thought I was right.

Problematic rabbis exist in the Sefardic world also

To be continued

Hell

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
(Dante?)

Do Gedolei Haposkim agree with Rav Shmuel?

Received email today which clearly indicated that the voice of opposition to this phony divorce has been deliberately suppressed amongst major Poskim

Trump’s Anti-Obama Eclipse Meme Doesn’t Make Scientific Sense

Health, Science, Medicine, Fitness News - TIME.com
http://time.com/4914037/donald-trump-barack-obama-eclipse-meme/

President Trump is the best moon in the entire solar system. He has the greatest craters—beautiful, beautiful craters—and the softest lunar dust. The journalists who cover him don’t have such soft dust. Sad!

You may never have thought of Donald Trump as the moon—a huge, heedless mass, forever doomed to repeat the same cycles day after day, year after year. OK, maybe you have. But either way, Trump apparently thinks of himself just that way. In the middle of a 56-minute Tweet squall this morning, the President retweeted this image, showing his smiling, full-color face slowly eclipsing a grim, black-and-white image of former President Barack Obama. The caption on the picture reads, “The best eclipse ever!”

pic.twitter.com/6XJxEg1gSs

— Jerry Travone �� (@JerryTravone) August 24, 2017

It’s never terribly easy to parse Presidential tweets. This one is even tougher than most, since there are so many different approaches you could take. There’s indifference: Trump’s retweet finger is a finely honed instrument, designed for speed, not discernment. He sees it, he likes it, he retweets it. The man is busy, after all.

There’s exhaustion: The eclipse? The eclipse? We’re now politicizing the eye-widening, soul-stirring, kumbaya-fest that was the total solar eclipse? Feel free to go lie down in a darkened room if you’d like. The front desk will call you in 2020.

Then, of course, there’s the scientific—and this is perhaps one Trump should have thought about a little bit more than he apparently did. Eclipses happen because every now and then, in predictable but still primally unsettling cycles, a warm, bright, life-giving object is obscured by a dark, dead, insensible rock. The rock is tiny—400 times smaller than the big, bright thing. But it’s also 400 times closer, so it appears much bigger than it is—its size and importance a mere illusion of proximity.

This surely isn’t where President Trump wanted to go, but hey, once you invite science to the dinner party, you don’t get to ask it to leave just because you don’t like the jokes it’s telling. So let’s consider too that it is during an eclipse that the sun in some ways shows itself most brightly. It’s not the black disk that the moon creates at the moment of totality that transfixes us so—that’s just a hole in the sky. It’s the brilliance of the solar corona—the veil of incandescent gasses that stream millions of miles into space. Try to look at the sun at any other time and it’s an exercise in pain and gaze aversion. Look at it during an eclipse, and it’s the hidden object—in this case Obama—not the obscuring one, that knocks your socks off.

The President’s opponents are not above just this kind of semiotic misfire. The eclipse meme Trump retweeted echoed a more slapdash entry from his opponents, with a smiling Obama moving in front of a snarling Trump and text that read, “The only eclipse we really wanna see.”

The only eclipse we really wanna see pic.twitter.com/GpI81nmdC1

— Eli McKenzie (@EliiMckenzie) August 22, 2017

No matter the particular meme, both sides should remember that it’s possible to go too far down the science-as-metaphor road. Start talking about the quantum entanglement of lifting the debt ceiling and building the border wall, or the Newtonian action of passing Obamacare giving rise to the equal and opposite reaction of trying to repeal it, and you’re definitely going to lose the room. (The one exception to this rule: Feel free to call anyone or anything at all a boson. Bosons are always funny.)

All the same, unlike most presidential tweets, there’s something to be learned from Thursday morning’s little offering, provided you look at it the right way. Science is a slow, patient, iterative process, in which serious people work very hard to arrive at elusive truths and meaningful results—results that often make the world a much better place. Politics, done right, ought to be the same thing. In a White House that has become the governing equivalent of a basement lab, it might be time for a little of the rigor the real scientists apply every day.

Jeffrey Kluger is Editor at Large for TIME magazine and the author of Apollo 8.

Response to defamatory RCA statement

From: Shalom Chaim Spira
Sent: August 14, 2017 12:39
To: Saul Emanuel
Cc: Michael Whitman; Rabbi Shmidman - LMS
Subject: Response to defamatory RCA statement

 

Dear Rabbi Saul Emanuel, shlit"a, Executive Director of the Jewish Community Council of Montreal
Please note the defamatory and slanderous statement from the RCA issued three days ago, falsely claiming that students of Jewish law such as myself who challenge the halakhic validity of the 1993 Beth Din of America prenuptial agreement (which - as already communicated to the Jewish Community Council of Montreal on several previous occasions - was used to coerce my own brother Dr. Avrum Elliot Spira to a get his wife) "threaten women".

http://www.rabbis.org/news/article.cfm?id=105949

Pursuant to the Gemara, fifth chapter of Berakhot, which derives from the righteous Hannah (mother of the prophet Samuel) that when an Orthodox Jew is wrongly suspected of sinful behaviour, the Jew should explain himself to vindicate himself, I am now responding to this accusation by the RCA. With all due respect to the RCA, I reject the accusation of the RCA that I "threaten women". Rather, I actually rescue women by clarifying the Halakhah of what constitutes a valid prenuptial agreement and what constitutes an invalid prenuptial agreement, as publicized in my essay on the subject at http://www.scribd.com/doc/176990434/Prenuptial-Agreements .
To express my dismay over this mistaken statement of the RCA, I am carbon copying the Yoshev Rosh of the RCA Beth Din for conversion in Montreal, R. Michael Whitman, shlit"a, as well as the heir to my revered teacher R. Joshua H. Shmidman, zatza"l, his son (yibadel le-chaim) R. Avraham Yerucham Shmidman, shlit"a, of Lower Merion Synagogue in Philadelphia. Let us work together to help agunot by finding real solutions (as identified by my essay), not the (well-meaning but unfortunately) disqualified solution of the RCA has fabricated.
Thank you and ktivah va-chatimah tovah,
Shalom

Shaor Yoshuv 50th year reunion

Click here to see video - Red Shmelkie Brazil's speech

Destroying Students’ Potential and Destroying Their Lives

// Rabbenu Murphy | Cross-Currents
https://cross-currents.com/2017/08/07/destroying-students-potential-destroying-lives/

We have all read about the incredible tragedy of Malky Klein. While there is always going to be unknown information about these and other similar cases, such that people will claim that we lack the full story, this and other alike occurrences should set off the loudest of alarms.

Judge Ruchie Freier wrote a must-read essay on the subject, and I have little to add. What more can be said?

All I can contribute to this heartrending discussion is that the issue of yeshiva and day school exclusion should perhaps be addressed on a broader scale. When children are boxed in (or out) and conspicuously labeled due to their abilities, they can get badly bruised and also unfairly pigeonholed and sidelined for life.

When a yeshiva or day school refers to the more rigorous or high-level Torah learning or secular studies track as the “masmidim shiur” or “honors program”, how are those not enrolled in these more advanced programs to view themselves? What message do these yeshivos and day schools send to these students? That they are not masmidim or honors material; they are lower; they are lesser in achievement and academic quality. And that is how many such students will hence view themselves and act upon the de facto labels that these schools have conferred upon them.

I am all in favor of more advanced Torah learning and secular studies tracks, but there is a sensitive and sensible way to market them.

When a child legitimately needs to be expelled from a yeshiva or day school, such as when as the child is a really damaging force there, or the child’s presence at the specific yeshiva or day school is very much not for the child’s benefit, the expulsion needs to be done in a manner that is sensitive to the child’s long-term needs, coordinated so that the child has the opportunity to transition into the yeshiva or day school that is best for him.

A true story:

Aharon was acting out in yeshiva, and was the most frequent occupant of the principal’s office other than the principal himself. Aharon was not doing anything “bad” in the acute sense (nothing criminal, lewd, etc.), but he was all too often calling out in class and was involved with some disruptive pranks. A few weeks before the close of the school year, Aharon’s parents, who had already registered him for the coming year, suddenly found out that Aharon was not being “invited back” for next year. 

Aharon’s parents frantically appealed to the yeshiva, arguing that it was not fair that they were given no advance notice of the expulsion, and that unless another yeshiva would somehow agree to accept their child so extremely late in the year, he would end up having to stay home or “on the street” next year. These appeals were rejected.

With Hashem’s help, including the intervention of a loving rebbe and great exertion by Aharon’s parents, he was accepted into a different yeshiva, where he was shown warmth and was given more personal attention, and where he matured and flourished. He is now at the top of his rosh yeshiva’s shiur and has established excellent academic credentials.

How many boys and girls are subject to expulsion that is executed with insensitivity and capriciousness, whereupon their parents are sent scrambling without ample opportunity to arrange for transition into another yeshiva or day school? How many children feel shamed that they are not labeled as masmidim or honors students, with their view toward their role in Torah learning and school achievement thus substantially narrowed and lowered? How many students like Malky will suffer at the hands of unloving and uncaring principals, who are slaves of elitism and who sacrifice children in its service?

There obviously must be standards, accountability and a drive for excellence, but there is way to do it and a way not to do it. Furthermore, sensitivity and love for each student, with his welfare and success being the priority, must be the goal; external factors of reputation and social standing are irrelevant.

Please read Judge Freier’s essay and think about what was, what could be and what is at the many yeshivos and day schools that are led and governed with compassion and true wisdom, and consider what we can all do to harness the good and bring about urgently needed change.

The post Destroying Students’ Potential and Destroying Their Lives appeared first on Cross-Currents.

---- 

Read in my feedly.com

Yakov Horowitz

linkedin

Yakov HorowitzDirector at Center for Jewish Family Life/Project YES2d  Edited

My Dear Friends As you may know, my heart is deeply troubled on many levels about the goings-on in our great country and I wrote a post here which generated quite a bit of "churn." Upon reflection, I realized that the tone of my writing was far too harsh, generating heat and very little light, and as a result, I deleted it. To all of you, I offer my sincere apologies. There are serious discussions that we need to have about what is transpiring in our great country, and I hope Hashem will grant me the wisdom in the coming weeks to present them in a manner that will sooth the divisions and strife and not add to them. ------ About 14 years ago, I began to realize what a terrible problem we had in our community regarding child abuse. I spent a few years begging people to listen and often writing about this topic in great frustration. After a few years of that, I decided to work on positive solutions to this problem and started to develop the child safety books that are b'h in over 50,000 homes. I would like to similarly channel all of this negative energy in a positive way along the lines of the Barb-Q dinner we will be hosting view link next Thursday. In the meantime, I wish you all a meaningful and enjoyable Shabbos. Yakov

צרת רבים חצי נחמה

שו"ת הרב"ז ילקוט החנוכי סימן לא

צרת רבים חצי נחמה [פתגם שגור בפי כל]. 

הפתגם הזה שגור בפי העם בשם מאמר חז"ל, ולא נודע מקומו איה. וכל העובר ישתומם על המאמר אשר שמו פלאי! הכי בצרה שלא תבא צרעת ממארת לכל באי עולם, יפיג בזה צערו עד שתהיה בעיניו חצי נחמה? אין זה כי אם רע לב וקנאת איש מרעהו! 

אמנם יש להמתיק הפתגם הזה כי דעת שפתם ברור מללו. כי הנה כבר אמר החכם מכל אדם (משלי י"ב כ"ה): "דאגה בלב איש יַשְׂחֶנָּה" לאחרים (כיומא ע"ה ע"א), ופירש רש"י: "ישחנה לאחרים, שמא ישאוהו עצה". ו"הערוך" (ע' שח ו') פי': "כדי שיבקשו עליו רחמים. וגם פירוש "הערוך" נכון הוא, כי כן אמרו רבנן בשבת (ס"ז ע"א) "דצריך להודיע צערו לרבים, ורבים יבקשו עליו רחמים". ובזה יעלה ויבא על נכון דברי חכמז"ל שהליטו דבריהם במעטה מליצתם: "צרת רבים חצי נחמה". כי אם רבים ישתתפו בצרת יחיד, ובצרתו גם להם צר, בטח מעתירים בעדו בעתר מאמרות ומבקשים עליו רחמים. כי חלילה להם מחדול להתפלל בעדו, כל שכן אם תלמיד חכם הוא צריכין שיחלו עצמן עליו (כברכות י"ב ע"ב). וגדולה תפלה יותר ממע"ט (שם ל"ב) ותפלתם זאת תחשב לו לצדקה לחצי נחמה, כמאמרם: "תפלה עשתה מחצה" (ויק"ר פ"י - ה'. עי' רש"י עקב ט' - כ'). 

כעת מצאתי זכר למאמר כזה ב"מדרש רבה" (דברים פ"ב - י"ד): "מהו בצר לך, אר"י בשם ר"ע כל צרה שהיא של יחיד צרה, שאינה של יחיד אינה צרה" יעוי"ש ב"מתנת כהונה". הלום ראיתי בספר "מלאכת מחשבת" (להגאון הפילוסוף האלהי ר' משה חפץ ז"ל, בפרשת תבא) שהביא מאמר הלזה צרת רבים חצי נחמה בשם "משל הקדמוני" והוא ז"ל הבין את המשל ומליצה פשוטו כמשמעו, ובאר בזה כמה כתובים, יעוי"ש טהורים אמרי נועם. 

מהרש"א חידושי אגדות מסכת גיטין דף נח עמוד א

וע"ד צרת רבים חצי נחמה 

באבן כספי לאיכה, עה"פ מה אעידך וגו', שכתב לשון הלז [צרת רבים חצי נחמה].
ועי' עוד בחינוך מ"ע של"א שכתב ג"כ בזה"ל: צרת רבים נחמה. 

ספר מגיד מישרים פרשת מקץ מהדורא בתרא

והיינו דאמר ר' יוחנן דין גרמא דעשיראה ביר, דודאי איכא למיתמה דהוה מנחם לבני נשא על דרך צער רבים חצי נחמה, והאי לאו נחמה דחכימי כוותיה איהו, אלא רזא דמילתא דלא הוה אמר הכי אלא לאינון דהוו צדיקייא ולא אתגלגלו אלא לאשלומי דרא, והוה אמר להו דלא ליצטערון דלית להון צורכא דבנין כמה דהוה ליה דמתו בנוי ולא מצטער עלייהו דלא הוה צריך לון, ומאי דקאמר דין גרמא דעשיראה ביר למירמז דמעשר ספירן יניק הוה וכלהו אשפיעו ביה ולא מתו אלא משום דלא הוה צריך להון: 

פלא יועץ ערך נחמה "ויש עוד מין נחמה אחרת, כמאמר רבותינו ז''ל (חינוד מצוה שלא) צרת רבים חצי נחמה. ויתן אל לבו כי רבים שתו ובארזים נפלה שלהבת, וכמה גדולי עולם אנשי חיל עברו על ראשם המים הזידונים רעות רבות וצרות מינים ממינים שונים, דק ותשכח, שכל מיני יסורין שבעולם נפתחו בגדולים ולא טוב הוא מהר:"

אך בערך אהבת רעים וכן בערך תשובה כתב צרת רבים נחמת שוטים.

Democrats in Congress to explore creating an expert panel on Trump’s mental health

www.statnews.com

By SHARON BEGLEY @sxbegle

AUGUST 16, 2017 

T

hree congressional Democrats have asked a psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine to consult with them about forming an expert panel to offer the legislators advice on assessing President Trump’s mental health.

Yale’s Dr. Bandy Lee told STAT that over the last few weeks members of Congress or their staff have asked her to discuss how members might convene psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals “to review the president’s mental health, and review it on a periodic basis.” The closed meeting is expected to take place in September, she said.

The request came from three current congressmen and one former member, she said. She declined to name them, saying they told her they did not wish to be publicly identified yet.

The invitation comes as 27 representatives, all Democrats, have co-sponsored a bill to establish “a commission on presidential capacity.” The commission would carry out a provision of the 25th Amendment, which gives Congress the authority to establish “a body” with the power to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Under the bill, H.R. 1987, eight of the 11 members of the commission would be physicians, including four psychiatrists.

STAT contacted the sponsors’ offices, which either did not respond or declined to comment.

Trump has not released his medical records beyond a brief summary from his physician last year. He has said he never sought or received a mental health evaluation or therapy.

But since his election and, increasingly, his inauguration, a number of mental health experts have spoken or written about what Trump’s behavior and speech suggest about his cognitive and emotional status, including impulsivity and paranoia, with some offering formal diagnoses, such as narcissistic personality disorder.

In a book scheduled for publication in October that was edited by Lee, 27 experts offer their views of what Lee calls “Trump’s mental symptoms,” including his impulsivity, “extreme present focus,” pathological levels of narcissism, and an apparent lack of trust that is a sign of deep paranoia. The book is based on a small meeting Lee organized at Yale in April on whether psychiatrists have a “duty to warn” about any dangers Trump poses because of his psychological make-up.

If members of Congress form an expert panel like the one Lee has been asked to advise on, psychiatrists who participate would be at risk of violating a decades-old ethics rule imposed by the American Psychiatric Association on its members. Called the Goldwater rule, it prohibits APA members from diagnosing the mental health of public figures whom they have not examined. (Sharing such a diagnosis of someone they have examined would, of course, violate a different ethical rule, on patient confidentiality.)

In March, after growing criticism that the Goldwater rule was essentially a gag order that prevented the public from hearing from experts, the APA not only reaffirmed the rule but extended it. Now, in addition to the prohibition against suggesting that someone might (or might not) have a specific mental disorder, APA members are barred from “render[ing] an opinion about the affect, behavior, speech, or other presentation of an individual that draws on the skills, training, expertise, and/or knowledge inherent in the practice of psychiatry.”

While there is an exception for court-ordered evaluations and for consultations even without personally evaluating someone, there is no explicit exception allowing psychiatrists to tell elected officials, in public or in private, their views of a public figure’s mental state. Last month, the American Psychoanalytic Association, another psychiatrists group, sent an email to its members reiterating that they are not bound by the APA’s rule.

Lee, whose academic research focuses on prison reform, recidivism, and the causes of violence, said she “kept with the Goldwater rule’s original conception of refraining from making diagnoses, but speaking to dangerousness and the need for an evaluation.”

The expert panel that Lee was asked to discuss convening would have several members, she said, but it remains to be worked out who would serve, how and by whom they would be chosen, what their mandate would be, and how and when they would offer their opinions to Congress, should the proposal even get off the ground.

On Friday, Lee and four other psychiatrists sent a letter to all members of the U.S. Senate and House arguing that Trump exhibits “severe emotional impediments that … present a grave threat to international security,” and asking Congress to “take immediate steps to establish a commission to determine his fitness for office.” The letter signers are staunch Trump opponents and believe his presidency should end.

The letter echoed one that Lee and a slightly different group of colleagues sent to Congress in July. The most recent one came in the wake of Trump’s reportedly ad-libbed statement last Tuesday that if North Korea carries through on its nuclear threats, “they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.” On Thursday, after North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un threatened to bomb the American territory of Guam, Trump said, “Maybe that statement wasn’t tough enough.”

Lee and the other signers of the new letter, including Dr. Lance Dodes, recently retired from Harvard Medical School, argue that Trump’s “alarming patterns of impulsive, reckless, and narcissistic behavior — regardless of diagnosis … put the world at risk,” posing an “imminent danger” that psychiatrists are ethically obligated to warn about.

“The role of honor or, rather, perceived humiliation is often overlooked as a powerful stimulant of international violence,” they write, adding that the “president may not have the capacity to consider an array of possible choices, due to his own emotional needs.” They ask Congress to “take immediate steps to establish a commission to determine his fitness for office.”

Whats the line between Judaism and xrist

Davening at the bed the Rebbe died on.
jdn.co.il

Israel: No More Fines For Using Another Person’s ‘Rav Kav’

August 8, 2017 10:30 pm

yeshiva world

Since the implementation of the Rav Kav transportation smart card in Israel, the Knesset’s Ombudsman’s Office has received many complaints from people fined for using a Rav Kav that belonged to someone else. That is to say, they paid for their travel, but the card they punched belonged to another person.

It should be pointed out that commuters are aware that regulations prohibit using a smart card that is not one’s own.

The Knesset Ombudsman Committee discussed the matter and decided it is absurd for a commuter to receive a 180 shekel fine for using another person’s card when the fare is paid in full. Citizens who were fined and complained to the ombudsman’s office question the justification of the fine when the fare was paid – seeking to understand why it matters who owns the smart card.

In addition, families with many children often do not purchase a card for each child, or at times, and not infrequently, a child loses his/her card so a parent instructs him/her to use a spouse’s card.

Head of the committee, MK Yisrael Eichler, raised the matter in Knesset after receiving hundreds of complaints. In addition, he contacted the Transportation Ministry, seeking to eliminate fines for use of another’s Rav Kav. Eichler succeeded and inspectors are being informed that one is no longer to be fined for using a Rav Kav belonging to another person. There are exceptions, which include a Rav Kav with a monthly ridership (חדשי חופשי) on it and a Rav Kav with reduced fares for the elderly.

In the case of students; if a student uses a card belonging to another student, which is a discounted fare, inspectors have the right to use discretion regarding a fine. If a fine is given, the rider has the right to appeal to the Transportation Ministry and if s/he can prove s/he is a student, the fine will be canceled.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)

Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis, Activists Take on Pedophilia in Public Rally

 

Wed Aug 9, 2017 6:11 am (PDT) . Posted by: 

"Dorron Katzin" dakatzin 

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.805800?=&ts=_1502280176526

*Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis, Activists Take on Pedophilia in Public Rally*

*Religious leaders take on the issue at rare public gathering in Haredi
town of Bnei Brak, dismiss rumors of ‘cult’ hunting children on street*

Aaron Rabinowitz (http://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/aaron-rabinowitz-1.
795882) Aug 09, 2017 12:55 AM

Also:
• Jerusalem men held on suspicion of sexually abusing children -
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/jerusalem-men-
held-on-suspicion-of-sexually-abusing-children-1.406215
• Breaking Israel's ultra-Orthodox taboo on discussing sexual abuse -
http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel/breaking-israel-s-
ultra-orthodox-taboo-on-discussing-sexual-abuse.premium-1.502383

In a rare gathering that took place Saturday night in Bnei Brak,
ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) rabbis and activists spoke publicly for the first
time on the issue of pedophilia (http://www.haaretz.com/
israel-news/.premium-1.710150) in the community, providing a glimpse into
how attackers and victims are dealt with.

The assembly was convened following a wave of rumors about a “missionary
cult” that was snatching children, sexually assaulting them, inciting them
against their parents and even threatening to murder them. These rumors
were making local parents hysterical, especially since dozens of children
had complained in recent months about strangers who approached them,
grabbed them and sexually assaulted them. An in-depth examination, however,
showed that the panic was apparently unjustified; although there had been
cases of children being assaulted, these attacks had been perpetrated by
pedophiles acting alone and not as part of any network or cult.

The story is also rooted in cases that took place earlier in Jerusalem. In
2011 a number of suspects were arrested in a series of attacks on children
in the Nahlaot neighborhood. Residents believed there was a wide network of
pedophiles in the area who had attacked dozens of children, but an
intensive police investigation uncovered no evidence of this, although
there had been a few individual instances.

A few years later there were rumors of a similar network operating in the
Jerusalem neighborhood of Sanhedria. In August 2016 police arrested a
number of people suspected of spreading the rumors about a “missionary
cult” and using them to extract hundreds of thousands of shekels from
people who contributed to help stop the imaginary cult.

After similar rumors started in Bnei Brak a few months ago, activists and
rabbis who intervened determined that these were groundless and that a
significant number of the children’s reports could not be proven
sufficiently or were outright lies.

As the Saturday assembly was called to calm frightened parents, the
phenomenon of pedophilia was discussed. At the start of the conference,
however, Rabbi Shlomo Levinstein, who is active in this area because of his
position in the Mishmeret Hakodesh Vehahinukh (“Guardians of Holiness and
Education”) organization, said, “For reasons of modesty, questions to the
rabbis will be allowed only after the gathering on a private basis.”
Teenagers were ordered out of the hall.

During his address, Levinstein said, “When we know who the attacker is,
there is sometimes an option to deal with it in the community. We know how
to do this, either through the Mishmeret Hakodesh or through Rabbi Chananya
Chollak [chairman of the Ezer Mizion aid organization]. We have ways of
sending people for treatment and we do so with a waiver on medical secrecy.
When we don’t know who did it, we call the Israel Police.”

He added, “Our community has all sorts of sensitivities that don’t exist in
other populations. When police are called, the detectives don’t know our
language and can sometimes ask things that a child wouldn’t know what they
want of him. Sometimes we arranged to have children questioned in Rabbi
Chollak’s office, and that’s acceptable to the police. But the first thing
that must be done is to protect the children – that is, to warn them not to
speak to strangers and that you are the sole proprietor over your body.”

*Nothing new*

Chollak also addressed the gathering, saying, “Unfortunately, assaults on
children are nothing new. Almost every week there’s an incident, in our
community as well, to our great regret. There was a story in Bnei Brak a
while back. Twenty-eight children were assaulted within 10 days, three of
them girls who were hospitalized. I couldn’t sit in my office and I went
out on ambushes with the police.”

Rabbi Yehuda Sillman, a senior rabbinic court judge, told the gathering,
“This story started in the Nahlaot neighborhood in Jerusalem, where there
were evil people who did terrible things and they’re sitting in jail.
There’s no doubt that in various instances you have to go to the
authorities, but in the current case [the rumored missionary cult in Bnei
Brak] it’s clear the story isn’t credible. Hysteria and imagination work
overtime in these cases and cause even worse damage – people who won’t
leave their homes, children who aren’t permitted to play in the park, and
more.”

Sillman added, “If there have been cases of assaults on children, they
should be reported to the police, in coordination with the rabbis and
activists to make sure the attackers indeed get punished and that there’s
oversight so that the complaints are checked in a manner suited to the
Haredi community. But there’s no need for exaggerated panic.”

In conclusion, the rabbis instructed the parents to repeatedly tell
children that they shouldn’t approach or talk to strangers, and that they
must explain to them that only they have say over their bodies.

“There are a lot of question marks in this case,” said Eli Schlesinger,
crime reporter for the website Bechadrei Haredim, who has been continuously
covering the issue of sexual assault in the community. “One city resident
collected the information and gave the rabbis a document with 30 instances
of assault. Rabbi Yehuda Sillman investigated but could not find evidence
of a cult operating in the city.”

Yisrael Cohen, a journalist for the Kikar Shabbat website, which divulged
the recordings from the Bnei Brak gathering, told Haaretz, “The rabbis and
the Haredi activists work in cooperation with the police, who in certain
cases look away and allow treatment within the community. The police
understand that the advantages of cooperation with Haredi officials
outweigh the disadvantages.”