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)