Avodah Mailing List

Volume 32: Number 132

Wed, 10 Sep 2014

• 1. Bitachon and Hishtadlus (Micha Berger)
• 2. Re: Zemanim (Kenneth Miller)
• 3. Re: Zemanim (Zev Sero)
• 4. Re: Zemanim (Micha Berger)
• 5. Re: Error in Magen Avraham 428 (Motti Yarchinai)
• 6. Daat Torah (Micha Berger)
• 7. Re: Ein Adam Meisim Atzmo Rasha (Kenneth Miller)
• 8. Re: Ein Adam Meisim Atzmo Rasha (Micha Berger)
• 9. Re: Error in Magen Avraham 428 (Motti Yarchinai)
• 10. Re: Error in Magen Avraham 428 (Micha Berger)
• 11. Re: Jerusalem rabbinical court refuses to let widow of 13 years remarry (elazar teitz)
• 12. Sources for 3 Stars and Earliest Talis Times (Prof. Levine)

The AhS (OC 242:44) discusses the person who doesn't have enough for
Shabbos. He is not obligated to go into deat in order to fulfil oneg
shabbos; he can eat what he does on a weekday. However, the gemara in the
beginning of Beitza pereq 2 famously says that what we spend on Shabbos
doesn't come out of the money Hashem allocates for us for the year.

So why not borrow?

The AhS answers that the gemara's "levu Alai veAni poreia" only refers
to someone who has a job. Someone who has no job, "asei shabesakha khol,
ve'al titztareikh laberios".

RYME points to the BY on se'if 1 and exokauns that someone who lives
of others, eg the qupah, shouldn't be borrowing.

Only someone who has a job can rely on Hashem's promise to reimberse
him.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             When memories exceed dreams,
mi...@aishdas.org        The end is near.
http://www.aishdas.org                   - Rav Moshe Sherer
Fax: (270) 514-1507

R' Micha Berger wrote:

<<< I understood RMF as saying chatzos lehalakhah is standardized,
the average for the sun being as high as it's going to go, and not the
actual time it occurs on that day. (Which is what RZS writes as well.) This
parallels the same issue we had with Rabbeinu Tam's tzeis. in fact, any
description of the start or end of day could be: 1- fixed minutes, perhaps
a legal mandate to wait as long as the most extreme case (this was
suggested WRT R' Tam's tzeis) >>>

I see a big difference between standardizing tzeis and standardizing chatzos.

The standardization of tzeis that you describe can be done by any balabos
who has a clock. Thos is similar to the 20 amah limit for sechach or ner
chanukah, which can be done by measuring height alone, and we don't
complicate it by measuring the horizontal distance, which surely affects
visibility. 

In sharp contrast, standardizing chatzos cannot be done except by those who
understand the analemma. I humbly suggest that this may be part of why this
view has been rejected by everyone; even Rav Moshe offers no explanation of
it other that it being a kabala from his father.

Akiva Miller
____________________________________________________________
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On 8/09/2014 9:06 PM, Kenneth Miller via Avodah wrote:
> I see a big difference between standardizing tzeis and standardizing chatzos.
>
> The standardization of tzeis that you describe can be done by any
> balabos who has a clock. Thos is similar to the 20 amah limit for
> sechach or ner chanukah, which can be done by measuring height alone,
> and we don't complicate it by measuring the horizontal distance, which
> surely affects visibility.
>
> In sharp contrast, standardizing chatzos cannot be done except by
> those who understand the analemma. I humbly suggest that this may be
> part of why this view has been rejected by everyone; even Rav Moshe
> offers no explanation of it other that it being a kabala from his
> father.

You have it exactly backwards.  Standardizing chatzos as mean noon makes it
absolutely trivial to anyone with a clock.   Having it be actual noon, as
everyone else says, means we need an analemma.

Of course clocks weren't common until recently, and with a sundial the case
is as you say -- but without a clock there doesn't seem to be any great
advantage to  standardizing tzeis as a number of minutes.

-- 
Zev Sero             Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable
z...@sero.name        from malice.
                                                          - Eric Raymond

On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 01:06:26AM +0000, Kenneth Miller via Avodah wrote:
: In sharp contrast, standardizing chatzos cannot be done except by those
: who understand the analemma. I humbly suggest that this may be part of
: why this view has been rejected by everyone; even Rav Moshe offers no
: explanation of it other that it being a kabala from his father.

OTOH, we know that chatzos alone among the zemanim was hard enough to
determine for Chazal to add a safety buffer -- the 30 min between chatzos
and minchah gedolah -- for that reason.

So maybe you found why it's difficult. Although it doesn't fit the
words of the gemara that closely. OTOH, if we use the words of the gemara
very strictly, chatzos has to be the day's noon, not an average, and not
halfway between an assymetrical beginning and end of day.

30 min is just a shade greater than the span of the analemma, and although
that's from earliest to latest, not earliest to mean, I find it suggestive.

But my point in chiming in was my I belief RMF was stating what the
din is, not that the physical chatzos is always the same time. RMF,
kedarko, would have asked an expert before writing a scientific fact.
It is therefore rare to find a fundamental error in fact in the IM. Like
the one I thought you were originally claiming.

Me, OTOH, I could (and did) write a whole post based on my having crossed
wires between the words "alos" and "haneitz".

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "The worst thing that can happen to a
mi...@aishdas.org        person is to remain asleep and untamed."
http://www.aishdas.org          - Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, Alter of Kelm
Fax: (270) 514-1507

Rabbi Teitz, thank you for your replies to this thread in Avodah vol 32,
issues 118 and 124 (Aug 8 and 19). Please allow me, first of all, to
correct your mathematics. You wrote (in paraphrase) that:

(a) Noon moladot (in general) occur every 2096 years, and you list occurrences of: Shevat 0351, and in the years 2447 or 2448, 4543 and 6639.

(b) A noon molad Tishrei occurred in 2447 or 2448, and never since.

I believe that all of the above is incorrect, though not by much in (a). I
hesitate to say this, because I see that you have a strong background in
mathematics, whereas I struggle with the subject. However, I get my
computer to do my maths (all integer maths) for me. I wrote the code many
years ago and I believe that by now it has been exhaustively tested and
debugged. Nevertheless, I would be grateful if you could look at the
corrected information about all this that I have posted and let me know if
you agree. It is at http://tiny.cc/jewishcalendar
(item 2 in the list of downloads). 

Regarding the other matters you mentioned:

You suspect that the error in Magen Avraham's description of GaTRaD and
BaTU-THaKPaT is a printer's error. This is a plausible theory, but one that
can only be verified if we find an old printed edition or manuscript that
differs from our current texts. What I find surprising is that this error
seems to have gone unnoticed for so long -- it does not seem to have
provoked any other comments on it.

> The calculated calendar ends in Elul 6000

Is there a specific sunset clause (no pun intended) to this effect
explicitly stated in a source text on the rules of the calendar, or is it
merely based on the expectation that mashiach will have come by (or in) the
7th millennium? (That is based on an abstract interpretation of sources
that are not specifically about the duration of the world or the coming of
mashiach.) If there is such a specific clause, it would provide a halachic
green light for calendar reform, which will eventually be necessary.

It is interesting to note that the tables of year-types in Pri Chadash on
Orach Chayim 428 only go up to the year 6000 (well, every table has to stop
somewhere), but the earlier table appended to the same chapter of the Tur
goes to the year 6024. Perhaps the Tur was not of the opinion that the
present calendar must end in Elul 6000.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikisou
rce/he/2/23/%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%97_%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A8.pdf)

Regarding the Saadia vs Ben-Meir dispute of the early 920's. All knowledge
of that dispute had been lost for centuries (and would have been unknown to
the Magen Avraham). It was only rediscovered from old writings retrieved by
Solomon Schechter at the turn of the 20th century from the Cairo Geniza,
where they had been accumulating for centuries.

The Rambam writes that all calendric authority is vested solely in the rabbinate of Israel (to the exclusion of the diaspora rabbinate).

Nonetheless, Saadia won that dispute, largely on the strength of the
vehemence of his attacks on Ben Meir. He was not yet Saadia Gaon at the
time of that dispute, just a young and relatively unknown rabbi, who
subsequently rose to fame and fortune (i.e. he won appointment to the
Gaonate) largely on the back of that very vituperative dispute. That was,
perhaps, one of Saadia's two main achievements from that dispute (aside
from firmly establishing for all future practice that molad zaken starts at
noon (18:0000, Jewish Mean Time) and not at 18:0642, JMT).

His second achievement was to thoroughly undermine the principle mentioned
above in the name of the Rambam. Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer puts it even more
starkly: Even if the righteous and the wise are in the diaspora and the
population of Israel are the peasantry (lit: shepherds and herders),
calendric decisions are to be made by the peasants.

Given the state of the rabbinate in Israel today, we might have cause
nowadays to be thankful to Saadia for trashing the above-mentioned
principle and ending the monopoly of the Israeli rabbinate over calendric
matters, but it was not necessarily good public policy.

The dispute, which began in 4681-2, lasted several years, during which the
years 4683, 4684 (and possibly 4688, if it was not yet resolved) were the
ones affected, and the affected Passovers were observed by Israeli Jewry
two days earlier than in the diaspora. One populace was eating chametz
while the other was eating matza. (This was not necessarily as bad a schism
as it seems, for the same thing still occurs every year on the 8th day of
Passover. OK, the analogy is only a superficial one, I know, and anyone on
this list would be able to point out why -- so don't bother.)

Historians tend to focus on the politics of the dispute rather than
analysing the calendar arithmetic behind it all, which leads to some
interesting speculation as to the real reason for molad zaken. W.M.
Feldman, on p 192 of Rabbinical Mathematics and Astronomy, has successfully
debunked the traditional explanation that molad zaken reflects the rule of
R. Zera in Rosh Hashanah 20b. This is not the place to go into all that at
length, but in brief:

> I don't know Where RAbM got the 642 chalakim

Apparently, the only thing he knew about it himself is that he had such a
tradition. He based his arguments solely on his geo-authority and advanced
no arguments (logical or mathematical) in support of it.

There are four theories about this. Two by Canadians Remy Landau and Irv Bromberg:

(http://hebrewcalendar.tripod.com/index.html#26)
(http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/hebrew/index.html).

(a) Landau is of the opinion that the reason for molad zaken is that there
is an (implicit) calendar rule that the first day of a month (even months
other than Tishrei) may never precede the day of its molad, and molad zaken
prevents this (in the preceding year). It is discussed at #25 of the above
link. However to serve this purpose, it need not be as early as 18:0000, it
can be as late as 18:0657. He believes this is why Ben Meir proposed to
relax the rule and thus eliminate unnecessary dehiyot, but this does not
adequately explain Ben-Meir's proposed value of 18:0642.

(b) Bromberg believes that Ben Meir was just confusing the equinox epoch
with the molad epoch. The 642 parts is part of the quantity D/2 where D is
the difference between a Shmuelian (tekufah) year and 12 calendric
lunations, 12 x (29.5d, 793p). D/2 is the quantity (5d, 10h, 642p) called
by Tosafot (RH 8a) "Chatzi odefet hatekufah al hamolad," (half of the
quantity by which the tekufah [year] exceeds the molad [year]). As a
consequence of this difference, tekufat Nisan of year 1 (Wed, SDN 171,
00:0000) precedes the molad of that Nisan (Wed, SDN 178, 09:0642) by 7d,
9h, 642p. (SDN is Shmuelian Day Number, a continuous day count, where day 1
is Monday, 1 Tishrei of year 1.) That time-quantity is the sum of D/2 plus
1d, 23h. The second addend is the amount by which tekufat Tishrei of year 2
(Thur, SDN 353, 15:0000) preceded molad Tishrei of year 2 (Fri, SDN 355,
14:0000, AKA molad VYD.)

This can be seen graphically (in a timeline) on p 3 and is further
explained on p 5 of my document "Tosafot (d.h. Litekufot) on b. Rosh
Hashanah 8a, translated & explained," which is in the downloads list at
http://tiny.cc/jewishcalendar.
It thoroughly explains everything contained in (b) above.

Bromberg thinks that Ben-Meir may have thought the two were related because the 9 hours are exactly half of the 18-hour molad zaken limit.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedi
a.org/wiki/Aaron_ben_Me%C3%AFr) offers two other theories, neither of
them adequately explained:

(c) that the 642p is the time difference betwen Babylon and Jerusalem (a
meridian difference of 8?55') and Ben-Meir wanted to shift Jewish calendar
time from Babylon to Jerusalem. (Bromberg has shown that at the time of the
Hasmoneans, the meridian corresponding to the moladot of the calendar was
halfway between the two rivers bounding the main Jewish populaces, the Nile
and the Euphrates, but it has been drifting eastward ever since.)

(d) is a variation on (b), in which Ben-Meir wanted to adjust the
calendar's epoch to fit R. Yehoshua's opinion that the world was created in
Nisan. (It only accounts for the 642p component of 9h, 642p.)

Motti Yarchinai
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The current issue of Jewish Action has a piece by R' Julius Berman
coming out in favor of da'as Torah. (Notable since this is an OU organ,
not Agudah's.)

RJB says that da'as Torah requires three things, though:

1- Sufficient expertise: either first-hand, or the rav having whom to
   consult,

2- Distinguishing between pesaq, daas Torah, and strong personal opinion.

3- There are profound advantages when a poseiq explains his basis. (Shu"t
   style.) It allows for dialog and peer review with other posqim,
   allowing for a more sound consensus to emerge.

See <http://www.ou.org/jewish_action/09/2014/daat-torah-missing-ch
apter-shulchan-aruch>
or <http://j.mp/1rC4ZS8>.

Gut Voch!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             None of us will leave this place alive.
mi...@aishdas.org        All that is left to us is
http://www.aishdas.org   to be as human as possible while we are here.
Fax: (270) 514-1507            - Anonymous MD, while a Nazi prisoner

R' Micha Berger wrote:

<<< If this re-analysis of Milgram's experiment (by adding the
post-experiment revalataions of the participants) is correct, we have
experimental evidence for ein adam meisim atzmo rasha. >>>

To my memory, that phrase is used to explain why a confession is
inadmissible in beis din. As such, it might be translated as "no one would
allow himself to be seen as evil."

But everything posted here leads to a very different conclusion: No one
sees himself as evil - even during the evil act itself. I do not dispute
this in any way at all. As Rabbi Shlomo Riskin once told our shiur: Humans
excel at self-deception. (My main point is that while this is a new and
interesting translation, I doubt that it was Chazal's main intention. )

Akiva Miller

____________________________________________________________
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On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 07:26:16PM +0000, Kenneth Miller via Avodah wrote:
: To my memory, that phrase is used to explain why a confession is
: inadmissible in beis din. As such, it might be translated as "no one
: would allow himself to be seen as evil."

: But everything posted here leads to a very different conclusion: No one
: sees himself as evil - even during the evil act itself...

I argued that one necessarily implies the other. I wrote:
> After all, if no one acts without interpreting their actions as positive,
> or without reinterpreting them that way after the fact, then we should
> assume that meaning when listening to the accused's testimony.

If the witness implicates himself in beis din, since the chance that
he thinks of himself as evil is negligable, we have to assume we didn't
understand the eidus.

And given palginan dibura, we are saying we only ignore that implication
of the eidus that the person sees himself as evil, but that BD understood
and can accept the rest of the statement.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Life is a stage and we are the actors,
mi...@aishdas.org        but only some of us have the script.
http://www.aishdas.org               - Rav Menachem Nissel
Fax: (270) 514-1507

WARNING: I just realised that something I wrote in my previous reply has
the potential to lead people into error and I should have included a
warning about it. There was a link to an online copy of the table of
year-types appended to ch 428 of the Tur, Orach Chayim. Many on this list
might already know this, but in case some don't, be warned: that table
should not be relied upon as it contains errors. In this case, it is well
established that they are not just printing errors -- the whole table is
built on on a flawed assumption about the calendar.

The table ostensibly gives the entire sequence of year types for the 970
years from year 5055 to year 6024. It purports to do this in a table with
only 247 entries, because it erroneously assumes a perfect repetition of
the same sequence every 247 years. The Pri Chadash commentary on the same
chapter of Shulchan Aruch corrects the errors in the Tur and provides a
corrected set of tables.

The flawed assumption arises from a curiosity known as the Iggul of Rabbi
Nachshon, which is a group of 13 Metonic cycles of 19 years. After 13 x 19
years (=247 years), the molad value at the beginning of the next year (Y)
has advanced from the molad of Y-247 by almost 1 week. The exact difference
is 1 week minus 905 parts, so, in effect, the molad of Y is just 905 parts
(about 50 mins) earlier in the week than the molad of Y-247. There is
therefore a tendency for the sequence of year types beginning with Y to
duplicate the sequence beginning with year Y-247. This tendency should not
be mistaken for a perfect repetition -- it is precisely what led to the
errors in that table.
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On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 09:46:01AM -0700, Motti Yarchinai via Avodah wrote:
: Regarding the Saadia vs Ben-Meir dispute of the early 920's...

This email list led to a collaboration between RYGB and RAZZ (both CC-ed)
that produced an article on this topic 15 years ago.
<http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol05/v05n038.shtml#08>

               Our Very Own Y2K Problem (More Precisely: Y0.92K):
           The Rabbi Sa'adia Gaon - Rabbi Aharon ben Meir Controversy
           Rabbi Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer with Rabbi Ari Z. Zivotofsky

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "I think, therefore I am." - Renne Descartes
mi...@aishdas.org        "I am thought about, therefore I am -
http://www.aishdas.org   my existence depends upon the thought of a
Fax: (270) 514-1507      Supreme Being Who thinks me." - R' SR Hirsch

     RYitzchok Levine asked, about the children born to a yevama lashuk,

<< Question: Are these 4 children considered mamzerim?

     RZev Sero answered:

    <No, they are not.  Yevama lachutz is an issur lav, and a mamzer is
only created
by an issur kareis.>

     While RZS's answer is correct, there is room for elaboration.

     When a yevama marries before chalitza, there is an opinion cited in
Shulchan Aruch (EH 159:2) that any children resulting from that union are
mamzeirim d'rabbanan.  However, in the case under discussion there was no
marriage.  In that case, the Aruch Hashulchan (159:17) rules that the
children are not mamzeirim according to all opinions. His reasoning is that
just as the brother-in-law may fulfill yiibbum if the yevama was m'zana
(where yibbum is practiced), but is prohibited from doing so if she got
married, so too as far as mamzeirus d'rabbanan is concerned.

     However, the Beis Din's decision also leaves room for discussion.  As
mentioned in 159::3, where it is cited by the RM"A as "yesh om'rim," it is
a chidddush of the Nimukei Yoseif that she is prohibited to the man if they
were not married, as a k'nas for her having sinned, and the acharonim are
at a loss to find a source for such a k'nas.  It is unclear why the Beis
Din decided l'chumra in what is even less than a s'feika d'rabbanan.

EMT
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 From http://www.myzmanim.com/read/sources.aspx

In New York and New Jersey, Motzoei Shabbos is never later than 50 
minutes past Shekiah. (Igros Moshe)

See the above URL for other opinions and a discussion of this issue.  YL
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