Avodah Mailing List

Volume 22: Number 21

Thu, 28 Dec 2006

• 1. Rambam on Sin (dfinch847@aol.com)
• 2. Re: History of Havarah (Micha Berger)
• 3. Re: History of Havarah (Minden)
• 4. Re: History of Havarah (afolger@aishdas.org)
• 5. Re: History of Havarah (Minden)
• 6. Changing Havarah (Jonathan Baker)
• 7. Re: Women/korim (afolger@aishdas.org)
• 8. Dechiyot (Aaron Gal)
• 9. Re: Al petach beito mabachutz (Dr. Josh Backon)
• 10. Keil melech neeman (Rich, Joel)
• 11. Re: Dechiyot (Simon Montagu)
• 12. Re: Al petach beito mabachutz (Zev Sero)
• 13. Size of Isoron (Akiva Blum)
• 14. Re: Dechiyot (Zev Sero)

Micha Berger writes:

"Not that all sin is due to the passions, but [by Rambam] the concept 
of sin can only apply to the domains of the sensory and the emotional."

Rambam says in Shemona Perakim I that "reason, that faculty peculiar to 
man, enables him to understand, reflect, acquire knowledge of the 
sciences, and to discriminate between proper and improper actions." A 
failure of reasoning at the margins of halacha (i.e., the ubitquitous 
"gray area" of conduct) might lead to sinful action or inaction without 
implicating the sensory or emotional domains. Rambam's discussion in 
Shemona Perakim II relates to "diseases of the soul" that lead to 
dysfunctional disorders of thoughts, desires, and conduct that usually, 
but not necessarily, involve sinful behavior. SP II focuses on the 
sensory and emotional, but in the context of vice and corruption, which 
are patterns of behavior, not sin per se.

Perhaps, then, it'd be more accurate it say that vice and corruption 
derives from the domains of the sensory and emotional, but sin can 
derive from any domain which, if not perfected, leads to non-halachic 
conduct.

David Riceman cites SP III:8 in this connection as well. Here Rambam 
draws on the Aristotelian form/matter dichotomy and states: "All man's 
acts of disobedience and sins are consequent upon his matter and not 
upon his form, whereas all his virtues are consequent upon his form." 
At first reading, this supports Micha's argument that sin applies to 
the sensory and emotional domains. But Rambam clarifies his form/matter 
distinction by stating that man's form "is in the image of G-d and His 
likeness," and therefore that sin, being by definition unG-dly, must 
"be bound to earthy, turbid, and dark matter" of man himself. In short, 
sin cannot be a matter of form because form must follow the image of 
G-d.

David Finch
dfinch847@aol.com

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On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 07:04:51 -0800 (PST), afolger@aishdas.org wrote:
> Eh, that is one tradition. Sefer Yetzirah reportedly has reish as part of
> beged kefet, giving us beged rakefet as the rule to apply. Suddenly, reish
> refuya will prop up allover the place.

Bege"d Kapore"t is the better acronym, IMHO. Sticks to listing them in
alphabetical order, and has a more auspicious meaning.

I don't know what you mean by that. Currently nearly every reish is refuyah,
there are only 14 degushot in Tanakh. How can they suddenly pop up all over
the place if they're already all over?

Perhaps you meant we would suddenly realize how many reish-es deserve to be
degushot, and /they/ would be the ones popping up?

I think the reish degushah fell between the cracks because it never had the
same rules as the bege"d kefe"t letters did. The rules constructed for geroniot
means that whatever rules reish had, it at best was a crompromise - a letter
that can take a dageish qal, but not chazaq? Aleph and reish are even treated
more this way than other geroniot; they even take on a new vowel in pi'el and
hitpa'el (hei and ayin do not, and ches never changes vowel) to represent the
dageish. Those missing degeishot would mean a lot of wrong niqud, too.

It also doesn't have an unvoiced sibling, the way b has p, g has k, and d has t.
It may have had two forms in the days of the Seifer haYetzirah (obviously), but
there is enough reason to believe it wasn't a full member of the set for me not
to assume the mesorah simply lost that many degeishim (even if before the
baalei mesorah came up with the idea of denoting one form with a dot). Nor that
it mis-vowelized that many words to compensate for those degeishim.

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

PS: This post has been brought to you by the people who make Mesorah, an email
list for people whose eyes didn't gloss over before getting this far.

--
Micha Berger             "And you shall love H' your G-d with your whole
micha@aishdas.org        heart, your entire soul, and all you own."
http://www.aishdas.org   Love is not two who look at each other,
Fax: (270) 514-1507      It is two who look in the same direction.

RAF wrote:
> While the mechanism you propose is sound, I wonder, VOS IZ SCHLECHT MIT DER AMERIKANISCHE OHSSPRACHE fin choilem in raish?! Actually, some argue that they are superior. The American reish may be a reish refuya.

Halachico-phonologically (TM), the American Reish might be just as good as other pronunciations in principle. The following points might be of import (simplified because of terche detzibbure):

- It's distinctive and doesn't sound like other sounds, with the exception in theory that some speakers might pronounce it quite similar to the English W, but that's not important, because the same speakers don't have a bilabial Waw in *Hebrew* but a Vav.

- All three common ways, the American, the French and the Spanish Rs, have a tendency to vanish after a vowel at the end of a syllable, sometimes with a lengthening of this vowel or an A in the place of the R, just like in Hebrew before an &ayin etc. That's no better than dropping it entirely, at least in cases like 'gorer' vs. 'gorea&' which both turn 'gorea'. In other words, a tongue-rolled R doesn't prevent R-dropping, and the Irish and many American dialects show that a non-rolled diffuse R can be pretty persistent. Better a pronounced American R than a dropped Yiddish one.

- Yes, it does indeed sound funny and non-authentic, but beauty certainly isn't an argument, and the question about what is the authentic R isn't so poshet. (I wrote a bit about that a year ago here: http://lipmans.blogspot.com/2005/10/purr.html ) The question is more between tongue and uvula, but who knows. A question related to authenticity is family tradition, but that mainly concerns a *deliberate* change from, say, the Yiddish ("French") R to the American, which is rarely if ever the case.

- There is a danger of slurring a preceding vowel with the American R. ('Shrr' for 'sure' - in fact, to my ears the lack of this slur sounds Irish.)

ELPhM
http://lipmans.blogspot.com

I wrote:
>> While the mechanism you propose is sound, I wonder, VOS IZ SCHLECHT MIT
>> DER AMERIKANISCHE OHSSPRACHE fin choilem in raish?! Actually, some argue
>> that they are superior. The American reish may be a reish refuya.

RMB replied:
> ... which (to spell it out) is almost every reish in Tanakh. Only 14 have
> a
> dageish.

Eh, that is one tradition. Sefer Yetzirah reportedly has reish as part of
beged kefet, giving us beged rakefet as the rule to apply. Suddenly, reish
refuya will prop up allover the place.

Kol tuv,

Arie Folger

R Michael Kopinsky wrote:
> Another issue is when a community decides, for reasons legitimate or not, to change their havarah.  The South African community changed their havara to sefaradit (ie Israeli) I believe in the 1950s

I think one shouldn't equate "sefaradit" with Israeli even for shortness' sake. It's an insult to the sefardi traditions of Hebrew (and a double insult if one subsumes the other non-Ashkenazi communities, of course), and it's not for nothing that Sefaradim refer to the Israeli pronunciation as Ashkenazit. The Israeli pronunciation is basically the tradition of German Protestant Christian scholars who heard it through their ears from Italian Jews (or one Italian Jew), whereafter it developped in church and academia for four or five centuries without any conctact to Jews. This is the basis, and the concrete performance of this basis is Ukrainer Yiddish. In fact, all that is interesting if not fascinating, and it works finely in the Israeli main vernacular, but it's really not Sefardic.

ELPhM
http://lipmans.blogspot.com

From: "Michael Kopinsky" <mkopinsky@gmail.com>
 
>                                The South African community changed
> their havara to sefaradit (ie Israeli) I believe in the 1950s as a
> move of "solidarity" with Israel, who had made that same decision.
 
> As I was born in SA, I grew up speaking sefaradit, and recently
> switched to American ashkenazis, as I could not justify an active
> decision to change a minhag, with no halachic justification. 

I'm sorry, but I don't see your personal switch as any more justifiable
than the initial communal switch.  If it's not allowed to change one's
havarah, it's not allowed to change one's havarah, even if one believes
that the havarah which one learned as a child is by some criterion 
"wrong".  

I know how my grandfather spoke Hebrew - galitzianer-chasidish.  He
grew up in Berdichev before WWI - they came to the US, already married,
just at the beginning of WWI.  He would use it sometimes, in reading
from the Haggadah or something.  However, in the States they were totally
non-religious, to the point that my father had to teach himself Hebrew
as an adult.  And when he did, the contemporary books all used havarah
Sefaradit, and my grandparents had moved to Florida, so there was no
continuity of tradition.  "Booreech Ahtoo...Eloikaini Meilech HoOilum" 
That's how I should speak, if I really wanted the traditional pronun-
ciation of my ancestors.  Note how the segol sounds sometimes like a
tzere, sometimes like a segol - what are the rules for that?  But
nobody would understand me in the modern world, where even Chasidim
speak Sefaradit to communicate with the outside world, particularly
with Israelis.

Now, if you just fall into it, which I find happening to me, having
been taught Hebrew at a school (Ramaz) which uses sefaradit prounuciation,
but living among American Ashkenazim, most of whom speak Ashkenozis,
I don't know - am I obligated to resist the temptation to use the 
sov instead of tov, emphasize the penultimate syllable by default instead
of the ultimate, etc.?  The most difficult for me is, not having grown
up distinguishing between kamatz & patach, to know when to use one or
the other.  So by choice, I'd stick with what I learned, as that has the
most potential to be a consistent havarah.  But 25 years of exposure to
American Ashkenazim has a countervailing effect on 12 years of schooling.

If you "can't justify an active decision to change a minhag", your own
decision to change was just as active.  What's next - going to stop 
saying Kabbalat Shabbat?  stop eating turkey?  stop wearing Western garb?
The minhag may have been wrong to change initially, but once it's 
established, it's established, and you have no more right to change "back"
than they did to change "forward".

--
        name: jon baker              web: http://www.panix.com/~jjbaker
     address: jjbaker@panix.com     blog: http://thanbook.blogspot.com

RSBA posted:
<<<<From: "Rich, [Reb] Joel" <>
R'YBS was known to feel that women should not go korim on Y"K since it
was not done in the women's area of the  bet mikdash when the avodah was
done. Does anyone know of a source that says women should/could do this
today?
>>

<<I have no source, but AFAIK, in (some?) Yekkishe kehilos it was done.>>

In fact, when RYBS expressed his opinion on the matter (that women should
not prostratethemselves as it wasn't done in the ezrat nashim) he was
reacting against what he had seen in Berlin.

Kol tuv,

Arie Folger

I am trying to find a table that shows the following:
1. What is the percentage of cases that Rosh Hashana falls on the Molad, with no any Dechiyot?
2. What the most common Dechiya? what percentage? is it Molad Zaken ?
3. What is the next one?

Aaron 
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R. Zev Sero said:


>That's not the "institution" posited.  That's an accomodation for sh'as
>sakana, and only for sh'as sakana.  It was suggested here that there was
>some sort of "institution" that we should always light inside, even when
>there is no sakana, in case there should ever be one, or something like
>that.  This was given as a reason why most people light inside today.
>I want to know where there is even a zecher to such a takana.

The question is how is sha'at sakana defined? I wonder if there is a functional
equivalence here of sakana to gezera as in a post I sent to AVODAH a few years
ago on the 4 tzomot:

There are different shitot on the gemara in Rosh Hashana 18b:

RASHI: defines "she'yesh shalom" as even when the bet hamikdash isn't built
if the hand of the goyim is not *tekefa* (held) over Israel, then the taaniyot
are days of rejoicing (sasson v'simcha) [but there is no *active* celebration].
By definition: if the bet hamikdash *is* built, even if the goyim have rule
over Israel, these fast days are days of simcha.

RABBENU CHANNANEL: all the tzomot are a zecher of the bet hamikdash. Thus in
time of peace (e.g. bet hamikdash is built), these fast days become days of
simcha. There is only a chovat tzom when there is a gezera (goyim rule). The
middle path: no bet hamikdash but no gezera: it's up to the decision of the
people as a whole.

RAMBAN: shalom = bet hamikdash is built and thus fast days become days of
simcha; no shalom but no days of gezera (rule of goyim over Israel): "ratzu
rov yisrael v'nismichu shelo l'hitanot EIN MATRICHIM ALEYHEM L'HITANOT".

RABBENU TAM: if there is no gezera against the Jews anywhere, the period is
NOT considered one that there is a chovat tzom.

RAMBAM (Peyrush hamishnayot Rosh Hashana 1:3): if yad ha'umot eino tekefa,
this is equivalent to shalom and thus the tzomot are yemei simcha; if there
is any gezera against Jews anywhere in the world, the tzomot revert back to
the will of the people.

RITVA: if there is no gezera, the people can abolish "rechitza, sika, u'neilat
ha'sandal" but not "achila". Thus so long as the bet hamikdash isn't rebuilt
we have to fast.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So as far as Chutz La'Aretz is concerned, "sakana" may not mean actual physical
harm [after all, Jews lived in closed ghettos up until 200 years ago 
and I can't imagine
hordes of goyim descending on a ghetto because someone lights a "lamp" outside
their door. It doesn't make any sense] but not being in charge of 
their destiny. On
Chanuka we are celebrating a military victory. Thus, only if there is 
no gezera against
Jews anywhere would one light the menorah outside next to the door. 
And that might also
explain why today in Israel the vast majority light indoors.

KT

Josh

Looks like I should have waited a week before asking :-)

See: http://vbm-torah.org/archive/tefila/08tefila.htm

KT
Joel Rich


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On 12/28/06, Aaron Gal <agal@haieramerica.com> wrote:

> I am trying to find a table that shows the following:
> 1. What is the percentage of cases that Rosh Hashana falls on the Molad,
> with no any Dechiyot?
> 2. What the most common Dechiya? what percentage? is it Molad Zaken ?
> 3. What is the next one?

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1584/index.html#24.3 gives these answers:

1. 39.0%
2. Lo Ido Rosh (42.9%)
3. Molad Zaken (14.3%)

After looking it up I realized that one could have deduced these
percentages logically: Lo Ido Rosh is obviously going to kick in in 3
years out of 7, and Molad Zaken in a quarter of the remaining years,
i.e. 1 out of 7.

Follow-up question: am I the only person who says "Lo Ido Rosh" rather
than "Lo Adu Rosh", and does anybody know why I do so?

Dr. Josh Backon wrote:


> So as far as Chutz La'Aretz is concerned, "sakana" may not mean actual 
> physical harm [after all, Jews lived in closed ghettos up until 200
> years ago and I can't imagine hordes of goyim descending on a ghetto
> because someone lights a "lamp" outside their door. It doesn't make
> any sense] but not being in charge of their destiny.


I imagine that in Europe they started lighting indoors because of
actual sakanah, at a time when any attention from the goyim was a
sakanah, and when that danger abated (because they all lived in the
"Jewish street", etc.) they continued the custom because of the cold.
(Remember that the Little Ice Age lasted until the mid-19th century,
and it then took 100 years or more for temperatures to recover; to
an extent, we're still recovering from it.)

But nowadays, in the neighbourhoods where most of us live, there is
no sakanah from lighting outside, and the Little Ice Age is over;
there's still the "unnaturally" cold climate of the North-Eastern
USA to deal with (caused by the Rockies diverting warm winds to the
south, leaving room for cold winds to pour down from Canada), but
in NYC we have a huge urban heat island counteracting that.  This
year, in Brooklyn NYC, there were a few nights on which it wasn't
very cold, and I lit outside without any discomfort.



-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev@sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas

The gemorah (pesochim 109a) states that a revi'is is 2 fingers by 2 finger
by 2.7 fingers. This is a total of 10.8 cubic fingers. A beitza is
therefore, as two thirds of a revi'is, 7.2 cubic fingers. An isoron is 43.2
beitzim (Rashi beshalach 16:36, Shach Y.D. 97:5). Therefore an isoron is
311.04 cubic fingers (Y.D. Ramo 324:1). (There are many ways of working this
out, they all come to the same thing.)

The mishna (menochos 11:5) states that the lechem haponim, when spread out
flat, were 5 tefochim by 10 tefochim. Rashi (beitzo 22b) says they were a
tefach thick. That equals 20 fingers by 40 fingers by 4, a total of 3200
cubic fingers. Each lechem was made of 2 isoronim (vayikro 24:5), so one
isoron should be 1600 cubic fingers.

Lechem haponim were baked matzos (menochos 97a). How could the flour be
311.04 cubic fingers per isoron, but the baked finished product be 1600
cubic fingers, more than five times as much?

(BTW, there is a nafke mina lehalocho.)

Akiva

Aaron Gal wrote:
> I am trying to find a table that shows the following:
> 1. What is the percentage of cases that Rosh Hashana falls on the Molad, 
> with no any Dechiyot?
> 2. What the most common Dechiya? what percentage? is it Molad Zaken ?
> 3. What is the next one?

Without consulting anything, but just on general principles, Molad Zaken
ought to occur in 25% of all years, while ADU ought to occur in 43% of
all years (in 11% of years they should both occur).  GaTReD Peshuta
should happen in 3.3% of years (and always triggers an ADU dechiya),
while BeTU TaKPaT Motzaei Meuberet should occur in only 0.5% of years.
It follows that in 40% of years there are no dechiyot at all.

-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev@sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas


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