Avodah Mailing List

Volume 24: Number 38

Wed, 31 Oct 2007

• 1. Heter mechirah vs. otzar beth din (Michael Elzufon)
• 2. Re: top recent seforim (Ken Bloom)
• 3. Minhag Yisroel (Jonathan Baker)
• 4. Top Recent Seforim (M Cohen)
• 5. Alleged story about the SM"A (Kelmar, Michael J.)
• 6. Rules of Psak (Jonathan Baker)
• 7. praying to tzadikkim (Saul.Z.Newman@kp.org)
• 8. Re: Rules of Psak (Rich, Joel)
• 9. Subject: Re: Shabbas he mi lezok (RallisW@aol.com)
• 10. V'sein Tal Umatar (yonah sears)
• 11. Re: Wrapping Tefillin in or out (Yzkd@aol.com)

RnSBoublil writes
 
<Rav Aviner wrote a summary of the questions regarding Heter Mechira and
Otzar Beit Din...

R. Teitz responded

     WADR to Rav Aviner, what he has written is a polemic, not a
summary... 

     He does, however, raise serious objections to the otzar beis din
hetter.  

[[MJE]] It seems to me that they are not so serious.  The Rambam by
holding that biur must destroy the produce once the time has past does
rule out otzar beth din and there are rishonim who come to the same
result, though not necessarily by the same path (e.g., the Ra'avad).
However, there also rishonim--e.g., the Rash on the Tosefta, the Ramban,
Tosfoth (Peshim 52b "Mitba'arin")--who disagree with him on this point.
Certainly, the Rash and the Kessef Mishneh do hold of otzar beth din.
The poskim today who hold of it do have quite a lot to rely on.

Criticism of paying people for the actual work necessary to collect and
distribute the produce and for hiring as these workers people those who
in other years would be working the fields ought to be more than
claiming that they are big hidushim.  Is there anything wrong with doing
either?

His querying how the prices being charged are set is a serious criticism
that applies to Otzar Ha'aretz and to otzroth beth din used by certain
wineries.  However, most of the otzar beth din produce that I have
encountered is at prices that can only be explained as being calculated
to cover labor costs.  (I was once told that if the money that they are
taking is not a fraction of what would be charged in normal commerce,
then it is not really an otzar beth din.  That may not be technically
accurate, but it makes the point.)

Years ago, a farmer on a yishuv that is shomer shmitta without recourse
to the heter mechirah told a group that I was part of that, due to the
limitations that the halacha places on what work may be done in the
fields during shmitta, they worked far harder during shmitta than any
other year.  He also said that it generally took them a couple of years
to make back what shmitta cost them.  I see no ground for denigrating
those who rely on the heter mechirah, but the mesiruth nefesh of those
who choose the other path should command respect.

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:50:26 -0400
Yitzhak Grossman <celejar@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:41:06 +0200
> "Eli Turkel" <eliturkel@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > A recent article I read asked for the names of any top Israeli
> > seforim in the last 10-20 years that might have a long term impact
> > 
> > Any suggestions?

Certainly anything by ROY or his sons will have a long term impact,
and most of those are quite recent.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.aishdas.org/private.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20071031/aeb38a7f/attachment-0001.pgp 

From: "Chana Luntz" <chana@kolsassoon.org.uk>
> And in Areivim in responding to another poster who wrote:
 
> >:  Girls' Torah education was a pretty
> >: major break, and IIRC, had to rely on 'eys laasos'....
 
> RMB responded
 
> >It did not. First, there is no issur -- the word used is "tiflus". 
 
> Um, I am not sure where you are getting this from.
 
> The precise language of the Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh Deah siman 246, si'if
> 6) which is word to word with the Rambam in Hilchos Talmud Torah perek 1
> halacha 13:
> 
> V'afal pi sheyesh la schar tzivu Chazal shelo yilmod adam es biso Torah
> mipnei she rov nashim ain da'asan micavenes l'hislamed u'motzios divrei
> Torah l'divrei havai lfi anist da'asan. Amru hachamim kol hamelamed es
> biso torah kielu melamda tiflus (Rema [dvar averah]) b'ma devarim omrim
> b'torah sheba'al peh aval torah shebichsav lo yilmod osah l'chatchila,
> v'im melameda ano k'lamda tiflus."
 
> Now, I struggle to see "tzivu Chazal" as anything but an issur.  The is
> modified (at least for Ashkenazim) by the Rema adding that in any case a
> woman is obligated (chayaves) to learn dinim shayachim l'isha. 

Sorry, I don't agree.  The issur is quite clearly, from the exact language
in the mishnah, on the FATHER to teach HIS DAUGHTER.  The rabbis have made
such diyukim before, e.g. in prozbul - individuals must forgive debts, but 
not batei din (and other corporate bodies?); in maakeh - individuals have 
to erect a fence, corporate owners don't (this was the reason given to one
future rav who complained that there wasn't a railing on the roof of his
yeshiva).

Now, the fact that throughout history, most people were taught by their
parents, rather than by an organized school system, would mitigate against
this distinction helping women.  But once people went to organized schools,
by the 19th century say, the "issur" wouldn't hold.

Note the exact language: "the Sages commanded that a man not teach his 
daughter Torah"  (the rationale is chopped out of another gemara and tacked
onto the mishnah).  It is separated from the statement about tiflus, but
the language of "not teach his daughter" is that of the mishnah about tiflus.

And you leave out the beginning of the paragraph: 

"A woman who learns Torah has a reward, albeit not the reward of a man who
studies Torah".

So a distinction is already clearly drawn between a woman who acquires Torah
on her own, or from her father.

There are lots of places where the actual halacha says X, but common 
practice is not-X, or pseudo-not-X.  This appears to be one of them.
Historic circumstance changed, people had to send their children to 
school, rather than teaching at home, so instead of absorbing the Torah
culture in the liebfraumilch, the schools need to inculcate a Torah 
personality.
 
> >Second, the CC argued that since girls were always taught enough to
> become observant 
> >women, today's world mandates broader education. The opening of
> universal secular education changed the metzius of pre-existing pesaq to
> include more.
> 
> Yes, you can try and argue that the Rema's dinim shayachim l'sha has
> been broadened by the reality of the modern world - but is is a stretch,
> a big stretch.  Especially when you are talking about learning Rashi,
> which of course is chock full of Torah shebaal peh that is hard to argue
> really falls within the category of shaychim l'isha.  And you can try
> arguing that schools aren't fathers and therefore aren't included in the
> issur (especially when it is done by other women! - just don't learn
> Rashi with your daughters round the shabbas table!).  But both of these
> are radical breaks with the way the issur was traditionally understood,
> and I don't think, in the interests of emes and honesty, one should
> pretend otherwise.  

as noted above, the radical break was universal institutional schooling.
changed circumstances require changed responses, as long as they are within
halacha.
 
> > He held that universal secular education for girls 
> > was a change in realia which changed the definition of 
> > "teaching them enough to keep them shomeros Torah umitzvos". 
> > Teaching halakhah is no longer enough; they now must also see 
> > that Torah has greater beauty than the other systems of 
> > thought to which they are exposed. As it is, the CC justified 
> > a change in minhag Yisrael, which is KEdin and thus follows 
> > the same rules -- but what was changed wasn't actually din itself.
 
> I confess I don't think I have ever seen anything in writing from the
> CC, so I don't know how he justified it, but I would be surprised, given
> the explicit wording of the Shulchan Aruch, if he said anything of the
> kind.  Eis la'asos sounds a fair bit more likely  - although eis la'asos

Oh, so now we fall into he said she said.  Micha & I think it's reasonable
to assume a diyuk in "lelamed bito", supported by the rest of the paragraph,
you think there's a real issur that required an eis laasos effort.

I can't find the teshuvot of the Chofetz Chaim on Bar-Ilan.  RMF in YD 2:113
suggests that the mishnah is limited to teaching the daughter mitzvos, but
that there is an overriding obligation to teach her belief in Hashem, which
can also be farmed out to schools.

In fact, that seems to be pragmatically what was going on.  The Mechaber's
distinction between TSBK and TSBP doesn't work - one does have to teach
one's chiildren belief in Hashem, which is based in Oral Torah as much as
Written Torah.  One has to teach brachot, etc., which are Oral Torah.  One
has to teach prayers, which are nothing if not Oral Torah.  Women were 
learning Tzene-rene, which is full of midrashic understandings of the
parshiyot.  

And I don't even see how that works either - not teaching the mitzves.
Not teach them mitzves?  How will they know how to live?  So the Rema
makes the logical interpretation - you have to teach them how to live 
a Jewish life.  But what do Sefardim do?  I don't mean how do their rabbis
read this, but how do they teach their daughters how to live, if they can't
teach Torah?

Or is it that the MOTHERS teach the daughters Torah, in which case they
too are making the diyuk that Micha and I see in the text - it's not the
FATHERS, it's the MOTHERS.

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

in machshava, michtav m'eliyahu

Mordechai Cohen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aishdas.org/private.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20071031/2294ef6f/attachment-0001.htm 

Rabbi Richard Wolpe wrote: "Since the Sma was dead 7 years before the
Shach was born it would take someone from the extreme NON-HISTORICAL
school to buy into the above story!"

Clearly, the SM"A could have taken on the shita that later would become
known as the Shach's shita, even before the Shach's birth.

RRW:

> The question remains. Are poskim bound by any set of rules or are the
> entitled to make them up as they go along?
 
> What Rabbi ABC and other Sephardim mis-understand re: Tosafos is that
> actaully Tosafos was notquite so innovative re: Halachah, and usually Tos.
> was more about conserving traditional practices [mimetics over text]  It
> would be unfair to say that Tosafos was unbound, aderabba, he was quite
> bound  b certain rules, just DIFFERENT rules.
 
> Aruch Hashulchan rarely repeals practice based upon original reads. Mostly,
> he accepts precedent, tradition, and Minhag.

What you're looking for is a real response to R' Joel Roth's "The Halakhic
Process: A Systemic Analysis".  I read an Orthodox review that said that
Roth concluded that while there are lots of rules of psak, it's left entirely
to the individual posek to decide which rule applies where.  In other words,
there are no rules that govern the application of the rules, so there are in
effect no actual rules that would lead inexorably from S {set of circumstances}
to P a singular psak. 

This, then, is an argument for anarchy in psak, allowing the Conservative
poskim to go where they will.

You argue that there are meta-rules such as "adherence to minhag" etc.
that govern where a psak goes, but that's still not a rule, that's an
excuse to generate a conclusion, and then Tosfos or the Rosh or whoever
are free to apply the rules as necessary to reach the conclusion.  Puk
chazi rules.  Not that that's a bad thing, when you're looking at a 
community that is 90% observant, but it doesn't help much when, as today,
90% of Jews are non-observant.

There needs to be some kind of new overarching principle to guide psak,
like the old "minhag rules" or "the Bavli rules".  Unfortunately, in this
post "Rupture and Reconstruction" world, the rule may be becoming "lomdish
chumra rules", which can drive more people away from Torah.

It seems to me that part of the original purpose of AishDas was to create,
on at least an individual level, a consciousness choice of meta-rules that
would describe and drive one's own path in Torah & mitzvah observance.  If
it's so difficult to even define the scope of a meta-rule, that goal was
probably doomed from the start.  It was part of the reasoning behind the
MMGH learning program - to learn enough about different derachim so as to
choose intelligently among meta-rules.  But learning enough about a derech
to even formulate a meta-rule is very difficult: philosphism, Chasidism 
(various strains), Lurianism, Yeshivishim, Modernism - all have different
ways of approaching the rules.

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

so it would seem from the consensus that , just as people  leave a kvittel 
at another tzaddik's  kever, htere shouldnt inherently be a difference 
doing this by the LRebbe, either in person or online;  and one needn't 
specify in one's kvittel that they are asking the RBSO for x bizchut the 
tzaddik- it could just as easily be the tzaddik to pray on your behalf...

NOTICE TO RECIPIENT:  If you are not the intended recipient of this 
e-mail, you are prohibited from sharing, copying, or otherwise using or 
disclosing its contents.  If you have received this e-mail in error, 
please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail and permanently 
delete this e-mail and any attachments without reading, forwarding or 
saving them.  Thank you.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aishdas.org/private.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20071031/4211ec70/attachment.html 

There needs to be some kind of new overarching principle to guide psak,
like the old "minhag rules" or "the Bavli rules".  Unfortunately, in
this post "Rupture and Reconstruction" world, the rule may be becoming
"lomdish chumra rules", which can drive more people away from Torah.

It seems to me that part of the original purpose of AishDas was to
create, on at least an individual level, a consciousness choice of
meta-rules that would describe and drive one's own path in Torah &
mitzvah observance.  If it's so difficult to even define the scope of a
meta-rule, that goal was probably doomed from the start.  It was part of
the reasoning behind the MMGH learning program - to learn enough about
different derachim so as to choose intelligently among meta-rules.  But
learning enough about a derech to even formulate a meta-rule is very
difficult: philosphism, Chasidism (various strains), Lurianism,
Yeshivishim, Modernism - all have different ways of approaching the
rules.

--
jon baker   
==========================================
A few thoughts:
1. People often think it's anivut when they ask someone a question and
are told here is my understanding but CLOR - I tell them it's not
anivut, just honesty since halacha is only partially an algorithmic
system and one needs to be plugged into the current mesora to know the
actual halacha (e.g. how many times if you listen to YUTORAH halacha
lmaaseh shiurim do you hear something like, "so it would seem to be X
but in this case it's Y because we're choshesh for the deah of the R'A
who we usually are not choshesh for even though R'B and R'C hold X")

2. The increase in learning exacerbates the issue since now every psak
is analyzed by more than just the cream of the crop and it's transmitted
instantaneously, the old "if R' X says so, it's good enough for me"
doesn't work as well.

3. Think Deep Blue (chess) - in our desire to (since the time of "the
chemist" (R' Chaim)) raise the science/intellect quotient of Torah, we
may have propounded the idea that it is totally analytic and thus face a
lot of incredulity when we now say , yea but it's all really up to the
moreh horaah.

KT       
THIS MESSAGE IS INTENDED ONLY FOR THE USE OF THE 
ADDRESSEE.  IT MAY CONTAIN PRIVILEGED OR CONFIDENTIAL 
INFORMATION THAT IS EXEMPT FROM DISCLOSURE.  Dissemination, 
distribution or copying of this message by anyone other than the addressee is 
strictly prohibited.  If you received this message in error, please notify us 
immediately by replying: "Received in error" and delete the message.  
Thank you.

 
Agreed!  The entire  problem of Bakakshos on Shabbos is IMHO  problematic
And since we do not say a weekday amidah on YT I am curious why  we say Avinu
Malkeinu on RH!

OTOH -  since we say all kinds of  bakachos on YK even when it is on Shabbos,
I am a bit clueless why we OMIT  Avinu Malkeinu when YK is in Shabbos

This is a much broader topic of  course.  I guess I question any bakasha on
Shabbos that is in the 13  weekday Amidah Bakashos. OTOH a bakasha for a
restful or an acceptable  Shabbas [e.g. retzei vimnuchoseinu] seems highly
appropos.

 
I think this just shows how accommodating the rabbonim throughout  the 
generations, have been to the k'lal. 
 
1) Whether it's the recitation of a mishaberach for the sick on  Shabbos and 
Yom Tov, even though not strictly permitted by halochoh unless the  choleh 
might be nifter C"S before the next Monday or Thursday. The  rabbis recognized 
that many people will either not show up for davening during  the week, or 
they'll forget to recite it.
 
2) The recitation of Yizkor on the last days of Yom Tov. How many people  
would attend davening if there were no Yizkor the eighth day of Pesach for  
example? 
 
3) The recitation of kaddish after Oleinu, or the recitation of Oleinu  
itself, after Kiddush Levono [Bris Miloh]. The recital of tehillim just to  follow 
them with a kaddish sometimes to access IMHO [Mizmor  Shir Chanukas HaBayis 
L'Dovid?].   
 
The one exception to this is the accepted recitation of Kaddish D'Rabbonon  
by people who can barely say kaddish. Shouldn't the recitation of that kaddish  
be; a) by the Rav, and b) after "real" learning?






************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aishdas.org/private.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20071031/bdfc3e46/attachment.htm 

I have wondered about this every year for many years, but never actually
looked into it. Now my son asked the same question, so I guess it's time I
looked for an answer (of course, this may very well be a completely
ridiculous question, and I could save myself the feeling of stupidity if I
just opened a few sforim and looked into it, but so far I haven't made the
time).
So, does anyone know why we wait to say V'sein Tal Umatar (which I always
understood to be so that the olei regel could get home before the rain
starts), but we don't switch to V'sein Brocha until they've already been
oleh regel for Pesach? Shouldn't we back up the switch before the travelers
set out?
- yonah sears
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aishdas.org/private.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20071031/666f19ba/attachment.html 

For a copy of the Piskei Tshuvos on this topic please go to:  
http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/faxes/tefillinPT.pdf
 
Kol  Tuv,
Yitzchok Zirkind



************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.aishdas.org/private.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20071031/7993068c/attachment.htm 

------------------------------


Avodah mailing list
Avodah@lists.aishdas.org
http://lists.aishdas.org/listinfo.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org


End of Avodah Digest, Vol 24, Issue 38
**************************************

Send Avodah mailing list submissions to
	avodah@lists.aishdas.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
	http://lists.aishdas.org/listinfo.cgi/avodah-aishdas.org
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
	avodah-request@lists.aishdas.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
	avodah-owner@lists.aishdas.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Avodah digest..."