Avodah Mailing List

Volume 16 : Number 077

Thursday, December 29 2005

• Re: a person who is in the "wrong body"
• Joseph and His Father
• Re: a person who is in the "wrong body"
• Re: Nimlach
• Re: Nimlach
• Re: a person who is in the "wrong body"
• Re: Joseph and His Father
• Re: Bugs
• Re: Chazal and science
• Re: Chazal and science
• Re: Chazal and science
• Re: Chazal and science
• RE: Length of Maaseh Breshis has no impact on halacha (science of origins is speculative and suspect)

Me:
> What about serious consequences to other people (e.g., the spouse of
> the transsexual person)?

RZS:
> I don't think that can properly be the concern either of the patient's
> psychiatrist or of his surgeon.

But it can be the concern of the posek, no?

RZS:
> It is my understanding that many/most poskim will permit an abortion
> based on a psychiatric determination that failure to do so will endanger
> the mother's life, even if there's nothing physically wrong with her.
> Surely sterilisation is far less serious an issur than abortion, and
> requires far less justification.

I'm not sure we can learn from one to the other. In theory, we could
trust a psychiatric approach to, say, depression more than to sexual
identity issues because the latter are arguably inseparable from
politics/philosophy. Just as we trust biologists regarding viruses
mutating into more virulent forms more than we trust them regarding the
origin of species.

- Ilana

Previous RZL:
> I thought it was clear in the presentation. Yosef could not imagine his
> father would have refrained from rescuing him or getting in touch with him,
> unless either he felt as the brothers did, **or he was not alive**
> [emphasis now added --MP].

Latest RZL:
> I don't understand.

[RMP, off list:]
> Does the added emphasis help you understand?

> You deleted the sentences in my reply (without even providing an elipsis)....
> I take umbrage. Kindly withdraw your claim. Thanks.

I humbly apologize to RM Popper for the false accusation of deleting the
part of my explanation that anticipated and answered his objection. I
also humbly apologize for doing this in a public posting, when the
communication I was replying to was off-list.

My excuses:

I was very tired when writing these posts, and here's what happenned:

I conflated RS Potter with RM Popper. I honestly thought I was responding
to the same person! I therefore thought that RM Popper already knew what I
wrote in reply to RS Potter, and couldn't figure out why he was asking the
same thing again! (And now I can't even find where I originally wrote the
"deleted" clarification!)

When RM Popper's off-list question began with "In Avodah V16 #74, RZL
replied in turn to RSP:..." I got the mistaken impression that this was
a public posting, and responded with a public post.

But back to the issue, i repsonse to my suggestion (that Joseph thought
before VaYigash that that perhaps his father was dead) I understand
RM Popper's challenge to be that Joseph already knew his father was
alive, since it was reported to him several times. My answer is that
my thesis maintained that Joseph was afraid that these reports may have
been dishonest. Thus I wrote,

"He constantly was asking his brothers if Yaakov was still alive, and
his brothers had been telling him that he was, indeed. But was this only
a ploy, perhaps to keep them from having to show up with Binyamin? Or
perhaps to cover up a dastardly deed of theirs, cv"s? Upon hearing from
Yehudah that Yaakov thought Yosef was killed by a beast, he burst out
'I am Yosef! Is then my father still alive?!'"

Does this answer the question?

Again, I'm very, very sorry. Please be moichel me.

Zvi Lampel

Moshe & Ilana Sober wrote:
> Are there dissenting psychiatric opinions - e.g., that gender dysphoria
> should be treated with therapy to enable the patient to become reconciled to
> his/her biological gender?

I don't know a great deal about the subject, but it is my impression that
this is always tried first, since it's a far less radical treatment than
surgery, and only if it doesn't work is surgery recommended.

> What about serious consequences to other people (e.g., the spouse of the
> transsexual person)?

I don't think that can properly be the concern either of the patient's
psychiatrist or of his surgeon.

> This raises the interesting question of how much we rely on psychiatry in
> determining halachic questions. In general, poskim rely on medical experts
> in questions of sakanah (e.g., eating on Yom Kippur, permitting
> contraception, etc.). On the other hand, as we have seen recently, many
> poskim emphatically do NOT rely on scientific experts in the fields of
> cosmology and evolutionary biology.  So where does psychiatry/psychology
> fit in?

It is my understanding that many/most poskim will permit an abortion
based on a psychiatric determination that failure to do so will endanger
the mother's life, even if there's nothing physically wrong with her.
Surely sterilisation is far less serious an issur than abortion, and
requires far less justification.

-- 
Zev Sero
zev@sero.name

> If somebody was intending to eat something and then forgot that he was
> intending to eat that thing and started making a bracha achrona and then
> remebered that he wanted to eat before saying the shem, and he now wants
> to eat, what should he do?

It would seem that once he decided to make the bracha achrona that
decision qualifies as a hefsek daas and his bracha rishona is no longer
chal, so he will in any case need a new bracha rishona. Thus, the Q is
really the same as: if Iım starting to benxch and then decide to eat more
of the same food...? But since he did not yet say the shem, better not to
make the bracha achrona (sheh lo tsricha) and make a new bracha rishona.

On 12/28/05, R. Alexander Seinfeld <seinfeld@daasbooks.com> wrote:
> It would seem that once he decided to make the bracha achrona that
> decision qualifies as a hefsek daas and his bracha rishona is no longer
> chal, so he will in any case need a new bracha rishona.

Yes. But he was nimlach betaus, so maybe it doesn't count.

Kol Tuv,
Shmuel

On Mon, Dec 26, 2005 at 01:26:48AM -0500, Zev Sero wrote:
: According to Tzitz Eliezer, the operation is halachically effective, and
: a post-op M2F transsexual is now a woman; her wife does not need a get,
: because she is no longer an "eshet ish", and there is no such thing as
: "eshet isha"...

I was wondering if the TzE holds this in every situation. The context
is one of a potential agunah -- a woman whose husband had the surgery
and then refused to give a get. I therefore wonder if he only considers
this a tzad lehaqeil beshe'as hadechaq, or if he really would conclude,
as TZS continues:
:                                                   And the reverse is
: true for a F2M: he is now chayav bemitzvot, may marry a woman, and may
: not be with a man.

-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             None of us will leave this place alive.
micha@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            - unknown MD, while a Nazi prisoner

On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 02:39:13PM -0500, Zvi Lampel pointed us to
<http://www.aishdas.org/articles/josephAndHisFather.shtml> where he wrote:
> Rashi cites the Zohar, which says that Yaakov's sending Joseph was
> Hashem's interfering with his normal thought-process. "He sent him out
> from Aimek Hebron, the deep place of Hebron. -- But Hebron is highland,
> not deep! It means that Yaakov's sending Joseph to his brothers was part
> of "oso eitza amuka," that deep, divine, master plan, to eventually put
> Yaakov in a situation forcing him against his will to leave Canaan and
> relocate in Egypt...

1- Where is the Zohar? What do people who claim a late date for the
Zohar do with this Rashi? Do they claim RMdL quoted Rashi in a text
he was attributing to a tanna?

2- You must have known the philosopher in me would have to ask: What about
Yaaqov Avinu's bechirah?

-mi

On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 04:12:45PM -0500, Zev Sero wrote:
: No. They're not talking about mixing the lettuce with anything else.
: They're talking about how much lettuce we consider when calculating
: the 10%. The point here is that a serving of lettuce is a lot smaller
: than an entire head. Suppose there is a 10% chance that each head of
: lettuce contains up to three bugs...

But we took a survey amongst our own experiences a couple of years ago.
For iceburg lettus and most leafy vegatables grown in the US, it doesn't
approach anywhere near 10% per head. So, one wonders what the cRc and
Star-K are chosheshim for. I simply don't see the metzi'us, and wonder
why I continue to check these things for bugs I have maybe found a
handful of times a decade.

If we're chosheish for odds like that, how can we hardboil eggs?

-mi

-- 
Micha Berger                 Time flies...
micha@aishdas.org                    ... but you're the pilot.
http://www.aishdas.org                       - R' Zelig Pliskin
Fax: (270) 514-1507      

On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 14:13 +0200, Marty Bluke wrote:
> Note, this description of the sun going out the window is part of the
> basis of R' Tam's shita for when nightfall is and therefore seems to be
> taken literally.

in this case, perhaps you can say, chazal had a mesorah for when nightfall
should occur (or perhaps different mesorot, because of the machloket)
and based on the mesorah of the halacha tried to give a "plausible"
reason for the halahca. Just because we don't find the reason plausible
anymore, doesn't mean the halacha is wrong.

This doesn't work for the first case though.

>Note, this description of the sun going out the window is part of
>the basis of R' Tam's shita for when nightfall is and therefore seems
>to be taken literally.

Also, the Maharam Alshaker (Al Ashkar) and the Minchas Cohen state that
Rabbeinu Tam's view is based on incorrect science.

>I would really like to understand how these Gemaras can be
>reconciled with modern science in a plausible manner.

The Maharam Alshaker rejects Rabbeinu Tam's view, so
he has no problem. The Minchas Cohen does not reject
Rabbeinu Tam's view, and I'll quote from this essay of mine
(<http://www.aishdas.org/toratemet/en_pamphlet4.html>) the explanation:

"The answer, as given by the Minchat Cohen (1:10), is very simple. R'
Yehuda observed certain natural phenomena that we can all see on a
daily basis. He saw the sun set, the indirect sunlight dissipate, and
darkness ascend until the stars became visible. While he interpreted these
phenomena based on his pre-Ptolemaic astronomy, his observations are still
valid. Stars come out at the same time regardless of one's astronomical
views. We do not follow R' Yehuda's astronomy; after all, Rebbe rejected
it. However, we do follow R' Yehuda's observations. In fact, a similar
understanding of R' Yehuda's approach was offered by the Tosefot Rid on
Shabbat 34b in the early 13th century. He follows the same understanding
of R' Yehuda as given above - which is the view of Rabbeinu Tam - but
explains the times as reflecting different stages of the sun's setting."

Gil Student,          Yashar Books
Subscribe to "Sefer Ha-Hayim - Books for Life" Newsletter:
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mailto:Gil@YasharBooks.com

On 12/29/05, Shaya Potter <spotter@yucs.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 14:13 +0200, Marty Bluke wrote:
>> Note, this description of the sun going out the window is part of the
>> basis of R' Tam's shita for when nightfall is and therefore seems to be
>> taken literally.

> in this case, perhaps you can say, chazal had a mesorah for when
> nightfall should occur (or perhaps different mesorot, because of the
> machloket) and based on the mesorah of the halacha tried to give a
> "plausible" reason for the halahca.  Just because we don't find the
> reason plausible anymore, doesn't mean the halacha is wrong.

R' Tam's shita is very difficult as the Gra points out because hachush
machish, reality contradicts it.

The description that Chazal are giving is very tangential to when
nightfall is. The gemara is trying to describe the motion of the sun
around the earth. R' Tam happens to pick up on the point about the sun
going out the window and uses it to explain the 2 shkiyas. The reason
why I brought in R' Tam was to point out that the Rishonim took the
gemara literally and understood that the gemara was telling us the
actual movement of the sun and therefore we cannot explain the gemara
away as allegory.

On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 02:13:27PM +0200, Marty Bluke wrote:
: R' Eliezer says that the world is like a three-walled building; the north
: side is not covered; The sun travels along the inside of the building
: during the day. When the sun reaches the northwest corner, it goes above
: the building (therefore we can't see it, and goes eastward overnight,
: and rises in the northeast in the morning).

Back in '99 I posted an attempt to show that Chazal's astronomy
tracked whatever was in style amongst non-Jews of the time. See
<http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol02/v02n183.shtml#11>.

-mi

>>"The conservation of energy principle serves us well in all sciences 
>>except cosmology. .... Where does all the energy go in an expanding 
>>universe? And where does it come from in a contracting universe? The 
>>answer is NOWHERE, BECAUSE IN THE COSMOS ENERGY IS NOT CONSERVED". 
>>[emphasis added, E.R. Harrison. Cosmology : The Science of the 
>>Universe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ; New York, 2000.Page 
>>349]

> [R. Joe Slater] 
> I went to the effort of looking this quote up, even though I 
> don't think the subject is at all relevant to your claim 
> (which is that the universe is literally no older than 5766 
> years). I think you've misunderstood it.
> He says that energy is lost due to the expansion of the 
> universe, as when the light from distant galaxies is 
> red-shifted. The energy this light had is not conserved: it 
> has not gone anywhere. On the other hand, energy within 
> regions that are dense enough to not be expanding (e.g., 
> Earth, the Solar System, our galaxy) is conserved.

You must have missed the letters in capitals -- see above -- BECAUSE IN
THE COSMOS ENERGY IS NOT CONSERVED. We are talking about the cosmos are
we not?

On page 363 of the 2nd edition of his text Harrison states he has tried
to think of an answer THAT CONSERVES TOTAL ENERGY. He answers that he
has TRIED and FAILED (emphasis added).

By the way, I want to endorse you for looking it up.

[R. Joe Slater] 
> ... Einstein's change of 
> mind actually refutes your position: he did think that the 
> universe was static but when Hubble later demonstrated that 
> the universe was expanding Einstein realized that he had been 
> wrong, and described his introduction of a constant into his 
> equations (to make his theory consistent with a static 
> universe) as "the biggest blunder I ever made". ...

I don't understand -- How does Einstein's change refute my position. His
change of mind is precisely what I am trying to understand. He and his
whole generation thought that the universe was static and eternal. The
nobel laureate Michelson stated that Newtonian physics was so compelling
that any future refinements could only be in the 6th decimal place. The
chairman of the physics department at Harvard advised his students
to find other jobs. That's how certain they were that the Newtonian
theory was correct! The evidence for Newton's theories of space,
time and gravity was (and is) SUPERB to use Penrose's categorization.
There was tremendous observational evidence for Newtononian physics
and the Newtonian conception of space and time, not just for gravity,
but later in optics and electromagnetism and the theory was confirmed
by thousands of observations in a variety of areas. The theory is so
good that it still gets us to the moon. Yet, within a few years of
Michelson's pronouncements, it was realized that Newton extrapolated
to the universe just did not work and was in fact false! How did that
happen? We are trying to understand how that change came to be. How
was it that later developments were able to so completely refute the
"compelling" Newtonian conceptions of space and time. By the way, to
think that Hubble "demonstrated" that the universe is expanding is to
confuse necessary conditions with sufficient conditions. On this more
below when we discuss demarcation criteria, but suffice is to say that
we may be in precisely the same boat today with our current theories.

Let's not forget what I was responding to.

[R. Eli Turkel]
> While no serious scientist will 
> deny that there are serious problems in cosmology including 
> dark matter and many other mysteries this has absolutely 
> nothing to do with the minimal age of the universe. No 
> serious astronomer will date the universe as less than 
> several billion years based on many different pieces of evidence.

Based on the above, I again pose my question. Great scientists such
as Einstein, Newton and even Aristotle thought that the minimal age
of the universe was static and eternal (t = -\infinity). Scientists now
think that was a mistake of infinite proportions and their date for the
universe is currently t = -13.7Gy. How did such a mistake come to be
made and is it possible that we may find our current minimal estimates
off target once again? As compelling as our evidence may appear, could
it be that we are vulnerable to future empirical disconfirmation?

[R. Joe Slater]
> How would this support your claim that the universe is 
> literally no older than 5766 years?

I don't believe that I made such a claim, at least I did not make
it based on scientific evidence. Rather, my question is what is the
nature of the evidence for the claim of billions of years? Perhaps you
could look back at my posts over the last year, or the big bang paper
at toriah.org, where details are provided about untested foundational
assumptions, vast extrapolations, suborn anomalies and undiscovered
hypothetical entities that plague the big bang model and hence its age
of the universe of 13.7 Gy. To think that 13.7Gy has been proved is to
confuse necessary conditions with sufficient conditions. For example,
the nobel laureate Steven Weinberg admits that the ASSUMPTION of
the cosmological principle hangs like a "dark cloud" over big bang
cosmology. This is an assumption that has never been tested. It is
required for big bang cosmology and since it has never been tested it
is vulnerable to empirical disconfirmation. Take a look at the paper to
get an idea of other problems as well. Well if a theory has untested
assumptions then it is not yet a fact is it? Facts we need to accept,
speculations are another matter entirely.

I also pointed out that as a layman I do not question the facts assembled
by qualified scientists, although what constitutes a fact is itself
sometimes debatable. But if men are to be convinced that we are merely
the product of billions of years of unsupervised chance and necessity,
then we have the right to ask about the connection between the factual
evidence and the conclusion when that connection is not apparent and
does not follow the necessary laws of thought. The layman has the right
to ask about the way in which the facts have been handled and whether
all the relevant facts have been taken into consideration. Well, after
considerable investigation, I feel they have not, as the physicist Frank
Tipler once wrote:

"It is universally thought that it is impossible to construct a
falsifiable theory which is consistent with the thousands of observations
indicating an age of billions of years, but which holds that the Universe
is only a few thousand years old. I consider such a view to be a slur on
the ingenuity of theoretical physicists: we can construct a falsifiable
theory with any characteristics you care to name."

The uniformity of nature is another assumption. Even under uniformitarian
assumptions cosmologists are unable to show energy conservation,
or that the speed of light has not remained constant, or that decay
rates have not changed (we can argue this last one in detail once we
agree on what the claim is). So, in any dating method, I ask whether
all the evidence has been considered, or perhaps you are just unaware
of the untested foundational assumptions, vast extrapolations, suborn
anomalies and undiscovered hypothetical entities. If you are unaware of
them, then you need to make yourself aware of them, I claim, before you
can say that there is compelling evidence for the results. Cosmologists
are aware that the actual data does not uniquely determine the billions
of years as shown, e.g..

 According to Aristotle, the uniformity of nature into the eternal past at
least had his philosophical justification that the universe is static
and eternal due to its necessity. Big bang cosmology destroyed any
philosophical justification for the presupposition of uniformity (I am
not talking about its strategic use, on this more below).

So we have a type of demarcation problem. Some chevra on avodah believe
the scientific claims about age but not about evolution. Why? We need
demarcation criteria to tell us what claims are credible and which claims
are less credible. (a) The speed of light is surely constant today. (b)
The claim that it has always been so is surely less credible than (a)
and definitely much harder to test. Empirical confirmation is the sina
qua non of all good science and what we are dealing with are matters that
rely on a sequence of unproven and possible untestable presuppositions.

In an earlier post I pointed out how the starlight problem has been
(mis)used to prove the billions of years. Some Torah scholars state that
the evidence for an old universe is vast and overwhelming and thus we
must allegorize the Genesis chapters as being non factual (e.g. Rabbi
Aryeh Kaplan zt"l calls the evidence "almost overwhelming" in his 1979
AOJS address on the age of the universe). For example, these scholars
ask us to consider the starlight problem, i.e. there is not enough
time in a young universe for light to reach us from the distant stars
which are billions of light years away (e.g. see RAK on page 13). These
scholars state that the constancy of the velocity of light is a basic and
unquestioned axiom of Einstein's theories of relativity which have passed
every test that physicists have devised. Unfortunately for their approach,
big bang cosmology has its own version of the starlight problem called
the Horizon Problem. Both inflation (Plan A) and a speed-up of light
by sixty orders of magnitude (Plan B, see [5]) are attempts to solve
Big Bang's own version of this problem. Thus you cannot very well quote
the starlight problem against the Torah when big bang cosmology has its
own problems in this regard, leading Magueijo and Barrow to challenge
Einstein on the constancy of the speed of light.

In one recent Torah book that I read the starlight problem was the first
piece of evidence that was quoted that was supposed to convince me that
the evidence was compelling and overwhelming. Well, I feel particularly
underwhelmed by this so called proof.

So here are some questions that I think we need to ask.

1. What are our demarcation criteria? [See Rambam MN:II:15 on his]. Is
all science automatically of equal credibility?

2. How do compelling theories like those of Newton fail when extrapolated
to the universe as a whole? The issue is not just in space and time,
but in our whole notion of causality as well. As Laplace pointed out,
Newtonian theories were deterministic and this type of reasoning has
been used to deny the possibility of free-will. Yet QM introduced the
possibility that the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. These
are huge changes. And QM is now used by some to claim that free-will
is not only operative but that it can be seen at work experimentally
(see earlier posts) and that these ideas can be used to heal OCD patients.

3. Could it be that our current theories suffer from the same systemic
problems to those of Newton?

4. Is the uniformity (or its non-uniformity) of mature testable,
falsifiable, predictive (all qualities design theories supposedly do not
satisfy). Although uniformity (e.g. the constancy of the speed of light,
conservation of energy, nuclear decay rates etc.) is a valuable strategic
principle, nature may not bow to our stipulations and it may be vulnerable
to disconfirmation, and science may risk difficulties. The philosopher
Del Ratzsch has argued in Nature, Design, and Science (SUNY Press, 2001)
that scientific presuppositions such as the uniformity of nature and
methodological naturalism (that excludes all supra-natural causes such
as Mind or G-d) from science may not be falsifiable or even minimally
testable. Note the quotes above due to Ellis and Tipler in this regard.

5. Great scientists such as Einstein, Newton and even Aristotle
thought that the minimal age of the universe was static and eternal
(t = -\infinity). Scientists now think that was a mistake of infinite
proportions and their date for the universe is currently t = -13.7Gy. How
did such a mistake come to be made and is it possible that we may find
our current minimal estimates off target once again? As compelling as
our evidence may appear, could it be that we are vulnerable to future
empirical disconfirmation?

KT ...   JSO

*********************


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