Avodah Mailing List

Volume 17 : Number 091

Wednesday, July 19 2006

• Re: historical contingency and brachos
• Re: Israeli News on NY Erev Shabbos
• Gedolah Melachah
• Re: How do Achronim become Rishonim?
• Re: historical contingency and brachos
• Re: Capital punishment
• Re: Capital punishment
• Re: Israeli News on NY Erev Shabbos
• Re: Israeli News on NY Erev Shabbos
• Re: Capital punishment
• Re: MB/Yeshiva Communities
• Re: How do Achronim become Rishonim?
• Re: How do Achronim become Rishonim?
• Re: historical contingency and brachos
• Re: Capital punishment
• Re: Israeli News on NY Erev Shabbos
• RE: Israeli News on NY Erev Shabbos

"kennethgmiller@juno.com" <kennethgmiller@juno.com> wrote:
> So, perhaps I can rephrase my question this way, and address it to the
> "bread is always the ikar of the seudah" crowd: In the case of the
> above-mentioned frankfurter, or a small piece of water-dough pizza,
> why would you make a mezonos on it? Or would you (like the Mechaber)
> say Hamotzi even on a small piece eaten explicitly as a snack?

For meat or cheese filler (e.g. pizza or small frankfurters), yes

Gershon
gershon.dubin@juno.com

JPOST or HAARETZ are certainly keeping track of the amount of traffic
to their site at all times.
The more traffic, the more resources they devote to their updates.
Presumably, this means more people being asked to work and more issurei
mealcha being performed.
I wonder whether this might be a eason to refrain from clicking on to
their sites once Shabbos has begun in EY.
In other words, it's more than a matter of benefitting from what
they're doing, but contributing (at least in a small way) to encouraging
addiitonal melacha.

Dovid Hojda

Dvar Hashem me'Yeurshalmi
Ma'asros  11b

 From the Kav v'Naki Biurim ad loc.

May the zechus of learning Yerushalmi protect the residents of the north,
the area in which it was written and redacted.

Here, R' Shimon bar Yochai says: "Work is great -- for the generation
of the flood was only eradicated because they were not productive and
turned to theft, yet a worker working in the field is exempt from the
prohibition of theft." In the Bavli, Nedarim 49b and in Mechilta d'Rashby,
Yisro 20:9, in different contexts, RSBY also says: Gedolah melachah.

The Maharatz Chajes to Nedarim loc. cit. asks: Is this not a contradiction
to RSBY's opinion in Berachos 35b that work is only the lot of the Jewish
people when they are not fully fulfilling Hashem's will, but that when
they are in full fulfillment of Hashem's will their work is performed
by others?

The Sdei Chemed (Ma'areches HaVav #15 d.h. V'Li HaDal) asks a related
question: Is RSBY's statement in Berachos not a contradiction to his
statement in Menachos 35b that one fulfills Lo Yamush Sefer HaTorah
HaZeh MePicha by reading Keri'as Shema twice daily?

He answers that the statement in Berachos was made by RSBY upon emerging
from the cave the first time, before the bas kol said to him "L'Hachriv
Olami Yotzasem? Chizru L'Me'araschem!" The statement in Menachos, on the
other hand, was made after he emerged from the cave the second time. The
Kav v'Naki proposes that this is the resolution of the contradiction
between our Yerushalmi and the Bavli in Berachos as well.

R' Dov Kay wrote:
> It is now almost universal, in accordance with the MB, for the
> tzibbur to recite the b'racha immediately preceding k'rias sh'ma
> together with the shat"z in order to avoid the safek whether one
> is permitted to respond amen to the shat"z's b'racha.

I'm glad you included the "almost". The practice in Elizabeth NJ is to
finish the bracha before the shatz, and to then answer Amen to the shatz.

Now that this subject has been raised, I'd like to address the following
question to any listmembers who really consider themselves to be choshesh
for this "safek": If for some reason you were davening without a minyan,
would you (or would you not) say "Kel Melech Neeman" between the bracha
and the Shma? If you would indeed say it, can you explain why it is less
of a hefsek than Amen would be?

Akiva Miller

On 7/18/06, kennethgmiller@juno.com <kennethgmiller@juno.com> wrote:
> R' Shmuel Weidberg wrote:
>> When eating bread you feel a different type of satiation
>> than when eating cake or crackers.

> I can't argue with your experience, but I haven't noticed any such
> difference. I will concede, though, that bread has a very different
> texture than most forms of pas habaa b'kisnin -- most crackers and
> cakes tend to crumble more easily than breads do. This feature makes
> bread well suited for sandwiches in our era, and well suited for
> wiping up gravy and other dips in other eras.

I find specifically bread all on its own to be more filling than mezonos
of any kind. It might be that if I eat most Mezonos in the quantity
that I might eat bread, for example four slices of rye bread, I would
be eating lots of chazerei and it somehow interferes.

> My main point in this thread has been that bread's role has never
> appeared to *me* as the ikar of the meal, but as an accompaniment to
> the other foods. I am willing to accept that in other cultures, bread
> was the ikar of the meal, and the meat was eaten to enhance the
> bread, but to me such logic seems somewhat bizarre.

I was also brought up on meals where the bread wasn't the ikkar. More
recently I ate many meals by my grandparents and they make a point
to wash at every meal, and their meals do have some formality that
is lacking at most meals of others. But I think you will find at most
restaurants that bread is put on the table automatically even before
you have ordered anything. And although I only know that this is so
at kosher restaurants, I never got the impression that this was done
because they were kosher. And most kosher restaurants do try to be like
the non-kosher ones.

I also think that the lack of chashivus that is shown to bread nowadays
is because we have so much. When you have so many extras, you lose sight
of what the basics are. You can see that from the famous "Let them eat
cake" quote.

The gemara talks about what people should eat depending on what they can
afford. Whether people should eat yerakos or basar. It also seems that
people have become weaker and the gemara says that even though previously
only wealthy people should eat basar, nowadays even poor people should
eat it because it is necessary nutritionally.

Also I think our society is simply skewed. Our values have been
artificially changed from what they really ought to be, and what they
would naturally be. Although this seems to be an ongoing debate over
here: whether as a whole current scientific and society standards are
on the whole reflective of the truth or whether to a significant degree
they are a perversion of the truth.

I think that the gedarim of mezonos are there to tell you whether it
changes the bread in such a way that it is difficult to make a meal
out of it. All the changes are such that they change the food into a
snack, so that really mezonos would be bread except that it has been
corrupted. However, if even though it is corrupted it can still be used
as a meal most of the time, then it would retain its bread quality.

> So, perhaps I can rephrase my question this way, and address it to
> the "bread is always the ikar of the seudah" crowd: In the case of
> the above-mentioned frankfurter, or a small piece of water-dough
> pizza, why would you make a mezonos on it? Or would you (like the
> Mechaber) say Hamotzi even on a small piece eaten explicitly as a
> snack?

The frankfurters that you mention (called pigs in blankets for some
reason) are undoubtedly mezonos. If you ate enough of them to be full
from the dough you would have a stomach ache.

With pizza if I am eating even one slice as a meal replacement I would
make Hamotzi and bench, although sometimes when its on the borderline
I'm meikel to make a mezonos.

 -Shmuel

"cbk" <fallingstar613@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>> 2)Why did the Sanhedrin leave the Lishkas HaGazis because there were
>>> too many capital cases, as is commonly learned?

>> Precisely because of that. There were a lot of murderers who had to be
>> executed, and the Romans wouldn't let them do so; their only choice was
>> to remove the obligation.

> This doesn't seem to answer the question precisely, because if it was
> all about the Romans not letting them carry out the death penalty,
> then even one case would be enough for them to leave.

1. Maybe the increase was from no convictions to one.
1a. Since only a fraction of actual crimes lead to convictions, especially
with the restrictive laws of evidence, such a small increase in the
number of convictions would represent a larger increase in the number
of crimes committed.

2. Maybe when convictions were few and far between they were able to
execute them in secret and not get caught, but when it became a regular
occurrence (even only once every few years), this became impossible.

3. Maybe the first few times they were in this dilemma they thought it
was a Davar She'eno Matzui, and they should just ignore it, but after
it came up a few times and they saw that it was going to keep coming up,
they felt forced to do something about it.

> If that is the
> reasoning. Why does the Gemara give the reason as being the amount of
> cases and not that the Romans interfered?

It does. It says "and they were not able to judge them". What do *you*
think that means? That there simply weren't enough dayanim in all of
EY to handle the enormous case load, nor any competent TC who could
be appointed as dayanim? That's ridiculous. It must mean that there
was something preventing them from handling capital cases; the gemara
doesn't say what, but from other evidence, e.g. the NT, we know that
there was a Roman law that did exactly this.

Jacob Farkas <jfarkas@compufar.com> wrote:
> "Broken windows" (assuming that it is even effective...) does not
> suggest that punishing white collar crimes or other violations of law
> (i.e. those that aren't really 'crimes' but are against the law, such
> as removing pillow tags) would bring to a reduction in violent crimes.

I don't see why it wouldn't have the same effect.

> Also, "broken windows" only works when there are Shotrim to witness
> lesser crimes so they can testify in court. This would be strange and
> invasive WRT to Sh'miras Shabbos. So the theory that strict enforcement
> of Shabbos would translate into fewer murders sounds far fetched.

Shotrim aren't policemen who patrol the streets, they're bailiffs who
enforce the court's orders. So they're irrelevant to the question.
All crimes suffer from the same evidentiary problem - if they happen
without witnesses, the BD can't do anything officially about them
(though it can act extrajudicially if things are getting out of hand).
I don't see why the violent nature of some crimes makes the theory
more applicable.

-- 
Zev Sero
zev@sero.name

On 7/18/06, Zev Sero <zev@sero.name> wrote:
> "Shmuel Weidberg" <ezrawax@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It seems to me that Beis Din felt guilty as well, for their inability
>> to prevent the murders from happening as well, because otherwise why
>> would they punish themselves by going into galus?

> Punish themselves? Where do you see the idea that they had any such
> intention or purpose? They moved a few dozen metres at most -- some
> punishment! No, the purpose was to make it against the halacha for any
> BD in the country to sentence anyone to death, and thereby to relieve
> themselves of an obligation that they were unable to fulfill.

They are punishing themselves in any case. Whatever their primary purpose
of moving away from the Lishka was, it is a pesichas hakovod for Beis
Din to not sit in the Lishka, and they were undoubtedly conscious of it
when they moved. And being that they were subjected to this bizayon they
were undoubtedly deserving of it. And it seems to me that the simplest
explanation for why they were deserving of galus is because they should
have somehow prevented the situation in which they found themselves
from happening.

 -Shmuel

If somebody would have been mechalel Shabbos even if what he was doing
was not for pikuach nefesh and it happened to be that it was for pikuach
nefesh, is he patur?

 -Shmuel

On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 09:50:10PM -0400, Shmuel Weidberg wrote:
: If somebody would have been mechalel Shabbos even if what he was doing
: was not for pikuach nefesh and it happened to be that it was for pikuach
: nefesh, is he patur?

Many communal eiruvim were built on the premise that one was preventing
chilul shabbos by those who would carry either way. How is this different?

-mi

On 7/18/06, cbk <fallingstar613@hotmail.com> wrote:

>> It seems to me that Beis Din felt guilty as well, for their inability
>> to prevent the murders from happening as well, because otherwise why
>> would they punish themselves by going into galus?

> This still goes back to previous posts in which it was stated that it
> would be wrong to not fulfill the mitzvah of putting these cases to death
> if that were what was deserved. Guilt on behalf of the leaders does not
> abdicate their responsibility to carry out the mitzvos that are upon them.

If they are not sitting in the Lishka, then they no longer have a mitzvah
to judge capital crimes. The question then changes to: How did they know
that they were allowed to remove that responsibility from themselves.

I think that when the value of life was lowered in the eyes of the people,
then when people murdered, they no longer deserved missah because their
actions were no longer the results of an intention to do a crime of the
severity that murder has, and the Torah states that the purpose of missah
is uviarta hara bekirbecha. Since the ra was not in the murderers but
in society, it was no longer possible to carry out without completely
destroying Klal Yisroel.

 -Shmuel

On 7/18/06, Moshe Yehuda Gluck <mgluck@gmail.com> wrote:
> R' JR:
>> Is learning during chazarat hashatz prohibited in Yeshiva communities?

> Yes.

When I was in Yeshiva it was an open question and it seemed like the
better answer was to not learn. But I have seen a well known posek
learning during Chazaras Hashatz, and ever since, I've been less careful
not to. Now that I think about it, though, he might have had a pressing
reason at that moment to look something up.

 -Shmuel

RD Kay wrote:
> I think this is accurate. It is now almost universal, in accordance
> with the MB, for the tzibbur to recite the b'racha immediately preceding
> k'rias sh'ma together with the shat"z in order to avoid the safek whether
> one is permitted to respond amen to the shat"z's b'racha.

There are many Jekkes around who continue their minhag ovaus with no
compunction, our kehillo inluded.

Arie Folger

R' Moshe Yehuda Gluck had written:
>>> was writing the Mishneh Berurah on the Laws of Sukkah - [R' Leibowitz
>>> recounted - MYG] his [the Chofetz Chaim's - MYG] practice was that they
>>> would clarify a Halachah and he would then write it. When he wrote
>>> a certain Halachah, R' Dovid pointed out the possibility of it being
>>> misinterpreted....

I said
>> Or that this was his intention but sometimes he didn't manage. Was there always a test reader like R' Dovid?

R' MYG answered:
> R' Ya'akov Kamenetsky clearly said that one can be m'dakdek in the
> MB as in a Rishon, as I quoted earlier, "And I said, that the author of
> the Chofetz Chaim Z"L, merited as a reward for guarding his speech that
> his Mishneh Berurah is so nuanced in its language that it is possible to
> infer from it as one does in the works of the Rishonim. This is Middah
> K'neged Middah."

So how do you reconcile this? Unwillingly, the anecdote you relate seems
to contradict R' Y. Kamenetsky's clear statement. Or was your point
exactly that, namely a shift in perception, turning an awe-inspiring
giant of Torah into a saint with supernatural forces?

[Email #2. -mi]

> R' Dov Kay wrote:
>> It is now almost universal, in accordance with the MB, for the tzibbur
>> to recite the b'racha immediately preceding k'rias sh'ma together with
>> the shat"z in order to avoid the safek whether one is permitted to
>> respond amen to the shat"z's b'racha.

Required.

R' AM write:
> Now that this subject has been raised, I'd like to address the following
> question to any listmembers who really consider themselves to be choshesh
> for this "safek": If for some reason you were davening without a minyan,
> would you (or would you not) say "Kel Melech Neeman" between the bracha
> and the Shma? If you would indeed say it, can you explain why it is less
> of a hefsek than Amen would be?

In accordance with the minneg, I don't have the modern hefsek issue,
and in accordance with the minneg, I say Keil Melech Ne'emon even with
a minyen, so thinking again, I might not be the right person to reply
to the question.

Nevertheless, I'm afraid the underlying answer is that the importance
of numerical mysticism is stronger than the din. Otherwise, why would
people even think of repeating the last words of the Shma, as it has
come to be the habit lately, I hear?

Lipman Phillip Minden

On 7/18/06, cbk <fallingstar613@hotmail.com> wrote:
> [The Metzi'us where I live is also that pizza is something you grab
> for a quick lunch or a light supper. Not a snack. -mi]

>> (PIZZA) But now since most people are koveiah seudah on it,

> Who says? MOST people?

I can't prove a ruba delesa kaman. But there people who are of that
opinion.

Interestingly. I know a Rav who boasts that he has never eaten pizza.
When I asked him that it says that a person will get a din for not having
hanaah from everything in this world, he told me that it doesn't apply
to pizza.

But that was in past generations. In the current generation of Rabbanim,
you won't find any that haven't had pizza. At least I don't think so.

 -Shmuel

On 7/18/06, I wrote:

> I think that when the value of life was lowered in the eyes of the
> people, then when people murdered, they no longer deserved missah
> because their actions were no longer the results of an intention to do
> a crime of the severity that murder has, and the Torah states that the
> purpose of missah is uviarta hara bekirbecha. Since the ra was not in
> the murderers but in society, it was no longer possible to carry out
> without completely destroying Klal Yisroel.

I just saw the Teshuva from R' Moshe that was linked here
<http://masliah.googlepages.com/deathpenalty.jpg> and the Teshuva says
in part:
> However, somebody who murders because the issur of murder has become
> hefker in his eyes and he is a big achzar, and so too when the number of
> murderers and evil doers increased, they would judge [capital crimes]
> in order to fence in the problem to stop murder, that action being the
> salvation of the state.

 -Shmuel

Micha Berger <micha@aishdas.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 18, 2006 at 09:50:10PM -0400, Shmuel Weidberg wrote:
>: If somebody would have been mechalel Shabbos even if what he was doing
>: was not for pikuach nefesh and it happened to be that it was for pikuach
>: nefesh, is he patur?

> Many communal eiruvim were built on the premise that one was preventing
> chilul shabbos by those who would carry either way. How is this different?

I remember hearing a pesak that given the choice of a frum vs not frum
doctor for a pikuach nefesh situation, the frum doctor is preferable;
the not frum doctor does not benefit from the heter of pikuach nefesh
if he's not otherwise shomer shabbos. Don't want to quote because I'm
not 100% who the pesak is from.

Gershon
gershon.dubin@juno.com

R' Shmuel Weidberg:
> If somebody would have been mechalel Shabbos even if what he was doing
> was not for pikuach nefesh and it happened to be that it was for pikuach
> nefesh, is he patur?

There is a (IIRC) Brisker Rav Al Hatorah that makes this distinction, and
says that he will not be patur. Because of this, some people are careful
not to use a non-frum taxi driver to go to the hospital on Shabbos.

KT,
MYG 

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


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