Avodah Mailing List

Volume 19: Number 10

Thu, 21 Sep 2006

• 1. Re: Kashering Corningware (T613K@aol.com)
• 2. Re: Kashering Corningware (Daniel Eidensohn)
• 3. Re: [Areivim] Chicken Scandal (Micha Berger)
• 4. Re: Kashering Corningware (Micha Berger)
• 5. Re: asher yatzar (Micha Berger)
• 6. Re: Chazal are Infallible (Micha Berger)
• 7. Re: [Areivim] Chicken Scandal (Zev Sero)
• 8. Re: Chazal are Infallible (Zev Sero)
• 9. Re: Ona'as D'varim (kennethgmiller@juno.com)
• 10. Re: asher yatzar (David Riceman)
• 11. what is proper musar (Eli Turkel)
• 12. place of shechina (Eli Turkel)
• 13. Re: [Areivim] How many kolot? (Simon Montagu)

 
 

"Beach Runner" <Bob4Health@hotmail.com> wrote the following to  scjm:

>> "Corningware" is a very wide product line that includes  many diverse
> products. The unique product, Correll is rather unique.  Correll was
> originally produced by accident, when an oven lost control  and went
> exponentially higher than it was supposed to. It produced a new  material
> with unique characteristics.

> The surface tension  was much stronger, making it very non-reactive.
> In fact, it is nothing  like glazed dishes. It contains much internal
> energy that makes in  non-reactive and thus, doesn't interact with food
> or chemicals. While  the bonds that keep it non reactive are strong,
> when it does break, it  explodes. <<

.
Thank you to RMB for posting this.   I have indeed noticed that  my Corelle 
plates, when they fall on my tiled floor, do not just  break, but shatter in a 
million pieces and scatter all over the kitchen.   I.e., they explode.   
Fascinating.  What I want to know though,  is not whether you can kasher Corelle, 
but something different:  do you  have to tovel Corelle?  
 
Every year or so I go off and buy a few new bowls and plates  to replace the 
ones that have exploded in the course of the year, and then  I don't let 
anyone use the new ones until I get around to tovelling them, which,  depending on 
how many Avodahs there are in my inbox to read and respond to, can  take a 
while.  My husband says that Corelle does not need tevillah but  I think they are 
at least safek glass and therefore insist on tovelling  them, usually along 
with a few metal things (to replace the odd spoon and  fork that accidentally 
got thrown in the garbage in the course of the year) in  order to obviate any 
shailah of whether safek glass needs a bracha when  tovelling.  Shattered 
plates and discarded silverware tell you more  than you probably wanted to know 
about my housekeeping skills, but at least I am  conscientious about halacha -- 
or try to be.  Truthfully, even if you tell  me that my husband is right, I 
will probably continue to tovel Corelle, but I am  curious what the olam thinks.






Kesiva vechasima tova

--Toby  Katz
=============
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/
Rabbi Heineman writes: 
http://www.star-k.org/kashrus/kk-containers-tevilas.htm

Keilim/ (vessels/utensils) can be categorized into three /halachic/ 
groupings. Utensils requiring /tevila/ (immersion) with a /brocha/, 
utensils requiring tevila without a /brocha/, and utensils not requiring 
/tevila/ at all. Utensils require tevila with a /brocha/ when they have 
direct contact with food during preparation or meal time and are made 
from metal such as aluminum, brass, copper, gold, iron, lead, silver, 
steel, tin, or glass such as pyrex, duralex, and corelle. (Corelle, a 
form of glass, should not be confused with corning ware, a form of 
earthenware, which will be discussed later in this article.)


**

On Mon, September 18, 2006 8:22 pm, R Harry Maryles wrote tp Areivim:
:>> "Everyone else eats there," should not be good enough,

:> Maybe the reason that they didn't publish this is that "everyone eats
:> there" is halachically good enough--it is based on a chezkas kashrus.

: In order for something to have a Chaezkas Kashrus, it first has to be
: established that it was ever Kosher in the first place. A Chazaka
: L'Mafreah. That everyone eats there does not confer such an
: presumption. All it shows it aht one person is copying another. If
: there was no Chazaka L'Mafreah, There can be no Chazaka D' Hashta.

There are two uses of the phrase "chezqas kashrus":
1- The chazaqah demei'iqarah (ch' lemfrei'ah, as RHM puts it) of the food
itself. Agreed that that's not applicable here.

2- The chazaqah disvara (rule of thumb) that observant Jews are trustworthy.
Stam a person off the street is assumed to be kasher le'eidus. That DOES apply
here.

However, as RnCL (RnCS?) pointed out, we seem to follow the Rambam in not
using the person's chezqas kashrus when he has financial negi'us. So, we have
machshirim. Now the rav hamachshir and the mashgi'ach are trusted because of
their chezqas kashrus. (Trust doesn't mean "hold like" or even "assume they
know what they're doing". Just that we shouldn't assume they're willfully
dishonest.)

-mi
http://www.aishdas.org/asp

A comment R"D JBackon made on scjm led me to the mail-jewish discussion titled
"Glassware" <http://www.ottmall.com/mj_ht_arch/v45/index.html#VY>. In
mail-jewish v45i17 (in that thread), RYZ expands the question to include pyrex
and corelle. In v45i21, RJBaker cites R' Mordechai Tendler
<http://www.yu.edu/faculty/emayer/riets> on the question of tevilah of these
items (pyrex, duralex, corelle, corningware) -- WRT tevilah they are all
glass.

Lots of variations on the theme, but I still don't see an explanation of why
corningware doesn't have the same din of glass.


-mi
http://www.aishdas.org/asp

On Fri, September 15, 2006 8:52 am, David Riceman wrote:
: My son and I are studying siddur, and we're curious about the bracha asher
: yatzar.  Isn't it praising God for a bug rather than a feature? Surely
: making human beings resistant against slight changes in form would be better
: design.

A number of rishonim relate the berakhah to being born. Before one is born,
the mouth is closed, and the navel is open. And yet adteroles must be
switched. That everything (almost always ) happens to transition so smoothly
is worthy of a berakhah.

I think the point of the berakhah is the necessary complexity. Not that the
design is flawed, but that it supports so many things because it's complex.
With complexity ought to come fragility.

The human body is a more complex design that the system I work on for work.
With that many parts, there will be many points of failure. And yet, the
system is down far more often than a person is.

-mi
http://www.aishdas.org/asp

On Thu, September 14, 2006 10:44 am, Kohn, Shalom wrote:
: Let me just say that I commend the gemara in Sukka to the list's
: attention, and you will see that chazal, rashi and tosafot are
: struggling with the relationships in a way that an elementary school
: child today would not.  Further, the gemara reflects a desire for
: precision (to establish shiurim for a kosher sukkah) which is belied by
: the suggestion of our posters that the "rules" were only intended as
: approximations.

The shiur of a round Sukkah was given by R' Yochanan. They then had to
reverse-engineer the sevarah, as well as what R' Yochanan meant. Moreover,
they couldn't just use the geometry, they had to use geometry as per the din
for precision for sqrt(2) and pi.

I do not see the gemara struggling with the math, but with peshat in R'
Yochanan. And many math majors needed to sit down and pen and paper to follow
the shaqla vetarya.

: Why do we assume Chazal had a good "secular" education, and more
: particularly, since we are dealing with shiurim to be yotzeh according
: to halacha, why would chazal NOT be as precise as possible?  Again, see
: the gemara I cited.

Simply because a good poseiq does not voice an opinion without researching the
metzi'us. This is true today, and it is a safe assumption about Chazal. I'm
not saying that they deduced that pi is irrational from the Torah. Rather,
that no baal mesorah would have gone on record without knowing pi as well as
they could turn up with solid research.

IOW, since the Bavliim of their time knew Greek math, why assume any opinion
considered seriously enough to get into shas doesn't reflect hitting the local
experts and their libraries?

On Thu, September 14, 2006 5:11 pm, Zev Sero wrote:
:> Pi, sqrt(2), the number of days in a month or months in a year are all
:> irrational numbers. Meaning, there is no way to give an exact number, the
:> exact value requires an infinite number of digits....           Estimation
:> is the only possibility.

: The Rambam, in PhM to the mishna in Eruvin, gives exactly this
: explanation for why the mishna says pi is 3.  It's impossible to give
: the exact value, it has to be rounded *somewhere*, and Rebbi decided
: to round it to an integer....

I disagree that it was Rebbe, since Rebbe is too late. As already pointed out,
since 3 < pi, this opinion is lequlah. Eiruvin predates Rebbe, Rebbe lacks the
power to be makhshir an eiruv that was hithertofor pasul. Lo kol shekein
sukkah. The notion that 3 is "good enough" for pi must be therefore deOraisa.
(And by eiruv, ke'ein de'Oraisa tiqnu.)

(Which means that the yam shel Shlomo is a ra'ayah, not a maqor.)

: Unfortunately, it doesn't explain the gemara, but the Rambam wasn't
: commenting on that, so he doesn't have to deal with it.  Tosfos,
: which does have to deal with the gemara, notes the problem, and
: doesn't even offer an attempt at resolving it.

I do not know what you mean by "doesn't explain the gemara". Please elaborate.
The gemara, like the mishnah, works with the assumption that since we can't
get perfect precision, we have a de'Oraisa telling us what to use. Perhaps
it's one of the shurim given as halakhos leMoshe miSinai.

On Thu, September 14, 2006 5:35 pm, RCM "hankman" wrote:
: But for halachik purposes [three] is the correct value, not an
: approximation, just don't expect a real circle to close by use of this value).

Agreed. Rebbe isn't writing 3 as an estimate of the "real din". The real din
is to use an estimate of 3. Which Rebbe exactly described.

BTW, real circular sukkos, eiruvin or yamim aren't perfect circles anyway

-mi
http://www.aishdas.org/asp

Micha Berger wrote:

> 2- The chazaqah disvara (rule of thumb) that observant Jews are trustworthy.
> Stam a person off the street is assumed to be kasher le'eidus. That DOES apply
> here.
> 
> However, as RnCL (RnCS?) pointed out, we seem to follow the Rambam in not
> using the person's chezqas kashrus when he has financial negi'us. So, we have
> machshirim. Now the rav hamachshir and the mashgi'ach are trusted because of
> their chezqas kashrus.

I don't think that's an accurate description of the Rambam's position.
The difference between the Raavad/Mechaber and the Rambam/Rama is not
whether we can rely on someone's chezkat kashrut when he has a financial
interest, but on how strong a chezkat kashrut we need in such a case.

The Raavad/Mechaber position is that all we need to know about someone
is that he is a Jew, and that we *not* know anything negative about him.
If his name is Cohen and we've never heard of him before, and he tells
us the food he's selling is kosher, we can believe that he's telling
the truth to the best of his knowledge.  (We still have to worry about
how far his knowledge extends; but if he says he bought everything as
raw ingredients, or with a good hechsher, that he bought his kelim new
and has never used them for anything else, etc, we don't need to worry
that he's lying.)

The Rambam/Rama position is that such a negative chazaka is not enough;
if he's selling something, we need not merely not to have heard
anything bad about him, but we need to know that he is an observant
Jew, as far as that can be known by others.  Once we do know that, we
can trust him.  The modern problem is that we don't know the people
who sell us our food, because our communities have grown so large,
and because we think nothing of shopping in other areas, or of having
people from other set up shop close to us.  In such a case, we need
someone who *does* know the seller, and can certify to us that he is
an observant Jew.  Note that this is still *not* a requirement for
hashgacha on the food itself; rather it's a hechsher on the *person*,
informing us that this person does indeed have a chezkat kashrut.
The machshir, on his part, need never set foot in the establishment,
or have the slightest interest in what goes on there.  All he is
saying is that he knows the seller, and he is indeed someone who has
an "enhanced" chezkat kashrut, one that satisfies the Rambam/Rama,
and not just the Raavad/Mechaber.

And that's mostly the function of the "heimishe" hashgachot -- they
look at the person, not the food; if the person is good then there's
no need to worry about the food, while if they don't think they can
trust the person then they don't give a hechsher no matter how good
the food may be.  The "major" hashgachot, OTOH, start with the
premise that the seller has no chezkat kashrut (as is indeed the
case with many of their sellers, not just according to the Rambam
but even according to the Raavad).  Working on that assumption,
they instead concentrate on making sure that this untrustworthy
person has no chance to treif up the food; IOW they avoid situations
that *require* trust.

That transfers the "chezkat kashrut" on which we must still rely,
from the seller to the machshir, and here once again we have two
positions that people take, on which machshirim they will trust;
some people take a pseudo-Raavad position, and will trust any
hechsher until they hear something negative about it; while others
take a pseudo-Rambam position, and want to know details about a
hechsher before they will trust it.

This also explains the story REMT told some time ago, of a time
when he was the OU mashgiach at a plant, and the representative
of a "heimishe" hechsher came, took one look at whom the OU had
sent, and decided that was enough to approve the product.  The
implication was that the other hechsher had not added anything
of value, but that is not true; what it had done was verify
that on this particular product the OU hechsher was reliable,
because its mashgiach was someone with a Rambam-style chezkat
kashrut.  Had the OU mashgiach not seemed so reliable, perhaps
the other mashgiach would have stayed, made other changes, or
even turned down the product altogether.  Think of the added
value like that added by an editor to an anthology; the editor
did not write any of the stories, and yet the quality of the
anthology is greatly enhanced by a good editor, who knows which
stories to pick and which to leave out.

As for the fact that in the Monsey case the "chezkat kashrut"
system seems to have failed, that is true, but the same happens
regularly with the major hechsherim's system.  In this case the
hechsher was on a person who (it seems) turned out not to be
trustworthy after all; but often when a hechsher doesn't trust
the owner's chezkat kashrut and instead relies on other chazakot
(such as that a businessman won't ruin his reputation by
deliberate and detectable fraud), or simply on careful supervision
of every aspect of the manufacture, they fail too.  Even in our
own homes, sometimes our self-"hashgacha" fails, and we have to
kasher something, and/or throw food out.  That doesn't mean the
principle is unreliable.


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

Micha Berger wrote:

> : Unfortunately, it doesn't explain the gemara, but the Rambam wasn't
> : commenting on that, so he doesn't have to deal with it.  Tosfos,
> : which does have to deal with the gemara, notes the problem, and
> : doesn't even offer an attempt at resolving it.

> I do not know what you mean by "doesn't explain the gemara". Please elaborate.
> The gemara, like the mishnah, works with the assumption that since we can't
> get perfect precision, we have a de'Oraisa telling us what to use.

No, the gemara (on that mishna in Eruvin) isn't talking about what to
do lemaaseh - it's talking about the yam shel shlomo, and it insists
that the dimensions given in the Tanach are precise, without even a
mashehu of approximation; it even insists that even though the rim
was very thin, even that mashehu can't be taken into account, because
both measurements were taken on the inside.  It seems to me impossible
that the author of that piece of gemara knew that both the mishna and
the pasuk are approximating.  As I said, Tosfos notes the problem and
moves on, as must we.  Vaiter gegangen.

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

R' Zevi Ashkenazi asked:
> Could being an anonymous blogger or making an anonymous
> comment on a blog fall into the category of Ona'as D'varim?

I don't participate in blogs much, so perhaps I'm misunderstanding 
the question. But it seems to me that anonymity is mostly irrelevant. 
If the things that are said are hurtful, than it is Onaas Dvarim 
whether anonymous or not, and if they are not hurtful, then being 
anonymous would probably not make it hurtful.

OTOH, I suppose they could be some cases where the things said are 
not hurtful, but a person could be pained by not being able to 
respond to the blogger. But isn't it the case that one *can* respond 
by making one's own comment?

Akiva Miller

From: "Micha Berger" <micha@aishdas.org>

> I think the point of the berakhah is the necessary complexity. Not that 
> the
> design is flawed, but that it supports so many things because it's 
> complex.
> With complexity ought to come fragility.

How are we do harmonize this with the doctrine of God's omnipotence? Doesn't 
the Ramban somewhere suggest that in the Messianic era God will give us 
sturdier bodies?

David Riceman 

I heard a story today about musar.
When RSZA and R. Chaim Levin were young (early teens) they
were chavuras in Eitz Chaim Yeshiva and decided they were in
need of musar. They went to the masgiach R. Aryeh Levin (R. Chaim's father).
to ask what sefer he would recommend. He suggested that instead of sefer
they
should peek in on R. Kook learning. They went to the bet medrash and each
took
turns looking through the peephole so as to not disturb him. They were so
impressed that they returned to their learning with increased enthusiasm
that lasted for several weeks. When they felt the influence waning they
would return to
look through the peephole for another short time.

Shana Tova

-- 
Eli Turkel
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The gemara at the beginning of succah (recent daf yomi) states that the
schechina never goes below 10 tefachim.
Given that G-d is not material and is everywhere what does this mean?

Shana Tova

-- 
Eli Turkel
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Taking this to Avodah at moderators' request:

On 9/20/06, Zev Sero <zev@sero.name> wrote:
>
> How recent, and how widespread, is the custom of 100 kolot?
> The SA seems to say the Sefardi (i.e. Spanish) custom in his day was
> to blow 61 kolot.  The Rema gives various customs, ranging from 40
> to 90.  The earliest mention of 100 I was able to find was from the
> Shelah.  So, what do the different edot actually do?
>
> In particular, the child of a friend learned in school that
> "Ashkenazim blow 100 kolot, and Sefardim blow 101".  I'm pretty sure
> that's incorrect, but since we have people here from different edot,
> perhaps we can compile a list.  E.g. what is actually done today by
> Yekkers, Oberlanders, Libyans, Syrians, Temanim, etc?
>

The Spanish and Portuguese in London (and here in Jerusalem where we mostly
follow London minhagim) blow 100, (not counting the final Teru'a Gedola) as
follows:

Di-meyushav :
TSRT TSRT TSRT
TST TST TST
TRT TRT TRT

No Shofar in the silent Amida. In Hhazarat Hashatz:
Malchuyot: TSRT TSRT TSRT
Zichronot: TST TST TST
Shofarot: TRT TRT TRT

In the middle of Kaddish:
TSRT TST TRT

After Kaddish:
TSRT TSRT TSRT
TST TST TST
TRT TRT TRT

Sephardi Yerushalmi also blow 100, but distributed slightly differently. In
both the silent Amida and repetition they blow TSRT TST TRT for each of M, Z
and S, and they omit the 30 kolot after Kaddish.

Shenizke lishmo'a shofaro shel Mashiahh.
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