Avodah Mailing List

Volume 30: Number 67

Wed, 20 Jun 2012

• 1. Re: Kivrey Avos (Zev Sero)
• 2. Re: Kivrey Avos (Liron Kopinsky)
• 3. Re: Kivrey Avos (Eliyahu Grossman)
• 4. Re: halachic infertility (Arie Folger)
• 5. Re: Kivrey Avos (Micha Berger)
• 6. Re: Kivrey Avos (Ben Waxman)
• 7. Re: Kivrey Avos (Zev Sero)
• 8. Re: Kivrey Avos (menucha)
• 9. Re: Kivrey Avos (Zev Sero)
• 10. What's a city? (David Riceman)
• 11. Re: What's a city? (Micha Berger)
• 12. Why Not: Yehoshua BEN Nun? (cantorwolb...@cox.net)
• 13. Re: What's a city? (Zev Sero)
• 14. Re: Kivrey Avos (Rich, Joel)
• 15. Re: loss of infants (Moshe Y. Gluck)
• 16. Re: loss of infants (Micha Berger)
• 17. Re: halachic infertility (Elazar M. Teitz)

On 19/06/2012 11:11 AM, Micha Berger wrote:
>
> : But my query was not about the spies seeking salvation through prayer but
> : about them WANTING to visit Kivrey Avos. These days it would be unthinkable
> : that any ehrlicher Yid, other than those who as a matter of principle,
> : would visit EY and not visit Mekomos HaKedoshim.
>
> Maybe: ha'oseiq bemitzvah patur min hamitzvah. Unless the visit would
> help the mission HQBH told Moshe to send them on, maybe it would have
> been wrong to interrupt it for the visit.

Note that Malbim reads "vayavo ad Chevron" not as Calev taking a side-
trip while the others were doing something else, but as *all* of them
going to Chevron, one at a time, so as not to attract attention, because
it was a stronghold.  But he still says that Calev was the only one to
daven at Mearas Hamachpela while he was there.   He doesn't say why, but
based on this explanation one can speculate that they didn't want to all
go, even individually, because it might attract attention for so many
visitors to go to this one obscure place on the same day.

-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
z...@sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
                 are expanding through human ingenuity."
                                            - Julian Simon

RMGR:

> : But my query was not about the spies seeking salvation through prayer but
>> : about them WANTING to visit Kivrey Avos. These days it would be
>> unthinkable
>> : that any ehrlicher Yid, other than those who as a matter of principle,
>> : would visit EY and not visit Mekomos HaKedoshim.
>>
>
So a few questions which might help answer this question:
1) Why did Calev go to daven at the Meara? I thought that he was going to
daven to have the strength to withstand the other meraglim. If this is
true, then it was already too late for them by this point. This also
suggests that if not for the need to go keneged the other meraglim Calev
may not have gone to daven there.

2) Why didn't Yehoshua go to daven there? If we say as above, that the
purpose of davening was to have the strength to withstand the other
meraglim, then maybe Yehoshua, (with the koach of his new Yud?) felt that
he already had the strength he needed and didn't need to ask for more. If
failing to daven at the kever was a failure of the meraglim, then Yehoshua
would need to be faulted for that as well.

Kol Tuv,
Liron
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With the exception of Midrashic literature, I have not found any source in
the Tanach for Jews visiting graves, although there is a Christian tradition
to visit their saints on their memorial days. There is the famous midrash
about Calev who supposedly stopped by Machpeleh, and those who love to go to
Uman have quoted me that as proof that it is allowed, but that isn't
history, and it's a misuse of midrash. 

It took me 8 years before I caved in and visited one of the two grave sites
of Rabbi Meir ba'al HaNes (and it is unlikely that any of his body parts are
interred in either one - the same goes with Kever Rut or Kever Yishai, and
some other "holy places") and witnessed the carnival-like atmosphere there. 

(Here was a fun video, a newscast from Israel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6GcPuP31JE . Some Charedei students decided
to make a "holy place" with a fake "Kever Onkelos" and people flocked to it,
even after they admitted it was a trick.)

Does the bones of Jewish "Saints" (using the Christian term intentionally)
make the place more holy than a vineyard? It depends what one believes, I
suppose - life or death as sanctification.

So I would question that salvation comes from the desire to visit an impure
place (a grave), rather than desiring to create something living (farming)
that would be an offering to HaShem.

Just my 2-shekels.

Eliyahu Grossman
Efrat, Israel

Quoted Text: ----------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2012 07:37:16 +1000
From: "Rabbi Meir G. Rabi, its Kosher!" <ra...@itskosher.com.au>
Subject: [Avodah] Kivrey Avos
Text: "But my query was not about the spies seeking salvation through prayer
but about them WANTING to visit Kivrey Avos. These days it would be
unthinkable that any ehrlicher Yid, other than those who as a matter of
principle, would visit EY and not visit Mekomos HaKedoshim."
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RMB wrote:
> If that's the route
> they take, it's likely the poseiq would advise two tevilos:
> Once, after niddah deOraisa, so that any consequent velad would definitely
> not have the pegam of being a ben niddah; and
> A 2nd time as per most couples, to fulfil the minhag Yisrael of 5 +
> 7 neqi'im.

RMF explicitly disagreed, saying any pegam comes from the biat issur,
which is absent here. To be honest, he also specifically excludes the
possibility of being meikil regarding 7 neqiyim, though the way he
writes it perhaps leaves open the possibility that he is hinting that
orally he might consider otherwise.

KT
-- 
Arie Folger,
Recent blog posts on http://ariefolger.wordpress.com/
* Wir ziehen um! ? We are Moving
* Muslims Question Their Calendar ? Could it Have Happened to Us?
* Technologie und j?disches Lernen
* Biblical Advice for the Internet Age iv
* The Disappearance of Big Ideas
* Rabbi, wie stehen Sie zur Ein?scherung?
* Biblical Advice for the Internet Age iii

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 08:04:33PM +0300, Eliyahu Grossman wrote:
: Does the bones of Jewish "Saints" (using the Christian term intentionally)
: make the place more holy than a vineyard? It depends what one believes, I
: suppose - life or death as sanctification.

The SA (YD 367:3) says one shouldn't daven at a qever, because
of lo'eig larash. The Shakh commends there that the Maharshal (and from
hi, the Derishah) and the Bach similarly pasqen that when saying Qaddish,
one should be 4 amos away from the qever.

Still, it's Chazal (Sotah 34b) -- not some late acharon -- who praise
Kaleiv for going to Me'aras haMachapeilah, and Chazal who imply this
was part of his rebellion from the wrong plan of the meraglim.

Rashi (Bereishis 48:7) says that Yaaqov tells Yoseif that Rachel was
buried where she was so that the Jews can daven at her qever on their
way into galus Bavel. (Invoking Yirmiyahu 31, but that pasuq only speaks
of her davening for us, not that we came to Rachel first.) According to
the Sefer haYashar (p' VaYeishev) Yoseif stops at Qever Racheil on his
way down to Mitzrayim.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             When faced with a decision ask yourself,
mi...@aishdas.org        "How would I decide if it were Ne'ilah now,
http://www.aishdas.org   at the closing moments of Yom Kippur?"
Fax: (270) 514-1507                            - Rav Yisrael Salanter

On several occasions I've seen cohanim in the Ma'ara; they were being 
somech on the opinion that qivrei tzaddiqim are not m'tahmei.

Ben

On 6/19/2012 8:04 PM, Eliyahu Grossman wrote:
>
> So I would question that salvation comes from the desire to visit an impure
> place (a grave), rather than desiring to create something living (farming)
> that would be an offering to HaShem.
>
> Just my 2-shekels.
>
> Eliyahu Grossman
> Efrat, Israel
>

On 19/06/2012 1:42 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
>
> The SA (YD 367:3) says one shouldn't daven at a qever, because
> of lo'eig larash.

Not quite.  He says one shouldn't daven or learn Torah or do other
mitzvos *as one passes by kevarim*, in other words when what one is
doing is not related to the meis.  This explicitly does not apply to
anything done for the kavod of the niftar.  (344:16-17)


> The Shakh commends there that the Maharshal (and from
> hi, the Derishah) and the Bach similarly pasqen that when saying Qaddish,
> one should be 4 amos away from the qever.

I assume this is because kaddish is not a prayer for the dead; if it
were then it would be kavod hameis, and permitted.

And of course the whole concept is not relevant when one is directly
addressing the niftar, asking him or her to intercede for us.

It's an explicit gemara that the nefashos of the dead are aware when
someone comes to their graves.  And it's an explicit Zohar that when
the world needs rain we should bring a sefer torah to the cemetery and
inform the nefashos of dead of our plight; they then go to Chevron to
inform those who lie there, and together they go up to the higher worlds
and inform their neshamos, and they intercede for us, and we get rain.
The Zohar also explicitly says that "vedoresh el hameisim" refers to
resha'im, who are called dead even in life, and not to tzadikim, who
are called alive even in death.


> [Examples of Kalev, Yosef, the Jews at Kever Rachel]

There's also Yirmiyahu, who went both to Chevron and to Har Nevo
to enlist the aid of the Avos and Moshe Rabbenu.


-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
z...@sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
                 are expanding through human ingenuity."
                                            - Julian Simon

Mearat Hamachpela has a different din than other kvarim because of its 
unique structure. 
http://www.hebron.org.il/hebrew/articles.php?cat_id=8&;limit=25

Ben Waxman wrote:

> On several occasions I've seen cohanim in the Ma'ara; they were being 
> somech on the opinion that qivrei tzaddiqim are not m'tahmei.
>

On 19/06/2012 1:29 PM, Ben Waxman wrote:
> On several occasions I've seen cohanim in the Ma'ara; they were being
> somech on the opinion that qivrei tzaddiqim are not m'tahmei.

There are other grounds to be lenient as well.  See an extensive
discussion of the issues here: http://www.machpela.com/essay.asp?id=14

-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
z...@sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
                 are expanding through human ingenuity."
                                            - Julian Simon

In OH 398 it says that a house within 70 and 2/3 amos of a city is part 
of a city.  But I can't find a definition of a city.

If you think of houses as points, and pairs of houses no further than 70 
and 2/3 amos (or possibly double that, for technical reasons I needn't 
go into here) as edges, is a city a connected subgraph? Or is there an 
independent definition of city somewhere which I've missed?

What happens in a town with large lots? For example, a square lot 
containing an acre is 200 by 200 feet.  That implies, if houses are no 
more than 40 feet wide, that they are 160 feet apart.  That it in turn 
would imply that a person living in such a town can walk no more that 
2000 amos in any direction on Shabbos, which seems small to me (the shul 
I attend is 1.1 miles from my house, and 2000 amos is around 0.6 miles; 
luckily I live in a much more densely populated town).

For comparison, in colonial New England, when towns were set up, they 
typically assigned 10 acres per house (with, of course, a much larger 
farm for each household outside of town).

Thanks,

David Riceman

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 02:38:35PM -0400, David Riceman wrote:
> In OH 398 it says that a house within 70 and 2/3 amos of a city is part  
> of a city.  But I can't find a definition of a city.

For the purposes of techum Shabbos:

A city has to have a minimum of 6 homes within 70-2/3 amos of each other.

The borders are then drawn as east-west and north-south lines that run
70-2/3 amos beyond the last house of the grouping in each of the four
compass points.

The shiur of 70-2/3 amos might be inexact lechumerah. The real derivation
is the side of a square of an area of 5000 sq-amos, the area of the
chatzeir hamishken. (Eruvin 23b) This would give it a real value of
70.7107... amos. My "might" is because I don't know if we require the
chumerah lemaaseh, or if it's just a shorthand for discussion purposes.

BTW, you effectively get 2004 amos beyond the city border, since the
next 4 amos beyond the actual techum are mutar as well.


If you don't live in a city (as defined above), you can still get to
a neighbor's house if his house's techum overlaps yours. So you can
get there even if they are over 1-1/8 mi (or 1.8km) apart. Or 9 houses
away or so in your hypothetical 10 acre per home community. (I got that
number using square lots. I'm also assuming an 18" ammah, which I would
think is fine for the derabbanan limitation of only 2000 ammos.) You
just can't make one big techum around both.

But that's not how Jews lived in Chazal's day. They were agrarian,
but all the fields surrounded a denser living area. This is not only an
issue with the cities given the levi'im, but even impacts how many of
us daven maariv -- Barukh H' LeOlam was invented around the fact that
everyone had to return from the area around the city in the dark.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Spirituality is like a bird: if you tighten
mi...@aishdas.org        your grip on it, it chokes; slacken your grip,
http://www.aishdas.org   and it flies away.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                            - Rav Yisrael Salanter

Michael Rand, a Hebrew linguist who works at the Academy of the Hebrew
Language in Jerusalem, was asked about the usage of BIN NUN and this is
what he offered: 

"...On principle, the Tiberian vocalization reflects the pronunciation that
was current among the Tiberian Masoretes, which is of course MUCH later
than the texts that they were pronouncing. On the other hand, since the
texts were/are sacred, are composed in a language which had been "dead"
(i.e., nobody's native tongue) for hundreds of years by the time that the
Masoretes got around to doing their work, and their reading took place
within a controlled, liturgical setting, it is likely that their
pronunciation did not change quite as radically over time as would have
happened in the case of a non-sacral, living language. Though of course we
cannot rule out the possibility that some of the phenomena that are
fixed/recorded by the Masoretic vocalization system reflect developments in
the languages that were in greater everyday use among the people who
developed and implemented it--i.e., Aramaic and Arabic. Finally, and this
is in favor of a generous estimation of the "veracity"
  of the Masoretic system, we may say that it is AMAZINGLY detailed, taking
  great pains to record all sorts of apparently minor (e.g., sub-phonemic)
  phenomena. So that we should assume that if the Masoretes took such pains
  to preserve the distinction in pronunciation between "ben" and "bin,"
  even though from the point of view of the morpheme meaning "son" it is
  quite irrelevant, it must reflect some sort of historical reality which
  probably has roots in a much earlier stage of the language. The point is
  that although the real historical basis for the distinction was quite
  likely already unclear by the time of the emergence of the Masoretic
  system, its after-effects were dutifully recorded by the Masoretes.  
 
That being said, it should be kept in mind that the Masoretic system of
vocalization is just one of three basic systems, the other two being the
Babylonian and the Palestinian. And its possible that in the other two, the
distinction in question is not observed, or perhaps some other distinction
obtains there. In any case, these factors must be taken into account in a
full work-up of the problem."

Also, see the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_vocalization
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On 19/06/2012 2:38 PM, David Riceman wrote:
> What happens in a town with large lots? For example, a square lot
> containing an acre is 200 by 200 feet.  That implies, if houses are no
> more than 40 feet wide, that they are 160 feet apart.  That it in turn
> would imply that a person living in such a town can walk no more that
> 2000 amos in any direction on Shabbos, which seems small to me (the
> shul I attend is 1.1 miles from my house, and 2000 amos is around 0.6
> miles; luckily I live in a much more densely populated town).

Lich'ora, if the property is fenced (and thus a reshut hayachid) one
counts the 70 2/3 amot from the fence, not from the house.

-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
z...@sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
                 are expanding through human ingenuity."
                                            - Julian Simon

It's an explicit gemara that the nefashos of the dead are aware when
someone comes to their graves
=============================
Actually the record is mixed on whether meitim yodim or not.  Maareh Mkomot available upon request.
KT
Joel Rich
 

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R' Akiva Blum:

Several years ago, I attended the levaya of a young women who in childbirth
had gone into a coma, and died several weeks later. The couple was barely
through shana rishona. As you can imagine, the attendees were crying away.
A very emotional levaya. However, I notices that the young husband had no
tears. I fact, he seemed very calm about the whole thing.

 

Shortly afterwards, I attended a levaya of and elderly women, with many
children and grandchildren. The attendees were very solemn, but the husband
and children were inconsolable. 

 

I realized that people cry for a person?s death for two reasons. One is for
the tragedy, the loss of a great potential or future. This was true in the
first case but not in the second. The second reason is the loss of the
relationship. This was true solely for the family in the second case, but
in the first, the husband had only known his wife for less than a year, and
the last part allowed him to become independent.

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



You are presuming that you can tell what a person is thinking and how deep his grief is (or is not) from the way he is acting. That is not necessarily true.

 

KT,

MYG

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On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:49:57AM -0400, Moshe Y. Gluck wrote:
: You are presuming that you can tell what a person is thinking and how
: deep his grief is (or is not) from the way he is acting. That is not
: necessarily true.

True, devarim shebeleiv einam devarim for a reason.

But if RAB's observation is statistical norm, one would have to ask why
a husband of one year would be capable of self-control more consistently
than the husband and children of an elderly person. I am just not sure
I'm willing to concede that his experience is typical.

There are also issues like /how/ a person died. Funerals for those
murdered, such as those for bombing victims during the intifadin (lo
aleinu), were much more demonstrative. Some of that "why them? why
me?" also comes into play.


Speaking as moderator, for a moment:
I don't know how much speculation about metzi'us I think is appropriate
for the list. OT1H it's off topic. OTOH, without it, we can't get back
to the topic of why the various lengths of aveilus without it. Just a
heads-up, for those thinking of replying, that depending on how I decide,
your post may not make it.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "And you shall love H' your G-d with your whole
mi...@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.

     For women whose period of bleeding is less than five days, there is a
     way to shorten the twelve-day period without relying on kulos:  skip
     going to the mikve one month.  There is then no need to wait five days
     before starting to count; she can begin as soon as the bleeding stops.
     . EMT
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