Avodah Mailing List

Volume 28: Number 223

Thu, 03 Nov 2011

• 1. Re: Is there any issur here al pi halacha?--selling/buying of kidneys (Rich, Joel)
• 2. Re: Birds & Fish in the Mabul (Chana Luntz)
• 3. Re: Is there any issur here al pi halacha?--selling/buying of kidneys (Ari Kahn)
• 4. Not our fault? (kennethgmil...@juno.com)
• 5. Re: To Stand or Not to Stand for a Chosson and Kallah (Zev Sero)
• 6. Re: mabul (Zev Sero)
• 7. Re: Status of Non-Jew born to Jewish Father (Zev Sero)
• 8. Re: mabul (Micha Berger)
• 9. Re: To Stand or Not to Stand for a Chosson and Kallah (Allan Engel)
• 10. Re: Is there any issur here al pi halacha?--selling/buying of kidneys (Zev Sero)
• 11. Is there any issur here al p ihalacha?--selling/buying of kidneys (Joseph C. Kaplan)
• 12. Re: To Stand or Not to Stand for a Chosson andKallah (Poppers, Michael)
• 13. Re: mabul (Zev Sero)
• 14. avraham's geirim (Saul.Z.New...@kp.org)
• 15. spurious correlation (David Riceman)
• 16. Re: avraham's geirim (Rich, Joel)

See RMF's (IM CM 2:73.2) and RSZA's (Nishmat Avraham YD pg 156) where
they each say that if two patients arrive at the same time, the one with
a better chance at chayei olam goes first; but if you are already caring
for someone capable only of chayei sha'ah, you can't stop treating him
to make time for the chayei olam. When RSZA says that the mishnah in
Horios can't be implemented today (as RJR cited), he doesn't mean that
therefore there are no halakhos of triage.

I also see that RJR cave a 2 part miniseries titled "Women and Children
First - Halachic Triage, Western Ethic, Neither or Both? at AABJ&D (West
Orange). If it's the same RJR as ours (CC-ed), maybe he could chime in?
=============================
Guilty as charged.  This was an extract from a much longer study with my
shabbat learning mates where we are learning horiyot.  This issue was why
we picked horiyot (as well as can the Sanhedrin err) and I had hoped the
intensive study would lead to an aha moment on resource allocation/triage. 
Unfortunately it never came, the quote above being a classic example (I'd
ask anyone with connections to see if they can get any non-YU gedolim to
comment) as to what exactly did R'SZA mean - is it not applicable today or
is it applicable but no one will listen.....
It seems some/most current  poskim treat horiyot priorities as a tertiary
tie breaker with almost no application (i.e. if both cholim are equally
sick and equally distant from the dr\ and we know they keep the same number
of mitzvot......)  some interpret the whole water bottle thing as chaye
shah vs. olam)
IMHO the minhag haolam (and poskim but I can't say which came first), is not what one would have expected from the primary sources, 
KT
Joel Rich
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I wrote:
>> The position I have been consistently arguing is that kol haaretz and
>> kol hashamayim are terms that are most logically to be understood in the
>> way that Noach and the other members of the dor hamabul would have
>> understood them (and did understand them, or refused to believe them). That
>> excludes anything completely out of their ken, like planets and galaxies from
>> either definition, but also Australia and England and other places that to
>> them did not exist. If you asked the dor hamabul for a definition of kol
>> haaretz, you would not get any references to Australia.

And RLL replied:
> But again, it's the narrative that says the whole world is going to be
> flooded.  If you take that to mean "the whole world that we knew about
> at the time", you might as well do the same thing with Genesis 1:1 and
> say Hashem only created the Middle East.  It stands to reason that the
> word is used the same way in both places.

No, there were no people around at the time of Genesis 1:1, so following the
same set of reasoning (ie contextualising the language to the time to which
it refers), with the only entities around at that time being (at most) the
angels, one might expect the language of Genesis 1:1 et seq to be either
unique to Hashem (sod amuk, see Ramban below) or be that of the angels
(isn't that the point of "na'aseh adam b'tzelmenu"?)

But more deeply, the moral messages of Breishis and the mabul are different.
I refer you back to Rashi and the Rambam:

Here is Rashi on the subject - first Rashi on the Torah:

"Rabbi Yitzchak said it was not necessary to begin the Torah except from
"hachodesh haze l'chem" because this is the first mitzvah that Israel was
commanded and what was the reason that  that it opens with breishis  because
of [Tehillim 111:6] "the power of his deeds he has made known to his people
to give to them the inheritance of nations" - because if the nations of the
world will say to Yisroel, you are robbers, because you conquered the lands
of the seven nations, they can say to them: all the land is HKBH's, he
created it and gives it to whoever seems right in his eyes, it was his will
to give it to them, and his will to take it from them and give it to us."

And the Ramban takes up the theme, after quoting this Rashi:

"And one could ask on this that there was a great need to begin the Torah
with Breishis bara Elokim because this is the root of emunah  and one who
does not believe in this and who believes that the world has always existed
is kofer b'ikar and has no Torah at all.  And the answer is because ma'aseh
breishis is a very deep secret [sod amuk] and cannot  be understood from the
verses and its depths cannot be known except from the kabala from Moshe
Rabbanu from the mouth of the Almighty and those who know it are obligated
to conceal it therefore Rabbi Yitzchak said that there was no need to begin
the Torah from Breishis bara.  And the story as to what was created on the
first day and what was created on the second day and the rest of the days
and the long account of the creation of Adam and Chava and their sin and
punishment and the story of gan eden and the expulsion of Adam from it
because all of this cannot be totally understood from the text and even more
so the story of the dor hamabul and the haflaga there isn't any great need
for them and for those who believe in the Torah it would be enough without
them and they would believe in the principle which is written in the aseres
hadibros "ki sheshes yamim asa hashem es hashamayim v'es ha'aretz es hayam
v'es kol asher bam, v'yinach b'yom hashvi'i". And the rest would be known to
yechidim that was transmitted from Moshe rabbanu with rest of the Torah she
baal peh and [therefore] Rabbi Yitzchak gave a reason for this that the
Torah began with Bereishis bara Elokim and told the whole story of creation
until the formation of Adam and how he gave him rulership over the work of
his hands and all things under his feet, and how gan eden which was the
choicest of the places that were created in this world was made to be his
dwelling place until his sin caused his expulsion from there and when the
dor hamabul sinned they were expelled from the world in total and the
righteous one amongst them only was saved, him and his children.  And when
his descendants sinned this caused them to be scattered in the places and
dispersed in the lands and they seized for themselves places for their
families in their nations as they were able, so that it is proper that where
a nation adds to its sins that it should be destroyed from its place and
another nation should come to inherit its land because this is the judgement
of Hashem in relation to land from the beginning and even more so in
relation to that which it told that Canaan was cursed to be sold as a slave
forever and it was not fitting that he should inherit the choicest places
but rather it should be inherited by His servants, the descendents of his
loved one as it is written "and he gave to them the lands of the nations and
they inherited the work of the peoples that they might keep his laws and his
Torah - that is to say he expels from there those who rebel against him and
puts there his servants who that they know by serving him that they will
inherit and if they sin against him the land will vomit them out as it did
to the nation that was before them ... ""


The moral message of Breishis is - I am Hashem who created everything,
including things well beyond your ken, so don't go objecting when I choose
to give a small piece of land to the Jews.

The moral message of the mabul is that of crime and punishment.  If you make
the punishment not fit the crime, indeed be disproportionate to the crime,
then you are alleging a Judge who does not do justly.  In an attempt to
expand on the gadulus of Hashem, by saying he flooded the whole planet, in
effect, it seems to me, people are diminishing the yashrus and tzidkus of
Hashem (and even there, if they really want to magnify the gadlus, they
should say that the planets too were flooded, why stop at one small
planet!).  It stops being a measured response (in which Hashem saves all
those who were indeed righteous even though they were less than a community,
amounting only to 8, and destroys those who were not while giving the wicked
time to repent while Noach is building the ark) and becomes a fit of pique,
in which vast areas of land are flooded due to the actions in (relatively
speaking) quite a small corner of it, those vast areas including many that
could not, due to the technology of the time, have been accessed by the
people or animals involved in the crimes.  Ultimately therefore it seems to
me a moral question, as to how one relates to HaShem once one realises the
physical realities (truth is, most people don't, they have an image of the
dor hamabul spread out all over the world, like we have today, and clearly
were that to be the case, then the appropriate punishment would be to flood
the whole world.  But given the numbers of people we are clearly talking
about, that cannot have been the case, and once that is realised, on some
level you end up having to choose between gadlus and yashrus).

> Lisa

Regards
Chana

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Micha Berger <mi...@aishdas.org> wrote:
> I also found a list by R' Ari Kahn of sources for a course on medical
> ethics
> http://www.biu.ac.il/Dean/course%20descript
> ion/Topics_in_Contemporary_Halachic_Issues.doc
> which includes:
...

if it is of any value - my conclusion is that in terms of halacha -
without taking into consideration the Dina Malchuta Dina issue; it is
permissible to sell an organ - but troublesome morally. The donating
of the organ to save a life is a huge mitzva, to take money for it is
in fact taking money to perform a mitzvah - which does not negate the
mitzva, but does minimize it.

In the thread titled "Status of Non-Jew born to Jewish Father", R"n Toby Katz wrote:

> We have to be nice to people but we do not have to clean up
> Reform and Conservative messes. It is not our fault that Jews
> marry non-Jews and it is not our job to pretend that that's OK.
> It's not our job to cover up for them and make the boo boo all
> better.  If we will not be true to the Torah, for G-d's sake,
> who will?  Who will?  

I must object to the line "It is not our fault that Jews marry non-Jews".
We cannot deny our responsibilities. If we were better at being true to the
Torah, that would most certainly trickle out to the rest of Klal Yisrael.

The exact ways in which we improve ourselves is not for this thread. Nor is
this the thread for debating whether or not we should show compassion by
helping to "clean up their messes" or by "making the boo boo all better".

My only point here is that we must not only reject their anti-Torah ways, but we must also accept our related responsibilities.

Akiva Miller

____________________________________________________________
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On 3/11/2011 9:52 AM, Prof. Levine wrote:
> At 09:34 AM 11/3/2011, M Cohen wrote:
>> RYL asked .. If it is indeed the case that we stand when people are going
>> to do a
>> mitzvah, then why don't we stand when the Baal Kriah gets up to
>> lein, when the Baal Shachris goes to the Amud to daven, etc. ?
>>
>> indeed, r Yaakov kamanetsky writes that the minhag to stand for az yashir
>> in pesukei d'zimra is to honor those going to give tzedah at that that time.

I think you mean Vayevarech David.


> Most people stand well before Az Yashir at v'yevorech Dovid. However, this standing is optional.

As I pointed out above, the time when the gabai tzedaka does his rounds
is at Vayevarech David, and thus we stand for him.  I have never heard
that this standing is optional.  Remaining standing for Az Yashir is
optional, because there's no real reason to remain standing except to
show chibah for that portion (and since we're going to stand again for
Yishtabach).



>> As for your question, what mitva/chiuv is Baal Shachris davening, Baal Kriah
>> leining, etc ?
>
> Are you saying that there is no mitzva to read the Torah on Mondays,
> Thursdays and on Shabbos?

No, there isn't.  It's an obligation of the tzibbur, not of any yachid,
and certainly not of the baal korei.


>  Is there no mitzva to daven with a minyan and hence the person leading
> the davening is not doing a mitzvah?

No more than any other member of the minyan.


> What about someone who puts on tefillin standing? Is he not doing a
> mitzvah, yet people do not stand for someone putting on tefillin.

He's not walking past, is he?


-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
z...@sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
                                            - Yitzchak Rabin

                    
                

On 3/11/2011 6:00 AM, Eli Turkel wrote:
> <<"Down" means towards the centre of the earth. "Up" means away from it.
> Thus all of the sky is above the land, not under it.>>
>
> This is true in modern terminology.
> The gemara assumes that the sun goes under the earth at night and heats
> the water in the streams

Not all the Amora'im knew the earth was round, but the Tana'im knew it.


-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
z...@sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
                                            - Yitzchak Rabin

                    
                

On 3/11/2011 9:37 AM, T6...@aol.com wrote:
> Based on the mesorah in which I was raised, I would strongly disagree
> with your friend's approach.  Converting a baby when the mother is not
> Jewish and will not be raising the baby in a Jewish, Torah home is
> just plain wrong.

The child is not being converted now.  Only the milah is being done,
so that if the child eventually decides to complete his conversion (or
if the family decides to return to yiddishkeit) he won't have to have
that done as an adult.

-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
z...@sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
                                            - Yitzchak Rabin

                    
                

On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 12:34:43PM -0400, Zev Sero wrote:
> Not all the Amora'im knew the earth was round, but the Tana'im knew it.

The dominant belief in the Roman Empire was the Ptolemeic universe. The
earth in the center, with orbiting transparent shells around it
("galgalim") that had the moon, sun and planets in them, and a final
solid shell that held numerous stars.

The Babylonians believed that the sky is a semi-spherical shell ("raqia")
above the planet. Under the Sassanids, the Ptolemeic model slowly gained
currency. And the mazalos are not attached to the dome, they move on their
own -- just like the kokhavei lekhes.

Among Chazal....

I don't share RZS's confidence that the line was between tannaim and
amoraim.

Both R' Eliezer and R' Yehushua both describe the flood (RH 11b) as
falling through the heaven onto the earth. Rebbe (Pesachim 94b) is
described as arguing against the ages of Rome when he said the mazalos
move and the galgal is fixed (which was the Babylonian theory). So there
were tannaim who didn't buy into Ptolemy.

Among amoraim as well (in agreement with RZS): Pesahim 94b and Y-mi
Berakhos 1:1 (3a-4b) both discuss the time it takes for the sun to go
from inside to behind the sky at sunset. The gemara in Pesachim revolves
around R' Yehudah, R' Chanina, and other Israeli names, so maybe it can't
testify about belief in Bavel. But in Chagiga 15a there is an explicit
description of the sky as a lid that toughes, or almost touches, the
earth at its edges. A couple of blatt earlier (12b) we were told that
the world floats on the tehom, or is held above it by pillars.

Although we do have a beraisa that proves that the sun goes under the
earth because the polls heat up at night, this also rules out believing
the earth is a globe. If it were a globe with the sun orbiting around it,
the sun at night would be further from those pools than it is during
the day by the diameter of the planet! And that beraisa appears as a
proof cited by R' Chiya -- an amora who clearly believed in neither of
the two models I gave on top. It's as though he heard something about
Ptolmey (orbits), but not the full idea.

Ptolemy does reach chazal, and we find that the amoraim of EY adopted that
astronomy before those of Bavel.

The conclusion I drew when I did a more complete survey (lost somewhere
in a 1990s mail-jewish archive) was that Chazal were on the conservative
side of the trend in the natural philosophy community, but did simply
follow the theories of that community.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             When a king dies, his power ends,
mi...@aishdas.org        but when a prophet dies, his influence is just
http://www.aishdas.org   beginning.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                    - Soren Kierkegaard

Did he sit for Az Yashir on Shabbos?

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 1:34 PM, M Cohen <mco...@touchlogic.com> wrote:
> indeed, r Yaakov kamanetsky writes that the minhag to stand for az yashir
> in pesukei d'zimra is to honor those going to give tzedah at that that time.

On 3/11/2011 11:01 AM, Micha Berger wrote:
> OTOH, RZS appears to believe that public resources are a different issue
> than brokering resources that never reach the public pool.

My basis is simple dinei mamonos. The reason there are objective criteria
for the public kupah is because it's the property of the whole community
who are taxed for it, not of any individual, and certainly not of the
gaba'im; thus no individual has the right to allocate it according to his
subjective preferences. The Torah says that each person has the right
to allocate *his* kodoshim as he pleases, not those of other people.
Therefore the gaba'im need objective criteria for how they should spend
the community's kupah, and the mishnah gives them some.


On 3/11/2011 11:23 AM, Ari Kahn wrote:
> if it is of any value - my conclusion is that in terms of halacha -
> without taking into consideration the Dina Malchuta Dina issue; it is
> permissible to sell an organ - but troublesome morally. The donating
> of the organ to save a life is a huge mitzva, to take money for it is
> in fact taking money to perform a mitzvah - which does not negate the
> mitzva, but does minimize it.

Proof that taking money for a mitzvah makes it smaller: the SA (OC 38)
says that all those who are engaged the STaM industry, not only sofrim
but also distributors and retailers, are "oskim bemitzvah" and therefore
exempt from any other mitzvah unless it falls into their laps.  But the
caveat is that they must be doing it exclusively for the mitzvah, taking
only their expenses; the moment they take money for themselves they are
oskim in their parnassah and lose their exemption.

-- 
Zev Sero
z...@sero.name

R'n IE: "The idea is really scary and makes me very uncomfortable, but it's hard to
make a moral judgment given that everyone comes out ahead - the recipient
gets a kidney and the donor gets badly needed money."

Not everybody.  The poor person whose condition is worse than the rich person's but doesn't get the kidney and dies comes out way behind.

Joseph Kaplan 
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In Avodah V28n222, RZS responded to me:
>> I have a possibly-related Q: at least some of the many who stand
>> for that last line first stand for all of "Mizmor l'David Havu
>> laH'" (and then sit down prior to the start of "L'cha Dodi") --
>> why the custom to stand for that mizmor? <<
> AIUI, because it contains Hashem's name 18 times. <
Thanks for the thought.  According to this understanding, however,
shouldn't those w/ that custom also stand for Shacharis' "Y'hi chvod H'"
(which, incidentally, is tadir compared to the saying of T'hilim 29)?  Just
to make things "worse": many of those people stand* for "Mizmor l'Sodah,"
which in certain siddurim is listed just before "Y'hi chvod," and then sit
down!  Thanks. 

*) apparently a minhag -- al pi SA, no need to stand but rather "just" to say the mizmor "bin'ginah"

All the best from 
-- Michael Poppers via BB pager

On 3/11/2011 1:26 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
> Both R' Eliezer and R' Yehushua both describe the flood (RH 11b) as
> falling through the heaven onto the earth. Rebbe (Pesachim 94b) is
> described as arguing against the ages of Rome when he said the mazalos
> move and the galgal is fixed (which was the Babylonian theory). So there
> were tannaim who didn't buy into Ptolemy.

None of which has to do with the shape of the earth itself.  It's my
contention that the Tana'im, being in EY and knowing of the Greeks'
discoveries, knew that the earth was a globe, and they were probably
also aware of its size, which the Greeks had measured pretty accurately.
They may not have all known or agreed about the precise theory of
galgalim, which was all speculation in any case, whereas the shape and
size of the earth can be proven.  Veharaaya, we now know that they were
all wrong about the galgalim, but right about the earth.

Whereas the amora'im in Bavel hadn't necessarily heard about these
discoveries, and thus we find some who thought the earth was flat and
some who knew it was round.

-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
z...@sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
                                            - Yitzchak Rabin

                    
                

http://revach.net/parshas-hash
avua/quick-vort/Parshas-Lech-Licha-What-Happened-To-All-Of-Avrohom039s-Geir
im/1158




see comments... the thought  that  the Gdolim of one dor   might be 'out 
of  touch'   with the product of a previous one ?


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Ought there to be any relation between a person's halachic opinion about 
brain death and about abortion?

David Riceman

http://revach.net/parshas-hash
avua/quick-vort/Parshas-Lech-Licha-What-Happened-To-All-Of-Avrohom039s-Geir
im/1158



see comments... the thought  that  the Gdolim of one dor   might be 'out
of  touch'   with the product of a previous one ?
==========================================
The simplest explanation imho is they became monotheists, not Jews.
KT
Joel Rich


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