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Yechiel Robinson

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Collecting Donations for the Cardozo School of Law Public Service Auction [Jan. 4th, 2012|02:52 pm]
I am collecting donations for the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Public Service Auction. I am planning to spend this summer working for a nonprofit organization, a government agency, or a judge. Cardozo will pay a stipend to hundreds of students, including me, who will work in unpaid public interest positions. Cardozo will raised the necessary funds from generous donations and an auction schedu...led for April 25, 2012. For more information, please read the solicitation letter from Cardozo here: https://cardozo.ejoinme.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=npvd0r5Xqvs%3d&tabid=326275&mid=581705

Please participate in this important project. Your donation will benefit the law school, the judicial system, and the broader communities of New York City and other cities. There are two ways for you to donate:

CHECK

Mail a check payable to "Cardozo School of Law" to my home address:

Yale Robinson
Attn: Donation to Cardozo School of Law
105 West 90th Street
New York, NY 10024

Also, please print out the following form: https://cardozo.ejoinme.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=gSHO6yzSZyU%3D&tabid=326275&mid=581705

Fill in your name, address, phone number and email, and include it with your check.

CREDIT CARD

Fill in your credit card information on the above-linked form, then mail it to my address, above.

DEADLINE

I am trying to raise $450 by Thursday, January 19 to comply with the program's fundraising deadline. If you are mailing a check, I suggest you put it in the mail no later than Friday, January 13.

Your donation, combined with other donations I have already received, will help me reach my fundraising goal.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

-Yechiel (Yale) Robinson
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The bachelor in Halakhah: A Sinner or a Pauper [Jan. 18th, 2011|05:49 pm]
I've been thinking about the first section of Even Ha'Ezer which states that a single Jewish man must marry by age 20 (the gemara Kiddushin implies some flexibility about the age number). A man who derelicts this duty is a sinner. The mechaber says the elders may physically punish him to urge him to marry; and Rama says he's not seen that practice. The approach is simple: a man has a responsibility to marry. If he does not marry, he is a sinner, and he is living in sin.

Given today's singles crisis, and my own single status, I find the mechaber's approach problematic. Is life really so simple? Are we all sinners? I can speak for myself, but I know friends and family who are good people and are single. Are they sinners, too? Do they deserve to be beaten up?

The issue is not whether physical punishment is appropriate. Our society frowns on this practice, both to children and adults. The issue is whether to view the bachelor as a sinner, or is there a more nuanced approach that recognizes that choosing to marry a woman is not completely in the man's control, and he may need assistance and luck.

Rambam in Hilkhot Matnot Aniyim ch. 7, following the gemara Ketubot in 67b, and cited with approval by the Shulchan Arukh Yoreh Deah near ch. 250 (I don't have it in front of me), says that the Torah commands anyone to give a pauper "dei machsoro asher yechsar lo" - whatever the poor man lacks, if he lacks it. The redundant language leads the gemara to understand that a poor person may need more than just food and clothing. Therefore, if a single man needs a wife, or a single woman needs a husband, one is commanded to find them an appropriate match, and one who makes the match is fulfilling the mitzvah of tzedakah. I note with commendation Rabbi Chananya Weissman's blogs about singles' issues, where he writes that only people with appropriate sensitivity and competence should involve themselves in this arena which can cause great emotional harm.

The difference between a single man and a financially poor man is that the single man is obligated to find his wife, and the community is obligated to sustain the poor man. On closer inspection, I understand these are two sides to the proverbial coin. If the single man cannot find for himself, the community must help. As to the poor man, the community is primarily obligated to feed and clothe him, but that does not absolve the poor man of responsibility. We must help those who help themselves. This is a common proverb, and is reflected in the mitzvah of helping the overloaded donkey (the owner must try to rectify the situation; only in such a case is the stranger also obligated to help). Similarly, Rambam at the end of Hilkhot Matnot Aniyim ch. 10, cited verbatim by Yoreh De'ah ch. 255, writes that a poor man must make every effort to find work for himself so that he can earn a living and not rely on other people to support him.

The two sides of the coin indicate a chain of responsibility. For financial assistance, the community is primarily obligated, but then the individual must help himself. For matchmaking, the individual must seek for himself, but then the community must help. I suspect the difference is attributable to the fact that every man (rich or poor) must give tzedakah, and every man must marry, so those are the respective starting points. But the endpoint is that both basic needs and matchmaking are combined, personal and communal imperatives.

I have undertaken some effort to find a shidduch in the last year. I do not obsess over it; at the moment, I have other responsibilities and I choose not to peruse online dating sites. At some point, I may return there. More importantly, I don't think I can manage the task myself. I will seek help as appropriate, recognizing that getting married, and seeing to it that other people get married, is a communal responsibility in accordance with the sources I cited.
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The wisdom of Joseph [Nov. 28th, 2008|12:34 am]
There are good reasons why I've neglected this page, but I prefer not to state them. If anyone still checks this page periodically to see what I've written, hello! I am not delusional, and I don't think anyone cares what I write here, but I've been wrong before.

On the coming Shabbat, as on every Chanukah, the weekly portion Miketz describes Joseph's journey from pauper to prince in Pharaoh's court. Joseph solved the riddle of Pharaoh's dream: the seven fat cows foreshadowed seven prosperous years, and the seven lean cows foreshadowed seven years of famine that would follow after the years of prosperity. The story is well known and need not be repeated here in detail. Of interest to me is how Joseph continues after he has finished interpreting the dream. At that point, one might imagine, Joseph's job is done. He was summoned to interpret the dream, and he did exactly that. Yet here, unlike with the wine-maker and the baker, Joseph advises Pharaoh how to react to the new information. He advises Pharaoh to appoint a minister who will supervise a nationwide effort to tax the country one-fifth of its productivity for the years of prosperity, and preserve the food in cities for when it will be needed in the years of famine. Pharaoh praises Joseph's wisdom, and as Ben Zoma says (Pirkei Avot 4:1), the wise person sees the future -- not as a prophet, but understands how present circumstances will likely lead to future events, somewhat like a weather forecaster. Part of the wisdom surely lies not only in interpreting the dream but in suggesting a viable practical response to it.

I asked myself some years ago why Joseph chose to tax the people one fifth. Why not tax them one half? That way, if a typical Egyptian farmer would produce 100 bushels in each of the seven prosperous years and 0 bushels in each of the years of famine, his consumption would average out to 50 bushels in each of those 14 years, and would be balanced without disrupting his routine in any of those years. Would not such a solution be better than the jarring transition from prosperity to catastrophic widespread poverty and famine that occurred? Joseph's final words are that "the land will not be cut off by famine." This is less than optimistic! Joseph says that the famine will be bad, very bad. The only thing his tax accomplishes is to prevent irreversible destruction of the land and its inhabitants. Is this the best he can do?

There are some practical reasons why Joseph's tax policy was politically prudent. Taxing the population more than 20% was likely to lead people to fierce resistance and rebellion against a king who was confiscating as much as half of their hard-earned labor. Abuses of power in this manner were common in the ancient world of despotism (and are not entirely absent in the present-day societies), and the predictable result of such drastic policies, in the long term, cannot be other than a rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor. Joseph's more moderate tax was intended to sustain the peace.

Moreover, after the famine began, and the population became serfs to Pharaoh and his kingdom, Joseph made the one-fifth tax a permanent feature of Egyptian society, with only the priests exempted. Maybe Joseph foresaw a political opportunity even before the famine would begin that instituting a one-fifth tax would create an essentially permanent source of power and revenue for the kingdom.

I think there is a more fundamental point. To divide up the amount of produce in years of plenty and years of famine so that people would have the average quantity for each year would have defeated God's plan that there be years of plenty followed by years of famine. It's not just that the land would produce less than its wont in the years of famine: people needed to experience the famine, as that was part of the dream's interpretation. More generally, it is not possible to play games with God's plan. If God says there will be years of plenty followed by years of famine, humans cannot avoid that. No matter how hard they might try, there will be periods of success and periods of adversity, as everyone has experienced in their own individual lives, and as nations experience in macroeconomic terms. It is wrong to approach the situation and say: how can I prevent the economic recession from having any effect on me? It will have an effect on you, at least indirectly. This cannot be avoided. If you try to insulate yourself, it will affect a friend or a charitable foundation or community organization with which you associate -- and if you have no such connections, your problems are more serious than poverty or wealth. The recently unfolding scandal of a massive Ponzi scheme that has destroyed billions of dollars spread across myriad individuals and institutional endowments has directly hurt both my high school and my college alma maters. I do not intend to donate any more money to them than I would otherwise (I plan to pay off my student loans before I give Yeshiva University a single dime as a gift, not out of spite but just because it makes sense to think in those terms), but I am keenly aware of the situation. So how do you deal with a situation like this? You draw upon the strength of past success and hope for future success even if the present situation is bleak. If life were designed to be a flat, unwavering road, there would be no famine nor plenty -- everyone would have just enough to get by.

In a reverse scenario, the prophet Jeremiah is tasked to buy a field from Chanamel his uncle (or cousin) even though the area was soon to be destroyed because God promised that someday in the future people would buy real estate there. In the bleakest time ever described in the prophetic books, with destruction looming and the process of exile already in progress, God asks Jeremiah to demonstrate with a physical action that the future holds hope.
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Note to readers [Aug. 7th, 2008|09:57 pm]
I have set most of my blog posts to friends-only. I had considered doing this earlier, and decided to act upon it now when someone wisely pointed out that a recent post may have divulged private information about someone else without that person's permission. This has been a recurring problem. I am also concerned about privacy implications of statements I have made about myself.

Currently there is nobody in my friends list. If you wish to become a friend, please ask. If I recognize you from real life or elsewhere on the Internet, I will consider your request.

Because of the way I write about various topics simultaneously, I have removed from public view some completely innocuous content alongside problematic statements. Since it would have been time-consuming, and perhaps not practical, to surgically remove problematic statements sentence by sentence, I decided to remove any post that contained any information I wished to conceal. The exception was "If you could ask Maimonides one question" - there I removed an off-topic introduction and restored it in a private post, then I preserved the part about Maimonides so that it reads continuously with the next post. I hope more words of Torah will fill the void left by today's concealment of comparatively unimportant material.
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Rambam and Free Will [Aug. 1st, 2008|03:49 pm]
In my last post I expressed hope that I would discuss the fifth chapter of Rambam's laws of Teshuva (repentance). Rambam posits Teshuva as a manifestation of humanity's ability to change itself for the better. Consequently, after he begins by delineating the process by which one may accomplish Teshuva, and the factors that may prevent a person from achieving Teshuva, he reaches toward the fundamental premise on which Teshuva stands: Free Will.

Quoting a mishnah from Pirkei Avot chapter 3, Rambam begins: "Permission is granted to each person" to make himself righteous or wicked. I am typing from my family computer which does not have Hebrew characters installed; if I were typing from my laptop, I would use Hebrew. The antecedent Mishnah in Pirkei Avot says HaKol tzafuy, vehaReshut netunah - "Everything is foreseen, but permission is granted." Rambam emphasizes the second clause and ignores the first for reasons that emerge later in the chapter. The contradiction between God's omniscience and man's free will is resolved either by saying God is not truly omniscient or man is not truly free. Either God's omniscience or man's free will, stated in absolute terms, is mutually exclusive. The alternative, which some people believe but I find unsatisfactory, is that God can watch and know from the outside what we will do but cannot compel us to do it. I understand the idea: I certainly do not feel compelled to type these words, but if it is really my choice to type them or not to type them, I do not understand how God can know that I will type them. Rambam deals with this question last, so I will revert to his order of presentation.

Faced with the dilemma of determinism versus free will, Rambam emphatically promotes free will as an absolute right and responsibility. I have lecture notes in Hebrew that I transcribed in Yeshivat Har Etzion in August 2002, six years ago, in the class of Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, one of the Roshei Yeshiva (deans). Rabbi Lichtenstein appended remarks on Laws of Teshuva in 20-minute segments after two-hour lectures regarding the first chapter of Masekhet Ketubot. Though it was my second year in Yeshiva, my Hebrew writing is not entirely clear in calligraphy or meaning, but it suffices to provide a faint echo of Rabbi Lichtenstein's thought process. Rabbi Lichtenstein interprets Rambam's use of the word Reshut not as a desirable action, the way that in Masekhet Berakhot the Rabbis classify the Evening Prayer as a "Reshut" rather than an absolute imperative, but rather Rambam uses Reshut to mean a neutral choice: one may choose to be good or evil. From subsequent clarification, though, it emerges that a person bears responsibility to choose life, as the verse in Deuteronomy so beautifully commands. Since a person has the ability to choose good or evil, the only reason he could have failed to choose good is by his own negligence or malfeasance, so he must actively correct his ways. Rabbi Lichtenstein, citing his awareness of modern thought, posits Rambam's statements as a rejection of the psychological theories that a person is driven toward certain habits by his upbringing or environment. In Rambam's own words, "Do not let it pass through your mind what non-Jewish idiots and many Jewish fools say, that God stipulates from a person's conception whether he will become good or evil. It is not true. Rather, anyone can become a righteous man like Moses or a wicked man like Jeroboam, or wise or stupid, or merciful or cruel, or profligate or thrifty, and likewise for all traits." Rabbi Lichtenstein states, according to my notes, that Rambam rejects both religious determinism and secular determinism. Religious determinism would reject the statement that "Everything is in the hands of Heaven except fear of Heaven," because in this mistaken view even fear of Heaven is included. Secular determinism I defined previously.

What concerns me about Rambam's position, and what causes me to ponder it, is his absolute rejection that any force leads a person toward sin. I don't know that Rambam rejects altogether that some people are tempted toward certain sins for which others experience no temptation, but even if Rambam accepts that as fact, he does not consider it in his analysis. To me, any analysis of Free Will must account for variable levels of temptation among different humans. For example, the Torah says in many places: "You shall not eat blood." In Deuteronomy it uses stronger language: "Only be strong, not to eat the blood because the blood is the life-force, and you shall not eat the life-force with the flesh. Do not eat it, rather spill it on the earth like water. Do not eat it, so that you and your children will experience favor for doing what is right in the eyes of God." The Rabbis in Masekhet Makkot implicitly ask: "For what reason is such exceptionally strong language used to prohibit blood? Is it not sufficient to say 'do not eat it,' that God must emphatically command 'only be strong'?" They answer that it is a clever hint: even though man does not desire to eat blood, God offers a reward for abstaining from eating it. All the more, if a person overcomes a real temptation, he will be rewarded. (I am paraphrasing everything here from memory and have not checked the sources.) I find this answer to be wonderfully insightful on its own merits, but insufficient to answer the question. It is obvious to me that some people in antiquity, and probably still today, do relish the taste of blood. We all remember how our mouths tasted when we lost teeth in our youth: blood has a thick, milky consistency that would naturally appeal to a certain subset of the population. Perhaps in modern times the temptation is lessened by the professional mannerisms of food processing, but in antiquity, where one attained meat by slaughtering the animal one intended to eat, it is not difficult to imagine someone wanting to eat the blood as a kind of sauce to make the meat more palatable. All this is speculation, but my point is, some people desire blood and others don't. For those who do, the temptation to violate God's prohibition is greater, and in a fair accounting of Reward and Punishment, God would presumably reward such a person more for abstaining, and punish him less for transgressing, than for another person who lacked the temptation.

Eating blood is a politically neutral topic because nobody I know expresses or even conceals a desire to do it. If you translate the preceding paragraph from blood to homosexuality, you strike a mother-lode of problems. It is indisputable that some people desire homosexual contact and others do not. Those who desire it find it difficult to express what is the source of their desire: it strikes them as natural and obvious, and if anything, they may have difficulty relating to heterosexual people who find it equally obvious that their own orientation is preferable. So when God says homosexual relations are an "abomination", I feel it is entirely God's right to say that, and I castigate in the strongest possible terms the arrogance of Conservative and Reform thinkers who deign to suggest that God may have fallen behind the times. What emerges, then, is the problem that a nontrivial percentage of Jewish adolescents and adults experience a strong desire for something God calls an abomination. Can I honestly say that these people have no force acting upon them? I feel they do have some force acting upon them, but being human beings with Free Will, they are tasked with overcoming that force with an equal and opposite force to obey the statutes of God. Still, I cannot equate the challenge of a homosexually oriented Jew with that of a heterosexual one: the latter would say, "Of course I will not do that! I would not want to do it anyway!" For that person, there is really no choice to make.

I note here, in passing, that the existence of any law in any society implies that somebody might wish to violate that law by commission or omission. Thus, the prohibition upon eating blood implies that someone might think to eat it: perhaps not that it is tasty or worthwhile to eat it, but at a minimum, it may physically be eaten. Some of the more mysterious prohibitions, like the ones not to reconstruct the composition of the Anointing Oil or the Incense, require a modicum of analysis to consider: "Why would anyone want to do that?" In those specific instances, a rogue chemist may desire to experience the pleasant smell or warmth of these perfumes either to usurp God's metaphysical pleasure for himself, or to transform the material into a talisman of superstition. The context of the verses: "Anyone who mixes the Incense to smell it shall be cut off from his people," or "Anyone who mixes the Anointing Oil or anoints it upon a layman shall be cut off from his people," place emphasis upon the lay use of holy objects. These prohibitions become a special case of usurpation of holy items, what is called Me'ilah. In most cases, Me'ilah occurs only for items that actually exist, but for the Anointing Oil and the Incense, there is a special theory of usurpation to prohibit anyone even from creating these items. However, if one creates them to learn how to do it, but not to usurp its holiness, it is permitted.

The relevance of the preceding comment to blood and homosexuality is this: There must be reasons why God prohibits those activities. Even if you or I might not want to do them anyway, someone does. For that person, it is more of a challenge to abstain from sin.

The last two questions Rambam answers strain his ability to encapsulate complicated ideas in short paragraphs. His penultimate question: If God does not allow anything to happen against His will, how can a person have the ability to act on his own and possibly to violate God's will? Answer: Everything occurs according to God's will, yet humans possess free will precisely because God endowed them with Free Will. Just as the Creator desired that the scientific world operates according to laws, so too He desired that humans have the Free Will to do as they please. In other words, "Permission is granted" because God, as the creator of humanity, chose to grant it.

Finally, Rambam asks how God can know everything if it's possible for humans to do something that God does not "expect" them to do. He ducks this question, begging for lack of space, but briefly he states that humans really do possess free will, and as for God's knowledge, it is not like human knowledge where humans know about some reality external to themselves, but rather God's knowledge is an inherent element of His identity in a way that humans cannot understand.

If there's one question I would ask Rambam, I would want him to explain this in a little more detail. Perhaps he has already tried it in Guide to the Perplexed: that is a book I have owned for many years but never read. What excites me about this particular question, though, is the analogy from artificial intelligence to demonstrate that humans and computers can use completely different modes of thinking to solve the same problem. Of what relevance is this? Endgame tablebases in chess solve problems by analyzing a complete set of information for all positions in a certain endgame. They produce results which are shocking to humans. A 517-move forced mate is worthy of the verse Rambam quotes from Isaiah ch. 55: "For My thoughts are not like your thoughts, nor are your ways like My ways, says God." Theoreticians have called tablebases "God's Algorithm," and I wonder in all seriousness, does God think this way? In a chess position, each player has a number of legal moves (sometimes only one, but usually 20 or more). The game-theoretical result of any move, and the means of obtaining that result, can be attained in some cases by computer analysis, and are invariably knowable to an omniscient being because chess is a game where all information is available to the players at any time. Within the framework of possibilities, a human chooses a move, and he may preserve a good outcome or deteriorate to a worse outcome depending on the move. Bilam proclaimed: "God is not like a man who deceives, or a mortal who changes his mind," yet He did change his mind not to destroy Nineveh in the Book of Yonah. Why? Did God deceive Yonah? I don't think so. In the reality of Nineveh as it existed at the time of Yonah's proclamation, God was prepared to destroy the city. Consequent to the inhabitants' repentance and rectification, God decided not to destroy the city. The fact that God, in the end, did not destroy the city does not negate the fact that he would have destroyed the city absent any change. Thus, in the original reality, God foresaw that the city would be destroyed, and within that reality, He was right. The inhabitants of Nineveh changed reality. God did not know that the inhabitants of Nineveh would repent. God did know that, if they were to repent, God would save the city. So if you were to ask me, did God really know all along that Nineveh would be spared? I don't think that's a precise question. In the emergent reality of repentance, God spared them. To compare with chess, the players of Nineveh made an outstanding move, preserving their ability to survive and not be "checkmated." The analogy is not precise because in chess you cannot turn a loss into a draw or win, but rather, your opponent may allow you a chance to draw or win, and you must capitalize on that chance. If you have no chance to win, even the best move will not save you. It is by the mercy of God that he does not "play chess" with humans as a brutal force of perfection, but allows us to salvage a "lost position" by making a "good move." Surely Rambam would consider all this irrelevant to his theory, but my own analysis of the paradox between Free Will and Determinism allows for God to determine the outcomes of multiple scenarios and for humans to choose among them. Each element in this game retains some autonomy. Humans choose, as they are commanded and designed to do, and God retains his knowledge of what will occur consequent to those choices. But as to what the humans will choose, I believe God does not really know that in advance of when it happens, and I think my interpretation of the paradox is consistent with Rambam on this particular point.
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If you could ask Maimonides one question... [Jul. 21st, 2008|10:03 pm]
[I removed material. - August 7, 2008.]

Turning to the headline topic, if you could ask the medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides (Rambam) one question, what would it be? An interested researcher could write a whole book of questions to ask this prolific scholar, whose achievements cannot be appreciated even by reference to superlatives. Still, despite Rambam's outstanding works in his commentary on the Mishnah, his Sefer HaMitzvot, the Mishneh Torah, and the Moreh Nevukhim, plus a few ancillary works attributed to him, some of Rambam's writings have troubled great Jewish sages for centuries since then. By keeping his writing so well-organized and on-point, Rambam has made it comparatively easy for us to contrast his statements on the same topic in two different places and to find inconsistencies among those statements. In contrast, it is probable that other contradictions in statements by other Rishonim are not so easily discovered or analyzed. Aside from internal contradictions, we find some real head-scratchers where Rambam deviates from the plain sense of the Gemara on which he bases his rulings.

A wise student asked the Rashba, as recorded in the Responsa of the Rashba (number 311) to explain why the Rambam writes in Laws of Bekhorot 2:6 (and in one other place) that if a Kohen seized an animal which was possibly but not definitely a firstborn (a "safeik bekhor"), the court will not remove it from the Kohen to restore it to the original owner. On the one hand, the Kohen needs to prove it is a bekhor, but on the other hand, after the Kohen has seized the animal, the original owner needs to prove it is NOT a bekhor if he wishes to reclaim it. There are some complicated issues regarding whether it is appropriate for the Kohen to seize under such circumstances, and what factors would cause the court system to intervene or to let the parties work out the dispute among themselves, but leaving all that aside, the Rambam rules that the Kohen may keep the "safeik bekhor." However, the Gemara in Bava Metzia chapter 1 begins with this statement from Rav Hamnuna, but Rabah goes on to disagree and suggest that really Beit Din should intervene and return the "safeik bekhor" to its original owner, and Rav Chananya supports Rabah, and that is how the Gemara concludes. For reasons that are not obvious, Rambam ignored the statement of Rabah and ruled in accordance with Rav Hamnuna, even though usually codifiers will rule in accordance with the last unchallenged statement in a sequence of statements or arguments. Clearly the Rambam decided the matter based on what the Gemara in a different context calls "shikul hada'at" (weight of insight) because he thought Rav Hamnuna's argument was more convincing, and supported that argument even though Rav Hamnuna technically did not have the "last word" in that sugya. The Kesef Mishnah summarizes the foregoing points in his comment on Rambam ad locum, and also cites the Rashba's responsum, but does not attempt to provide a convincing answer. Rashba does try to construct a logical framework within which Rambam's ruling makes sense, and perhaps he succeeds in reading the Rambam's mind. We will never know the answer to this puzzle, but I imagine that if Rashba could ask Rambam one question, he would ask to explain the famous sugya of "tokfo Kohen" - the Kohen seized the "safeik bekhor."

Ramban (Nachmanides) might ask Rambam about his second of fourteen rules for counting mitzvot in Rambam's Sefer HaMitzvot. Ramban disagrees with many of Rambam's general rules and localized applications, so it would take them a long time to resolve their differences. However, Ramban's criticism of Rambam's second rule, though it maintains Ramban's beautifully respectful tone throughout, ends with unusually strong wording: "This book by the Rav" [before Rav Kook and Rav Soloveitchik lived, Ramban referred to Rambam as simply "the Rav," though in other contexts, a commentator will always refer to the antecedent author as "the Rav" or "Rabbeinu."] "...its ideas are sweet and entirely wonderful" [paraphrasing from the Song of Songs 5:16] "...except for this principle which uproots big mountains in the Talmud" [this is an offhand reference to the concluding sugya of Masekhet Horayot 14a where the Rabbis debate whether "Sinai" or "uprooting mountains" is better] "...and fells fortified walls in the Gemara, and this idea for students of the Gemara is bad and bitter" [Hebrew: רע ומר, a reference to Yirmeyahu 2:19] "...let the matter be suppressed and not be stated!" Those are strong words, but the importance of the underlying dispute justifies them. Rambam argues that a commandment learned from the 13 principles by which the Rabbis interpret the Torah or by an expansion of its literal meaning (ריבוי, "ribuy") is not counted among the 613 mitzvot unless the Gemara explicitly states that a particular item is "de'orayta." Ramban shows numerous deviations from this principle. Notably, Rambam writes in Laws of Eidut 3:4 that testimony is accepted mide'orayta only from witnesses who speak in person, but not by written depositions, so the entire authority of shtarot (written formal documents) in monetary law is derabbanan. Rambam's expansion of the rule preventing testimony by written deposition to disqualify any shtar mide'orayta, though a logical extension of that principle, creates numerous other problems which I will not discuss here. (Rav Chayim wrote an interesting analysis to suggest that Rambam classifies "shtarei kinyan" such as Gittin and Kiddushin as de'orayta, and "shtarei ra'ayah" such as a promissory note as derabbanan.) Ramban has no issue with saying that shtarot in general operate at the strength of de'orayta based on extensions of the literal meaning of the Torah, and he resolves the obvious problem of Gittin and some less obvious problems by stating categorically that shtarot are de'orayta. It's obvious to me, though I know little about these topics, that the substantive issues could keep an interested student busy for weeks if not months. Perhaps this is one question Ramban would have liked to ask Rambam.

I would like to ask Rambam about his understanding of free will as he describes it in Chapter 5 of Laws of Teshuva (repentance). Since the hour is late, I will reserve the details of Rambam's position, and my concerns about his position, for a later posting.

A cute midrash cited in the Gemara interprets a verse in the Song of Songs, דובב שפתי ישנים, to say that God moves the lips of "sleeping" people, i.e. that wise scholars continue to speak even after they have died. Obviously they do not move their lips in vain; they are saying something. To me it means that their scholarship lives on in their writings. Rabbi Soloveitchik's famous analogy of his father sitting around the table with Rambam and the other great scholars of history reinforces this principle.
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Improving safety [Jun. 15th, 2008|11:47 am]
Having read articles on Wikipedia about train signalling, I understand that the system used on the MBTA Green Line is not the safest possible standard, and a safer system would probably have prevented the accident that occurred on May 28. I've spent some hours reading about train accidents and train signalling on Wikipedia, and I still don't understand all of the details. In broad outline, I can say the following: on railroads with two parallel tracks for trains moving in opposite directions, such as on the MBTA, the chance of a head-on collision, where two trains moving toward each other in opposite directions collide, is practically zero. Such collisions have occurred on single tracks, where there is only room for one train, and the other train moving in the opposite direction is required to wait on a side-track rail, somewhat akin to a rest stop on a highway, before re-entering the track after the first train passes. For example, the head-on collision in Hinton, Alberta was caused when the conductor of a freight train failed to obey a stop signal as it moved onto a single track that was already occupied by a passenger train moving in the opposite direction. Collisions can also occur when two trains merge from two separate tracks onto a single track while moving in the same direction. This is similar to a car crash where two cars collide on one car's passenger side and the other car's driver's side as they merge on a road from two lanes into a single lane. An accident like this occurred in Chase, Maryland, when a freight train failed to comply with a stop signal in front of a bridge and continued onto a track that had been reserved for a passenger Amtrak train, which crashed into it moments later. Though there are track junctions in a few places on the Green Line, for example where three branches merge into Kenmore station, the signalling system is designed to prevent accidents, and in addition, the three lines merge onto two separate tracks at Kenmore before merging again to one track at the Massachusetts Ave. station, mitigating the logjam of junctions. The E branch merges again at Copley.

What happened on May 28 was the other kind of collision: a rear-end collision between two trains moving on the same track in the same direction. It should be noted, for the sake of completeness, that in a few cases, most famously the Armagh (Ireland) disaster of 1889 and a more recent disaster in Tanzania, a forward train's brake system failed as it was climbing a hill, and fell backwards down the track until it hit another train behind it. (I guess "The Little Engine that Could," one of my favorite stories from childhood, doesn't always work out in real life.) On the Green Line D Branch, there were two trains moving in the same direction on the same track between Waban and Woodland stations. The forward train was coming out of a stop signal and moving at about 3-4 mph; and the rear train had violated a stop signal (assuming that the signal was working) and was moving at 37-38 mph. The sources I've read contradict one another as to exactly where the crash occurred, but it was somewhere between Waban and Woodland stations.

Investigators have narrowed the search for a cause to human error by Terrese Edmonds, the operator of the rear train who was killed in the crash. So far as they can tell, the signal was working properly and should have displayed a red for "stop and proceed slowly at operator's discretion", where "slowly" is defined as not more that 10 mph. The track and train were in good condition, and visibility was perfect (although it should be noted that a slight curve would have delayed the point at which Edmonds would have seen the train in front of her. Edmonds tested negative for drugs or alcohol; not that anyone would have suspected her, but marijuana use was found among the operators at fault in the Chase, Maryland crash. Rumors about her using a cell phone, which I mentioned in my last post, have been dismissed by the District Attorney's office as lacking in any evidence whatsoever. So the most likely remaining conclusion is that she simply did not see a signal that was literally right in front of her at Waban station, or else saw it but disregarded it. We can only guess as to why she might have made such a catastrophic blunder. Inexperience may have played a role: she was 24 years old and was one of the newer train operators at the MBTA. Fatigue may also have played a role: it was 6:00 PM, and she had probably been working or otherwise occupied all day, and she was nearing the end of an hour-long journey from downtown Boston to Riverside. Bad luck undoubtedly also played a role. As a student of chess, I laugh at the silly mistakes that even grandmasters make on occasion, though of course I make those same mistake much more often. Tigran Petrosian and Leonid Stein each left their queen hanging for their opponent to capture with a knight, without any fancy combination. What is more, Stein's opponent John Emma somehow missed the opportunity to take the queen, and ended up drawing the game! Sammy Reshevsky and Yuri Averbakh each allowed a mate-in-two by the opponent: again, Laszlo Szabo missed his once-in-a-lifetime chance to embarrass Reshevsky and eventually drew the game. The litany of chess blunders could go on for pages upon pages, and one could hardly agree as to which is the worst blunder. What we can agree is that even the most highly trained professionals occasionally make beginner mistakes. There is a certain human fallibility that chess players cannot avoid, and train operators (and airline pilots and truck drivers) cannot avoid it either. One can only hope that, in that one instance out of many thousands when a train operator misses a signal, the track happens to be clear anyway. In this case, it wasn't. That was bad luck.

The question is where the fate of the trains was sealed for doom. Edmonds did not brake before hitting the train in front of her; perhaps she did not see it, or she was too surprised to know what to do with mere seconds to respond. Investigators wonder if by visual inspection as the train moved around the curve, she might have been able to mitigate the momentum of the crash or forestall it altogether. Failing that, the point of no return occurred when the rear train passed the signal at Waban station to cross under the Beacon Street bridge. This type of violation is called a Signal Passed at Danger (SPAD). The front train, being between Waban and Woodland stations, was given control of that entire block, and the general rule states that two trains should not be moving at full speed in the same direction in the same block at the same time. This is the margin of error to prevent collisions from happening. Once the rear train committed the SPAD violation, the margin of error was gone, and the stage for disaster was arranged. In other words, based on what I understand from information that has been published to date, the cause of the crash was a failure by the operator to obey a stop signal, and after she crossed the stop signal there was not much chance to avert the collision.

What bothers me about this conclusion is that on many train systems, including on the MBTA Red Line, which is operated by the same parent organization as the Green Line, there exist fail-safe systems to prevent train collisions even after an SPAD. There are many different ways to do this. Some systems automatically stop the train if the operator continues for a few seconds past a stop signal without slowing the train himself. Others require the operator to acknowledge a warning and proceed at his own discretion. The common theme of all train protection systems is that they contain cab sigalling within the train cab itself where the operator is sitting. Even if the operator runs a red light, so to speak, there will be a signal on the train telling her that she just ran a red light. Here the difference between roads and railways is critical. On a road, if you as a driver run a red light and make it to the other side unharmed, your violation of the red light cannot have any consequences. You have safely crossed the danger zone, so there is no longer any danger. In contrast, when a train operator runs a red light (i.e. commits an SPAD violation), the danger increases with every meter the train continues to travel forward. In this circumstance it is preferable to have a backup system in place to warn the operator or even stop the train automatically if the operator disobeys the signal command. Technology of this form has typically been installed on heavy rail such as subways or Amtrak commuter trains, but was not installed on the MBTA Green Line which is considered light rail. It is time for the MBTA administration to consider installing such a fail-safe collision avoidance system on Green Line trains to prevent a recurrence of the May 28 accident.

The NTSB investigation concerns itself not merely with causes of an accident, but also with lessons to learn and safety improvements to undertake. The cause of the accident will never be determined to anyone's full satisfaction because, to our great sorrow, the one person who knows the most about the cause paid the ultimate price for what was almost certainly her innocent mistake. However, safety improvements to follow from the accident can already be discussed on a preliminary level now, even before the NTSB issues its report a year or more from now. A collision avoidance system to account for SPAD would have prevented this accident; therefore, a collision avoidance system needs to be considered for installation on Green Line trains, at least those operating on the D Branch where the accident occurred. Trains operating on the B, C, and E branches have to stop at grade intersections with roads, so there are many more signals on those lines, and the chance of a train-on-train collision is vastly reduced to begin with (even as the chance of a train-on-car collision is somewhat increased). The D Branch has no grade intersections: every road is crossed either by a rail bridge over the road or a road bridge over the rail. So the scope of the safety improvement may be limited to one branch of one line, but it should still be considered. There may be other safety improvements that could prevent an accident of this type without requiring an extensive new installation of hardware on dozens of trains.

I consider safety to be a sliding scale rather than a question of yes or no. On a scale of yes or no, the Green Line trains are definitely safe. I place complete trust in the operators, who in my experience riding these trains for more than 10 years are professional and proficient in every way. I do not consider rail transport to be dangerous: it may even be safer than driving. Yet just because trains are safe, does not mean we should refrain from making them safer. A collision avoidance system would repair a hole in the safety structure that could reduce the chances of a fatal accident from miniscule to negligible, and it may be worth the price in money to save the invaluable worth of a human life.

[I removed one paragraph. - September 12, 2008.]

I mentioned the presidential election in what is now a two-man race between John McCain and Barack Obama. If it were any other pair of candidates, I would support the Democrat. I voted for Kerry and I wanted to vote for Gore, being about five weeks shy of my 18th birthday in November 2000. Seven years of a George W. Bush administration that has gone wrong in so many ways need to be reversed by four years or more of "Change". The Supreme Court decision about the Guantanamo Bay detainees drove the point home that the War on Terror does not justify removal of basic Constitutional rights, and that ruling passed by only 5 to 4, with Bush appointee Chief Justice John G. Roberts on the wrong side of this historic decision. With the next president likely to choose the next Supreme Court Justice, I would scarcely allow John McCain to choose the judge who would tip the balance in the other direction. I also support Obama's healthcare plan and energy ideas, and basically I support Democratic themes in general over Republican themes. What really scares me, though, is foreign policy. Obama knows squat about foreign policy, while McCain has decades of experience as a war veteran and senator. Let's consider the question of Iran's nuclear ambition. Just because Saddam Hussein didn't have Weapons of Mass Destruction, doesn't mean Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't have WMD. (May the name of wicked men be blotted from memory.) If he doesn't have long-range missiles, he certainly wants them, and you get no bonus points for guessing where he might want to fire those missiles. (Hint: he called it a "stinking corpse".) I have full confidence that McCain simply will not allow this to happen. I worry that Obama's anti-war platform on Iraq may have a spill-over effect to weaken his diplomatic power toward Iran. I know these things should not be connected logically, but logic does not always win these debates. I need to know viscerally that my president will defend Israel. With McCain, I have that confidence. With Obama, I am still learning to trust him. It may yet take a while before I can make up my mind to support him. Certainly the endorsement from a Hamas leader and from Arab groups in general hurts Obama much more than that silly nonsense controversy about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright. Here's why: Reverend Wright said "God damn America." Nobody seriously doubts Obama's commitment to America. The question is about Obama's commitment to Israel. For my consideration, that's still an unresolved question. If I can't reconcile my concerns about Obama's support for Israel, I will be forced into the difficult choice of voting for McCain essentially because of a single issue even though I oppose him on most other issues. So be it.

I leave now to attend a siyum by Rabbi Norbert Weinberg on Masekhet Brakhot, to honor the yahrzeit of his father, Dr. Seligmann Weinberg. It takes place at the Adams Street Shul, my local synagogue until I move to Stony Brook for graduate school.
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Sudden disaster on the Green Line [Jun. 8th, 2008|03:01 pm]
Kohelet ponders the suddenness and inevitability of death (9:11-12).

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race does not belong to the swift, nor the war to the brave, nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the erudite, nor grace to the insightful, because a moment and a disaster happens to all of them. For a man does not even know his appointed time, like fish who are caught in a terrible trap, and like birds who are ensnared in a trap, like them the sons of man are trapped for a terrible moment when it befalls them suddenly."

The translation is my own. It is not perfectly literal, but I prefer not to rely on the free translations available on the web if I do not fully agree with every word they use. I could cite the translation in the Jerusalem Bible or another reliable source, but for this context, a rough approximation will serve the needs of the reader.

I always am moved to tears, or at least deeply reflective thought, when I read these verses. Here Kohelet varies from his message about the injustice in the world, where righteous men suffer and wicked men prosper for reasons unknown to mortals. Kohelet grapples with this question of theodicy, which has bothered the rabbis of the Talmud and fostered a literature of responses from religious teachers until the present day. The formulation of צדיק ורע לו, רשע וטוב לו ("righteous person who suffers, wicked person who prospers") implies that there is an injustice or imbalance that somehow ought to be corrected. Here there is no justice or injustice. There is simply indiscriminate destruction. Everyone, regardless of their standing in life, experiences the same death.

Yet there is a special tragedy for people whose death truly is instantaneous as a result of a catastrophic accident. One moment, my friend Yoni Jesner was riding a Dan bus on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv on 13 Tishrei 5763. The next moment, a suicide bomber entered the bus and detonated an improvised explosive device on his clothing, and five people died on the scene, and Yoni suffered catastrophic brain damage and died the next day. He was, in a sense, "trapped" on that bus. I was touring the Galilee with friends from the Yeshiva that day, but I will never forget how I felt. I felt shocked by the sudden disaster, the moment of death that fell upon my friend. It was only last week that he had been studying in the Beit Midrash and prayed there on Yom Kippur, and now he was dead. We prayed in that day of doubt for mercy from God, but we knew it would not help. On 14 Tishrei I received a text message from the Yeshiva office, saying "Baruch dayan emet. The levaya for Yoni Jesner will be at Har Hamenuchot at 3:30 PM. A bus will leave from the yeshiva at about 2:30." I was already in Jerusalem, and I read the text message while walking on Jaffa Road. Riding from Har Nof to the burial center at about 3:00 PM, the taxi driver had Israel Radio turned on, and I heard the beeps followed by an announcement, at the top of the news, that Yoni Jesner's funeral would take place in a half hour. I entered the crowded funeral hall, which was standing-room only with more people unable to enter and waiting outside. The wall quoted a verse from Kohelet (12:7), "The dust will return to the earth where it once was, and the spirit will return to the God who granted it." I read the entire chapter in my Tanakh, which I carried with me in my backpack, as I waited for the proceedings to begin. The funeral itself was not especially memorable, but the sense of painful loss, that everyone felt so deeply just hours before the holiday of Sukkot would begin, will never completely leave me. Yoni Jesner is still dead, and the loss is still there.

I attended a ceremony to unveil Yoni's grave at Har Hamenuchot about 3 months later. His whole extended family from England and Scotland came to see it. (He lived in Glasgow.) I walked on Allenby Street when I toured Tel Aviv on the Friday of Chanukah that year, and everything seemed normal. I would never have known that a terror attack had occured here just a few months earlier. I met a middle-aged couple in London in 2004 when I visited that city on a class trip because my mother knew them somehow. They said they were distant relatives by marriage of the Jesner family. When they asked me how I felt about the situation in Israel, I said, "I ignore these tragedies, but I don't ignore them the way I used to." They admitted they felt the same way. I wish I could feel the pain even today, only because I do not want to stay on the sidelines while others are suffering. I feel that expressing pain for the suffering of Israel, wherever it occurs, is a moral responsibility, one which I have not fulfilled to the necessary extent.

On May 28, 2008, here in Newton, Massachusetts, another tragedy took the life of Terrese Edmonds, a 24-year-old MBTA train operator. I did not know this woman, but from the descriptions in the newspaper she clearly looked and was spoken of as a normal, respectable member of her community, one whose loss was closely felt by her family, friends and coworkers. This time, it was not the work of nefarious terrorists, but simply an accident. Edmonds was driving her train too fast on the section of track between Waban and Woodland stations on the Green Line, and her train struck the train in front of her, which was moving slowly. More than 100 riders evacuated the two trains, and about seven suffered serious injuries that are, thank God, not life-threatening as far as I know. The National Transportation Safety Board flew in a team of expert investigators to examine the possible causes of the crash. (I think they do this in any incident on a public form of transportation where at least one person is killed in an accident.) The investigators determined that the train and the signals were working properly, and that the signals were telling Edmonds to move forward at 10 miles per hour, not the 37-38 mph that the train's instruments logged immediately prior to the crash. (The other train was moving forward at 3-4 mph.) If there were no train in front, she would have been permitted to travel at up to 40 mph, but there was a train. She just didn't see the signal warning her about the train, and it's possible she didn't see the train itself when it came into view, since she didn't apply the brakes. With mechanical failure ruled out as a reasonable possibility, the only other likely cause is human error. But what went wrong?

I happened to walk near Waban station at about 6:00 PM yesterday on Shabbat. I looked at the signal just before the bridge where the trains pass under Beacon Street. I think this was the signal the operator needed to see. It's possible that there was another signal farther down the track. The accident occurred about 1000 to 2000 feet west of that location, opposite Dorset Road to the south and the Brae Burn Country Club to the north. I am generally familiar with this area, which is about 2 miles west of my family's house in Newton Center. I looked at the signal, and I wondered how it could be that such a clearly visible signal was simply missed? How did she not see it? Even if she was tired at the end of an hour-long train ride, and even if she was moving in the general direction of the setting sun (which did not appear to be a significant visual hindrance), and even if she was distracted by something happening behind her on the train, and even if (according to an unsubstantiated rumor) she might have been talking on her cellphone, I still don't see how this happened. There just doesn't seem to be a rational explanation. The best I can come up with is that she just assumed that the signal was green, and didn't actually look at it, and went ahead assuming that the track ahead was clear like it always is. Again, fatigue may have played a role in such a thought process. It's not a fully satisfying explanation, but I don't have a better one. I wish the NTSB investigators good luck in trying to solve this case because the safety of people I know will be enhanced by ensuring that whatever caused this crash does not cause another crash in the future. For now, it remains a mystery.

Not knowing the victims, I approach this case from the point of view of accident investigators, based on my experience watching downloaded videos and YouTube clips from the National Geographic Channel series "Air Crash Investigation," also known as "Mayday." For those who knew Terrese Edmonds, they care somewhat about the technical details, but they care much more about the friend they lost. Terrese, like Yoni, was like a bird or fish caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's a cliche, but it's exactly what Kohelet is saying: the place is the "trap", and the time is the terrible moment of disaster. Having survived a near-death experience, a serious injury, and a car crash in three separate events in the last three years, I know only too well that what happened to them could have happened to me. I thank God in what I think of as the "survivor's psalm" (Psalms 124:6-7). The speaker uses the same analogy of a bird being trapped to represent the specter of oncoming death, but this time, the outcome is different. "Our lives are like a bird that has escaped from the trap of hunters: the trap was broken, and we escaped. Our helper is the name of God, creator of heaven and earth." My death will come someday just the same, but when it comes, I should be blessed to know it is coming, and to allow my family to prepare for it, whenever that will be.

I am concerned about the presidential campaign and the Israeli negotiations with Syria about the future of the Golan Heights, but my clock just turned to 4:00 and I have to go. Hopefully I will write about this later.
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Tum'ah and Taharah: which is the normal state? [Apr. 9th, 2008|10:13 pm]
I am working on two major projects now. The first is an old take-home test from Rabbi Mayer Twersky's shiur on Kiddushin in 2005. Due to circumstances I prefer to keep private, I was unable to take the test at the time, so I obtained a copy and filed it away without looking at the questions. Recently I have had the time to revisit the test, and I am doing my level best to refresh my memory on sections of Talmud I studied three years ago, and in Yeshiva in Israel four years before that. It's hard to write coherently about a subject after neglecting it for so long, but I am amazed that I can demonstrate any competence whatsoever. I ignored this project for a while because I thought it was a lost cause to try and figure out complicated questions after literally years of neglect, during which I suffered both physically and mentally, and on more than one occasion was almost killed or seriously injured. It's hard to work on a project, be interrupted in the middle, live for two years through physical and emotional pain, and then return to the project, and still remember what I was working on originally. It's not the first time I've done something like this, but as I said, I'm amazed I can still understand what's going on. I thought I had forgotten everything. God has treated me very kindly: He broke my leg, but He spared my brain.

The second project is a continuation of The Innocence WikiProject. Poetlister and ten other user accounts were banned on May 30, 2007, in what many people both inside and outside Wikipedia now regard as a blatant miscarriage of justice. At first I was unconvinced, but after investigating the evidence in much more detail than the blocking administrator did, and after communicating with Poetlister herself, I am now convinced that she is innocent. Trying to prove that case to anyone who has the power to overturn the ban will require every ounce of skill I have, along with assistance from Heaven (סייעתא דשמיא). I've discussed some details on Wikipedia Review, but for strategic reasons I've decided not to reveal all of my evidence publicly. Since I'm not editing Wikipedia, I have time to take on this extremely complicated case. Is it worthwhile to spend hours fighting for someone I never met? Yes, because I'm fighting also for the soul of Wikipedia. If I can win this case for Poetlister, I might be willing to rejoin Wikipedia myself, notwithstanding Wikipedia's other problems.

It would make my life a lot easier if Wikipedia would just ban sockpuppets altogether. Myspace and Facebook require an email address to confirm account registration. Wikipedia should do no less. As I wrote on one of my user subpages, account creation should be reasonably difficult to discourage sockpuppeting. You should need to create an account only once or twice in your entire lifetime. Currently Wikipedia allows you to click on "Register account" in the upper right-hand corner of the page, then you type in your username once and your password twice, and immediately you have an account and can edit from that account without delay. This system is wide-open to abuse. Take one look at the archives of Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser, and you will see that sockpuppeting has gone way out of control. Sockpuppets have infested Wikipedia like school-age vandals, with no exterminator in sight. Policies have not adapted to the changing reality that Wikipedia's increased popularity engenders an increase in vandalism and sockpuppetry.

There are three ways to approach these problems. One approach is to keep your head in the sand and say the old policies are working well enough for everyone to keep writing the encyclopedia and address problems as they arise. That's what Wikipedia seems to be doing. Another approach is to change the structure radically by requiring users to identify their real names publicly, so that nobody can create two accounts unless they convince the administrators that they have two different real-life identities. That's what Citizendium has done by adopting a "Real Names" policy, which fundamentally alters the community dynamics while eliminating vandalism and sockpuppetry. A third approach would be to make gradual adjustments and reforms while trying not to destroy the positive aspects of Wikipedia's social openness. Instead of making it impossible to vandalize and use sockpuppets, a few software changes to make such skulduggery more difficult would save the administrators hundreds of hours of wasted time. Some changes have already been implemented. About a year ago, the developers required anonymous editors to submit a CAPTCHA for any edit where they added an external link in order to prevent automated spambots from attacking articles. I've seen human "spambots" attack articles, but the CAPTCHA is a perfectly reasonable approach because adding external links is a rare activity for most legitimate editors. Stable versions is also being discussed. The idea would be to display an approved version of an article for readers while allowing writers to edit a draft page, then importing the draft edits to the display page by approving a draft version as the next "stable version." Citizendium already does something similar, and to the best of my knowledge, the wiki developers have programmed a mechanism into the software that will enable this system to work. Implementation will require some difficult choices about who can decide what is a "stable version," and what criteria should be used. A full application of the stable versions software upgrade may render obsolete the repeated instances of high-profile articles existing in a vandalized state for hours or days before anyone notices. (On April 4 I reverted the article "Hajj" to remove the word "(SAW)" which someone had randomly added after Mohammed's name in five different places. The silliness never ends!) Requiring email verification for account creation, which has not been proposed, would reduce sockpuppets by more than 50%, and possibly more than 90%. (You would only be allowed one account per email address: if you want a second account, you need to associate it with a separate email address or ask an administrator to bypass the restriction and create the alternate account for some legitimate purpose.) I have only one active email address. My college email address forwards automatically to my gmail account, but aside from my AOL account from many years ago, I don't have other email addresses. Of course I could create as many free accounts on yahoo or hotmail as I want, but that takes time, and it adds a couple of additional barriers to the process of building a "sock farm." First I have to create the yahoo account. Then I have to log on to Wikipedia, click on "create account," type in a username, a password, and the CAPTCHA, then save. Then I have to wait for my confirmation email and click on the link therein. What was originally a one-minute process becomes a slight nuisance taking between five and ten minutes. Of course, if you already have a legitimate email address and don't have to create one, it's not such a nuisance. As I said, account creation is something you should have to do only once or twice in your lifetime. There are only so many times you can see user accumulate dozens of sockpuppets (Wikipedia:Deny recognition applies here, but I can list examples off the top of my head) before you ask yourself, "Is there any way to stop this ridiculous nonsense?" There certainly is a way to stop the nonsense without inconveniencing legitimate users. Indeed, most people are accustomed to confirming account creation for web forums, and will not be surprised or bothered about needing to do that to register an account on Wikipedia. If they don't want to create an account, they're welcome to edit anonymously. That's not going to change anytime soon, nor should it.

I took longer on that previous point than I intended. My original thought was to discuss Tum'ah and Taharah, the central topic of the middle section of Sefer Vayikra, which we are reading in synagogue these few weeks. Tum'ah and Taharah is an extremely technically challenging topic. It is made doubly difficult because, as with quantum theory, it is a constructed system that, while reflecting a deeply true reality, does not correlate with human experience. The old translations refer to Tamey animals or clothes or people as "unclean," but there is nothing physically distinct about a person who is Tahor versus another who is Tamey. Perhaps the translators simply couldn't think of a better word. (Contemporary translators prefer to render Tamey as "impure" or "contaminated.") Perhaps they extrapolated from the instances of Tum'ah where a person's body is physically changed, either by bleeding or seminal emission or skin discoloration, and these changes somehow make the person "unclean." This characterization is limited because it cannot encompass all forms of Tum'ah. Certainly there is nothing "unclean" about a lion compared to a deer, yet the lion is "tamey hu lakhem" - off limits to you - while the deer is permitted to eat.

The unavoidable conclusion, as I hinted already, is that Tum'ah and Taharah is a constructed system. Something is Tamey because God said it is. There certainly is a rational logic behind God's decision to define certain animals, people, clothes and vessels as Tamey, but regardless of the reasons, the fact remains true that Tum'ah or Taharah is an intrinsic property of any item that exists on earth. The philosophy is complicated by the details of Avot HaTum'ah, Rishon, Sheni, and so forth.

So what is the normal status of all items? Is everything in a default state of Tum'ah or Taharah? Does it matter? I read in Lawrence Dresner's book on superconductivity, when I worked in the summer of 2002 finding scholarly publications for an expert on superconducting magnets, that Heike Kammerlingh-Onnes discovered in 1911 a state at which a metal wire conducts current with essentially zero resistance when subjected to extremely low temperatures in liquid helium. He named this the "superconductive state," and the name stuck. Dresner wryly observed that the nonsuperconductive state is simply referred to as the normal state because it was the first to be discovered. I think he was trying to assert that there's nothing special about a copper wire at 5 K temperature, or (as was discovered much later) a composite doped ceramic metal alloy at 100 K. Either a material superconducts under given conditions, or it does not. Neither state can be considered "normal" objectively. We may agree only that the nonsuperconductive state is known to humans in the ambient conditions of our daily experience, but superconductivity remains relegated to the obscure domains of particle accelerators, Maglev trains, and the massive ITER fusion reactor under construction in France.

By comparison, I can suggest that Taharah is the default state of anything that has not yet encountered something Tamey, and that is not intrinsically Tamey. Yet, in human experience, Tum'ah is a dominant theme. The assumption that everyone is Tamey Meit (impure by contact with a dead human corpse) is not questioned by the halakhic authorities who disagree as to whether Jewish people may ascend to what is now the Muslim section of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. For healthy adult men and women, Tum'ah from seminal emission or menstruation, respectively, is commonplace, though not a daily occurrence. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein said in a gathering of students at Yeshivat Har Etzion in 2002-03, and has written somewhere, that Tum'ah is generally limited to the human sphere of influence: the untamed natural world is not, as a whole, Mekabeil Tum'ah. (Most animals are Tamey in the sense that you may not eat them, but a fallen tree branch is not Mekabeil Tum'ah as a Kli because it has not been fashioned into a designed tool for human implementation.) In light of these observations, I may conclude that, in practice, we humans live in an existence where Tum'ah surrounds us and emanates from our physical being.

What gives? Are we doomed to a perpetual state of Tum'at Meit, and a recurring state of Tum'ah for sexuality, or can we rise to the state of Taharah required for entry to the Holy Temple? This question moves beyond the characterization of Tum'ah and Taharah as neutral halakhic categories, akin to superconducting and nonsuperconducting states, where it doesn't really matter which one you are, but you need to be defined one way or the other. The last Mishnah of Yoma, and indeed the verse in Parashat Acharei Mot on which it is based, rejects the notion that it doesn't matter whether you're Tahor or Tamey. כי ביום הזה יכפר עליכם לטהר אתכם מכל חטאתיכם לפני ה תטהרו - On this Day, God will atone for you to purify you from all your sins: before God you will be cleansed! Yom Kippur is a day of elevated holiness, and therefore a day of elevated purity. The Kohen Gadol's service helps everyone rise to that state of purity even though we may have made ourselves impure by sinning during the preceding year and throughout our lives. This single verse in the Torah planted the root of Taharah as a moral imperative, which finds branches of expression in the prophecy of Yechezkel and the teaching of Rabbi Akiva.

The structure of most scenarios in the Torah describing Tumah and Taharah lends indirect support to the moral imperative to strive for Taharah. The Torah describes a scenario in which someone or something becomes Tamey, then a process whereby that person or thing may become Tahor. The story ends in rare cases with destruction of the item because it is beyond repair, but in most cases there is a happy ending: Taharah is restored. Again and again, the story ends with the same theme: the vessel becomes Tahor, or the person becomes Tahor. In four notable cases (the Mechusrei Kaparah of the Mishnah in chapter 2 of Kritot), the individual who becomes Tahor must bring sacrifices at the Temple to complete his process of purification. The message is that Tum'ah occurs by accident, or at least from causes beyond the human's control in most cases. Taharah is restored by a deliberate choice. In most cases you can make something Tahor again, but it doesn't just happen by itself. You must do something to make it happen, and then the Torah rewards you with that repetitive happy ending: Taharah is restored. It is not surprising that the prophets and Rabbis chose to extend this metaphor to Teshuvah. Sin is, like Tum'ah, a recurring unavoidable theme of human existence, but is not found in the natural world. We hope our sins are accidental scenarios: we are presented with temptations and challenges that lead us to make the wrong choices. We do not absolve ourselves of responsibility for making those choices, but we cannot expect to live perfectly in an imperfect world. Lying or stealing may help you gain more money, which you need to pay off your mortgage: should you do it? If you didn't have the mortgage to pay it might not be so hard to resist, but if it weren't the mortage it would be something else you want to buy or pay for. The motivations and opportunities to sin are always present, waiting to trap us. We have to avoid them. Thus, the Tumah of sin comes to us as if by accident, removing us from our previous state of moral integrity. In order to restore that moral integrity, we must undertake a deliberate action: repent and resolve never to commit the same sin twice. It's not easy, and I'm certainly no expert in practice, but in theory God prescribes this process for us.

Thus, to answer my original question: neither Tumah nor Taharah is truly the definitive normal state. Rather, there is an existential tension between them, such that anything Tahor may potentially become Tamey in some scenario, and vice versa it may be restored to Taharah by a deliberate action. The moral sphere works in a similar way. We continually suffer the consequences of making ourselves Tamey, but God grants us the opportunity to become Tahor and repeat the cycle of moral learning from a vantage point of increased wisdom.
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How do you measure time? [Jan. 31st, 2008|09:16 pm]
Is it now the month of January or Feburary? It depends where you are on the planet. In the eastern hemisphere, it is February 1, but in most of the Western Hemisphere, including where I live, it is still January 31.

This is significant because in the Internet age, the question is not where you are, but rather where you want to be. Although I am located in the northeastern United States, I can teleport to a different part of the world, or to a place totally removed from the world, by logging onto various websites. In the global world I live in, the local time is meaningless except in a limited context.

Specifically, as I've written previously, I spend too much time writing on Wikipedia. When I sign my posts on Wikipedia talk and process pages, the time and date appears in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time), which is 5 hours ahead of Eastern U.S. Stanndard Time in the winter and 4 hours ahead of Eastern U.S. Daylight Saving Time in the summer. I often think in terms of "Wikipedia time." I know that the Main Page will be updated with the new featured article and featured picture at 7 or 8 PM, depending on the season.

I also rediscovered Israel Radio this week on the Internet. When I lived in Israel for two years, I often turned on the radio, and in my opinion, the highest quality radio programming was on the government-owned Israel Radio stations. I remembered the beeps at the top of each hour's news broadcast: "Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. BEEEEEEP! Shalom Rav, HaSha'ah Shalosh. Hiney HaChadashot Mipi Malakhi Chizkiyah." I remember how, at exactly 5:58 AM every morning, the radio plays a stirring musical rendition of "Shema Yisrael." For some reason I cannot recall, a memory was triggered in my mind that the newscasts referred to the Israel Radio website, "www Nekuda iba Nekuda org Nekuda il". I looked it up (after first confusing org with co) and I found a link to the live radio broadcast over the web. I listened to it, and the memories came rushing back. Yes, Malakhi Chizkiyah (and Dan Kanero and Leora Goshen) still reads the news at the top of the hour, and they still play Shema Yisrael at exactly 5:58 AM every morning.

In order to hear the Shema, I must be listening on my computer at 10:58 PM on the previous day in my time zone. When I hear the radio, I feel like I am back in Israel. Though it's not physically true, it's like the dream that the Psalmist made famous. I miss Israel. My happiest days so far were there, and not only because of the institutionalized vacations I got to enjoy. I really feel that Israel is a better place for me, even in times that are more difficult for me emotionally.

So why don't I go back there? The main issue is that it needs to work practically. I've decided to apply to graduate school in chemistry, and that career choice limits my options. I can only go to graduate programs where they exist. Many do exist in the northeast United States, and I've also applied to an oustanding school in the Midwest (University of Illinois is ranked among the top ten chemistry graduate programs in the nation). However, there are only seven universities in Israel that offer any kind of postgraduate program in chemistry, and only two of these -- Technion in Haifa and Weizmann in Rehovot -- can fairly be considered to be world-class places that a non-native of Israel would want to attend. Since application deadlines also don't match up, I applied only to American schools, and if I get in someplace, that's where I'll go.

The truth is that such problems are not limited to chemistry. Israel is a small country. Including the disputed territories (what the press calls the "Palestinian territories", ignoring the fact that more than 200,000 Israelis live there also), the total population is about 10 million people. For comparison, the total population of the United States is more than 300 million, or 30 times as many. The land area of Israel is comparable to New Jersey, and the southern half of Israel is sparsely populated due to the unforgiving arid climate of the desert and the difficulty of agriculture there (though mining helps the economy in those regions). At no point in Israel are you more than about 60 miles from an international border. From the top of Har Meron, on a clear day, you can see the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Hermon mountain to the northeast, and beyond its edges, Lebanon and Syria. The security problems posed by the proximity of enemies is well-known, but the economic effects should not be ignored. It's difficult to play a role in the global economy if you're in a small country. The specialty that you've developed for your career elsewhere simply may not exist in Israel, or if it does exist, it's only in one or two places, and you need to be lucky, or else find a different career.

Aside from the practical problems, there's also a lack of willingness on my part to go and just see what happens. Maybe it's a lack of faith, or of initiative. Many advocates of Aliyah (immigration to Israel) emphasize the primary role of personal motivation -- or in some cases, family motivation -- in making the dream come to reality. For various reasons, I don't want to live in Israel so badly that I would make sacrifices for that goal. Lest you accuse me of being weak of heart, I observe that most people do not wish to break from routine, and do not arbitrarily uproot themselves from a familiar life to dwell in a strange culture where English speakers are a distinct minority, much like the Hispanic population in the northeastern United States (especially New York City).

Maybe I want to be able to come and go from Israel as I please, both geographically and on the Internet. Israel is an off-and-on relationship: I love her when I feel like it, and I ignore her most of the time. This is no way to build a healthy, long-lasting relationship. Maybe next week, after the Super Bowl, I'll stop listening to Israel Radio and go back to life as usual with ESPN radio and NPR. Maybe I'll go in the other direction and seriously plan to visit Israel after Passover instead of just thinking about it in general. I don't know.

What I do know is that I'm seeking to build a personal identity, and that identity, based on principles of religious Zionism, must include the modern State of Israel as a force connecting Jews with their land and their history. Unfortunately, without actually being in Israel, there's not much I can do. Listening to Israel Radio and checking ynet.co.il, the website of Yedioth Ahronoth, only takes you so far. And please spare me the constant appeals for Israel advocacy. My cynical approach is that most of the world hates Israel, and there's not much I can do about it. Really, I understand why the world wants Palestinians to have a state of their own instead of being trapped in a newly constructed fence with a weak national government and a failing economy. Of course, statehood will not solve these problems by itself, and it certainly won't stop the rockets from raining on Sderot and disrupting lives on a daily basis in a town just 2 miles from the Gaza Strip and about 35 miles from Tel Aviv. And it won't bring back our prisoners from Gaza and Lebanon, and it won't bring back to life my murdered friend Yoni Jesner, who paid the ultimate price for the crime of riding a public bus on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv two days before the Sukkot holiday in 2002. Now I would like to forgive the past if it could bring peace for the future, but I'd first like to see a permanent end to the rocket attacks and bus bombings. I think the international community makes a fundamental error in stating that a Palestinian state can bring peace. First there must be peace per se, in that Israel is not forced to defend itself against a constant, ongoing war. Let me say very clearly: Israel is engaged in a war right now with Hamas in Gaza. It does not wish to invade Gaza with ground troops because that will cause people to die, but it's doing everything else it can to stop the rockets being fired at Sderot. So let there first be peace. Then, and only then, it's rational to talk about giving land to Palestinian control in order to build on that peace and make it permanent. I'm not saying Israel should or should not give away land, and I know it's a very complicated issue. I'm saying that the discussion is off the table until terrorism can be spoken of in the same tense as the Holocaust -- past tense. It may take a while, but I'm willing to wait. Yitzchak Rabin and Ehud Barak have taken the peace process seriously, and Ehud Olmert, the current prime minister, seems ready to follow in their path. That's fine. But it's important that he not be deluded by false hope when facts on the ground suggest that peace is far away and war is very close.

The American presidential primaries are much on my mind. I have very little confidence in the voting process for two reasons. First, as a Massachusetts resident, my vote in the general election does not count. Massachusetts has voted for the Democratic candidate every election since long before I was born. Second, I turned 18 while the result of the Florida election in 2000 was being determined. Let me say very clearly: Al Gore won that election. It was stolen from him because of a nasty technicality: namely, the ballots were designed in a way that confused voters who ended up voting for Pat Buchanan, a fringe candidate, instead. The fact that the ballots could not be changed after the fact has no effect on the value judgment of what happened. Legal technicalities aside, the decision to award the election to George Bush was an embarrassment to the legacy of democracy and the Constitution. If the majority of voters in Florida intended to vote for Gore, as is evident, then Gore should have been awarded the election, or a "mistrial" of sorts should have been declared with the vote being done again statewide. The confusion of hundreds of voters who punched the whole for Buchanan instead of Gore by mistake was just one issue raised in the election. We also learned about hanging chads, dimpled chads, ballots that contained two votes or no votes at all, or where the existence of a vote was in the eye of the beholder. This is no way to run a democracy! Surely we can find ways to ensure that every vote counts and is counted correctly and fairly. Yet, after more than 7 years, the problem remains unresolved in many states and counties, and there is nothing to prevent a similar controversy from happening at any time in the future. It is almost beside the point that Al Gore won the popular vote, and was thus the choice of the American people to be president.

I'd like to see two changes in my lifetime. I want the Electoral College to be reformed or retired so that America elects its president based on the popular vote, so that every vote truly counts, whether from Massachusetts or Ohio. The pros and cons of the current system have been discussed ad nauseum, but the fundamental principle is that every voter in a democracy should have equal power to decide an election. Giving voters extra power because they live in Ohio rather than Massachusetts is not much better than giving voters extra power because they are men and not women, or white and not black, or have the ability to pay a poll tax. And don't even get me started on that silly and totally unnecessary voter ID law that the US Supreme Court upheld in the State of Indiana. The point is, I want my vote to count the same as anyone else's vote, and in the Electoral College, this is not the case. And I want a truly reliable system to be implemented so that I have full confidence that my vote will actually be counted as one vote in favor of the candidates I choose -- not zero votes, and not two. One vote, like every other vote. The technology is there, but where is the willpower from politicians who got into office with the broken electoral system we have today?

I think I'll vote for McCain in the primaries. Here, I feel my vote really can influence the course of world history. Of the four major candidates at this stage, I would rank my preferences (1) McCain (2) Obama (3) Clinton (4) Romney. I think McCain and Obama both have the power and motivation to build a bipartisan coalition in the legislature. McCain has done this on more than one occasion, and Obama has the personality to do it, and has not made any enemies yet to prevent him from doing it. Clinton leans farther to the left, and Romney farther to the right. I personally lean to the left, and I voted for the Democrats in 2004 and 2006 (except in the local election for Alan Hevesi in New York, where I voted against him for ethical violations that led to his resignation a couple of months after he won reelection). I also think McCain will do good things for Israel. I don't have a good read on any of the other candidates' foreign policy approaches. Most of all, I really mistrust Romney. I think he's a stereotypical political liar who will say whatever it takes to get elected, regardless of whether he honestly feels that way or not. So I will almost certainly vote for McCain, not only because I really respect the man, but also because I want to knock Romney out of the race.

As time passes, there are only 22 minutes until "Shema Yisrael" plays again. I hope to be listening, so I must prepare for bed. I will try to use my time wisely, in whatever way I decide to measure time.

It should also be noted that the Hebrew calendar, with days of the week numbered rather than the Pagan names used in the English language, and months connected to the traditional holidays, must play a role in a religious Jew's mindset. That is not connected to the warping of time zones produced by the Internet, but is important regardless.
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