A dyvbuq has taken possession of the bride: on dagesh hazaq in bg"d kf"t letters

This one is irremediably geeqy. Apologies to the nondiqduqgeeqs who dropped in.

When there's a dagesh hazaq, the degushah letter is geminated--it is repeated, as though there's a sheva nah between the two occurrences of the letter. In Professor Moshe Goshen-Gottstein's Diqduq ha'ivri hashimmushi (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1996), two examples are given (p. 28):

עַמִּים = עַמְמִים and שִׁבֵּר = שִׁבְ-בֵּר

The first of these is a little problematic, since Professor Goshen-Gottstein just told us (p. 26) that a sheva between two identical letters is a sheva na, not a nah. Maybe a hyphen, as in the second example, would have helped. But we know what he means, and the first example isn't the one I'm really interested in.

I see the logic in the second example, and it may well be theoretically correct. But assuming you pronounce the dagesh hazaq in tefillah or qeri'ah, does it make sense in real life to pronounce these bg"d kf"t letters as a fricative followed by a stop? Most likely, the person doing this would get corrected. This would be awkward at best. Let's say that during Untaneh Tokef the hazzan sings something about "yom tzom kifpur." A few possibilities arise. Maybe someone could incorrectly "correct" the hazzan. If the hazzan insists on his correctness, it would probably be embarrassing for the correcter, the hazzan, or both. Not to mention disruptive. But if the hazzan accepts an incorrect correction, that's not really great either. Even if nobody says anything, the pronunciation would be so unusual as to be a distraction for everyone.

It seems to me that when we have a dagesh hazaq in a bg"d kf"t letter, the best thing is to sacrifice a possible correctness for decorum. But then, who cares how it seems to me?

No sale, ver. 2.0

Ver. 1.0, posted about three years ago, has been taken down because the tone was much too sarcastic. Believe it or not, ver. 2.0 is very toned down.

Some Orthodox rabbis allow, or even encourage, members of their synagogues to have their relatives' hametz sold in preparation for Pesah, even without the relatives' knowledge. To me this seems misguided. Why "misguided"? Because I'm being tactful.

Is such a sale really a sale? The certificate that the seller signs usually says that the transaction that's being arranged is a legal sale under both halakhah and the laws of the state that the synagogue is in. I'm skeptical. Would the state recognize a sale in which the seller not only hasn't authorized the sale, but doesn't even know about it? (Lawyers, please comment on this.) Does halakhah recognize such a sale? (Halakhists, you should comment on this too.)

I have heard someone raise the objection that theft might be involved. Dad (for example) might eat the Gentile's oatmeal. That's right--Dad is the thief in this scenario, not the "baal teshuvah" and the rabbi. The rabbi set the questioner's mind at ease: he should still have Dad's stuff sold, since owning hametz during Pesah is worse than theft.

Dad's kid thinks he's sold Dad's stuff, Dad is neither informed nor asked about the sale, Dad doesn't realize a penny from the sale, and this guy has the hutzpah to call Dad a thief. This is a much more serious untethering from reality than mere superstition would be.

And let's say Dad, whom his son loves and reveres because that's what such a pious person does, finds out about this transaction. Dad is an apikoros and therefore unreasonable about such things. "You sold my stuff? What were you thinking?"

"Dad, I did it for your own good. I realize it was wrong of you to steal the goy's food, but owning hametz on Pesah is worse than theft."

"So you're saying that because I have h instead of matzah on Friday night during Pesah, I'm worse than a thief? Although I'm also a thief because I ate food that you think you sold to some shaygetz--maybe even a shvartze." Apikorsim just don't understand what's important (and some of them are annoyed by "goy").

Now let's imagine the "baal teshuvah" didn't tell Dad about the scheme, and the Gentile buyer comes to pick up his purchase, or at least to inventory it. What a surprise for both Dad and the Gentile. Dad and the Gentile have two things in common (in addition to being surprised and not being Torah Jews)--both claim the same oatmeal, and both are probably appalled by this bogus transaction once they figure out what happened. Not only do you think you sold Dad's stuff, but you also think you authorized some stranger to wander into his home. To take his stuff. And what about the Gentile? He probably entered into the deal in good faith, imagining that only the actual owners were selling their stuff. The rabbi and the "baal teshuvah" are acting in bad faith with the buyer by selling stuff they have no right to sell. Also, the Gentile is probably one who doesn't hold negative stereotypes about how Jews do business. And this is how you deal with him? After the encounter with Dad, the Gentile goes to the rabbi and asks what gives. What can the rabbi possibly say that won't sound stupid, cynical, or both?

Another possibility: the Gentile comes over with some deranged-sounding story about having bought Dad's food. Tempers erupt. The police are called. Perhaps the press will print an accurate story about the deal. It would be a fake shandeh. Anti-Semitism on the part of the press!

OK. Maybe Dad finds out, maybe he doesn't. But let's say the "baal teshuvah" has a little bit of common sense left and suspects that such a sale isn't really OK under state law. He asks the rabbi. Maybe the rabbi thinks such a sale is obviously OK under state law because why wouldn't it be? Such a rabbi can be suspected of being short on common sense. On the other hand, maybe the rabbi sees the problem, but encourages the "baal teshuvah" to sign it anyway. Draw your own conclusions.

Shabbat shalom

At a recent Shabbat lunch, one of the other guests, Alef, was complaining about the offensive behavior of his youthful "white trash" neighbors. Nobody there but us Orthos, so it was OK to talk like that.

What are we to make of "white trash"? The most cynical explanation I can think of is that in Alef's opinion, blacks are trash by default and whites are not, so if whites are trash, you need to specify. I reject this explanation because I choose to. Another possibility is that Alef wanted to show his lack of racism--whether or not he actually lacks racism--by making it clear that the people he objected to were white. And since in most contexts it's unusual for us melanin-deficient people to say, "Well, this white person did whatever he or she did," he used "white trash."

Then one of the other guests, Beyt, who used to live near where Alef now lives, asked some questions about the family. Beyt recognized them as the people who moved into her old place. The mother in the family is the daughter of a respected Jewish professional, and she married a non-Jew.

Shock!, tohubohu!, foofaraw!, and balaganism! at the table. These kids are Jewish? These kids are Jewish! Vey'z mir!, gevalt!, shrek! Strong men weeping. Delicate ladies falling in vapours. Jewish people behaving obnoxiously? How can this be? And amid all the chaos, Alef was heard saying (and I'm not sure of the exact words--if I'd remembered my mp3 player, I would have recorded it), "Now that I know they're Jewish, I'm going to treat them better."

So now more questions arise. Had Alef been treating them abusively? If so, how would their not being Jewish have made that OK? Had Alef been reproving them appropriately? If so, why would he stop doing that because they're Jewish?

Another question, of course, is what a supposedly pious person--one who's into all this "image of God" stuff--is doing by calling anybody trash.

And if I'm sounding superior, that's unintentional, because my behavior at the table was unacceptable--I wimped out, didn't object to anything, sat on my mouth. As always.

Gentilic jargon with probable transliteration inconsistency

Don't worry. The interesting part isn't as geeqy as it may look from here.

בלע״ז

is the abbreviation for

בלשון עם זר

--pronounced bilshon am zar--which means "in the language of a foreign people." It's used by Hebrew writers on religious matters when they're forced to use a non-Hebrew word (written in Hebrew letters) to make themselves clear. Rashi, for example, would write בלע״ז when using a then-modern French word. I translate בלע״ז as "in Gentilic jargon."

This is all by way of introduction to something interesting (to me). In Sefer diqduq l'Ramhal (The grammar book of Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto), edited and annotated by Eluzer Brieger of Brooklyn (Bnei Brak: Mishor, [1994]), page 25, note 2, we find this:

שפְּעוּלָה היא מה שאנו קורים בלע״ז אקטי״ב, והִפָּעֵל הוא מה שקורים פּעסי״ב

Or, in English, "...פְּעוּלָה is what we call aktiv in Gentilic jargon, while הִפָּעֵל is what we call pessiv."

So why not either both aktiv and passiv, or both ektiv and pessiv? We can sort of guess why each was chosen (and we shouldn't forget that these are guesses). Aktiv seems more scholarly and Continental, and is in fact consistent with the spelling in English; pessiv seems to reflect what I assume to be Reb Eluzer's pronunciation of English. Each makes sense on its own terms, but the combination is interesting. I'm not going to try to get any big meanings out of it.

For the record, although this shouldn't be necessary, I'm not making fun of anything--neither Reb Eluzer's presumed accent nor the apparent inconsistency.

The following was added the next morning.

I spent the night regretting that I didn't include this.

In the comments on pessiv there was an unstated but blatant circularity. Why did Reb Eluzer write pessiv? Because he speaks English with a Yiddish accent. And how do I know he has a Yiddish accent? Because he wrote pessiv. This is such a nice circle that you can use it for your geometry homework.

And how do I even know pessiv reflects a Yiddish accent? Well, I don't actually know that it does. Maybe it reflects a plain ordinary U.S.A. accent. Consider the words "active" and "passive." We don't pronounce the noun in the first syllable like an "ah." We pronounce it æ. It's the sound that we use in "æccent," "æt," and "ænd"; it's the sound BBC news readers use in "Nicarægua" and "Jæck Cheeræck." Yiddish doesn't have (or hæve) the æ sound. Pessiv is as reasonable an approximation of "pæssive" as passiv would be.

And it's still interesting that two different vowels were used in the Gentilic jargon for "active" and "passive."

Saving gentiles on Shabbat revisited

The always-menshlich (and I'm not being sarcastic) Brooklyn Wolf posts on the hypothetical question of whether he'd save a Gentile's life on Shabbat (he would, as I knew he would). The comments are interesting--Brooklyn (I take the liberty of using his first name) has more hareidi commenters than I do. He also has more nonhareidi commenters.

I posted on a similarish theme some time ago.

Shoveling snow on Shabbat, '09 version

I'm copying and pasting a big chunk of the first version of this post. Not because it's so eloquent that it needs to be repeated, but so that I don't have to bother paraphrasing it. There's some new stuff at the end.

Snowy sidewalks are no big deal in themselves, but they become icy sidewalks after they've been walked on for a while, and those things are dangerous.

When it's necessary to shovel on Shabbat, I always do so, wearing socks on my hands as a shinnui. I haven't asked a rabbi about this, and this is out of respect for the rabbinate--I want to save them the embarrassment of possibly giving the wrong answer.

As a side note, I once told a friend, former and (I hope) future havrusa and/or hevruta, and ethical adviser about this. He (who lives in an apartment where the landlord is responsible for shoveling, so it's not his problem) said he thought this a fine idea. Since it's just me, he said, I should do it without any distinctive Jewish accessories visible. If, however, I were R' Gedalia Dov Schwartz, av beit din of the RCA and the Chicago Rabbinical Council, who lives a few blocks away, I should do it looking like I was R' Gedalia Dov Schwartz so everyone would know it's OK. I take his point, although I should point out that if I were R' Gedalia Dov Schwartz, I wouldn't need his advice.

And now the new stuff. This last Shabbat morning, there was a layer of slush on the sidewalk. I ignored it, since it was Shabbat, and what would the people coming to lunch think? By Sunday morning, the slush had turned into solid ice with footprints.

So let's imagine that someone had injured themselves on the ice that I piously left there, and let's further imagine that I'd passed away and had to face the Heavenly Tribunal.

Members of the Tribunal (M"T): Well, what about this Mr. McNotzreigh who got injured on your ice?

Me: Sorry about that, but only a little, since I was observing Shabbat.

M"T: Very nice.

(I assume the M"T are Orthodox Jews, among whom "very nice" means "yeah, right, whatever.")

Right. Well, very nice. But next time, I'm going to do what needs to be done and forgo the after-the-fact teshuvah.

Thanks, guys

Well, I've finished the eleven months of kaddish for my mother. Underestimating, we have twenty-two minyanim a week (which includes Shabbat mussaf, but none of the mussafim for other special days, or ne'ilah), four weeks in a month (an underestimate for ten of the eleven months), and eleven months. This comes to more than 968 minyanim. Vey'z mir. Why do I mention this? Because I don't think I was ever in a minyan that included ten people saying kaddish. In other words, kaddish is made possible by people who show up who aren't saying kaddish. Thank you, fellers.

In the past, I mostly davened at home except for Shabbat and yom tov. I'm now going to daven in shul more often. Not with the same sense of urgency as in the eleven months, but several times a week.

Thanks again.

Yiddishkeit and Hebreishkeit in Toronto, Canada (respectively)

This seems odd to me. The title page of R' Abraham Price's Canadian edition of Sefer Hasidim twice refers to Toronto, Canada, as

טאראנטא קנדה.

The reason this seems, as I was just saying, odd to me is that "Toronto" is spelled in Yiddish style, and "Canada" is spelled in Hebrew style.

Anyone out there have any idea why they might have done things this way?

Since they're not doing some sort of touchy-feely (as it were) ecumenical religious discussion, this must be OK

Roman Catholic and Orthodox Jewish officials in New York are mounting an intense lobbying effort to block a bill before the State Legislature that would temporarily lift the statute of limitations for lawsuits alleging the sexual abuse of children. (from Paul Vitello, "Religious Leaders Battle Abuse Bill in New York," New York Times, March 11, 2009; free registration may be needed)

Tip o' the yarmulka to the ever-informative Religion Clause for this post.

Hear hear

Professor Haym Soloveitchik, writing in the Tradition Seforim blog:

Intellectual engagement entails reciprocity of exposure. To criticize others behind a shield of anonymity is to my thinking craven and unworthy of a scholar or talmid hakham.

Oxymorons

While waiting for a minyan recently, I heard someone say "'Frum Conservative Jew' is an oxymoron." I looked up long enough to see what looked like a satisfied smile from the utterer.

Yeahyeahyeah, I've heard it all before. "Reform Judaism" is an oxymoron, "Conservative Judaism" is an oxymoron, "Orthodox Judaism" is an oxymoron, "religious non-Orthodox Jew" is an oxymoron, "Modern Orthodox Jew" is an oxymoron....

This isn't an argument; it's a slogan. (I use the singular since they're all the same.) It's not an enlightening slogan; it won't win anyone over, all it will do is get the speaker a pat on the keppeleh--sorry, the keppi--from those who already agree. And it isn't a clever or original slogan; it's just a cliché (sorry).

It's sad that we're in attack mode so often, and "oxymoron!" as slogan is used in no other mode. And it's incredibly lame.

And yes, I know this isn't just a Jewish thing.

Delicately stated

A devar Torah that I heard this Shabbat ended with something like this (and this isn't a direct quote, but I'm pretty sure I got all the key stuff right): Every life is infinitely precious. Thirteen Israelis were killed in the recent war, and we grieve for all of them. And we thank Hashem that there were no more deaths than that.

Every life is infinitely precious--how beautiful, how very enlightened. A speaker with less delicate sensibilities might have said that every Jewish life is infinitely precious.

Hanukkah candles in hotels

I was recently at a shul for the period between Minhah and Ma'ariv. Instead of giving the usual Mishnah shi'ur, the rabbi opined that you should probably not leave unattended lit Hanukkah candles in hotels. I was dismayed by the quality of the objections that people shouted out. Since I'm not much of a shouter, nobody heard me in the free-for-all. So since I have this widely read blog, I'm going to give my objections to some of the most ridiculous objections here. So blaaaah to them.

An objection: Shabbos candles and Hanukkah candles aren't dangerous.

My objection to this objection: Well, here in West Rogers Park, at the southwest corner of Sacramento and North Shore, is the former home of some friends of ours. They no longer live there because it was burned out by Shabbos candles. Fortunately, nobody was injured in this case. Yep, this stuff happens.

A continuation of the first objection: And since we do it in our homes, why shouldn't we do it in a hotel.

My answer: Because you should be more careful about risking burning down someone else's building than you are about not burning down your own. Because it isn't yours.

Someone in the shul who thinks lighting in a hotel is an OK idea: But the hotel is liable if your candles start a fire. You're not.
An objection to this: Sure they're liable. But they're also liable if you get burned by the hotel's hot water.

Rolling my eyes: I've heard some pretty good bad analogies, and this must be one of the best bad analogies I've ever heard. You see, if the hotel is liable for burning you with its hot water, there's a certain justice because it's their water. But if it's your flame and the hotel is liable, that justice isn't there. And hot water doesn't, you know, spread the way a flame does. Test it and see. On second thought, don't.

And are we even sure the hotel is liable if your fire burns the place down? Isn't there some sort of stupidity clause (they may not call it that) in the fine print in the check-in document?

My final comment: Whatever.

Avinu Malkeinu version 1.2

Please read this instead.

Badoomp-Clang

Shmoozing in shul (not during the davening), a gentleman told a story about a relative of his who played in a traveling band in the 1930s. Most of the musicians were Jewish; one was black. They called the black one "Shvartze." One day the black musician asked the storyteller's relative what "shvartze" means; the relative answered that it means a person with good rhythm. So the black musician went around telling people, "Hey, I'm a shvartze." The storyteller went on to say, "My ancestor was--."

"Not a nice person," I said, trying to help out.

"No, he was a very nice person. He just sometimes liked to make nasty jokes."

I'm not going to waste my electrons or your time explaining that this was just pure nastiness and not a joke. I only note that this story was considered perfectly acceptable, and downright funny, in an Orthodox synagogue.

Zimmun in Pseudo-German

In Dr. Seligmann Baer's Seder [Siddur on the binding of the recent Israeli reprint] Avodat Yisrael (Rödelheim 1868, 1901), most of the instructions and comments are in Hebrew. Some--but very few--of the instructions are in German transliterated into Hebrew letters, with an orthographic system almost identical to that of Moses Mendelssohn's translation of the Bible. Most of the Hebrew comments are in Rashi script. Words in Hebrew or Aramaic that are meant to be uttered are in block letters, sometimes menuqad. The German, whether or not it's meant to be uttered, is in a font that I haven't seen before and is very hard on my old eyes. Addendum: Thank you, Mississippi Fred MacDowell, for pointing out in a comment that this font is called Vaibertaitsch. In my comment to his comment, I said I think I thought otherwise (at least I think so), but I now believe Fred was right. B"N, a post on this topic will follow.

Warning: Before you go any further, I disclose that this is all based on the assumptions (1) that the German I learned in high school in the late 1960s is reasonably similar to the German of Dr. Baer and his contemporaries and (2) that I remember any of it correctly. Supporting assumption 1 is the fact that both were a long time ago.

The introduction to the German zimmun in Dr. Baer's siddur is interesting in that it isn't really in German, either in vocabulary or in idiom. The words (with one or two--literally either one or two--exceptions) are German, but the phrasing is a direct translation of the traditional Yiddish zimmun. In what follows, Rashi script is the default, [block letters are in square brackets], {and the German with its odd font is in curly brackets}. Exclamation marks are in the original (following the German style for imperatives). Italics (added by me) indicate words that are incorrect, idiosyncratic, or with an ambiguous letter but nevertheless definitely not correct German.

Here is what appears before the zimmun in the siddur (p. 554):

שלשה שאכלו כאחת חייבים
בזמון. וכיצד מזמנים? המזמן
אומר [הב לן ונברך!] או בל״א [רבותי] {וויר
וואָללען בענטען/בענשען!}׃

בל״א is an abbreviation for bilshon ashkenaz, "in the language of Ashkenaz." It's a little misleading; in more traditional siddurim it means in Yiddish, while here it means in German.

The zimmun itself follows, with embedded instructions regarding a minyan in Hebrew only. After the zimmun we have

יחיד מתחיל. {ווער פֿיר זיך אַליין בעטעט פֿאָנגט היער אַן.}׃

כאחת should be ונברך. כאחד is usually פֿאָנגט. ונבריך represents the German fängt. In the Hebrew-lettered German of Mendelssohn and Baer, אֶ is used for both ä and ö. So this is an actual error: פֿאָנגט should be פֿאֶנגט. This orthographic system doesn't deal with umlauts well. The same character is used for both ä and ö; for ü, they simply used a yod, as here in פֿיר (für). (Mississippi Fred MacDowell recently reproduced a manuscript of a letter to Julius Fuerst [Fürst] with an umlauted vav in the greeting. It appears in the last word in the first line of the manuscript reproduced in this post.)

I point out these errors only because they show that we shouldn't assume that the slashed and italicized בענטען/בענשען is correct in German. To me, with the combination of a smeared character, a difficult font, and my eyes, the fourth letter is ambiguous. If the fourth letter is a shin, then we have בענשען (benshen) here--a non-Germanic Yiddish word. If it is a tet, there are two possibilities: (1) the tet is supposed to be a shin, in which case it would be a misspelling of בענשען; or (2) the first nun could be superfluous, in which case it would be a misspelling of בעטען (beten), German for "to pray." Given that the German following the zimmun has the correctly spelled word בעטעט (betet) (3rd sing. present of beten), I'm prepared to textually emend the German introduction to

רבותי וויר וואָללען בעטען! ׃
רבותי, wir wollen beten!

(But only if we assume it's German, which we're not assuming. See below.)

Wir wollen beten! means "We want to pray," or, less likely, "We intend to pray." (Contrary to what your high school German teacher and mine taught us, wollen doesn't only mean "to want"; it can also mean "to intend," according to the big dictionary I recently looked it up in. But our teachers' main point, that it doesn't indicate future tense, was correct.) Be that as it may, I'm not prepared to say that "Wir wollen beten!" is an incorrect way to say "Let's pray"--my knowledge of German is far too limited to have any confidence about that. But I am reasonably confident that a more conventional way of saying it would be "Beten wir!"

So why would Dr. Baer have written "Wir wollen beten!" instead? Possibly for the same reason that רבותי appears in an allegedly German phrase--it's a verbatim translation (except for the first word, which isn't translated) of the familiar Yiddish

רבותי מיר וועללען בענשען! ׃

And it's possible that my emendation to beten was incorrect. After all, it was based on the assumption that the phrase is German. But it may not be. Perhaps Dr. Baer was as reluctant to part with בענשען as he was to part with רבותי. Or with the Yiddish zimmun in general.

***

Besides the question of whether the German is really German, another interesting matter is why some of the instructions are translated into German and some are not. The mezammen is told to say "Let's benedict" in German, and the lone eater is told in German where to begin benedicting, but the instructions to the mezammen to say "Elokeinu" only in the presence of a minyan are in Hebrew only. If it's assumed that some users of the siddur will need the German for "Let's benedict," why not also assume they need to be told in German when to change the wording if there's a minyan?

Obligations

This is a true story about my acquaintance Arbuthnot (not his real name), who asks that I spread the word on this.

Arbuthnot is a member of a small Shabbat-and-holiday-only shul with no office staff, and in fact no office. Everything that's done is done by volunteers, and Arbuthnot's job is to check the voice mail. Sometimes he's quite conscientious, checking the messages every day. Most of the time there are no messages, and most of the messages are junk mail--someone wants to sell something to whoever is at the phone number. He often lets a day or two slide by, and no harm is done.

Friday, June 27, after a few days of not checking, Arbuthnot phoned in for the voice mail. There were a few messages from Wednesday, June 18; more days than he'd realized had gone by. A gentleman was calling for Rabbi Ploni. His mother was dying; she used to attend the shul, and she wanted the rabbi to officiate at the funeral.

Had Arbuthnot gotten the message in a timely way, he would have contacted the rabbi immediately. Since it was already nine days later, he called the gentleman instead. Arbuthnot apologized, said he was the voice-mail person from the shul, and asked how the man's mother was. The man said his mother had died, and he had managed to get in contact with the rabbi.

Arbuthnot's message to the readers of Consider the Source is that it's important to be scrupulous in fulfilling one's obligations.

Shoveling snow on Shabbat

On a neighborhood e-mail list that I subscribe to, a thread has begun in which people are protesting against those neighbors who don't shovel their sidewalks. One writer links to Ask Chicagoist, which quotes the Chicago municipal code (and I haven't confirmed this quote):

The snow which falls or accumulates during the day (excepting Sundays) before four p.m. shall be removed within three hours after the same has fallen or accumulated. The snow which falls or accumulates on Sunday or after four p.m. and during the night on other days shall be removed before ten a.m.

I agree with the code, and with my fellow e-mailers, on this. Snowy sidewalks are no big deal in themselves, but they become icy sidewalks after they've been walked on for a while, and those things are dangerous.

When it's necessary to shovel on Shabbat, I always do so, wearing socks on my hands as a shinnui (and this was before I saw this quote from the code). I haven't asked a rabbi about this, and this is out of respect for the rabbinate--I want to save them the embarrassment of possibly giving the wrong answer.

As a side note, I once told a friend, former and (I hope) future havrusa and/or hevruta, and ethical adviser about this. He (who lives in an apartment where the landlord is responsible for shoveling, so it's not his problem) said he thought this a fine idea. Since it's just me, he said, I should do it without any distinctive Jewish accessories visible. If, however, I were R' Gedalia Dov Schwartz, av beit din of the RCA and the Chicago Rabbinical Council, who lives a few blocks away, he'd advise me to do it looking like I was R' Gedalia Dov Schwartz so everyone would know it's OK. I take his point, although I should point out that if I were R' Gedalia Dov Schwartz, I wouldn't need his advice.

Season's geeqings

It's Christmas Eve, and I'm rereading Marc Shapiro, "Torah Study on Christmas Eve," Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999): 319-53. It's an interesting read; if you're a member of a library that subscribes to EBSCOhost Academic, or if you're a student or employee of a university whose library subscribes to it, you can probably download a PDF of it. (I'm not attaching a PDF to this post, since that would probably violate my library's terms of use.)

Before I get into the promised geeqery, let me point out two things. First, I intend to learn Torah tonight. Shapiro doesn't find any rabbinic support for the custom of not learning Torah on Christmas Eve, and he questions the antiquity of the custom. Second, the point of all this is going to be that even if you believe in gematria, you should examine the statements that are claimed to be gematriatically equivalent, even if they add up.

Anyhow, on p. 326 Shapiro cites R' Moses Grunwald, Arugat ha-Bosem, vol. 2 (Brooklyn, 1959), p 146a, as claiming that

עת לעשות לה׳ הפרו תורתיך

and

זו שעה שתקופת טבת נופלת בו

are gematriatically equivalent. I won't explain the phrases, because the explanations will require explanations, and you'd be better off reading Shapiro's paper. And my topic here is the gematriatical equivalency, not the content. The first of the phrases contains an abbreviation for "Hashem." If we use the gematria for the Tetragrammaton (as I always call it) instead of that of the abbreviation, both phrases do indeed have a gematriatical value of 2,659. If I got the gematriot wrong, please comment.

My Hebrew is minimal, but I'm pretty sure both phrases are incorrect in ways that render the claim of equivalency incorrect.

The final word of the first phrase is either an unusual but correct way of spelling the word for "your Torahs [plural]" or an incorrect way of spelling "your Torah [singular]." To me, the incorrectly spelled singular seems more likely. If it is the incorrect spelling, it's understandable--at the end of a phrase, "torat^ekha" is pronounced "toratekha" (with the underlining indicating the accented vowel). This -ekha ending is used in the plural and takes a yod, but the yod isn't used in the singular. If this were meant to be the plural "torotekha," it would usually take a vav after the resh, although it isn't strictly required. But it's unusual without it. And what would "your Torahs" mean anyway? It might make sense--the written and the oral Torahs--but it just rings oddly to me. On the other hand, I'm new in this neighborhood.

If I'm correct and the singular was intended, we can fix the phrase by deleting the yod, which would reduce the gematriatical value to 2,649.

In the second phrase "sha'ah" ("hour") is a feminine noun. Two of the other words referring to it, "zo" and "nofelet," are also feminine. But "bo" is masculine.

If "bo" is incorrect, we can fix it by changing it to "bah." The change causes a net loss of 1, making the corrected gematria 2,658.

In short, if I'm right that either phrase is incorrect, the gematriatical equivalency is incorrect. Put another way, the equivalency depends on incorrectness--it fails if the phrases are corrected. If I'm right about all this stuff, that is. Even if you believe in gematria, you may have reason to reject this particular equivalency.

More generally, even if you believe that something works, you should still read instances of it carefully. This is the real topic of my sermon.

Unsatisfactory

Boro Park Pyro (ak"a "Steg" and "King o' the Goblins") recently had a post describing a discussion that he and his hevruta had with some racist yeshiva bahurim. The Pyro and his hevruta challenged the bahurim, and kol hakavod, yasher koah, and kudos to them for that.

More interesting to me was Kylopod's comment on the post. Interesting because his reaction to Orthodox racism, when he's a witness to it, is very much the same as mine:

When this kind of thing happens to me, I don't feel outrage anymore. I'm beyond that. I've developed a sort of weary cynicism about the whole matter.

I'm still outraged by it. But what I actually do about it is what Kylopod does.

I can't stand that so many Orthodox Jews are bigots, but for me it's a personal thing. Every time I hear a racist remark from a frum person, and how natural they make it sound, as though it were so obvious that everyone present should agree...

Indeed. I used to go to shalosh se'udot at my shul. I stopped after a while for the reason Kylopod describes: "Nobody here but us Orthodox Jews, and we can speak freely, and obviously we're all in on the hilarious jokes we're about to share."

...I think to myself, "Why am I hanging out with these people?" Nowadays I rarely challenge it directly unless it comes from a friend, but I make sure never to make it seem like I'm agreeing with them.

That's what I do too. "'Why am I hanging out with these people?'" Good question. Another question is whether this passive non-agreement is a satisfactory substitute for active disagreement. I don't know Kylopod's answer; to me, it's completely unsatisfactory. If we heard that some other group had a bunch of members who were openly bigoted--the bigotry might even be anti-Semitic--and the nonbigots just sort of kept quiet and didn't actively agree with the bigots, how would we feel about it? Would we let the quiet nonbigots off the hook, or would we do some pious tut-tutting about how the nonbigots have an obligation to disapprove? And if these quiet non-Jewish nonbigots have an obligation to object to bigotry, don't we as well?

And what are we to make of this anecdote?

Gerald Blidstein recalls the following conversation with R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik: "I remember that in Israel there was a real problem, do you save a gentile on the Sabbath? One evening during this time I was with the Rav [Joseph B. Soloveitchik] and he said 'I have been in Boston many years and I always rule that one saves the lives of gentiles, because if we don't permit this, they won't save our sick ones.' I asked him if this reason satisfied him from a moral standpoint, and he replied, 'No, from a moral standpoint it does not satisfy me.'" (Marc B. Shapiro, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg 1884-1966 [London: Littman, 1999], 182-83 n. 47, citing Gilyon [Heshvan 5754 (1993)]: 25) (bracketed material in Shapiro)

Should we be satisfied with the Rav on this point? Why didn't he give what he would have considered a morally satisfactory reason? I understand why some of us don't want to be socially ostracized or don't want to be confrontational. I understand why a young man on a rabbinic track doesn't want to jeopardize his career. I don't understand why a leader and innovator like the Rav was so timid (perhaps this is the wrong word--comment, please, if you disagree with it) about making what he himself would have considered a morally satisfactory statement. Dare we assume that it was OK because he was the Rav, and if he (being the Rav) did this it must have been OK? It's tragic that such a person hedges on this, and it makes me worry for Orthodox Judaism. I honor Blidstein for asking the Rav this question.

I would hate to see us Modern Orthos treat the Rav the way ArtScroll treats hareidi "gedolim." But that horse may have left the stable long ago. Which is another topic.