העורך Editor

An excerpt from The Torah Revolution:

I am a Shomron resident and after ten years of gun ownership the police called me up, telling me to surround my gun to them, my license has expired. What happened was that up until now the Ministry of Interior sent out a notification, with a related form to pay a fee at the post office, to renew the license of gun ownership in every two or three years. Now, and without notice, they changed this practice and stopped sending out notifications of renewal, effectively disarming thousands of people with this cowardly bureaucratic trick.

See the rest here.

“לתקן עולם במלכות שדי”.

See the article on “the Seforim blog” right here by Mitchell First entitled “Le-Tacen Olam (לתכן עולם): Establishing the Correct Text in Aleinu”. (It originally appeared here.) The title is self-explanatory; the claim is made that the original and correct version of “Letaken” in “Aleinu” is spelled with the letter ‘Kaf’, not ‘Kuf’.

All I could come up with were several absent-minded interjections, like “Why not ‘Leconen’ instead?”, and “Is ‘Social Justice’ the accurate translation for ‘Tikkun Olam’?”). Instead of forming any sustained opinion on the issue, I will let you see it through virgin, unbiased eyes for yourself.

Please note: One really must check out many of the endnotes to get a decent picture of the views expressed. Indeed, this almost seems a misguided style requirement. Posts on the Seforim Blog often have footnotes more voluminous than the body of the article itself, simply because the content and citations are divided up between the two sections. What the ratio or criteria are I do not know.

(I am not saying this is more than a formal mess; I manage to read most notes without even checking what they refer to…)

I recently heard an audio Torah lesson from state-prostitute Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef (son of Rabbi Ovadya). Discussing יד מסמא יד מחרשת (O.C. 4:3), he said it still “applies”, and since one must wash hands after sleeping during the day (O.C. 4:15), therefore, one must also wash the hands of an infant (from the age it holds food directly, as opposed to a bottle) after every single nap (no mention of length) so it doesn’t go blind and deaf.

I’m not going to go into the independent onion-layers of ignorance shown here (per ספק ספיקא המתהפך). I wish to point out only the thought process which does and would have prevented many similar notions by modern Torah students: Try to imagine the sages of the Talmud actually ruling  – and living! – according to your proposed understanding. In this case, the sheer logistics of using that much water, and the price of the water, not kept artificially low, as it is today.

Bein Din Ledin provides an overview of the Bechukoseihem prohibition.

Check it out here.

‘וידבר שלשת אלפים משל…’