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Bar Ilan University FINALLY Halts the ‘Religious’ Charade! (When Are They Going to Fix the Logo?)

Bar Ilan University Cancels Tznius Guidelines, Yarmulke Requirement

Fri, 10/25/2019 – 14:10

Bar Ilan University has removed from its student discipline rules the requirement that male students wear yarmulkes in classes on Judaism, as well as the requirement to “avoid wearing revealing apparel” on campus.

Haaretz reported that the demands have anyway not been enforced in recent years, and it has now been decided to remove them from the “Student Declaration” of the institution, which students are asked to sign.

The university also noted that the change comes as a result of the decline of religious students in the institution compared to the secular ones.

Read more at Arutz Sheva.

From Matzav, here.

Do Government Building Codes Blunt Earthquakes’ Effects? NO WAY!

Statist Myths About the Japanese Earthquake

Walter Block refutes them.

Posted Jun 25, 2012

The usual Keynesian suspects have come out from under the rocks of economic illiteracy which they inhabit, to claim that the Japanese earthquake of 2011 will actually help the economy of that country. We need not spend too much time refuting this broken window fallacy yet again. Bastiat and Hazlitt have already done so. Perhaps it will suffice to point out that these advocates of the benefits of destruction are guilty of a performative contradiction. If it is so advantageous for a city to be destroyed by a tsunami, why don’t these Krugmanites obliterate their own properties? That is, they could enrich not only themselves, but society as a whole, by taking the wrecking ball to their homes, yachts, automobiles, factories, fancy restaurants, night clubs. Yet, we never see any such thing happening. If it is argued that this can only be done on a massive, not an individual scale, then we would expect entire communities, such as the Peoples’ Republics of Santa Monica, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Cambridge Mass, the upper west side of New York City, etc., wherever “progressives” congregate, to engage in such activities. We await with baited breath these occurrences. The fact that the Keynesians continue to drive around in their cars, inhabit their homes ought to put paid to this malicious and erroneous theory. And this would indeed likely occur, if we did not live in a world where the mainstream media still hold sway.

Another error takes this form: All thanks to the Japanese government. It had the wisdom and foresight to mandate strict building codes, which safeguarded its people. Japanese skyscrapers were built so as to bend, not snap, in the wind. All of their edifices withstood the challenges of the earthquake to a far greater degree than would otherwise have been the case, due to these benevolent statist regulations. For example, states a USA Today editorial of 3/14/11 entitled “Japanese earthquake sends sobering message for USA” (the message: we have to strengthen, and attain greater compliance with our own building codes): “If any country understands this interplay of earthquakes, waves and buildings it is Japan, which has developed stringent building codes….” According to this fallacious argument, the Haitian government fell down on the job of inculcating such building codes. The latter country lost a greater proportion of its population with a lower intensity earthquake than the former, with a higher count (8.9) on the Richter scale because it did not enact strict building codes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason the Japanese suffered relatively fewer losses had little to do with statist real estate regulations. Rather, they were able to build better because they were richer, and “wealthier is healthier.” And why, in turn, were the Japanese more prosperous than the Haitians? This was at least in large part due to the fact that the country in the Far East had a far freer economy than the Caribbean nation. (The Fraser Institute study of 2008 ranked Japan as the 27th most economically free country out of 141 nations they surveyed, while Haiti took 96th place.) Economists all the way from the Salamancans to Adam Smith to Mises to Hayek to Rothbard have demonstrated why it should be the case that to be economically freer is to be more affluent. Private property rights, free market prices, allow for economic growth, rational calculation, proper allocation of resources and spread of vital economic information. They provide incentives for innovation. In contrast, central planning, socialism, government regulation, the mixed economy, are recipes for economic stultification. Mises, in his book Socialism, has done more than anyone else to drive home this point.

Why should wealthier be healthier? Because, in a word, the richer is an economy, the more wherewithal it has with which to purchase all sorts of things, safety among them, and, usually, preeminently so.

But are not government building codes of help too, in this context? Are they not at least sufficient, if not necessary? No. This may be seen by assuming that Haiti had adopted the selfsame earthquake protection building codes operational in Japan (or in the U.S.). What, then, would have occurred in Haiti, had they engaged in this “progressive” legislation? Nothing, that is what. Namely, if these regulations were scrupulously adhered to, either no building would have occurred at all, or very little, and the people would not have been sheltered at all (or to an inadequate degree, leading to many more deaths.)

It is the same old story. An economy, such as that of the US, or the UK, or Japan, benefits from economic growth. As it does, regulations mandating good things that would have occurred anyway are promulgated, in order to falsely take credit for them, when they are due to the greater wealth. For example, this occurred with child labor laws, maximum hours legislation, regulations stipulating minimum numbers of years of education, etc., and, in the present case, requirements that dwellings be constructed more safely. These gains would have been registered in any case; they are due, solely, to economic progress, which takes place in spite of such bureaucratic regulations, not because of them. The proof of the pudding? Suppose that the UK banned child labor in the early 17th century. Would the kiddies all been placed in nice schools? Not a bit of it. They would have, instead, starved in droves, because the economy simply was not well enough developed at that time so as to afford this luxury of universal schooling.

One objection to the foregoing is that people, even rich ones, are simply too stupid to insist upon earthquake-protected buildings. If so, then by what magic do they become smart enough to elect politicians who will then turn around and force the populace to do what it refuses to do in the first place? This premise, moreover, must be rejected at the outset. Even ordinary folk are smart enough to purchase fire insurance (if they have a mortgage, and there is even a vestige of free enterprise, their bank will insist upon this). Why, not, then, expect the average man to be willing to pay a bit more for housing with built-in protection against earthquakes, vis-à-vis residences that do not boast of these benefits?

Private insurance, moreover, would not cover geographical areas located in dangerous areas subject to storms, flooding, or lying below sea level (e.g., New Orleans). Or, rather, would charge prices that fully reflect these threats. Government “insurance” in sharp contrast, typically bails out those foolish enough to again and again locate in these areas, as if the phenomenon of moral hazard did not exist. Thus, the state subsidizes irrational geographical location decision-making, unlike private insurance that can be bankrupted if it erred in any such manner.

From Psychology Today, here.

‘The Things Money Can’t Buy’ – Eretz Yisrael Is for the Discerning Investor!

It’s a Package Deal

Various Perspectives and Experiences of English speakers Living in Eretz Yisroel

I want people to know that life in many places here in Eretz Yisroel—the lifestyle, values, and education system—is very different than that in America. I love this life, but it is different, and it does have its challenges. People shouldn’t come here thinking they can continue living just like they did in America, only with the perks of living in Eretz Yisroel. Sometimes the challenges actually “are” the positives. That’s because life here is just “different.”

Many communities in Eretz Yisroel are more polarized, and the penalties for non-conformity are higher. Adults who hate labels and stereotypes and see themselves as a unique mix of the best of multiple worlds will have a hard time in those communities. Take a city like Beitar for example where I live—even if they befriend like-minded people, no chinuch system here supports that attitude. Children need clarity, harmony between home and school, and a peer group to which they feel they belong. From my observation, the children of adults who try to raise their kids in the almost non-existent middle ground (i.e. between Chareidi and Modern Orthodox), usually wind up going up or down spiritually—and unfortunately, down is much easier than up. When I was in seminary, somebody advised me that if I wanted to live here, I should pick the group that I wanted to be part of and conform to their standards. It was good advice, and I took it.

It’s harder to acquire gashmiyus but easier to acquire ruchniyus. It’s harder to make money, but easier to get the things that money can’t buy.

People here live in more crowded conditions and smaller apartments. This fosters more interaction with neighbors. As a general rule, Americans value self-sufficiency, while Israelis value chessed. Borrowing, lending, and helping neighbors is a way of life, including passing along things that you don’t need, from leftovers to clothing and from furniture to appliances. My older children spend a lot of time outside, riding bikes, building forts, and otherwise keeping themselves busy with their friends. They are certainly not plugged into screens. This lifestyle also fosters independence. Children in Eretz Yisroel are more independent than their American counterparts. Our six and seven-year-old boys are able to travel to their local schools by themselves on public buses.

It’s a simpler and more wholesome life. I feel like I’m raising my kids in a previous generation.  Also, I’m raising my kids in a Chareidi bubble. While at some point our children will encounter the bigger world, the values and norms of that world will be abnormal to them.

A word about finances: Tuition, childcare, and healthcare are substantially cheaper here. Just to shock you, cheider is around 300 shekalim (about $85) per month, while if you send your girls to the “public” Beis Yaakov schools (as opposed to private schools), there is no tuition. Over three months of paid maternity leave is no joke either. If you live in a place like Beitar, you can easily live without a car. The standard of living is also lower. Then again, income is also substantially lower. (This is especially true if the husband is learning, which is more common here than it is in chutz la’Aretz).

I don’t know how to describe it, but there is just more spirituality in the air. Emuna, bitachon, and yiras shomayim come a lot easier here. I think that this is a function of Eretz Yisroel itself, plus of the nature of the Chareidi community here.

This focus on ruchniyus leads to some major differences in the boys’ chinuch system. The American system tries to produce well-rounded students who know some kodesh and some chol and are somewhat prepared to both learn and work. In contrast, the Israeli Chareidi system in many communities is designed to produce talmidei chachamim. It’s a higher-risk, higher return investment. A kid who makes it will go so much further than he would in America (at least in the Torah-studies department), but there are more kids who don’t make it, and would need extra parental input to make them happy with being well-rounded, shiur-going, working men. It is definitely true that “success” is far more narrowly defined for boys here, especially during their school years. As for adults, roughly half of the men in Beitar work. It is also true that at least in the Litvish world, learning is considered the most prestigious.

I speak as the mother of two boys with ADD/ADHD who works very hard to help them succeed within the system. One started Ritalin and is now one of the top boys in his class and loving the experience. The other is in a kita mekademet, a special education environment within a regular school, with smaller class sizes, more individual attention, built-in therapies, etc. I am very glad that this classroom exists within a regular cheider, with no extra costs involved. When I lived in L.A., no such option existed. There are definitely many ways to help children who are struggling, although some of these struggles would be alleviated by a more flexible system.

It is a package deal; but I chose this package, and I’ve never regretted it.

Finally! An American-Style Kehillah Coming to Beitar B!

In America, your shul is also your social kehillah and support system, but in Eretz Yisroel’s Chareidi Litvish community, this is not so common. First of all, the Israelis usually have a lot more family support. Secondly (perhaps consequently), Israelis tend to have a shtieble mentality, where they daven each tefilla wherever it happens to be most convenient, as opposed to seeing themselves as belonging to a particular shul.

American immigrants, usually without nearby family, sorely lack this support. Thus, so far, Beitar addresses this need with the mere presence of other chutznikim. The Beitar N’shei has a few melave malkas each year, organizes meals in case of need (after birth, etc.), and operates a very popular email list. In Beitar A, there are two English-speaking kehillos, Rabbi Friedman’s Yeshivas Birkas Mordechai and Rabbi Stern’s shul, Ohel Torah. As for Beitar B, my husband’s friend, Rabbi Zevy Stark, is building an American-style shul/kehillah. 

– Shira Yael Klein, Beitar Illit

This article is part of our Eretz Chemdah series featuring Anglo-Chareidim living in, settling, and building up Eretz Yisroel. A joint project of Avira D’Eretz Yisroel, Kedushas Tzion and Naava Kodesh, coordinated by Yoel Berman – info@naavakodesh.org.

Reprinted with permission from Naava Kodesh.

That First Rashi: Torah Is NOTHING BUT a Legal Code (With Scattered Spurs to Uphold the Law)

Bereishit (5773) – A Living Book

It is the most famous, majestic and influential opening of any book in literature: “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.” What is surpassingly strange is the way Rashi – most beloved of all Jewish commentators – begins his commentary:

Rabbi Isaac said: The Torah should have begun with the verse (Ex. 12: 1): “This month shall be to you the first of the months”, which was the first commandment given to Israel.

Can we really take this at face value? Did Rabbi Isaac, or for that matter Rashi, seriously suggest that the Book of books might have begun in the middle – a third of the way into Exodus? That it might have passed by in silence the creation of the universe – which is, after all, one of the fundamentals of Jewish faith?

Could we understand the history of Israel without its prehistory, the stories of Abraham and Sarah and their children? Could we have understood those narratives without knowing what preceded them: G-d’s repeated disappointment with Adam and Eve, Cain, the generation of the Flood and the builders of the Tower of Babel?

The fifty chapters of Genesis together with the opening of Exodus are the source-book of biblical faith. They are as near as we get to an exposition of the philosophy of Judaism. What then did Rabbi Isaac mean?

He meant something profound, which we often forget. To understand a book, we need to know to what genre it belongs. Is it history or legend, chronicle or myth? To what question is it an answer? A history book answers the question: what happened? A book of cosmology – be it science or myth – answers the question: how did it happen?

What Rabbi Isaac is telling us is that if we seek to understand the Torah, we must read it as Torah, which is to say: law, instruction, teaching, guidance. Torah is an answer to the question: how shall we live? That is why he raises the question as to why it does not begin with the first command given to Israel.

Torah is not a book of history, even though it includes history. It is not a book of science, even though the first chapter of Genesis – as the 19th-century sociologist Max Weber pointed out – is the necessary prelude to science, because it represents the first time people saw the universe as the product of a single creative will, and therefore as intelligible rather than capricious and mysterious. It is, first and last, a book about how to live. Everything it contains – not only commandments but also narratives, including the narrative of creation itself – is there solely for the sake of ethical and spiritual instruction.

It moves from the minutest details to the most majestic visions of the universe and our place within it. But it never deviates from its intense focus on the questions: What shall I do? How shall I live? What kind of person should I strive to become? It begins, in Genesis 1, with the most fundamental question of all. As the Psalm (8: 4) puts it: “What is man that You are mindful of him?”

Pico della Mirandola’s 15th century Oration on Man was one of the turning points of Western civilization, the “manifesto” of the Italian Renaissance. In it he attributed the following declaration to G-d, addressing the first man:

“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.”

Homo sapiens, that unique synthesis of “dust of the earth” and breath of G-d, is unique among created beings in having no fixed essence: in being free to be what he or she chooses. Mirandola’s Oration was a break with the two dominant traditions of the Middle Ages: the Christian doctrine that human beings are irretrievably corrupt, tainted by original sin, and the Platonic idea that humanity is bounded by fixed forms.

It is also a strikingly Jewish account – almost identical with the one given by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik in Halakhic Man: “The most fundamental principle of all is that man must create himself. It is this idea that Judaism introduced into the world.” It is therefore with a frisson of recognition that we discover that Mirandola had a Jewish teacher, Rabbi Elijah ben Moses Delmedigo (1460-1497).

Born in Crete, Delmedigo was a Talmudic prodigy, appointed at a young age to be head of the yeshivah in Padua. At the same time, he studied philosophy, in particular the work of Aristotle, Maimonides and Averroes. At the age of 23 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Padua. It was through this that he came to know Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who became both his student and his patron. Eventually, however, Delmedigo’s philosophical writings – especially his work Bechinat ha-Dat – became controversial. He was accused, by other rabbis, of heresy. He had to leave Italy and return to Crete. He was much admired by Jews and Christians alike, and when he died young, many Christians as well as Jews attended his funeral.

This emphasis on choice, freedom and responsibility is one of the most distinctive features of Jewish thought. It is proclaimed in the first chapter of Genesis in the most subtle way. We are all familiar with its statement that G-d created man “in His image, after His likeness”. Seldom do we pause to reflect on the paradox. If there is one thing emphasized time and again in the Torah, it is that G-d has no image. “I will be what I will be”, He says to Moses when he asks Him His name.

Since G-d transcends nature – the fundamental point of Genesis 1 – then He is free, unbounded by nature’s laws. By creating human beings in His image, He gave us a similar freedom, thus creating the one being capable itself of being creative. The unprecedented account of G-d in the Torah’s opening chapter leads to an equally unprecedented view of the human person and our capacity for self-transformation.

The Renaissance, one of the high points of European civilization, eventually collapsed. A series of corrupt rulers and Popes led to the Reformation, and to the quite different views of Luther and Calvin. It is fascinating to speculate what might have happened had it continued along the lines signalled by Mirandola. His late 15th century humanism was not secular but deeply religious.

As it is, the great truth of Genesis 1 remains. As the rabbis put it (Bereishith Rabbah 8: 1; Sanhedrin 38a): “Why was man created last? In order to say, if he is worthy, all creation was made for you; but if he is unworthy, he is told, even a gnat preceded you.” The Torah remains G-d’s supreme call to humankind to freedom and creativity on the one hand, and on the other, to responsibility and restraint – becoming G-d’s partner in the work of creation.

Shabbat Shalom

From Rabbi Sacks, here.

Milton Friedman: Greedy Politicians Are No Nobler Than Greedy Businessmen!

Milton Friedman – Your Greed or Their Greed?

Find (from Jul 14, 2007), here on YouTube.

Note: Brief immodest image!

Partial quote (via GoodReads):

“Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”