Introducing Rabbi Tzadok Cable’s Shul (Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimmel)…

Bnei Aliyah – Setting An Example

Haaretz Hatovah – Real Life Stories and Experiences of Yidden Settling in Eretz Yisroel.

I grew up in Kensington – that’s between Boro Park and Flatbush, for those unfamiliar with Brooklyn, it’s in the heart of the frum community. I came to Eretz Yisroel straight after high school although I was a bit young and that was off the beaten track. I wanted to learn, and found my place in Yeshiva HaKotel – today known as Netiv Aryeh. I thrived there, learning full time for two years.

As I look back at the factors that brought me here and keep me here, I think it was just a natural development in my life. I didn’t really think much about living here until I arrived – and then I just couldn’t envision leaving! I was in Yeshiva during the intifada, and the horrific bus bombings; it was a powerfully emotional time. That situation motivated me to think a lot about the country as a whole, the people and the way of life. I started wondering… could I make this a reality? As I explored options, I saw I could manage yeshiva and college here, no need to go back to the USA. I continued learning during the day while attending an Israeli college, the Machon Lev evening program.

Four years later I had a business degree and was ready to move on to the next stage of life. I was not considering moving back to the USA, and BH my parents were very supportive.

Fortunately, I met my wife here in EY shortly thereafter. Michal (Goldberg) grew up in West Orange New Jersey and came to learn in EY after high school, and she, also very idealistic, wanted to stay here as well. We flew to the East Coast, got married and quickly headed back here… we actually had one of our sheva brachos on our Nefesh B’Nefesh flight!

Fifteen years have passed. We started out in Yerushalayim but then moved to Ramat Beit Shemesh Alef. Although we were happy there, when RBS Gimmel opened up, we were among the pioneers. Currently, I work for an online marketing company and do some handyman jobs as they come up. Michal works for a patent filing company, selling their services. Hashem has blessed us with four daughters and a son; all are doing well in school both socially and academically.

Without saying much, we set good examples for our families. My sister made Aliyah a couple of years after we did; she never would have done so if not for the fact that we were living here! My brother’s daughter just finished seminary and is in a Shana Bet program, and wants to stay. My parents come to visit for months at a time and we hope they will join us here soon!

My wife also set an example in her family. She came, her siblings followed and finally, her parents made Aliyah! Definitely easier and more fun when you have family here!

Living in a new and growing community affords many opportunities for us pioneers. We recently started a new shul in RBSG; Rav Tzadok Cable is our Rav and I am the gabbai. One of our goals is to help Anglo bnei aliyah who do not quite fit into Israeli shuls; our needs are different. Language is an issue, of course, but so is culture. We emphasize friendliness and offer encouragement and information in many areas, but especially in navigating the chareidi system; it’s different than in America in a few ways. One of the big challenges we chutznikim deal with is leaving full time learning. Yes, certainly we have to adjust but it should not mean lowering our spiritual level. In our shul, we’re trying to help people continue on the Torah path while working, which is, practically speaking, a chutznik concept. We offer regular shiurim during the week and more on Shabbos, and have a daily netz kollel every morning from 5-7 learning and davening – the schedule varies according to the time of netz.

Our next project is getting land and building, as we are presently situated in a parking lot. We look forward to continued growth on all levels, and welcoming many more bnei aliyah!

– Avromi Sommers

This article is part of our Haaretz Hatovah series featuring Yidden living in, settling, and building up Eretz Yisroel. For more info please contact info@naavakodesh.org or visit naavakodesh.org/haaretz-hatovah

From Naava Kodesh, here.

‘Correlation Does Not Equal Causation’, and Other Basics

Can You Trust What Medical Journals Publish?

By John Dale Dunn
November 29, 2019

I have repeatedly questioned the validity of medical journal claims in regards to politically charged issues like air pollution and climate change, as well as global warming here at AT.  More recently, I showed how a major medical journal violates basic rules on scientific inquiry.

There is another important problem with medical research as reported in medical journals and then often expanded by the lay press as big news: that medical journal articles are often proven wrong for unreliable results or promotion of treatments that are not beneficial or not any more efficacious than treatments they propose to replace.

I was reminded recently of this problem by an article in Emergency Medicine News, a medical specialty newspaper, that reported on a study by Dr. Vinay Prasad, a comprehensive review of randomized clinical trials in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine identifying 396 medical reversals.  Reversals are cases where medical journal articles are found to be faulty, misleading and just plain wrong.

When high-flying medical researchers on environmental issues use bad methods and report false results, it is motivated by political agendas usually, but when medical researchers report what end up being unreliable results in other areas, it is often due to biases and fallacious thinking and lack of effort to assiduously test their results and repeat them to assure that the hypothesis is valid and reliable and the results are testable and verified.

Some “rules” turned out to be wrong, for example, tight blood sugar control, mechanical chest compressions, protocols for treatment of sepsis (infections with severe complications).  The unreliability problem is troublesome since the study shows that many recommended treatments and strategies are not efficacious.

Here are some additional specifics from the Prasad study:

  • Mechanical compression was not better than manual compressions for CPR. (JAMA. 2014;311[1]:53)
  • Early and aggressive methods for care of patients with sepsis (severe infection) were no better than usual care. (JAMA. 2017;318[13]:1233)
  • The REACT-2 trial found that routine use of an immediate total-body CT did not impact mortality or benefit compared with conventional imaging and selective CT scanning in patients with severe trauma. (Lancet. 2016;388[10045]:673)
  • Platelet transfusion after acute hemorrhagic stroke was found by the 2015 PATCH study to worsen survival in the platelet transfusion group (68%) compared with the standard care group (77%). (Lancet. 2016;387[10038]:2605)

The authors were so alert to the problem that they created a website for best practices that, like other such practice websites, intends to alert physicians to the realities of the research mistakes and misinformation.

Medical reversals and rejection of medical protocols and suggested treatments are too common and the result of bad methods and scientific dishonesty.  Real science honesty would identify the problems and discover the unreliable information, and the studies would not be published.

The reports of this or that new breakthrough should be assessed with care by the public and medical professionals.

In 2005, an obscure Greek physician, John Ioannidis, published a groundbreaking article on the unreliability of medical research, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” and he became famous — so famous that he is now at Stanford, heading a study project on scientific integrity, funded by a philanthropist.  What Ioannidis found was that medical research is driven by ambition, intellectual passion, and fallacious thinking.  He didn’t say researchers are dishonest; he just said they often put out false claims and make false assertions.

I have, in these articles at AT, tried to warn the readers of the problems of dishonesty and malfeasance in medical research — the lay reader is warned to apply these rules as a way to avoid being taken in by bad research methods or just plain cheating and dishonesty.

There are some basic rules to help avoid being taken in by charlatans.

  1. The study should be a human study, or, if it is an animal study, the limits of such a study should be declared.
  2. The study should follow basic rules about how to determine causation, and avoid the trap of claiming that “association” or “coincidence” is proof of causation.
  3. The study should avoid surveys and questionnaires as a source of “evidence” since recall bias is always a problem in survey or response studies.
  4. The study should always be measured in terms of the magnitude of the “effect,” and the rule is that magnitude of effect should be “robust” — at least 2 or 3 times the increase in effect over the baseline.
  5. The study should establish a mechanism to explain the causal effect asserted — for example, ice cream consumption is associated with an increase in drowning deaths, but it is not a cause of those deaths.
  6. Although I could argue that peer review and publication are not a good standard for reliability, the source of the research and the reputation of that source as well as the reputation of the journal the research was published in is often worth something.  How much it is worth is the question.

The important thing is that professionals and citizens should be careful to question and evaluate what is pronounced by medical journals.  Too often, they are overwhelmed by self-esteem and ambition.

John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. is an emergency physician and inactive attorney in Brownwood, Texas.

From American Thinker, here.

ר’ אבא מנשק כיפי דעכו, ר’ חייא בר גמדא מיגנדר בעפרה

סיפורים על חיבת ארץ ישראל שנלקטו מתוך פורום “אוהב ציון” (kdushastzion1@googlegroups.com):

שמעתי סיפור על הגר”ד שווארצמן זצל (חתנו של ר’ אהרן קוטלר זצל), שהיה מאד מקפיד לא לצאת מא”י לשום דבר בחודש אלול… פעם אחד מהתלמידים המקורבים שלו היה אמור להתחתן באלול ורצה שרבו יסדר קידושין וכו’ ובסוף הוא הסכים אבל בתנאי שהוא יעסוק בשמחת חתן וכלה מרגע היציאה ועד רגע החזרתו… וכך הוה… החתן נסע איתו מא”י לאולם בחו”ל, הוא בירך כל הברכות בחופה, רקד איתו לבד עד סוף החתונה, וליווה אותו בחזרה לשדה התעופה…

סיפר לי עד נאמן שראה את הגה”צ רצ”מ זילברברג שליט”א שלמד בספר בדרכו לא”י וכשאמרו לו שרואים כבר את הארץ מיד סגר את הספר, ונכנס לדביקות כדרכו (תשובה ועוד) למשך כ10 דקות.

הרב אביגדור נבנצל שליט”א הוכרח פעם לצאת לחו”ל. בהלוך הזמין מקום בכסא האחורי ביותר ובחזור בכסא הקדמי ביותר. עוד כמה שניות של ישוב א”י.

מזכיר את הסיפור עם הגה”ק מקלויזנבורג זצוק”ל [יתכן שאני מחליף עם רבי חסידי אחר] שבנסיעתו פעם לארץ ישראל (מלבד מה שהוא מלמל בכל הדרך את עשרת קינות ‘ציון’, זה בטוח היה אצל הנ”ל) לקראת כניסת המטוס לשמי ארצנו ביקש להיכנס לתא הטייס כדי להקדים את כניסתו לארץ חמדה בשבריר שניה…

ע”כ.

Mussar Is IATROGENIC: The Chazon Ish Against Treating Negi’os As Nega’im

From “Making of a Godol” pp. 577-578:

(Also cf. החוזה מליטא by חייים ע. קוליץ published by הוצאת ראובן מס בע”מ, ירושלים pp. 118-119 which demonstrates how R. Scher’s approach interlocked with that of the anti-Musar Hazon-Ish when it states: “Our teacher [the Hazon-Ish] did not generally ascribe importance to the ‘Musarite’ demand for ‘breaking the traits [שבירת המידות]’ [of the personality], or to extra bewonderment of one’s spiritual powers [כוחות הנפש], and even less to picking at someone else’s spirit [emphasis added].

He would say, ‘We need not tell a man all that we know about him.’ In his opinion, good deeds are not disqualified because their performer has self-interest in mind; and he also did not hold that some self-gain [טובת הנאה] — a ‘נגיעה [touching]’, in the Musar terminology — is a sore of leprosy [נגע צרעת] that requires constant scratching. Whoever does that becomes plagued by his scratching. Our teacher smiled and whispered, ‘The World’s Creator and his Torah have more faith in man than do the Musar masters of Novharodok.’*”)

*For G-d’s faith in mankind, see ספרי דברים, אות שז, to wit, “‘אל אמונה’: שהאמין בעולמו ובראו’ (G-d of faith’: Who had faith in the world and created it).” Also cf. p. 480, above, and fn. m ad loc.

The end.