Don’t Mess With Brisk! (I Mean BREAD…)

The following story is almost utterly worthless in itself (I don’t know the source), but the point is the story was taken seriously, and it influenced people’s thinking.

A generally serious Torah scholar told me he heard someone once came to the Brisker Rav to tell him about a kashrus problem with bakeries. So, what was the response of the Brisker Rav, known for his Yir’as Shamayim (except wherever halacha conflicted with so-called holy “Minhag”)?

He said: Don’t mess with bread!

As they say, “I don’t know if it happened, but they don’t tell such “inspiring” stories about the Chazon Ish…”

Start with ‘No’: The Bureaucratic/Academic Mindset

Excerpted from an article on Lewrockwell.com:

The academic mind, like the academic guild, is closed. It is trained from high school on to focus on what is irrelevant and therefore safe. The process is, as they say, majoring in minors.

I recall the day I took my young wife to a lecture at a Protestant seminary. The lecture was being given by a not-quite Ph.D. who was candidating for a teaching position. I told my wife the following before the lecture began:

This will be the most boring lecture you have ever heard. You will not have heard of the facts he mentions. The speaker will draw no conclusions of any importance.

After the lecture, she said, “How did you know? I almost fell asleep.” Here was my answer (approximately):

The guy was candidating for a job. He did not want to make a mistake. He therefore summarized his Ph.D. dissertation, as I knew he would. The topic is sufficiently narrow so that nobody on the faculty could spot a major error. Also, nobody is ever not hired because his lectures are boring. Lots of people are not hired because their lectures are lively, which might embarrass the other faculty members.

The man was hired. He has been president of the seminary for years. He is a very good lecturer. He speaks at denominational family camps, where teenagers attend. They apparently enjoy him. His insufferable boredom that candidating day was a product of the academic system, not his abilities.

The academic is a trained bureaucrat. He has survived a long system of specialized training in the rules of bureaucracy. Everything is tied to tests, term papers, and formal requirements. Academics and priests were the original trained bureaucrats. This is because they were literate. Kings made use of priests to do administrative duties.

Academics have less power than bureaucrats. They have fewer official responsibilities. Tenure converts fearful people into bored people. Nothing threatens an academic more than a requirement to perform. If he must face a free market, he is terrified.

The scene in Ghostbusters, where the three parapsychologists are fired by the university, is among my all-time favorites. Dan Ackroyd’s character warns the other two:

I liked the University. They gave us money, they gave us the facilities, and we didn’t have to produce anything! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results. You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there.

The rule of survival in every bureaucracy is “Safety first.” Corollaries are: “Don’t make a mistake.” “Keep your head down.” “Do it by the book.” “Don’t make waves.” But the central, unbreakable rule of a master bureaucrat is this one:

Always say no initially. It’s a matter of leaving room to retreat. You can retreat from no to yes, and the person asking you to do something is happy. If you have to retreat from yes to no, you’ve made an enemy.

I remember that one clearly. It was the answer given to a reporter by the Washington bureaucrat with the longest tenure in 1976, upon her retirement. He had asked her how she had survived for so long.

The free market’s law is to say yes initially. The salesman wants the commission. To the question, “Can I get it in blue?” the salesman answers: “Will you sign the contract if I can get it for you in blue?” After the contract is signed, the salesman puts the pressure on the company to deliver it in blue.

…

A decade ago, the neoconservative classicist Victor D. Hansen co-authored a book, Who Killed Homer? I have read it twice. It is a great little book. He shows how few students earn degrees in the classics today: under 600 a year. The entire field is dying. Who killed it? His conclusion: the professors themselves — the feminists, the quibblers, the purveyors of arcane specialized linguistic studies.

That sounds good, but he neglects to mention that the quibblers and the purveyors of arcane linguistic studies dominated classics departments early. They set the pattern, not just for today’s classicists but for all academia. They were paid to study the past and make judgments about the past — judgments that could be verified only by other scholars. Then they decided to narrow the field: to study the grammar and vocabulary of dead languages, which was really safe. Nobody spoke these languages. Who could say what the facts were? Only other specialists.

What we need is an amateur army of skilled analysts in every field from outside academia — people who have the basic skills of the scholar, but not the mindset. They need to know how to understand and interpret the past in terms of the present, in preparation for the future. This, the academic mind is trained not to do. The exceptions — the feminists, the Marxists, and the deconstructionists — are at war with the society that funds them, especially the taxpayers, who are deeply resented for not forking over even more of their income to fund their own destruction.

Education must be decentralized. It must be taken off tax-funded life support.

…

Read the rest of it here.

CHASSIDIC Requiems for Chassidus…

THE TISCH: THE END OF HASSIDISM?

A cursory glance reveals that the fascination with hassidic lore continues to animate many of our contemporary communities.

BY LEVI COOPER
 SEPTEMBER 24, 2010

While the legacy of the Ba’al Shem Tov and Hassidism lives on in our day, there were some thinkers who surmised that the innovations of Hassidism were timebound, rather than eternal values. They felt that the message and contribution of Hassidism was to last for a limited time and then fade. It would not be surprising to hear mitnagdim, the staunch opponents to Hassidism, say the movement had passed its prime. But remarkably, this idea came from the midst of the hassidic camp and in fact was voiced by those who served in prominent leadership roles within the hassidic community.

In a letter penned at the end of 1866, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Schneersohn (1830-1900), the newly appointed rebbe of Kapust (Kopys, today in Belarus), wrote: “From the days of the revelation to this world of our master the Ba’al Shem Tov… until this time… it has been 150 years that the river has flowed out of Eden and entered the garden… and now it has ceased. And we must live as uncultivated aftergrowths; woe to us that in our day it has ceased… How can we live in the redoubled darkness in the final throes of the messianic era…?” Rabbi Shlomo Zalman of Kapust lamented that the inspiration of the Ba’al Shem Tov – the river that flowed from Eden – no longer was a lifegiving source. He wrote these words to the Kapust Hassidim after the demise of his father, Rabbi Yehuda Leib (1811-1866), the founding rebbe in Kapust. This heartbreak came only months after the passing of Rabbi Yehuda Leib’s father, the Tzemah Tzedek, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneersohn of Lubavitch (1789-1866). As Rabbi Shlomo Zalman accepted the mantle of leadership of the Kapust Hassidim in the wake of these tragedies, it must have appeared to him that indeed the hassidic life-force was no more.

A CONTEMPORARY but slightly different tradition is reported in the name of the Galician hassidic master, Rabbi Haim Halberstam of Sanz (1793–1876), known by the title of his work, Divrei Haim (“The Words of Haim”). He too asserted that no religious innovation could last longer than 150 years; even that of the Ba’al Shem Tov.

Once, when he was in Tarnow for Shabbat, surrounded by hundreds of loyal hassidim, he declared: “The time has come to return the crown to its former place,” and he continued with the following parable: “There was once a person who had a new garment. After a year or two the color of the garment had faded, so the person gave the garment to the tailor and asked him to turn it inside out so that it would look like a new garment. A year or two later the garment was once again faded.

The owner of the garment said to himself: ‘What am I to do? Since both the inside and the outside are faded, I may as well turn it back to the original way it was made.’” RABBI HAIM of Sanz unpacked the parable: “Thus it is [with Hassidism] – the Ba’al Shem Tov saw that in his day the path of Torah and fear of heaven had deteriorated; there was an assortment of obstacles and stumbling blocks along the path, such as conceit, self-interest and insincerity. Therefore, [the Ba’al Shem Tov] paved the path of Hassidism, with service [of God] and piety. Now that this path, too, has deteriorated, it would be better to return to the original path of Torah and fear of heaven.”

A third such statement is attributed to Rabbi Shalom Rokeah of Belz (1781-1855), known as the Sar Shalom (Prince of Peace). The Sar Shalom reportedly declared before his death that he was the last of the hassidic masters who was permitted to perform miracles and act as the Ba’al Shem Tov had acted.

Despite the claims that the glow of the inspiration from the early hassidic masters has dimmed, that the cloak of Hassidism was in tatters, that the miraculous powers of the Ba’al Shem Tov were no more, common experience would seem to defy this analysis. Indeed, one might say the opposite is true: A cursory glance reveals that the fascination with hassidic lore, the melody of hassidic song and the interest in hassidic ideas continue to animate many of our contemporary communities.

The writer is on the faculty of Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and is a rabbi in Tzur Hadassah.

From JPost, here.

Do Briskers Understand ANYTHING?!

Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966)

April 1st, 2016

How can we know whether a claim someone makes is scientific or not? The question is of the utmost consequence, as we are surrounded on all sides by claims that sound credible, that use the language of science—and often do so in attempts to refute scientific consensus. As we’ve seen in the case of the anti-vaccine crusade, falling victim to pseudoscientific arguments can have dire effects. So how can ordinary people, ordinary parents, and ordinary citizens evaluate such arguments?

The problem of demarcation, or what is and what is not science, has occupied philosophers for some time, and the most famous answer comes from philosopher of science Karl Popper, who proposed his theory of “falsifiability” in 1963. According to Popper, an idea is scientific if it can conceivably be proven wrong. Although Popper’s strict definition of science has had its uses over the years, it has also come in for its share of criticism, since so much accepted science was falsified in its day (Newton’s gravitational theory, Bohr’s theory of the atom), and so much current theoretical science cannot be falsified (string theory, for example). Whatever the case, the problem for lay people remains. If a scientific theory is beyond our comprehension, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to see how it might be disproven.

Physicist and science communicator Richard Feynman came up with another criterion, one that applies directly to the non-scientist likely to be bamboozled by fancy terminology that sounds scientific. Simon Oxenham at Big Think points to the example of Deepak Chopra, who is “infamous for making profound sounding yet entirely meaningless statements by abusing scientific language.” (What Daniel Dennet calls “deepities.”) As a balm against such statements, Oxenham refers us to a speech Feynman gave in 1966 to a meeting of the National Science Teachers Association. Rather than asking lay people to confront scientific-sounding claims on their own terms, Feynman would have us translate them into ordinary language, thereby assuring that what the claim asserts is a logical concept, rather than just a collection of jargon.

The example Feynman gives comes from the most rudimentary source, a “first grade science textbook” which “begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science”: it shows its student a picture of a “windable toy dog,” then a picture of a real dog, then a motorbike. In each case, the student is asked “What makes it move?” The answer, Feynman tells us “was in the teacher’s edition of the book… ‘energy makes it move.’” Few students would have intuited such an abstract concept unless they had previously learned the word, which is all the lesson teaches them. The answer, Feynman points out, might as well have been “’God makes it move,’ or ‘Spirit makes it move,’ or, ‘Movability makes it move.’”

Instead, a good science lesson “should think about what an ordinary human being would answer.” Engaging with the concept of energy in ordinary language enables the student to explain it, and this, Feynman says, constitutes a test for “whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way”:

Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language. Without using the word “energy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.

Feynman’s insistence on ordinary language recalls the statement attributed to Einstein about not really understanding something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. The method, Feynman says, guards against learning “a mystic formula for answering questions,” and Oxenham describes it as “a valuable way of testing ourselves on whether we have really learned something, or whether we just think we have learned something.”

It is equally useful for testing the claims of others. If someone cannot explain something in plain English, then we should question whether they really do themselves understand what they profess…. In the words of Feynman, “It is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudoscience.”

Does Feynman’s ordinary language test solve the demarcation problem? No, but if we use it as a guide when confronted with plausible-sounding claims couched in scientific-sounding verbiage, it can help us either get clarity or suss out total nonsense. And if anyone would know how scientists can explain complicated ideas in plainly accessible ways, Feynman would.

via Big Think

From Open Culture, here.

On Partly-Private Space Pyramids

Ha!

A non-profit named SpaceIL sent an unmanned spacecraft called “Beresheet” to the moon using a rocket built by yet another private company, known as Spaceflight Industries, mainly funded by private donations. This is the first privately-funded “moon mission”, generally.

Was there any commercial benefit here? Well, the thingamajig will drop off a container “containing over 30 million pages of data, including a full copy of English-language Wikipedia, the Bible, children’s drawings, memories of a Holocaust survivor, Israel’s national anthem (Hatikvah), the Israeli flag, and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.”

Sounds mighty useful…

Oh, wait! Beresheet will also “measure the Moon’s local magnetic field to help understand how it formed.”

I don’t think that will quite recoup expenses…

So, if useless, pyramid-like, “national greatness” projects can be done using the free market, what do we need NASA and Israel’s governmental space agency: סוכנות החלל הישראלית for?!