Want To Understand Gemara? Slow Down!

Here are some excerpts from Daf Yomi Review:

Rav Wasserman taught that the Talmud is designed to be difficult. It’s purposely crafted to be difficult. He said every sugya (discussion) is like a tight knot in a ball of string. When you disentangle that ball of string, you have to go slow. If you’re impatient, you make the knot much worse. You have to pick out each piece, slowly and unravel it and by the time, you’ve decoded the sugya it’s one beautiful straight piece of string. Then you see that it was crafted into the smallest and most compressed and most beautiful space possible (i.e. could not possibly be written with fewer or better words. this applies also to every Rashi, Tosfos, and the like). It takes patience, it takes technique.

When you go through a complex piece of gemora, and you’re a little bit vague on point 1, the rest is an amplification of vagueness, and by the time you get to the end, you don’t know what’s going on. Gemora has a nasty trick, a nasty bite. A bite, of allowing you to get to the end and thinking, more or less you sort of understood, but something is a little bit back. And when you walk out and try to tell your friend about it you realize you didn’t understand anything from the beginning. that’s the way it works. Gemora is built in such a way that unless you have it all, you have nothing.

Read the rest.

Against Libertarian Anti-Zionism

At Long Last, A Defense of Israel Against Rothbard

Back in 1967, in response to the outbreak of the Six Day War, Dr. Murray Rothbard penned an article entitled “War Guilt in the Middle East“. In the article, Rothbard denies Israel’s right to exist and accuses it of starting an unjust war. We, obviously, disagree.

Now, 50 years later, we his students have written a rebuttal, just published in The Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law. It is coauthored by Alan Futerman, Dr. Walter Block, and me. I wrote section 8 and much of the conclusion. Walter wrote section 7. Alan wrote the rest, and we all collectively edited.

Continue reading…

From the Jewish Libertarian, here.

האם ישנו מצות עשה בלימוד סימני טהרה של החיות?

ספר סימני חיה ובהמה

מדריך מעשי להבנת סימני החיה והבהמה והכרת החיות הטהורות. מאת הרב שמחה יאיר פוסטולסקי שליט”א, ספר חובה בכל בית יהודי!

צלצל עכשיו: 050-4140778

המשך לקרוא…

מאתר שטייגן, כאן. [האתר נעלם]

Critiquing Sefer ‘Chafetz Chaim’ and Defining ‘Toeles’

In general, I am not in favor of Chofetz Chaim-based lashon hara guidelines (as her propounds in this essay), for several reasons. People over-apply them. They are formulated in a way biased to prevent possible slander, more than concerned for protecting potential victims. They took what had, until this point, been a mostly hashkafic and good-middot matter, and transformed them into halacha. And while some contemporaries disagreed with him, for lashon hara, unlike the rest of his halachic work, we don’t have an Aruch HaShulchan disputant to give contrast to his Mishna Berurah.

Hear hear!

The Pischei Teshuva (O.C. 156) notes that while Mussar books are strongly focused on the prohibition of speaking Lashon Harah, there is a worse sin – not speaking up to prevent harm to others!

I think the entire post shows the problem with trying to work out “Judaism” using feelings and Mussar instead of Halacha. This is a far wider topic. Anyway, see the rest of the article.