Yesterday morning I was one of 1,000 Rabbis listening in on a conference call with President Obama on the hot button issue of heath care reform. The call was organized by coalition of Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist organizatoins including
The Central Conference of American Rabbis, Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbinical Assembly, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, and coordinated by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
Technically speaking I’m not sure I’m “supposed” to write about the call. The intent of the call was less informative on Obama’s position, but more for the Rabbis to explore how to address the health care controversy in their upcoming High Holiday sermons. (In a nice move by Obama’s handler’s he began his health care discussion by referencing unetaneh tokef). Nevertheless there were point which I took away from the call that I feel are worth sharing with the public at large.

Since I moved down to the Lower East Side I have received more questions on Eiruvin than anything else. From conversations with many Jewish residents in the area – both members and non-members of my congregation – there is a great deal of interest and desire to have an eiruv erected on the Lower East Side. Setting aside the economic and political obstacles of putting up and eiruv down here, I decided that the best thing to do is simply to teach the basics of eiruvin in terms of how they work in halakha.
The intent of these shiurim is not to get people to the level of pesak and as such we did not explore the vast teshuva literature on the subject. Rather the goal was to provide working definitions and explain the laws and principles underlying the various halakhic disputes. Most sources are from the Talmud, Rambam, and Shulhan Aruch.
I decided to split this shiur into three parts:

1. Part 1 introduces the reshuyot and the basic definitions of eiruvin, and demonstrates that halakha views eiruvin positively and that putting one up is considered to be a Good Thing.
2. Part 2 covers the physical construction of the eiruv – the lehi, korah, and mostly the tzurat hapetach, explaining their halakhic function.
3. Part 3 discusses the conceptual requirement of getting all residents in an area to join an eiruv, as well as several solutions to the problem of getting Jews to agree on anything.

All three shiurim have been added to YUTOPIA’s Source Sheet Archive.
As always, comments and corrections/suggestions are welcome!

A few months ago I wrote a short article for the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals’ new journal Conversations. The purpose of this journal is to promote communal dialogue on various issues facing the Jewish community. Unlike the Edah/Meorot journals, the journal is supposed to be more accessible than academic and so I was given two editorial conditions:1. keep it short and 2. no footnotes.

As longtime blog readers know, that last condition was a tough one to overcome.

At any rate, I’m posting my article “A Fair And Balanced Approach To Jewish Social Justice” and I plan on revisiting the motivations for the article at some later point.

Wow.
I can hardly believe how long it’s been since I’ve last written anything. I’ve barely had time to get basic derashot out, let alone formulate for intelligible posting (maybe next year :-). Consider that for the months of September and October I was commuting from Springfield to the LES for every Shabbat and Chag, packing, unpacking, and writing derashot. Then for some reason things just keep popping up that I haven’t had the time to think let alone research and write.
So I’m sticking my head out to say that yes I am alive and well, just too distracted with many life and shul details to write more – though I must say I’ve been feeling the absence of not writing.
Right now I’m prepping a shiur for Dec 25 on Talmudic Responses to Greek and Christian Culture. Of course it’s not going to be close to comprehensive but it serves a double inyanei deyoma.
God willing I’ll try to make more time to write. I’ve really missed this place.

Dear Loyal Readers,
It’s been nearly five years since the big move from first moved domain names from Blogger to YUCS and we’ve had a great run on the ‘ol server. Sadly, the future of YUCS is uncertain at present¹, which meant that I needed to start looking for actual paid hosting to handle both the blog and the Jewish guitar chords archive and then to port everything over.
Today I am very pleased to announce that the transition appears to be complete. Thanks to a great deal of hacking and the good support people at tweakedhosting.com, both the chords and guitar database are up and running at their new homes:
The new site for YUTOPIA is:

www.JoshYuter.com

and the new feed is https://joshyuter.com/atom.xml.
The Jewish guitar chords can be found appropriately enough at:

www.JewishGuitarChords.com

For the time being YUCS is redirecting all traffic to the new site,² but since I don’t know how much longer YUCS will be in operation, I’d like to ask if you could please update your links and feed subscriptions accordingly.
I don’t have metrics just yet, but it does seem the site runs slightly slower and loads a little weirder than before. On the plus side, I’ve sorted out most of the new glitches and thanks to the new system I’ve even added some cool features such as this nifty little new contact form for direct spam-free feedback.
It also seems to be a good time to update the Blogroll on the side. If you’d like to exchange links or if you’re already linking and would appreciate the reciprocity, please let me know.
Thank you all very much for your help and support. It’s been an exciting time lately, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon.³ I hope I’ll be able to continue sharing in the next adventures of my little YUTOPIAN world.

1. And if and when it ever does go down, I’ll write up a history. Tentative title: “From 501 to 404.” (Yes, that’s an obscure but relevant reference).
2. Some pages might not be working due to previous movabletype upgrades. I’ll fix those as they come up.
3. Another big announcement forthcoming, and no I’m not getting engaged.

A few weeks ago I received the relieving news that my master’s thesis from the University of Chicago finally passed after several years and several attempts. The approved version was actually a draft and needed some degree of editing for typos, grammar, and a few structural changes. After mulling it over for a while and getting some positive feedback I’ve decided to post the thesis here with a few explanations.

I know I’ve had one of my extended absences from blogging, and I promise I *will* return with a full explanation and lots of other cool stuff. Just checking in to report that I’ve added the 300th song to the Jewish Guitar Chord Archive. The auspicious song in question is the Dovid Melech camp song, “with the pre-macarena hand motions.”
Keep on playing!