Category: Odds & Ends

Best In Show

December 8, 2004 Odds & Ends

Remember last year I went to see the One Man Star Wars Trillogy? It looks like the guy is back in Chicago and now also does a one man Lord of the Rings. It’s in a bigger theater and the tickets are a little more expensive, but not by much.
Actually, there are several shows playing in Chicago including the pre-broadway production of Spamalot with the original cast. Surprisingly, these are also relatively affordable especially compared to NY.
At some point I figure I’ll need a break from writing. So, if I’m going to see one show this year, what should it be?
Any recommendations?



Clarifications

December 4, 2004 Meta

Over shabbat, it occurred to me that my last post could be seen as overly critical of the OU. However, my goal was more to point out the inadequacies of its letter rather than criticize the OU itself or its practices in the areas of hashgacha. While I do think the OU needs to issue its own clarification, I also said that they need to get the benefit of the doubt in this case.

  1. Thousands of shehitot are done at this plant. We have no idea if this is a common occurrence or an isolated incident.
  2. We don’t know for certain if the sheita is in fact pasul.
  3. Until the Rabbanut issues a formal pesak halakha – the Jerusalem Post doesn’t count – we’re not sure exactly what their position is.
  4. Even if the shehita doesn’t meet the Rabbanut’s standards, that religious body technically has no authority in America.
  5. Even if the shehita was in fact objectively pasul, we have no idea if the meat was ever distributed or packaged as kosher. For all we know, the mashgichim saw it – and rejected it.
  6. Someone who has actually visited the plant told me that several “runs” are done at the plant. Meaning at the same plant, different mashgichim oversee shehita for different organizations. Thus, the infraction might not have even occurred under the OU’s watch.

As I mentioned in the last post, now is not the time for people who have never opened a Yoreh Deah to start paskening and invalidating the OU. They’ve been doing hashgacha for a long time and aren’t going to do anything to cause the masses to sin.
Again, just sit tight and wait for the OU to formally address the issue.



Crazy Like A Firefox

November 17, 2004 Meta

A few months ago, I switched from Mozilla to Firefox as my primary browser. You might have seen some news coverage about its latest release, and could contemplate the switch. Aside from being secure and stable, there are several useful plugins to make browsing easier. Some of my favorites:

  • Googlebar – Mimics Google’s own equivalent
  • Adblock – Removes image and flash advertisements from web pages – customizable based on URI
  • Sage – A Firefox based RSS Reader
  • Prefbar – Easy Access to preferences
  • IE View – Handy tool to open up IE exclusive pages and links in an IE window.
  • Spellbound – Works like IE Spell – checks spelling in web forms.

And there are loads more from which to chose. Now that I can do blog spell checking1 from Firefox, I officially have no more use for Internet Explorer other than to handle MS’s own websites.
Vive la revolucion revolution!

1. Yes, I do that occasionally.



Weekend Updates

November 15, 2004 Odds & Ends

Blogging may be a little slow for a while – certainly don’t expect the longer postings to continue.
My mother came home from rehab on Sunday. Rehab will continue at home, but it’s unclear how long it will take. Normally, rehab for hip surgery requires more support from the other hip/leg side. In my mother’s case, the other side is still hampered by a broken kneecap. Therefore, she can’t do the weight-bearing excersizes just yet so rehab may take longer than usual.
On the plus side, she is able to work at home – her boss installed a cable modem in the house. If you’d like to send wishes, you can e-mail Rabbiyuter at aol dot com. I’m sure she’d love to hear from random strangers.
I’ve gotten conned into regiving my shiurim at the Hillel here. The research is done, and I could use the hazara. Also, it gives me the opportunity to write out the shiurim instead of just putting up sources.
Finally, Izzy Kramer has been on fire in sending me loads of chords, and it’s been hard to keep up posting them.1 If I have any spare time, I’ll be working on automating some things using PHP.2 If there are any interested volunteers, please let me know.

1. Also transposing. Izzy uses a lot of barre chords – as well he should – but many players including myself have difficulty barre-ing acoustics.
2. At the risk of a flame war, I think PHP is cooler and faster than Perl – that and I forgot most of Perl and I’ve been wanting to learn PHP for a while. ASP.net isn’t really an option since YUCS isn’t running Mono – and there just isn’t a need for it. From looking through the documentation and speaking to friends, PHP can best do what I need/want it to, even without MySQL



The NCSY Shabbaton Experience

October 23, 2004 Jewish Culture, Shtick

I’ve always had an odd relationship with NCSY. I was chapter president of Springfield for 4 years – 2 Junior and 2 Senior – but that was mostly because there was no one else around my age to do the job. At the shabbatons themselves I found myself somewhat marginailzed, due to a combination of adolescent awkwardness (read: geek) and having an alternative hashkafa which emphasized independent thought.
This past shabbat there was a Senior NCSY shabbaton in Springfield. An old friend my high school NCSY days, is now the regional director of some sort – despite swearing repeatedly that, “I am *never* doing NCSY when I graduate.” Aside from him, I knew a maximum of four other people who were involved with the shabbaton.
Anyway, it got me thinking back to my days as an NCSY’er. Since I’m home, I dug up a poem I wrote for the yearbook.
This was my last year in NCSY. I was outgoing Sr. President of Springfield, and my sister Esther was advisor of Juniors at the time. The Etz Chaim region has a thing called the “Torah Fund,” where they hit up the chapters for arbitrarily assessed amounts – loosely based on membership. This money went to the usual causes of supporting students for Israel programs and getting nice things for administrator’s families.
Fortunately, a chapter could fulfill its requirement by purchasing ads in the yearbook, and Springfield’s was so low that we were able to cover it by getting two ads. Esther and I decided to split one of them for Juniors and Seniors and I knocked out the following poem in roughly 15 minutes (she can vouch for that).
One editor of the yearbook was so offended by it she almost didn’t let it get published. In the end, she let it go through, but only after she mangled the meter on most stanzas. I don’t care enough to fix it right now, so you’ll have to deal with someone else’s horrible editing of a high-school senior’s 15 minute poem.
I present, now with additional annotations,

The NCSY Shabbaton Experience

[Continue Reading...]



We Bang!

October 14, 2004 Jewish Guitar Chords, Meta

I was wondering why the hit count jumped recently. It turns out that we’ve been linked from BangItOut.com – specifically the chords archive.1
Rabbi Week will continue shortly…

1. Although they complain about the lack of Karduner chords, I’ve been trying to correct this problem for some time and hopefully it won’t be an issue.



Year In Review (Abridged)

August 4, 2004 Culture, Odds & Ends

Yes, today is my birthday. I’m now 27, and over the hill. But, it’s a good time to start looking over at the year in retrospective. Most normal people do this around New Years for their respective calenders, but considering I’m still on an academic schedule, I get to go in the summer.1
It’s a little easier this year thanks to this blog. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, but now I can actually look back at what I wrote and sometimes see a different person. Also, it’s been roughly a year since I started blogging. The very first posting on the old site was on May 15 2003, but things didn’t really take off until I moved to YUCS on October 20th. So as it turns out, August 4th is close enough to splitting the difference.
Right now, I’m not in the mood for anything shticky2 like top 10 lists or major meta-analysis, but I have been thinking about what this past year has meant to me, and the blog is a nice reminder of things. In the FAQ I explained “I started blogging primarily to improve my writing skills with minimal accountability. Meaning, I felt I needed a non-threatening public forum where I could speak my mind and not get vilified. (yet).”
I think this has happened to some extent. I’ve been getting better at writing out my thoughts, and perhaps as a consequence, I haven’t been lynched (again, I stress, yet). But in my creation of a personal forum something really strange happened:
People started reading the damn thing.
I’m not just talking about friends from the heights or YU, but completely random people. Even stranger is that these people actually like reading this blog, to the extent where on more than one occasion I’ve had IM’s pop up from people I didn’t know asking me when I was going to post something new. What has happened is that I’ve been able to not only maintain a semblance of contact with older Friends of mine, but I’ve some wonderful people through this. As sappy as it sounds, all the people who have commented or IMmed me to shmooze have had a profound impact on me this year3.
For one example, here’s a beautiful e-mail I got a while back from a fan of the chord collection:

    Greetings from Brooklyn, NY. I would just like to thank you for posting the guitar chords and transliterations of various Jewish songs on your website. I am a Catholic-raised gentile currently working for the Heritage for the Blind; my employers and many of my coworkers are Jewish. Since coming on board here a year and a half ago, I have begun a love affair with Jewish music. There is something about the music that speaks to me, despite the fact that I don?t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, and I don?t “understand” 99% of what I?m hearing. But…my soul gets uplifted at the sound of many of these songs. As a musician, I know that music can often bypass language comprehension, and speak directly to hearts. Five Towns Radio (www.fivetownsradio.com) has replaced Lite FM as the choice of listening music on my computer.

    I play piano, guitar, and sing. I?m often frustrated by my desire to play and sing various Jewish songs — because I don?t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, and I don?t want to mispronounce everything, I refrain from singing. I thought it would be easy to find a website or two that would translate/transliterate the lyrics to these songs into English. (A lyrics page in Hebrew won?t do me much good.) I spent some time looking for pages that transliterated the lyrics into English, and luckily I found your blog through Google.com. It is, as far as I know, one of the only sites online that provides guitar chords and transliterated Hebrew music. I?d like to thank you for posting the guitar chords and transliterations to songs such as Ana Hashem and Shiru Lamelech. I can strum away on my guitar, and sing, and feel that I?m not butchering the Hebrew words to death. Please continue to post chords and lyrics. Your hard work is deeply appreciated. Have a Kosher and Happy Pesach.

This entire year has been extremely important in my personal and intellectual development. I left a two-block ghetto in New York, and took several risks in moving out to Chicago. As a result, I’ve expanded my mind, met so many new people, forged countless positive relationships while reinforcing existing ones. I’ve been thinking in ways I haven’t thought before and I done things I’d never would have tried before and I’d like to think it’s had a positive effect on me.
Overall, this has really been a wonderful year for me, While hardly perfect, I will never regret my decision to come here. For those of you who follow my intellectual and emotional exploits, I thank you for your interest, feedback, and in many cases, friendship. All readers, be it fans or critics, have been of invaluable for helping me refine and articulate my ideas and feelings.
As far as what you can expect for next year, I have no idea4, but I’m certain it’s going to be interesting. For the growing collection of loyal readers, I will try to continue doing whatever it is that I’ve been doing up until now. From simple musings to academic discourses, this is a and will always be a window to my increasingly strange and ever changing world, my personal YUTOPIA.5

1. And Rosh Hashana is coming up….
2. Must be getting grumpy in the old age.
3. Some positive, some not yet positive.
4. Seriously, I really don’t. Job leads are better than no leads, but leads alone don’t pay rent.
5. With footnotes where applicable, and sometimes where they’re not.



Slip Sliding Away

July 18, 2004 Odds & Ends

If you ever find yourself in an intellectual discussion, you might hear (or yourself use) the term “slippery slope argument.” The general logic behind a “slippery slope” argument is that if we allow X, then Y would be the inevitable consequence. Since Y is obviously bad, then we shouldn’t allow X. The main flaws of this logic would be irrationally assigning an extreme value to Y or by not demonstrating how X -> Y. Opponents of “slippery slopes” rarely argue the merits or demerits of the argument but instead chose to redefine the logic as it suits them. Since the reformulation is usually flawed, opponents may then use the derisive “slippery slope” label to easily discount opposing positions.
Some site maintenance pointed me to Zachary Sholem Berger’s response to my review of Rabbi Steve Greenberg’s book. Berger’s first contention is that my position “smacks of the slippery slope argument used against same-sex marriage.”

    If gays can marry, why not polygamy? or incest? or bestiality? The idea, I suppose, is that homosexuality is basically the same thing as everything else outside the bounds of traditional understanding, and homosexuality is traditionally condemned for the same reason as these other activities. Neither of these is true. The same can be said of ones: homosexuality is different from adultery and murder, I should think, in important ways – namely that homosexuality is not, a priori, immoral, while adultery breaches a relationship and murder takes life.

Here, Berger imposes the issue of morality on my legal argument. His equation compares same-sex marriage with murder on moral grounds. Since there is a moral distinction between them, the laws should obviously be different. However, my critique of R. Greenberg was not based on morality, but on halakhic or legal reasoning. The difference is that laws are not abstract, but they are the rules for normative behavior to which all society must (or at least should) adhere. Jurists from the Talmud through the American Supreme Court have concerned themselves with interpreting law not only for the immediate case at hand, but also the ramifications for future cases.
In the example of oness, R. Greenberg argued that since homosexuals are born with the desire, then we should treat them in the legal category of being exempt if they commit a biblical prohibition. However, if the mere innate desire is sufficient to exempt one type of sin, then the logical consequence would be to apply that logic to other desires as well. Once all desires are outside of one’s control, then all transgressions may be dismissed. This is not an issue of what is moral or immoral, but of the ramifications of assigning legal categories.
Similarly, the secular debate of homosexual marriage may be phrased in legal terms as well. Does the government have a legal right to legislate the private sexual actions of consenting individuals? If the government does, then technically, it could have the power to outlaw homosexual unions. If it does not, then by what legal right does it have to prohibit other sexual acts, such as statutory rape based on an arbitrarily decided age of consent? True, many are motivated by moral concerns, but the legal issues must still be addressed.
The other general problem I see with the immediate rejection of slippery slope arguments is the intrinsic inconsistency. Most logical arguments I have seen follow the logic of IF X THEN Y, including those positions taken by those who oppose the slippery slope arguments. For example, Berger concludes, “As a liberal Jew, however, I do sometimes feel like a passenger on a cruise ship, who asks himself, ‘How much longer do we have to be swinging right on this thing?'” To which I counter, what is wrong with “swinging right” on this or any issue? Furthermore, why shouldn’t we be able to discriminate against whomever we chose? If your answer would follow the logic of IF we did that THEN something would happen, you’ve just set up a slippery slope argument.
This is not to say that all slippery slope arguments are valid – some are clearly far fetched. However, each one must be taken at its merits and debated as it is formulated, and not as one decides to interpret them. I find it ironic that “slippery slope” arguments are often rejected because of their misleading logic, and so they are dismissed automatically based on equally misleading logic.
Berger’s other issue deals more with the question of halakhic authority, one which I cannot detail yet at this point. However, I think it’s time for me to just write a general summary of how Jewish Law works, or at least the concepts and rationale for why I believe what I believe.



Moving Day In Israel

June 28, 2004 Odds & Ends

Today is special day in the extended Yuter family. Avi, Esther, and family are packing up out of their home for the past two years in Ramat Bet-Shemesh and heading out to Modi’in. Wish them luck by sending them an e-mail!
In honor of the big move, here are some more nibling stories from e-mails I’ve collected.
First, Eli shows the frum side of sibling rivalry:

    Over Shabbat, Eli had a friend over. While they were playing, things got a
    little out of hand, and Eli kicked Hadassah. After the friend went home, we
    sat Eli down and asked him why he kicked her. This was his answer:
    “Inside of me, I have “yetser ha-tov” and a “yetser ha’ra”. I just couldn’t
    stop the yetser ha’ra.”
    I asked him where he learned about all of this. He explained to me that it
    was from Yehoshua’s talk with the 2 1/2 tribes that settled on the other
    side of the Yarden, towards the end of the sefer.

Displaying his affinity for intertextuality:

    Eli needs to learn the berachot that Ya’akov gave to his sons in va-yechi. We were reading Yisachar’s berachah, and read, “va-yar menuha KI TOV”. Eli looked up and me and said, “Hey, that’s what it says in Bereshit for the days of creation!”

Hadassah on the other hand has become somewhat of a fashion critic.

    While waiting for Avi after shul today, Hadassah saw a lady with her 3 sons,
    all dressed in all white. She curiously asked me, “why are they wearing so
    much white?” (It did look kind of strange).

While this did happen after Memorial Day, it’s harder to keep track of these things in Israel.
Finally, we have a really cute one from Shelomoh:

    Now that Shelomoh is talking more, he is doing cute things!
    Shelomoh has South African teachers this year. He found a toy pacifier while
    I was packing, and didn’t know it was called a pacifier; He called it a
    “dummy”. Today, I asked him what a “nappy” was, and he told me it was a
    diaper, but looked at me funny why I was using that word. Then I asked him
    if he knew what a “pram” was. Avi asked, “Isn’t that a stroller?” Shelomoh
    answered, “yes, pram stroller”. Maybe Hebrew won’t be so hard for him
    after all if he already understands that objects can be called by different
    names (this is the first stage of bilingual awareness). Though, it’s funny
    to think of him starting bilingualism with different dialects of English!

For more nibling fun, check out some older stories