Michael el Chayil

Long story short: I ended up at the "Rabbi's" table for a chasuna I attended recently. Waiting for the pictures to be finished and the dancing to start has never been more pleasurable. I don't want to be accused of just another name dropper, so I shall only mention that I was seated between two notable talmidei chachamim: R' Fuest, shlita, Dayan, Agudath Yisrael, Chicago; and R' Zucker, shlita, Rosh Kollel, Chicago Community Kollel. I mention them (besides to impress you), because of the fascinating discussion I had the opportunity to observe. (I shall not be writing "shlita" in what follows, but I thought it each time I wrote a name.) R' Zucker had gotten a question from a woman one erev Shabbos. She had somehow been very efficient that erev Shabbos and finished her preparations a bit early. She was thrilled to be able light candles like a mentsh without the usual rush and "on condition that I can still do the stuff I have to finish....

There is an old canard that women are disrespected, chas v'shalom, by Torah Judaism. That myth, much like the myth that Jews run the world (why, yes, I do  mean to compare those who espouse either), is fueled by hate and jealousy. Of course, to make it believable -- as that author of the greatest slaughter of Jews in modern times demonstrated -- one needs to add just a little bit of truth into the big lie. That is, bits of true statements/ideas taken out of context and woven into a false fabric of destructive lies. Am I being too subtle here? The truth in this case, is that women can not function as kosher witnesses in an official setting that requires two witnesses; such as in court, or at a chuppah, or on a halachically binding legal document. What they neglect to mention, of course, is that two brothers -- even the great Moshe Rabbeinu together with his exalted brother Aaron Kohein Gadol -- are also not valid as witnesses in those same situations. This is clearly not a case of...

Here's a fact: Approximately 10% of dairy cows are treifos ((gleaned from the OU web article,  Milk from a Possibly Treif Cow ). Here's another fact: the milk from a treif animal is treif. One more: By strict Torah law, in a mixture of like kosher and non-kosher liquids, the non-kosher component is nullified by a simple majority. By rabbinic decree, though, we require the familiar nullification by one part in 60. Putting that together, we seem to come to the following obviously erroneous conclusion: Since 10% of dairy cows are treifos and milk from a treif cow is itself treif, and all or our large dairy farms mix milk from many cows in many herds, so the milk in any one bottle is composed of 90% kosher milk and 10% treif milk, since 10% is much higher than one in 60; conclusion: it is forbidden by rabbinic decree to drink any milk from a large dairy farm. How do I know that conclusion is  obviously  erroneous? Simply because the OU, OK, Star-K, CRC, and a whole slew of ...

I am often accused of being over-analytical. Guilty. (I mean, maybe you don't care that there shouldn't have been any sound of X-Wing fighters hitting the outside of the death start because there is no medium in space to support sound waves .) I am also often accused of being overly precise. Guilty. (I mean, nothing can be "very unique" because the word "unique" means "one of a kind" and the only number less than one is zero, so "very unique" pretty much means "doesn't exist".) In any case, both traits -- analytical and precise -- come in very handy when applied to halacha in general,  and all the more so in monetary disputes . As discussed , two of the great tools for managing uncertainty of information in halacha are חזקה/presumption and רוב/majority. Once you are in the realm of uncertainty, you are certainly outside the realm of simplicity. For one thing, many cases of uncertainty have more than one kind of uncertainty...

I remember in the naivete of my youth thinking how strange it is was that people were always complaining about how annoying people who claim to always be right are. After all, no one can be right all the time. I thought, "But it's easy to always be right. Just don't say anything unless you have all the facts." Of course, that is naive, but it turns out there are two reasons that plan can go sour. For one thing, because many find it hard to stick to that rule and it is  precisely  those people who are so annoying. The remediation for that is two fold: (1) train yourself to ignore those people, and (2) don't become one of those people. Both can be solved with serious study of M'silas Yesharim. The second fault with the naive view is, as one learns with experience, many of life's issues and challenges come with ineludible (great word, no?) uncertainties and nonetheless , an actionable decision is required. Halacha gives us two great tools for coping with th...

If you don't regularly daven כותיקין, then I don't think I can really explain how it feels to wake up and see the sun shining through the window. Maybe its something like the feeling one would experience if he arrived to his own wedding a day late. Sure, there are things you can do to remediate, but you really have lost something that cannot be recovered. Even that is not quite the same, because -- as the saying goes -- "there are plenty of fish in the sea", but that תפילה כותיקין is forever lost. What is the remediation? As with any remediation, that תפילה כותיקין is lost, but there are a few levels of salvaging some shreds of communication with the Creator. First, as the Shulchan Aruch says (O.Ch. 89:1), the time for תפילה extends till 10:00 AM. (That is, the first third of the day.  For brevity, though, we'll henceforth call that 10:00AM, which is the time when you have a twelve hour day that begins at 6:00AM. Appropriate adjustments need to be made for other...

I don't often get to hear an advanced Torah pilpul shiur. Those are the kind of shiurim that have enough mass appeal to be readily available on popular Torah shiur download sites. Moreover, most of time for shiurim is while riding my bicycle, which is most definitely a terrible time to get so involved in a topic that one loses track of his surroundings. I also don't often get to hear a shiur from a rosh kollel whom I have known since he was just starting to learn in kollel. (I experienced a pleasant bit of cognitive dissonance, in fact, when I heard him say, "one of they yungeleit asked me a question"; oh, right... the rosh kollel is no longer yungeleit.) Yesterday I to experience both at once. Since this particular rosh kollel davens vasikin, I was also able to clarify some points with him this morning. Here goes. Mistakes are mine; this is a case where one should most definitely blame the messenger. The daf yomi cycle is (apparently; yes, I am quite out of touch...

There are two different kinds of בין אדם לחברו/interpersonal damage related to vision. One is called היזק ראיה/damaging sight, the other is, of course, עין הרע/The Evil Eye.  I say "of course", because I think that the term עין הרע is more well known than היזק ראיה. I never understood the difference -- nor even that there was  a difference -- between the two until I started learning Bava Basra. Bava Basra basically begins with a long discussion of היזק ראיה, which I kept mentally translating as עין הרע. I did that until I got to a commentary that said something like, "which is one of the way that היזק ראיה is different from עין הרע." Whoops. That realization led to enough cognitive dissonance that I was forced to re-examine what I had learned, and even go back to re-learn some of those gemaras. (Another in my long list of reasons why I don't learn Daf Yomi; I am not a linear learner.) For those who are as easily confused as I am, I present this high level overvi...

The Torah includes a borrower as a kind of guardian. That is, the borrower accepts a certain level of responsibility to protect the object, including damage or loss that was beyond his control to prevent. There is, however, one gaping loophole in that responsibility: if it broke/died in normal use. In that case the borrower is off the hook completely. After all, he borrowed it to use and the lender lent him the object for normal use. I stress the phrase "normal use", because there are subtleties hidden there.  The rishonim give two different explanations of why the borrower should be exempt from paying in the case of damage not due to negligence that occurred during normal use. The one that rings a bit more straightforward to my 20th century, mechanistic world ears is simply that physical stuff wears out with use. That's just the way the world works. Therefore, when the lender lent the object for normal use, he was implicitly accepting that is might break. It is certain...