Michael el Chayil

When I first entered the workforce in the late 1900s (😱 really?!), there was a thing called "vacation time." Companies offered vacation time as a bargaining chip to lure potential employees. When comparing job offers, one might weigh the benefit of a higher salary from one company with more vacation time from the other. Eventually the phrase "vacation time" went out of style and it became PTO (paid time off), which also included sick days, personal holidays, etc. Also the personnel departments rebranded themselves as "Human Resources" (kind of a sick and demented term, if you think about it: the status of being a human being has been demoted to just another resource, like computers and desks). The HR departments also invented (in 1970s, but really took off in 1980s) the term " work-life balance " to make everybody feel like the company cared more about you than just a vehicle to make money. (They don't. They just discovered that they can att...

Without context, you can't answer the simplest questions. Here is an example: Is the earth big? Here is a more subtle example. The mishnah on daf 118a of Bava Kamma makes a seemingly straightforward statement, and then goes on to demonstrate that there are four different ways to read it. Each of which leads to quite different and practical differences in halacha. (The interested reader may see at the end of this for more details.) I brought this up because I want to take a more wholistic view of a recent TftD regarding the receipt of bad news. Chazal teach us that our response to bad news and our understanding of bad news are distinct and often apparently contradictory. That being said, it is also clear from Chazal that there is, indeed, bad news. This may stem from the nature of good and bad tidings. Good tidings mean we are right now able to experience the goodness of those situations. Bad tidings, on the other hand, require us to do some work to reveal the goodness. When I hea...