Note: I’m trying to post more often, which means posting from my phone. Which will be easier with simple bullet points. So here goes:

- The issue is very complex. But while I don’t support the divestiture, I can see where supporters are coming from. Israel is stronger so comes off as the aggressor, plus the RW insistence on mixing settlements up with security claims makes it hard to sympathize with their predicament. And a boycott is not terrorism. It’s a valid expression of protest.

- Is BDS really supported by Dustin Hoffman & Meg Ryan? Should Jews now boycott their movies?

- Is BDS really subversive and do they really want to destroy Israel?

- There should be a distinction drawn between feeling Israel doesn’t have a right to exist at all vs. supporting full equality for all residents, with no ethnic or religious preferences and no official state religion.

Rivki Schwartz: age 26, defied her parents who wanted to send her to seminary, managed to get a full scholarship to college, then went to law school while working part-time as a paralegal. She just passed the bar and has a job offer at a prestigious law firm. She does not keep Kosher or Shabbos.

Neighborhood yenta 1: ”Oy, did you hear about Hindy and Shoimie Goldstein’s daughter Chani? Nebach, she went off the derech! Such a shame, such a shame. Such a waste. And, oy, her sisters and brothers will have such a hard time with shidduchim.”

Neighborhood yenta 2: ”Yes, and the same thing happened with Malka and Chaim’s Shwartz’s daughter Rivki! Nebach, she went off the derech too! Oy, such a terrible shame, isn’t it? What a waste of a Yiddeshe neshama! Her brothers and sisters are also going to have a really hard time with shidduchim.”

Both shake their heads sadly.

Scientists say sugar is as toxic as alcohol – and there should be a drinking age for soda

I agree. Not that it’s all silly. Sugar is a serious problem, and our food culture is awash in the refined stuff, causing childhood obesity & diabetes, along with a host of other problems. The human body never evolved to consume so much sugar.

The silly part is the proposed solution. I’m no libertarian, but at a certain point, government regulations become excessive & ridiculous.

If they want to use governmental power to solve it, ending the insane corn subsidies would be a good place to start. Those subsidies result in way too much corn being produced in the US, which ends up making its way, in great quantities, into almost every processed food, especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

The corn industry, in the wake of HFCS’s increasingly negative image, is attempting to rebrand HFCS as “Corn Sugar”, which has a more natural sound.

I have a suggestion – for every rebranding, concerned people should just add adjectives. “Corn Sugar? Oh, you mean Industrial Corn Supersugar!”

The problem with that, as I see it, is that despite his plea for tolerance, and his deeply needed and timely condemnation of Charedi extremists, Rabbi Edelstein still condescends to non-Orthodox Jews in his statement. He refers to them as tinokot shenishbu, which basically means that they sin, but that they don’t know any better.

Is that really how all Orthodox Jews see the non-Orthodox? How about respecting them as adult human beings who have made choices for themselves. They may not be the same choices as halachically observant people, but that doesn’t mean they should be pitied and seen as some sort of ignorant children.

How about simply approaching them as equals?

I’m disappointed in some of the signatories, especially some that are fellow bloggers on blogs I read regularly. This really does show that “Modern Orthodoxy” is really a very big tent, or it’s splitting.

Here’s what I commented:

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Harry,

You’re absolutely right. But don’t forget about the fact that frum couples are expected to spend even more & more money to live a frum life, at the very same time when men are encouraged to stay in kollel for years. Day school tuition, for increasingly large families, is huge! The cost of kosher meat has skyrocketed. and Shabbat meals have become more & more elaborate in certain circles. What non-Jews do for Thanksgiving & Christmas, frum families are expected to do every week! When I visit Brooklyn & go to the kosher supermarkets, I see kollel wives pushing around carts filled with hundreds of dollars of food.

Basically, the lifestyle is unsustainable, yet the men are told they can’t get jobs.

No wonder divorce is on the rise!

While Allison’s explanation is certainly more palatable than Biblical literalism, I have a problem with science/Torah reconciliations as well. It’s basically a struggle to try to mash together two systems that are often incompatible. For example, her equating of “taninim gedolim” with dinosaurs is weak at best.

I prefer to view science & Torah as two separate spheres, utilizing views of the Rambam & others only insomuch as providing a precedent for one to view the Torah allegorically, but not attempting to shoehorn the details together.

Science tells us how the world works, and is based on observation, theories, and peer review. Torah, on the other hand, is about the spiritual realm. The historicity of Torah is irrelevant. The fact that these things may not have happened, that science tells us there was never a worldwide flood, is unimportant. These Torah informs our worship of Hashem, not of science.

The world was not created in 7 days. That’s obvious. We now know the universe is around 14 billion years old and the earth is 4 billion years old, and that we evolved from earlier primates.

Meanwhile, the Torah tells us stories, but those stories are meant to related to spiritually and emotionally. It’s a separate sphere entirely. Trying to reconcile the two diminishes and harms both.

The further you go down the reconciliation path, the more compromises you are forced to make. When you study the Ancient Near East, you begin to realize that much of the Biblical narrative cannot be literally true, and even the authorship of the Torah comes into question. Tying oneself into knots to painfully reconcile details is a losing proposition.

But if you simply view the Torah as a sacred text, whose literal truth and even authorship are irrelevant to one’s spiritual life, then there’s never a problem, and the richness of one’s relationship with Hashem remains strong.

I’m certainly not pleased with the quote, but but is it really as bad as right wingers make it out to be? I assume that the context meant the removal of Israeli settlements from what  he views as Palestinian land. It’s part of jockeying for advantage in any talks, positioning the Palestinian demand of removal of ALL “settlements” beyond the 1949 armistice border.

Also, notice he said “Israeli” not “Jew”.

I’m not making out Abbas to be some sort of statesman-like peacemaker. But I also don’t think the quote is nearly as bad as the hysterical right wing portrays it to be.

This is when the woman has a shorter cycle and her ovulation occurs during the 7 clean days before she is allowed to go to the mikvah. Thus, even though she would have no trouble conceiving a child if she and her husband had sex while she was ovulating, because halacha requires her to wait for 7 days after her period ends, they never have sex during that window when she is fertile.

There have been various solutions proposed. Some poskim find a loophole that allows the woman to go to the mikvah earlier. That is a compassionate stance.

But there are also those who work with doctors to prescribe drugs such as Clomid to delay ovulation. But medications have side effects as well as long-term health risks. In the case of Clomid, there’s even an increased risk of ovarian cancer.

Is that really ethical to prescribe such medications? In my opinion, any doctor who prescribes medication (with all the side effects and health complications) to a perfectly healthy woman because of her religious beliefs is guilty of a violation of his/her Hippocratic oath?

And any rabbi who tells a couple do this is unethical as well. That makes halacha, which is a beautiful thing, warped and ugly.

Atheism

The belief that there was nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then became dinosaurs.

Makes perfect sense.

Right. So cosmology and the theory of evolution, based on painstaking observation and peer review is somehow “magical”, but creationism is rational???

Schools should have required courses in critical thinking to prevent this sort of idiocy.