Pets on Shabbat, Rabbi Morenu, and Epidemics

Orthodox Jews traditionally have not kept pets.

Marc B. Shapiro blogs:

* R. Moshe did not regard pets as muktzeh. It would thus be permissible to handle your own cat that lives in your home, but not to do so with a stray cat or with an animal on a farm, as they are not pets.

* “A widow is forbidden to raise a dog, because of suspicion [people will suspect her of bestiality].”

As far as I can tell, there is agreement among the aharonim that this law also applies to a divorced woman, but there is no consensus about a single woman. There also seems to be agreement that there is no problem with a female dog.

Despite the fact that this halakhah is found in the Shulhan Arukh, there is no question that it is ignored in the Modern Orthodox world, either because people don’t know about it or because they find it far-fetched or even offensive.

* In general, dogs don’t come out looking too well in rabbinic literature…

* In Louis Jacob’s autobiography, Helping With Inquiries, pp. 54-55, he writes:

“Before leaving my account of the Gateshead Kolel, I feel it would be incomplete unless I said something more about Rabbi Dessler, one of the most remarkable men I have ever met. Until he became the spiritual guide of the Ponievezh Yeshivah in B’nai B’rak, near Tel Aviv, Rabbi Dessler was the moving spirit behind the Kolel and his wise counsel was sought by its members even when he had moved to Israel. He was physically small and had a full but neatly trimmed beard until he went to Ponievezh, when he allowed it to grow long. He had studied in his youth at the famed Musar School in Kelm, presided over by the foremost disciple of Reb Israel Salanter, R. Simhah Züssel. He married the daughter of Reb Nahum Zeev, son of Reb Simhah Züssel. Reb Nahum Zeev was also an outstanding Musar teacher. He earned his living as a merchant in Koenigsberg, where he dressed and conducted his life in Western style. His wife and daughters dressed in the latest fashion. He even had a dog. Rabbi Dessler told us of the occasion when a Polish rabbi, in Koenigsberg to consult a physician, was invited by Reb Nahum Zeev to be a guest in his home. Witnessing the Western style in which the home was conducted, the rabbi was careful to eat very little, suspecting that the food was not completely kosher. Late at night, the Polish rabbi was awakened from his sleep by the sound of bitter weeping from a nearby room. Thinking someone needed help, the rabbi went on tiptoe to the room from which the sobs were coming only to hear the “Westernised gentleman” sobbing his heart out as he chanted the verse from Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanity; all is vanity.” Needless to say, after this experience, the rabbi had no further qualms about eating at Reb Nahum Zeev’s table.”[8]

I cite this passage because it reports that that R. Ziv had a dog, and this information must have come from R. Dessler.

R. Ziv was a very great man and there is a lot more that can be said about him. R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg reports that when he lived in Germany, not only did he dress in a modern fashion, but he also trimmed his beard and shook the hands of women. R. Yosef Yozel Horowitz of Novardok was very upset about these things and asked the young R. Weinberg, at this time serving as a rabbi in Pilwishki, to rebuke R. Ziv. R. Ziv told R. Weinberg, “What does he want from a Jew in Germany? I am just a simple Jew and I do not wish to cause ahillul ha-Shem. I behave like the other German Orthodox Jews.”

* In years past there were two understandings of how diseases were spread. One is known as the Miasma Theory, and I can do no better than to quote the opening lines of the Wikipedia entry on the topic: “The miasma theory (also called the miasmatic theory) is an obsolete medical theory that held diseases—such as cholera, chlamydia, or the Black Death—were caused by a miasma (μίασμα, ancient Greek: ‘pollution’), a noxious form of ‘bad air’, also known as night air. The theory held that the origin of epidemics was due to a miasma, emanating from rotting organic matter.”

The other theory is Germ Theory, which in non-scientific language must be regarded as a fact. Germ theory explains the spread of disease as coming about through the spread of living organisms. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, both the Miasma Theory and Germ Theory (in earlier versions) found supporters in the scientific community.

In an article published in 1851,[16] Joseph Loewy claims that the amora Samuel accepted the Miasma Theory. He calls attention to Bava Metzia 107b: “And the Lord shall take away from thee all sickness (Deut. 7:15). . . . Samuel said: This refers to the wind. Samuel follows his views, for he said: All [illness] is caused by the wind.”

* For R. Zvi Yehudah Kook, the “original sin,” as it were, of Agudat Israel is precisely that it was founded by a layperson (Rosenheim), and R. Zvi Yehudah contrasts this to Mizrachi which was founded by a great Torah scholar, R. Isaac Jacob Reines. See Be-Ma’arakhah ha-Tziburit (Jerusalem, 1986), p. 76. In his eulogy for Rosenheim, R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, Li-Frakim (2016 edition), p. 607, also refers to him as the founder of Agudat Israel. Yet it is more correct to say that Rosenheim was the major force in the founding of Agudat Israel, as he cannot be identified as the organization’s sole founder.

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POST-MOSAIC ADDITIONS TO THE TORAH?

Marc B. Shapiro blog:

* One of the biggest theological changes in Orthodoxy in the last decades—perhaps the sources collected in Limits were significant in this regard—is the acknowledgment that asserting limited post-Mosaic additions to the Torah is not to be regarded as heretical.[6] In Limits and subsequent blog posts I have recorded around thirty-five rishonim and aharonim who claim that Ibn Ezra believed in post-Mosaic additions. When you throw in R. Judah he-Hasid, R. Avigdor Katz, R. Menahem Tziyoni, and other sources I referred to in Limits, it is hard to convince people this is a heretical position, despite what Maimonides’ Eighth Principle states. It is also hard to convince them that this matter has been “decided” in accordance with Maimonides’ view. R. Mordechai Breuer states flatly that the legitimacy of Ibn Ezra’s opinion cannot be denied.

* Yet fifty years ago, speaking about these opinions would have been regarded as incredibly controversial, if not heretical in many eyes. Today, it seems like it is no big deal, and I have in mind not just Modern Orthodox circles but in the intellectual haredi world as well. It is significant that it its affirmation of Torah mi-Sinai, the Rabbinical Council of America did not deny the existence of views that speak of small additions to the Torah, but instead noted the great difference between these views and modern critical approaches. Here is the relevant paragraph (the entire statement can be seen here).

“When critical approaches to the Torah’s authorship first arose, every Orthodox rabbinic figure recognized that they strike at the heart of the classical Jewish faith. Whatever weight one assigns to a small number of remarks by medieval figures regarding the later addition of a few scattered phrases, there is a chasm between them and the position that large swaths of the Torah were written later – all the more so when that position asserts that virtually the entire Torah was written by several authors who, in their ignorance, regularly provided erroneous information and generated genuine, irreconcilable contradictions. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, none of the above mentioned figures would have regarded such a position as falling within the framework of authentic Judaism.”

Without getting into the content of this statement which I believe is generally correct,[8] what is important for our purposes is that I do not believe such a statement would have been issued even fifty years ago, as it acknowledges the existence of “remarks by medieval figures” that are at odds with Maimonides’ Eighth Principle.[9]

What are we to make of the approach to Torah mi-Sinai in R. Judah he-Hasid’s “school”? Weitman suggests a few possibilities, one of which is that they believed in the existence of a “continuing revelation,” namely, that the Torah continued to be revealed even after the initial revelation to Moses. This would be an extension of the talmudic view that the last eight verses of the Torah were written by Joshua. While some might find this approach quite provocative, I think it is actually the meaning not just of R. Judah’s “school” but of Ibn Ezra and pretty much everyone who believed in intentional post-Mosaic additions. That is, they believed that these were added by prophets, as they would have regarded as completely unacceptable, indeed heretical, the notion that the Torah contains non-prophetic verses.

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Meir Kahane At Brandeis University

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Living As an Orthodox Jew at the Highest Levels of Government || Dr Dov Zakheim

According to Wikipedia:

Dov S. Zakheim (born December 18, 1948) is an American businessman, writer, politician, and former official of the United States government. In the Reagan administration, he held various Department of Defense positions.

Dov S. Zakheim was born on December 18, 1948 in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his bachelor’s degree in government from Columbia University in 1970, and his doctorate in economics and politics at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. He is Jewish.

Zakheim was an adjunct professor at the National War College, Yeshiva University, Columbia University and Trinity College, where he was presidential scholar.

Zakheim served in various Department of Defense posts during the Reagan administration, including Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Planning and Resources from 1985 to 1987. There was some controversy in both the US and Israel over Zakheim’s involvement in ending the Israeli fighter program, the IAI Lavi. He argued that Israeli and U.S. interests would be best served by having Israel purchase F-16 fighters, rather than investing in an entirely new aircraft.

Zakheim was signed a letter to Clinton about Iraq.[4][5][6] During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign, Zakheim served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice that called itself The Vulcans.

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Emasculated – The problem of men writing about sex

Luke Brown writes:

When Philip Roth died in 2018 an era of unpalatable writing by men about men seemed to close. Roth, who often wrote about antagonistic relationships, was dogged by accusations of misogyny for his portrayals of women. Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago resigned from the judging panel of the Man Booker International Prize in 2011 when it was given to Roth: “he goes on and on and on about the same subject. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe”.

Roth wrote regularly about betrayal: by wives and daughters, and by friends and brothers and Cold War foreign policy and the voting public and antisemites and Puritanism and medicine, by one’s own spine, prostate, penis and heart. But it was for the focus on the penis that Roth was best known, for his willingness to portray masculinity in the unflattering light of desire. In the course of his most extreme and nihilistic novel about lust, Sabbath’s Theatre (1995), Mickey Sabbath remembers the taped phone sex (transcribed word for word) with one of his students that lost him his job, steals a pair of his friend’s daughter’s knickers and tells his wife while trying to seduce her that “there is no punishment too extreme for the crazy bastard who came up with the idea of fidelity”. The novel is shocking in its accumulating vision, though some of the depraved things Sabbath does are simply the result of following the kind of commonplace urges generally kept in check by the male super ego.

When the superego fails, restrictions must be imposed from without. There is a pressure now to avoid the unflattering light, to the extent that you might conclude from reading many recently successful male literary authors that they have “solved the problem of sex”: their male characters have idealized sex drives, or ones we know little about. Meanwhile female writers have taken up the gauntlet, presenting sexual relationships that are real and complex, in which goodness is difficult. Many of us male writers have ceased to describe ourselves honestly, and no longer seem able to present a world in which reconciliation with women is fraught.

Heterosexual male desire has been linked so closely to abuses of power for so long that the two seem inextricable. It is understandable, then, that male writers might want to turn away from it altogether as subject matter. But the risk of avoiding the unpalatable aspects of our experience of love is also that of avoiding what is true and compelling. To write about negotiations of power in relationships with nuance and sympathy – as done by Gwendoline Riley in First Love or Lisa Halliday in Asymmetry (inspired by her own asymmetrical relationship with Roth) or Sally Rooney in Conversations with Friends – might now seem invidious for a man, for expressing sympathy with the type of desire that has frequently been harmful to women, for fear of being seen to diminish the significance of the history of sexism. In the wider context of intergenerational inequality the plot about love’s interrelationship with property arises organically – I used it for my own novel, Theft – but the tradition of men writing about such relationships from the perspective of the older partner is regarded as stale and sexist: no sensible man is impolitic enough to write these sort of novels now.

We do still have Michel Houellebecq, of course, the exemplar of the miseries of the male libido, who was widely portrayed as a misogynist in reviews of his recent novel, Serotonin (2019). You can certainly say that his characters see women primarily in terms of offering sexual gratification. His exaggerated portrayal of the way men objectify women and prioritize sex over everything else is designed to provoke: an overstated refusal of a sentimental humanism which, in ignoring the losers in an atomized society, is no more progressive than portrayals of men only interested in “blowjobs and pussy”. But his vision is too extreme to be representative: there must be a space for presenting men as other than monsters without doing a PR job on them.

The idea of having “solved the problem of sex” comes from J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in which David Lurie, a Byron scholar, is pleased to have found a way to avoid the chaos of romantic relationships and seductions by making a weekly visit to a prostitute. Lurie’s disgrace falls on him when the object of his desire, whom he has begun to think of affectionately as a girlfriend, on exactly his terms, stops wanting to see him. During the madness of his unreasonable grief he manipulates an undergraduate into sleeping with him – “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core”. This use of position and experience to sweep past the objections of a younger woman is the sort of abuse of power that the #MeToo movement addresses. Back in 1999, when Disgrace won the Booker Prize, Coetzee could put into the mouth of Lurie’s ex-wife the sentiments that have been more widely vocalized since: that men accused of such abuse should expect “No sympathy, no mercy, not in this day and age”.

Coetzee’s novel is not an apology for the ways in which entitled men’s desire inflicts violence on women, but it dramatizes the way men’s desire inflicts violence upon women – with a fearlessness that I would argue is difficult today. Lurie maintains to the end that he has been “enriched” by his desire even as we see the case for how his and other men’s desire has impoverished others – even after his daughter is raped by three men – and even as we might (or increasingly might not) share some of Lurie’s suspicion of the pious uprightness with which his colleagues conduct his arraignment.

…Saunders is also on record as saying that becoming a parent made him a better writer. One way of writing about masculinity without having to write about sexual desire is to write about men in the act of parenthood. Max Porter’s male protagonists (in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, 2015, and Lanny, 2019) are children, or fathers, or surrogate fathers in the act of parenting or being parented. The “good-dad” narrative advertises its own progressiveness. The rich responsibilities engendered by parenthood are emphasized above the selfish urge to escape them. Karl Ove Knausgaard who in My Struggle admits to resisting the joy that children can bring – “But joy is not my goal, what good is joy to me? The family is not my goal, either” – has described being attacked at public events in Sweden for admitting to being “a man who looks after children but is bored and would rather write”.

…The literary-minded men I see socially are London-based, in our thirties and forties, and unlikely to represent a perceived idea of the male reader – a category that doesn’t actually exist – in that we read more fiction written by women than men these days, particularly in terms of new writers of literary fiction. The culture encourages us to do so, and there are more good new books published by women than men. (When I scanned the publishing catalogues for January–July 2020, the only lead literary debut written by a man I spotted from a big publisher was Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez.) It could be that fiction by women as a whole feels more alive at the moment because of women’s freedom to own their desire in all its destructiveness and to write about it with relish: not just theirs but men’s desire too. Taffy Brodesser-Aknar’s bestselling Fleischman Is in Trouble (2019) is an account of a decent dad’s sudden ecstatic promiscuity as he is let loose on hook-up apps in the months after his marriage ends: territory one could imagine appealing to Bellow or Roth or Updike, though there is a sting in the sudden reversal of perspective at the end of the novel in which we see his wife’s side of the story, the status-obsessed villain who has run away and abandoned her children – and we realize the role our protagonist has played in her breakdown.

…Sex in the imagination has never fitted neatly into a moral framework of the good and the bad, and men who want to be on the right side of history may feel it is no longer politic to write about it. We must acknowledge again the rhetorical logic of Lerner’s idea of the Spread: We’ve had to listen to men’s accounts of desire for a long time; now it’s women’s turn. Men are always reducing women to minor characters. Why should we listen to them exalting their lust? Isn’t this the cultural noise that allows a man like Weinstein to make his moves? Aren’t you embarrassed to be making the case you’re making?

Men who feel entitled to abuse women need to be stopped. Just as men who feel they have an enlightened attitude to women need to be on guard for complacency. Pointing the finger at the wrongdoing of other men or of younger selves is too easy a way of dealing with the conflict a man will have in his life with women. And when we examine ourselves we should be prepared to disagree with generalized judgements of what men are like: righteous anger provides no guarantee of accurate analysis. There can be no progress towards an ideal unless we start off from the real.

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