February 25, 2019 Conservative Conversions Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Conservative Conversions

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Luke Ford

Of particular interest to me was R. Yissachar Dov Hoffman’s article on the practice of a number of great Torah sages of prior generations not to kiss their children. Such a practice is so much against the contemporary mindset of what is regarded as healthy that, as R. Hoffman notes, even a Satmar rabbi, R. Israel David Harfenes, has stated that “in our time it is forbidden to follow this path” (p. 293).
Apropos of the above-mentioned responsum on conversion by R. Ovadiah Yosef, in Beit Hillel, Adar 5770, R. Yisrael Meir Yonah deals with a conversion done by a Conservative beit din. He rules that in this particular case the conversion is valid. This ruling was affirmed by R. Ovadiah.
In his responsum, R. Yonah states that R. Moses Feinstein regarded Conservative conversions as doubtful conversions rather than completely invalid…

R. Feinstein himself, who wrote very strongly against Conservative conversions, also writes about such a conversion: כמעט ברור שאין עושין הגרות כדין. The word כמעט shows us that even R. Moshe recognized that there are times when a Conservative conversion can be halakhically valid. In Mesorat Moshe, vol. 1, p. 327, we see as well that R. Moshe acknowledged the possibility that a Conservative conversion could be valid…

I also know someone who offers eyewitness testimony that R. Moshe did not think that every Conservative conversion could be voided without investigation, especially as this would mean that women married to these converts would then be able to remarry without a get. R. Moshe was not willing to go this far.
Similarly, R. Ovadiah Yosef, when asked about a Conservative conversion, replied that before giving a ruling it was necessary to find out which Conservative rabbi did the conversion, “since the Conservatives are not all alike.”[3]
R. Ovadiah was also asked about a woman who had become religious and was interested in going out with a kohen for the purpose of marriage. The problem was that she had slept with a man whose mother was converted by a Conservative rabbi. This man’s family was somewhat traditional as they kept kosher, made kiddush, and lit Shabbat candles. Could the woman in question marry a kohen, which is forbidden if she had slept with a non-Jew? The answer to this question depends on the status of the man whose mother was converted by a Conservative rabbi. If the conversion was invalid then the man was also to be regarded as a non-Jew, and the woman we are discussing, who slept with this man, would be forbidden to a kohen.
R. Ovadiah replied that the woman could marry a kohen, which means that be-diavad he accepted the Conservative conversion. He gave this ruling without even seeking further knowledge about the particular rabbi who did the conversion under question, which appears to me to be an incredible leniency. In seeking to explain this ruling, R. Yehudah Naki writes, “We see that they observed some mitzvot, so be-diavad there is more room to be lenient, at least not to forbid others” (that is, to forbid the woman from marrying the kohen).[4]
As mentioned, R. Ovadiah accepted R. Yonah’s pesak that a particular conversion carried out by a Conservative beit din was valid. In this case, the daughter of a woman who had been converted wished to marry a kohen. This would only be allowed if the daughter was born Jewish, meaning that everything depended on the status of her mother’s conversion.

* There are fourteen different synagogues in Djerba. After visiting a number of them I noticed that they had no women’s sections. I asked one of the rabbis about the lack of ezrat nashim. He replied, in words that must sound blasphemous to Modern Orthodox ears, “What do women have to do with a synagogue?” While in the U.S. we build “women friendly” mehitzot, so that as much as possible the women can feel part of the synagogue service, in Djerba women’s spirituality has nothing to do with the synagogue. While I later learned that three of the synagogues do have an ezrat nashim, women never attend on Shabbat, only on Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur, and Purim. The popular Modern Orthodox notion that it is important for women, especially unmarried ones, to attend synagogue on Shabbat is something the women of Djerba know nothing about.

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The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter–And How to Make the Most of Them Now

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Luke Ford

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How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

Posted on February 22, 2019 by Luke Ford

Here are excerpts from this 2018 book:

* The company put off drafting an army of sales and marketing people until much later. Instead, in 1999 and 2000, Google staffed up with—what else?—brainiacs. Larry and Sergey hired software engineers, hardware engineers, network engineers, mathematicians, even neurosurgeons. Just as with every other facet of their company, Page and Brin wanted only the very best. They wanted Ph.D.’s and scientists. Google would become notorious for the rigorous way it interviewed and screened potential hires—and for its exacting selectiveness. For many years, every new employee was personally vetted by Brin and Page themselves, who expected candidates to measure up to their own intellectual standard. “We just hired people like us,” Page said.

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NYT: Jeffrey Hart, Influential and Iconoclastic Conservative, Is Dead at 88

Posted on February 21, 2019 by Luke Ford

I interviewed Jeffrey Hart in 2005.

Jeffrey: “I thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then I supported [the American-led invasion]. Now I find that many of those claims were not only incorrect, but possibly fabricated.”

Luke: “What grade would you give the Bush administration?”

Jeffrey: “He’s the worst president in American history. I’ve been reading about James Buchanan. He wasn’t bad. He was just trapped in a situation where civil war was inevitable.”

Luke: “How do people at National Review and how do you view the chapter on race in the book The Bell Curve?”

Jeffrey: “The National Review had a symposium on that when the book came out. Psychometrically it’s a commonplace that blacks score 15 [IQ points behind (on the mean average) whites who are about 15 IQ points behind asians].

“No one is saying that this is immensely important in any sense. It’s a fact. If you lack five IQ points on somebody, it does not mean you will accomplish less.”

From the New York Times today:

Jeffrey Hart, Influential and Iconoclastic Conservative, Is Dead at 88
Jeffrey Hart, a defiant defender of the Western literary canon and a profusely credentialed but contrarian conservative who bolted the Republican Party to support John Kerry and Barack Obama for president, died on Sundayin Fairlee, Vt. He was 88.
The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Nancy Hart, said.
Professor Hart, who taught English literature at Dartmouth for three decades, drafted speeches for Ronald Reagan and Richard M. Nixon when they were presidential candidates; wrote copiously for William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, where he was also a senior editor; and was the author of books and a syndicated column.
He was also what Christopher Buckley, William’s son, called a Pied Piper for The Dartmouth Review, the acerbic, decidedly conservative, often inflammatory journal (not affiliated with the university) founded in Professor Hart’s living room in 1980 by four students, including his son, Ben. The Review became a proving ground for such vocal conservatives as the author Dinesh D’Souza and the talk-show host Laura Ingraham.
“Jeff Hart was one of the most influential conservative writers for approaching half a century,” Jack Fowler, the vice president of National Review, said in an email.
Professor Hart defected to the Democrats largely because of the war in Iraq, which he branded as “the greatest strategic blunder in American history.”
Claims by the Bush administration that the Iraqis were stockpiling weapons of mass destruction proved to be “dishonest,” he said, and without a strongman like Saddam Hussein, rivalry between religious sects rendered the region ungovernable.
Professor Hart was an iconoclastic conservative — some would say a political apostate — who supported stem cell research and criticized the Republican platform on the environment. He considered the crusade to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion as impractical. “It is a very peculiar kind of conservatism that values life only in utero,” he said.
Professor Hart liked to flaunt his nonconformity, commuting to campus in a gas-guzzling Cadillac limousine that occupied two parking spaces; sporting an ankle-length raccoon coat at campus football games; coupling a meerschaum pipe with lumberjack boots and a Budweiser tie; seeking to restore the school’s American Indian symbol (Dartmouth was chartered in part to educate children of Indian tribes); and wearing mischievously provocative political buttons from his collection, like one that exhorted, “Soak the Poor.”

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Greco-Christianity

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Luke Ford

Bud says: I had a thought this week while I was clicking around on Wikipedia regarding Dante — I noticed more than ever how many references there are to Greek mythology in Inferno. I found myself reading about “the judgement of Paris,” which is a story from Greek mythology I had never heard of. On its Wikipedia page, at bottom, there are some 25 paintings of the scene imagined by different European (Christian) painters between 1400-1900. It’s interesting to think that, at least among the educated and artists, it was really a “Greco-Christianity” as much as a Judeo Christianity. But I regret to say that I received exactly zero education in the Greek classics and myths growing up as a kid in public school. It’s a real loss, and it makes accessing the Western canon that much more difficult. Did you study the Greek myths when you were growing up? My son knows all about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass though, SO THAT’S NICE.

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