Oh Sweet Latke

לביבה מתוקה

מתאימה לחנוכה

לביבה מתוקה

בורא פרי האדמה

כמו אוזן של המן

50% שומן

בקיטנה וגם בגן

נס גדול היה כאן

Lyrics: Oren Hatch
Melody: traditional
Note: Some latkes may not be ha'adama.  Ask your rabbi.

Beat It

You can drive to our shul by going east on Oliphant street.  About a block before the shul, the sidewalk ends, and then, a few meters before the shul, the street ends.  The street is continued by a courtyard paved with bricks, kind of like a pedestrian walkway.  On one side is the shul, and on the other side is an apartment building.

Most residents of the apartment building, like most residents of Tel Aviv, are not particularly frum.  The building is usually quiet, but one Friday night, one of the apartments was hosting a loud party.  As I walked past the building on the way to shul, I could hear Beat It blasting from the windows.

A month or so later, Michael Jackson passed away.  I saw a few posters on Shenkin mourning his passing.  (The posters were styled to look like the death notices of prominent rabbis and other Haredim, which one sees posted every so often.)  I was a bit curious as to what he died of.  I looked at Wikipedia, which, curiously, did not say.  So I did a little bit of googling.  I never found the answer to my question, but I did come across an article featuring some lite lit crit of Michael Jackson's songs.  This article referred to "Beat It" as a pacifist song.  This, IMAO, totally misses the point of the song.  I think the song is pretty clear.  "You better run, you better do what you can," Jackson sings.

Why?

Because "they'll kick you and they'll beat you and they'll tell you it's fair."  Not because violence is bad, but because you don't have a chance.  It's kind of like "he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day".  It's like those Gemaras in Gittin which everyone reads on Tisha B'Av: this is why Jerusalem was destroyed, this is why Betar was destroyed, this is why [City I don't remember] was destroyed.  The Jerusalem story is kind of complicated, so many people are distracted from the point of the three stories taken together: we stood up for our pride, ignoring the threat of Roman retaliation; the Romans retaliated; and we got our butts kicked.  If we'd only bitten our lips and submitted to the far superior power of the Roman Empire, the Holy Temple would still be here.  Don't throw rocks at someone holding a gun.

So who was supposed to beat it, that Friday night in Tel Aviv?  The Haredim?  I don't think so.  You don't sing "Beat It" to your enemies.  You sing "Beat It" to your friends.  Sometimes, you sing "Beat It" to yourself.  Times are changing.  It's not the Haredim who need to beat it anymore, not even in Tel Aviv.

Don't Let Them Take Our Spinoza Away

In the introduction to Richard Dawkins' excellent book The God Delusion, Dawkins drops the name of Baruch Spinoza and says something like, "pantheism is sexed-up atheism".  Somewhere in Hume's Treatise, he also refers to Spinonza as an atheist (derisively, by the way).

IMAO, nothing could be further from the truth.  Spinoza had God on his mind 24 hours a day.  True, Spinoza's God was not the traditional, "personal" God, but Spinoza describes an all-consuming love for this Being, kind of an unrequited love.

When I was discussing this with a friend of mine, he said, "OK, but Spinoza was a materialist."  This is also wrong IMAO.  Spinoza asserted that Mind and Matter are but two of an infinite number of dimensions.  This is very similar to what is nowadays called dualism, except with Spinoza's usual mystical twist.

Ironically, I think that Hume is often called an atheist himself, although I can't think of good examples right now.  IMAO, this is technically true, but somewhat misleading.  Hume was a skeptic about everything, not about God in particular.  He didn't believe in God any less than he believed, say, in his mother.

Bug of the Day, or, How I Escaped from the Evil Empire

I saw the bug description and my heart sank.  It was that dreaded two-letter word: IE.

I do not own a Windows computer, which means that I would have to borrow one, and worse, that I'd have to debug remotely. Also, debugging on Internet Explorer is a pain in and of itself.  Only Firefox has historically provided good support for debugging JavaScript.

Before I actually borrowed the Windows, though, I looked at the bug again.  The bug said that the text "null" appeared under the chart image on the examples page in IE.  I thought to myself, "Oh, the image URL string that's supposed to be printed under the chart is coming up null in IE."  To verify this, I went to our QA engineer and asked her about the bug.

"So the image URL is coming up null in IE?" I asked.

"What image URL?" she asked.

Apparently, there was no text at all under the chart image in Firefox, Chrome etc.  This looked fine to the QA engineer, but I knew that that was incorrect as well.  In fact, it probably meant that the bug was really one unified cross-browser bug; the method that was supposed to return the image URL was returning null, and the only difference was that IE printed the URL as the text "null" and Firefox didn't print it at all.  In this case, the behavior of IE was actually more helpful.  Imagine my relief!  In all probability, I wouldn't have to deal with IE after all.

So I went back to good old Firefox and opened the examples page.  As soon as I looked at the page source, it was clear that the example was getting the image URL with the wrong signature -- a signature I'd used previously but had since abandoned.  Apparently, since I'd changed the signature, I hadn't even opened the examples page.  I just ran the tests and submitted the code without looking at what the code actually did.

That was kind of embarrassing, but in terms of present work, it was great!  It meant that the problem was in our private examples page, not in the public API code I'd written.  All I had to do was fix the function signature in the example and the "bug" would be fixed.

However, when I fixed the signature, I was in for another surprise; an unpleasant surprise.  The URL showed up, but the chart was gone!  How could printing a URL string make the chart disappear?  I tried printing "hello world" instead of the URL, which, of course, had no effect on the chart.  After messing around for a few minutes, I realized what was going on.  The code to compute the URL was actually clearing the chart's container!  That means that any call to retrieve the image URL would kill the chart in the process.  The entire image URL feature I'd implemented was worse than worse than useless: it was thoroughly evil!

Once I discovered this, it was very easy to fix: I just had to save the image URL instead of recalculating it.  This was something I'd been planning to do anyway, but I probably wouldn't have gotten around to it before the release.

In conclusion, an evil bug in my production code had been hiding behind a bug in my example code.  And it would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for the vigilant eye of our QA engineer, and a little browser they call Internet Explorer.

The Subtlest Diaper I've Ever Seen

We usually buy Pampers.  Every once in a while we buy a local brand called Titulim.  The design on the Titulim diapers doesn't have any text on it.  It has a pattern of medium-size shapes in subdued blue and purple, like wallpaper.

For a while, I didn't pay much attention to what the different shapes represented.  About a year after moving to Israel, I reflected a little bit on the shapes themselves.  There are six shapes repeated on the diaper: butterflies, balls, bears, baloons, blocks, and stars.

Presumably, the B was chosen because it's the first letter of the word "baby", though of course babies do not appear on the diaper.

The burning question, of course, is what are the stars doing there?  Is the designer going for a higher order of subtlety by including a misfit?  "One of these things is not like the others?"

I cheated by not mentioning something about the stars: they come in pairs (one bigger and one smaller), which suggests that together they form a binary star.

Who designed this thing, an English professor who didn't get tenure?

Who Will Laugh?

Recently I wrote a post on the Bruria story, so I decided to write a post about my favorite example of traditional Jewish humor.  This has been on my toblog list for a while.  Besides, Rosh HaShana is coming.

Where did Yitzhak Avinu (known to some as the Patriarch Isaac) get his name?

This will be no mystery to most of my Dear Readers.  Yitzhak means "he will laugh", and he was called Yitzhak because both his parents laughed at the prophecy of Yitzhak's birth.  Avraham's wife, Sara, was too old to have children, and yet Hashem (known to some as God) told them (individually) that she would have a son.  The reaction of both was laughter.

Avraham and Sara laughed at the prophecy because they couldn't beleive it.  Why do you laugh at something you can't beleive?  You can't believe it, so you assume that the speaker is "pulling your leg", "putting you on" -- that the speaker is joking.

Sara, of course, subsequently had a son, so it was clear to Avraham and Sara that they'd been wrong; Hashem had been serious.  Until, a few years later, a funny thing happened.

"Hey Avraham," Hashem said.  "Remember how I said that Sara was going to have a son?"

"Of course," Avraham said.  "At first I thought You were just joking.  But then she did have a son, and isn't he a sweetheart.  Thanks a million."

"Actually," Hashem said, "I was joking, though maybe not the way you thought at first."

"What do you mean?" Avraham asked.

"Now," Hashem said, "you have to kill him."

If Avraham had been a Shunamite woman, he would have said, "Didn't I tell You not to f*** with me?"  But he was a bit more circumspect, so he did as he was told.  Then, when the knife was at Yitzhak's throat, Hashem said:

"Just kidding!  Ha ha."

And that is how Yitzhak got his name.

Funny, isn't it?

Godel Escher Bach Rashi

Rashi's Bruria story is pretty wild, isn't it?  If you can, I suggest reading the original Hebrew (the citation's in the wikipedia article).

Until yesterday, my reaction to this story was just that I found it offensive.  But yesterday, my friend Moshe Noiman challenged me to look at the story a different way.  He asked me, what is the moral of the story?  After thinking about it that way for a little while, it hit me like a ton of bricks.  The moral of the story is very simple: maybe women are not so light-headed after all.

Think about it.  Rebbe Meir didn't intend to kill his wife, he just wanted to have some fun at her expense.  But Bruria took things much more seriously than he expected.

Note that neither Rebbe Meir nor his unnamed student -- the men of the story -- committed suicide, though their misdeeds were surely, from a technical standpoint, just as serious as Bruria's misdeeds.  By playing their little practical joke, the men of this story took very lightly something that the reader probably realizes should be taken a bit more seriously.

The story operates on two levels; it's a second-order narrative.  Rebbe Meir and his student set out to prove that women are light-headed (relative to men).  But they become part of a bigger story which proves the opposite, that men are light-headed relative to women.  Overtly, the story buttresses the Talmud's dictum that women are light-headed; covertly, the story satirizes and undermines that very dictum.

Nice Try, but The Incredibles Was Better

Yesterday I finished watching The Dark Knight.  If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading now, because I'm going to give away the ending.

The movie made me very sad.  I was sad that Rachel and Harvey died.

I think that part of the reason it made me so sad is that the plot was sloppy.  The death of a fictional character can be poignant, moving, even cathartic, if the character is killed by a good, solid plot, like Leonard Bast in Howards End.  When characters I like are killed by a sloppy plot it just gets me down.  As if Rachel and Harvey died in vain, if you know what I mean.

I was also really sad that Heath Ledger died.  His performance as the Joker almost lived up to the hype.  But the movie as a whole did not.  Sure, a lot of things were very well done, but based on the hype, I was expecting The Great American Superhero Movie.

Just in Time

In a previous post I asked about the meaning of the "urhatz" ritual at the Pesach Seder.  In the times of the Bet Hamikdash, we used to do netilat yadayim before eating vegetables that had come into contact with water, but nowadays netilat yadayim is only before bread.  Why do we do netilat yadayim before karpas at the seder?

One approach to answering this question is to suggest that the reason that we wash our hands is to emphasize the fact that the karpas, by the time we eat it, will become mekabel tumah (or in English, "susceptible to ritual impurity").  We are emphasizing the fact that the dipping of the karpas, which chronologically follows the urhatz ritual, will render the karpas mekabel tumah.  In fact, let's go all the way and suggest that the entire reason for dipping the karpas in the first place is to render it mekabel tumah.  Urchatz, then, serves to emphasize this point.  If this approach is correct, then the fact that karpas is mekabel tumah is essential to the meaning of the karpas ritual.  But why would that be?  What is the significance of eating a vegetable that is mekabel tumah at the seder?

Let me answer that question by giving you a homework assignment, Dear Reader.  Remember that midrash where it says that The Jewish People had sunk to the 49th level of tumah in Egypt?  (This is supposed to explain the 49 days of the omer between Pesach and Shavuot.)  Well, your job is to find it and provide a reference to it, preferably a hyperlink to the full text online in English (with a citation of the original source, of course.)  I think it says in that midrash that if The Jewish People had reached the 50th level of tumah, there would have been no going back.  Symbolically, when we eat the karpas, we rescue it from becoming tamei, just in time.

I Hate to See Women And Children Being Dragged from Their Homes, But Why Are There Polling Stations in Efrat?

In a recent post, I argued that the settlements don't make me safer. I didn't make any explicit indication of what policy I was actually advocating. Some of my Dear Readers may have come away with the impression that I advocate the immediate evacuation of all Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Look, I realize that such a move might be a bit drastic, a bit impractical, and, let's say, tactically imprudent.

I hate seeing women and children being dragged from their homes. Everyone does.

I'd like to see an Israeli government that publicly declares that the settlements were a historic mistake. I'd like to see the government issue a call to all the Zionists out there in the West Bank to do the Zionist thing and come home.

I'd like to see government compensation and incentives for settlers who do come home, a move that has been proposed by some Labor MKs.

I'd like to see Knesset elections without a single polling station in the West Bank. Israelis who live in New York and Los Angeles can't vote unless they hop on a plane; the very least that the settlers can do is hop on a bus. The West Bank isn't part of Israel, right? (At least, so the Israeli government claims; that's the excuse for not giving Palestinians Israeli citizenship.)

I'd like to see an end to construction in the settlements. For those who already have construction permits, let them finish, of course, and then stop granting permits. Does that mean that some young couples won't be able to live in the same settlement as their parents? Believe me, I feel very sorry for these young couples, but BSD they'll be OK, especially if we enter them all in a sweepstakes where one lucky couple will win a Glatt Kosher Romantic Getaway in the South of France.

Finally, I have to admit that I would like to see an immediate evacuation of all the illegal settlements. The date of evacuation should be made public in advance, along with a promise that anyone still in the illegal settlements on the date of evacuation will go to jail. Anyone who is willing to leave beforehand can get generous government assistance. Subsequently, anyone who tries to build a new settlement will also go to jail. This would, of course, involve some women and children being dragged from their homes; criminal women who dragged their children into a Holy War over Greater Israel.

All of these initiatives are common sense. I didn't make them up (except for the one about the polling stations).

They won't get rid of the settlements overnight. But they might start things moving in the right direction.

They won't make the Europeans love us overnight. But maybe our leaders will finally be able to say the word "democracy" with a straight face.

Who is a Terrorist?

Obama is going to talk to Iran, as soon as Khameni puts down the demonstrations and takes care of Mousavi. Why are there no similar plans to talk to Hamas?

Most of my Dear Readers would answer simply, because Hamas is a terrorist organization.

But that didn't stop Rabin from talking to the PLO. Perhaps Obama is trying to avoid repeating Rabin's mistake? But if talking to the PLO was a mistake in 1992, why is it OK to talk to Abu Mazen now?

Anyway, is Hamas really a terrorist organization? Jimmy Carter doesn't think so. How about Harry Truman, was he a terrorist? What about Moshe Rabbenu?

We human beings used to have all kinds of semantic debates: who is a terrorist, who is a Jew, what "is" is, and so on. Then wikipedia was invented. Now all we need to do is wikipedia terrorism.

The wikipedia entry on terrorism really drops a bomb, so to speak: the term "terrorism" is actually politically incorrect! Of course, wikipedia provides the correct term that we should use instead:

<wikipedia>The word “terrorism” is politically and emotionally charged,^[5] and this greatly compounds the difficulty of providing a precise definition. A 1988 study by the United States Army found that over 100 definitions of the word “terrorism” have been used.^[6] The concept of terrorism is itself controversial because it is often used by states to delegitimize political or foreign opponents, and potentially legitimize the state's own use of terror against them. A less politically and emotionally charged term (used not only for terrorists), allowing for more accurate analyses, is violent non-state actor."</wikipedia>

Some of you Dear Readers might protest that all of this semantics is just obscuring the issue. Hamas targets civilians. Targeting civilians is evil. Therefore, Hamas is evil. Therefore, negotiating with Hamas is evil.

Believe me, no one hates the targeting of civilians more than I do. That's why this week's parsha makes me sick. But let's consider a few things:

First of all, I'd like one of my Dear Readers, one who is not quite as lazy as I am, to come up with two numbers. One number would be all the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas. Let's call this number A. The other number would be the number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel, and we'll call it B. Once I have those numbers, I can (that is, Google Calculator can) divide A / B. What do you think I'll come up with? Yes, I know that Israel's activities are directed against combatants, and Israel tries to minimize civilian casualties.

Second of all, how many suicide bombings has Hamas perpetrated since the disengagement? (Bli ayin hora!) A reporter in Hamodia recently claimed that the IDF, "with a little help from Fatah", is preventing Hamas terror attacks around the clock. I suppose that may be true, but why is the IDF so much more successful after the disengagement? Did the creation of Hamastan in Gaza somehow increase the effectiveness of the IDF's anti-terrorism (I mean, anti-violent-non-state-actor) units?

Finally, other news sources, including some from the same Hamodia, suggest that Hamas is now actually preventing terror attacks on Israel, and trying to prevent missiles from being fired at Israel from Gaza.

Hamas certainly hasn't officially renounced suicide bombings, or apologized for them, or anything like that. Along with the entire civilized world, I call on Hamas to renounce the targeting of civilians. But should this be a precondition for negotiations, or should it be a goal of negotiations?

I'd like to take an abstract approach to this question and ask in general, when you want something from your enemies, should it be a precondition to negotiations or a goal of negotiations?

What do you think, Dear Readers? My own opinion will appear, God willing, in an upcoming post.

The Settlements Don't Make Me Safer

In a previous post, I said that I would eventually write about my own view of the settlements. Here it is:

Over 2 million Palestinians live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They can't vote in Israeli elections and don't receive Israeli social benefits, plus they lack other rights in Israeli law that I'm somewhat fuzzy on. This has been going on for more than 40 years. Doesn't seem fair, does it? Can anyone with any intellectual honesty call Israel a democracy?

Why has Israel adopted this policy of indefinite occupation? Why doesn't Israel return to its democratic roots by withdrawing from the West Bank and allowing the Palestinians to establish an independent country there?

Zionists such as myself would like to believe that Israel does not withdraw because it fears that a withdrawal from the West Bank -- especially an unconditional withdrawal -- would endanger the security of Israel and its citizens. Israel fears that an independent Palestine would become a base for terror and a client of scary Iran. A popular poster during the recent campaign said, "A Palestinian State Puts You In the Crosshairs."

I would like to believe that Israel is occupying the West Bank in self-defense, but I can't.

Because if Israel is occupying the West Bank in self-defense, what are all of those Jewish settlements doing there?

Believe me, the Israeli army could protect me quite well if there were not a single Jewish settler in the West Bank. The settlers do not contribute anything to the army's ability to protect me. Every Jewish settler in the West Bank is living proof that the Israeli Army is occupying the territory not to protect Israeli citizens, but so that Israeli Jews (who, of course, vote in Israeli elections and enjoy Israeli social benefits) can live there. Proof that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is for Jewish domination of Greater Israel, or, as we say in Hebrew, Eretz Yisrael Hashlema.

So would a peace treaty with Fatah, which of course is only possible if it includes Palestinian statehood, bring real peace, or would it just put me in the crosshairs? Maybe even the Palestinians would be worse off in a war-torn, eventually Hamas-controlled Palestinian state. I don't know.

I do know one thing, though: the settlements don't make me safer.

The Analytic Fallacy

In Stewart Shapiro's excellent book (with an excellent cover photo), Thinking About Mathematics, Shapiro writes: "Quine's thesis is...there is no sense in saying that a sentence is true in virtue of language alone...critics of Quine's view point out that some sentences are in fact true in virtue of meaning.  Can we really contemplate experiences that could get us to deny that cats are feline, bachelors are unmarried, or 6=6?"

Shapiro's strategy is to suggest that Quine should not be taken too literally.  Shapiro writes: "In any case, I think that Quine can concede that some sentences are true in virtue of meaning and so are analytic...Quine's point is that analycicity cannot play the central role that the logical positivists had for it."  In other words, Quine didn't really mean that *no* sentences are true in virtue of language alone; what he really meant was that *almost no* sentences are true in virtue of language alone, or that almost no interesting sentences are true in virtue of meaning alone.  Being a real scholar, Shapiro goes on to pull some quotes from Quine (written much later than the first quote) that support this point.

I am a Dilletante so I cannot give you quotes.  All I can give you is my deep thoughts.  Here they are:

Of course I can contemplate experiences that would get me to deny that cats are feline.  There is a particular animal that I call a dog.  If I go outside and hear that everyone else calls this animal a cat, I will deny that cats are feline, unless people start using the word "feline" differently.

Why?

There are two kinds of linguistic propositions.  The first is empirical: it states an attribute of what people generally mean when they use a term.  So the proposition "bachelors are unmarried" can mean, "when people use the term bachelor to describe someone, that someone is usually unmarried."

The second kind of linguistic proposition is truly definitional, when I define a term that I will be using in my own communication.  So I could say, "I will use the term bachelor to mean an unmarried man", or, "I will use the term gnosis to mean unmediated knowledge, or valid intuition."  This kind of a proposition is not really a proposition at all.  It doesn't really say anything; rather, it lays the groundwork for me to be able to say things, perhaps more clearly (or perhaps less clearly).

I still don't quite understand the proposition 6=6, but I do think that a lot of the logical positivist thought about math is really formalism in disguise.  So let me get back to you on 6=6.

So I don't know if Quine is an anti-linguistic purist or not.  But I am.  No sentences are really true in virtue of language alone.

In fact, I think Kant's distinction between analysis and synthesis was a big mistake and has caused us a lot of headaches.

Haredi Core

First of all, good music is Kiddush Hashem.  When a believer hears good music, like, really glorious music, the glory really goes to Hashem as the creator of the musician and the one who provided the inspiration for the music.  It's kind of like the Grand Canyon or Niagra Falls or a starry night or the sun shining through the trees on Balfour 14.

I recently was thinking of sampling a sound from an Eminem song (in the end, I didn't sample it.)  So my producer (Daniel Machness) and I were listening to this Eminem song and waiting for the particular sound that I was interested in, and Daniel said something like, "I love this music.  I would listen to this all the time except that every other word is a profanity."  I'm not claiming that my music is as good as Eminem's, but wouldn't it be nice to have gangsta rap that frum Jews like us can feel good about listening to?

So from that angle, my music is only as good a Kiddush Hashem as it is good music -- make your own decision.

Second of all, I think that there are aspects of gangsta rap that are a Kiddush Hashem in particular.  Gangsta rap is arrogant and aggressive, in a humourous, self-conscious, post-modernist way.  I have problems with arrogance and anger management, and I think I'm not alone.  Gangsta rap gives me the opportunity -- in composing it and listening to it -- to channel these potentially negative traits in a harmless direction and to laugh at them.  I think this is very helpful in improving my middos overall.

Kadima Now

At some point in Bibi's first term, Ariel Sharon suggested that a Palestinian state might not be such a bad idea after all.

At some point during Sharon's term as Prime Minister (well before Sharon announced his plans to withdraw from Gaza), the Likud party held a vote on the issue of Palestinian statehood.  Sharon said yes; Bibi said no.  Bibi won.  (Sharon was quick to say that he appreciated the input of his party members, but he was Prime Minister and would do as he pleased.)

When Bibi was elected the second time around, he invited Tzipi, the heir of Ariel Sharon, to join his government.  She refused, ostensibly because Bibi refused to accept the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Well, as of this weekend, Bibi accepted the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Time for Tzipi to join Bibi's government, IMAO.

Lieberman will probably be indicted soon, at which point he will be forced to step down as Foreign Minister.  I think that would be a perfect time for Tzipi to step up to the plate.  I think Israel will be much better off with Tzipi as Foreign Minister than Danny Ayalon.  Especially because I always get him confused with Bogey Ya'alon.

It's very simple.  Bibi will be the Prime Minister, but Tzipi will negotiate with Fatah, not Bibi.  Either Tzipi will be able to cut a good deal with Fatah, or she won't.  If she is able to cut a good deal with Fatah, she will give Bibi a simple choice.  Either he signs on the dotted line and shares the Nobel Prize with her, or she resigns, wins the elections, and becomes the Prime Minister herself, which is apparently what she wants.

The time has come, Tzipi.  You could have the Nobel Prize.  Do you need to be Prime Minister too?

As it says in this week's parsha, rav lach.

Settlement Cap and Trade

Bibi and I don't see eye to eye on the settlements.

I lived in a settlement for two years; did Bibi?

But my own personal views will appear, God willing, in a later post.  For now let's stick to Bibi.

Bibi seems to be on a collision course with Obama regarding the settlements.  Obama demands zero construction; Bibi insists on lebensraum, or, as he calls it, "natural growth".

Is it all just a show, orchestrated by Bibi and Obama, to give Bibi the chance to prove that his Israel is The Israel That Can Say No?

Maybe.

But what if it isn't?  What if these two world leaders would prefer to find a way to work together instead of butting heads?  Are "zero construction" and "natural growth" mutually exclusive?

What about Cap And Trade?

What if Bibi were to allow some settlements to expand, and to compensate Obama by evacuating some settlements (I mean currently legal settlements), so that the total number of housing units in the settlements remains constant?  What if the settlements that expanded were large settlements situated in settlement blocks with small Arab populations, and the settlements evacuated were small settlements surrounded by Arab villages?

This is analogous to how the border would probably be drawn if there were ever a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians: Israel would get Gush Etzion and Palestine would get the Jordan Valley, etc.

Pretty clever, eh?

If you think this is my only brilliant idea, you're mistaken.  I'm full of them.  I'm here to help, Bibi.  I'm waiting for your call.

MC Complete, at your service.

Say What?

In the beginning of Parshat Vayigash, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers.  Upon revealing himself, Joseph gives a speech, mostly about the prospect of his father and brothers joining him in Egypt.  After Joseph's speech, the Torah says "and his brothers spoke with him."  However, the Torah does not tell us what Joseph's brothers said.  If the content of the brothers' comments is not important to record in the Torah, what is the significance of the fact that they spoke to him?

One possibility is that this verse is a reference to a verse in the beginning of Parshat Vayigash.  When Joseph tells his brothers about his dreams of family domination, the brothers get so mad that "they were not able to speak to him peacefully."  Thus, the verse in Parshat Vayigash may be coming to tell us that now, for the first time since Joseph's dreams, the brothers were able to speak to him.  It is a closing paranthesis, as it were, of a period of strife between the brothers.

Permission to Believe

Reason is based on faith.

Think about math and science.  Math is kind of like a game played with certain axioms.  To believe that the claims of math (such as, 7 + 5 = 12) are true means to believe that the axioms are valid.  They are intuitive to us, convincing to us, and we believe them -- essentially, we have faith in them.  Science is based on the scientific method, which is really another axiom in which we trust.  (Technically speaking, positivistic science owes a large debt to the principle of proof by contradiction, which is a logical axiom, and is, of course, just another item of faith.)   To repeat my favorite Terry Eagleton quote: reason does not go all the way down.

Think about David Hume's classic example: do you believe that it is safer to go out the door than to go out the window (he was speaking, of course, of a higher-story window.)  I work on the 26th floor (at least, I believe that I do).  Do you think that it's safer for me to take the elevator down rather than squeezing through the cracks in one of the windows (God forbid)?

That belief is based on some form of inductive reasoning, inductive reasoning which has no justification outside of itself -- which is ultimately an article of faith.

What is the difference between faith in inductive reasoning, faith in arithmetic, and faith in God?  What do you think, Dear Readers?  From a theoretical standpoint, I don't think there is much difference.

Is it possible that some article of faith was actually implanted by a Cartesian demon, such as genes or "memes"?  Sure.  When I have faith, I realize that my faith could have been implanted by a Cartesian demon, but I believe that it was not; I believe that it is a true intuition.  Is there any "reason" to believe that it is a true intuition rather than a demonic implant?  Not really; faith has no external justification.  However, just as important, there is no coherent reason *not* to have faith in any article of intuition.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_epistemology for a similar argument.)

The Root of Most Evil

I was listening to Richard Dawkins this morning, and he made the following argument:

Faith is not grounded in evidence.
Therefore, it is impossible to challenge the beliefs of a Man of Faith.
Religion is based on faith.
Some peoples' religion tells them to behead Dutch filmmakers.
Therefore, if a religious person believes that he must behead a Dutch filmmaker, there is no way to dissuade him.
Therefore, religion is a license to immorality.
Therefore, religion is the root of most evil.

What's wrong with this picture?

What's wrong with this picture is that morality is not grounded in evidence either.  If your only tool of persuasion is evidence, there is no way you will convince anyone not to behead Dutch filmmakers.  No evidence can possibly demonstrate to someone that he should not behead a Dutch filmmaker.

Atheists often claim that religion is a license to immorality.  On the other hand, believers often claim that atheism is a license to immorality, or that religion/God is the only possible basis for morality.

(Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen's book Permission to Believe goes so far as to argue that the "fact" of morality is evidence of the existence of God.)

In theory, both are wrong; morality and religion are orthogonal in principle.  I may expand on this in a later post.

In practice, I would love to see statistics that study the relationship between religion and morality in the real world.  Such a study would, of course, be limited by the moral standard it chooses to apply.

Deep Thought of the Day: the belief that all beliefs must be grounded in evidence is self-contradictory, because there is not (and could not possibly be) any evidence that supports the belief "all beliefs must be grounded in evidence".

Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?

"Netilat Yadayim" is a ritualization of hand washing practiced in traditional Judaism. In the days of the Holy Temple, we Jews used to perform the netilat yadayim ritual before eating vegetables, fruits, grains, or their derivatives, unless the food had never come into contact with moisture. Since the destruction of the Temple around 70 AD, we only do netilat yadayim before eating bread. Except at the Passover seder, that is. On Passover, we eat a vegetable before the meal (this vegetable, called "karpas", must be dipped in salt water), and we perform the netilat yadayim ritual in preperation for eating the vegetable.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

Why do we do netilat yadayim in preparation for a vegetable? For that matter, why do we eat this vegetable before the meal, and why do we dip it in salt water?

My own personal answer will appear in a later post. Meanwhile, Dear Reader, please comment with your answer.

Citation Needed

One of you Dear Readers asked where it says that aliyot are not supposed to end with Bad News. Unfortunately, I don't know. Moshe Noiman suggested looking at the end of Tractate Megilla where many laws of reading the Torah are discussed. I hope to look it up soon. Unless one of you Dear Readers wants to save me some work and look it up for me.

Where were we? Oh yes, the first aliyah of Ki Tisa. (Which I erroneously referred to last time as "Ki Tetze". Very embarassing. Fortunately, The Internet allows us to Change The Past, so all traces of that humiliating mistake have been removed. I even changed the title of the post!) Very long, isn't it? Why is it so long, anyway? Couldn't it have been broken up into two or even three smaller aliyot?

Imagine, Dear Reader, that it was broken up into smaller aliyot. That would mean that the Golden Calf aliyah would be number three or four. As it is, the Golden Calf aliyah is number two. And aliyah numebr two, is, of course, the aliyah reserved for a Levi. And wouldn't you know it? The tribe of Levi figures prominently in the story of the Golden Calf. When Moshe sees the nation worshiping the Golden Calf, he cries out, "Whoever is for Hashem, come to me!" He is then joined by the tribe of Levi, and together they put an end to the Golden Calf worship (along with many of the worshipers). In fact, it seems to be as a reward for this heroic act that Hashem accorded a special status upon the tribe of Levi.

You could even say that it is because of the Levi aliyah in Ki Tisa that there is a Levi aliyah in the first place.

(Compare to V'zot Habracha: the aliyah of Levi begins with, "And he said to Levi".)

The First two Aliyot of Parshat Ki Tisa

Why are the first two aliyot of parshat Ki Tisa so long?

Some aliyot later in the parsha are pretty short.

It's not hard to guess why the second aliyah might be long. The second aliyah is the story of the Golden Calf. It's a long passage of Bad News. We usually assume that the Sages try to avoid ending an aliyah at a point of Bad News.

What about the first aliyah? Why is it so long?

My own personal answer will appear in a later post. Meanwhile, Dear Reader, please comment with your answer.