Seeking Ferret

Happy Purim!

It's a hard holiday to do alone. I did some shots with friends on zoom, I chatted some with my sister (pictures of my nieces in a wizard hat are beyond cute), I listened to an online megillah reading, I'll be dropping of mishloach manot at lunch. My hamentaschen are delicious, and about half of them have a lovely triangular shape, so there is that.


I am looking forward to Purimgifts reveals, even though I ended up defaulting on my own stories. In the meantime, this bit of Star Wars purim Torah is excellent.


And I am trying to remember the message of Purim: (That's a joke. Jewish holidays don't have 'a message', they have 70 messages) That no matter how dark things seem at the moment, they can turn suddenly and unexpectedly for the better. Next year, I"YH, we will celebrate Purim publicly the way it should be celebrated.

The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 by Scott Seligman


This was one of the most fun I've had reading nonfiction in ages, and then I gave it to my father and he's been having a lot of fun reading it, too, and I think my mother will probably read it after him. I highly recommend this if you're interested in the history of kosher meat or the history of US labor movements or both. And honestly who isn't?

In 1902, kosher beef in New York City increased in price from about twelve cents a pound to about eighteen cents a pound. The reasons for this are in total a little complicated and many things share blame, and Seligman goes through them all in detail, but the primary reason was the impact on the beef market of the so-called Beef Trust, a technology-enabled agreement in the late 19th century between several major beef companies to fix prices and split territories. The Beef Trust largely dealt in non-kosher meat, though, so their effect on the kosher market was indirect and harder to trace; as a result, the observant Jewish wives of the Lower East Side blamed not the Beef Trust but the local butchers who were actually selling them their meat. The butchers, meanwhile, blamed their distributors, who blamed the market.

When the price increased, not long after another smaller but significant increase, the Jews held big public meetings and decided to strike, agreeing not to buy beef and to prevent others from buying beef from local butchers. The protests got violent and lasted for months before a combination of settlement agreements and the strikes petering out calmed things down, but beef protests would remain a phenomenon for the next several decades. The cartoons of housewives smashing butcher shops that appeared in newspapers at the time are amazing.

Seligman singles it out as being an unusually female dominated movement for the time, with a couple of 50-something women being the initial organizers of the protests, although as the strike went on there was increasing pressure for the women to cede their leading roles to male labor leaders and Rabbinic figures. Seligman does a brilliant job, given limited primary source reference, of teasing out the ways in which it being a female dominated movement was significant- the fact that organizational meetings could take place when husbands were at work and the significance of female social networks and door to door activism, the struggle to get recognized to speak on the issue at the more conservative synagogues on Shabbos, the way that women being beaten by the police drew greater instantaneous sympathy than men doing the same. He also traces a line showing how important female labor and other activist figures of the 1910s and 1920s cut their teeth in the kosher meat wars, learning how protests were organized and taking inspiration from the leaders of the 1902 protests. I learned a lot that was facinating and I really enjoyed reading this.

Happy Chanukah!

I have days off to be taken by the end of the year, so I took off Friday even though taking off for Chanukah isn't really a thing. I drove up to go see my sister (outdoors, masked and distanced) and dropped off Chanukah gifts for my nieces. We hadn't seen each other in person since shortly pre-pandemic and I hadn't met my younger niece who was born in June in person yet, so I was very excited.

My younger niece is very cute, and she growls, it's adorable. My older niece is somehow two and a half and she played tea party with me and waved various sticks while shouting "Abra kedabra" and mostly just ran around, and I was so grateful to have the chance to spend time with them, and to catch up with my sister.


Apparently this is the Chanukah of awesome Chanukah music by members of the original Hamilton cast.

It was a mostly good first days of Sukkot. My new sukkah stood up, the weather was terrific, I cooked tasty food, and I had a good time. But I struggled with the loneliness of doing Sukkot all by myself.

Friday evening I ate my chicken dinner by myself and sang zemiros while reading from the newly translated R' Chaim Kanievsky commentary on zemiros, and I listened as my neighbors sang zemiros from their sukkahs, and then from the other side there were zemiros from a few houses down the block, and it was nice to feel like part of that community even though I was also distanced from it. And I felt a sense of peace of almost sinking into the familiar holiday feeling. But it also really made me miss going from sukkah to sukkah and sharing meals with people.

I think it also hurt a little that my new sukkah is noticeably bigger than my old one. I got tired of the crummy half-assed wood frame I put together a few years ago, which has gotten harder and harder to assemble, and more and more unreliable to stay up, as the wood warps in my warm, sometimes humid basement year to year. So last fall I bought a bunch of PVC pipe to replace the wood frame, and it has mostly been a success in terms of stability and ease of assembly, but having a bigger hut and less people to sit in it sort of intensified the loneliness. I"Y next year, it will still be bigger and easier to assemble and more welcoming.

I also bought some of those programmable color-changing LED strips to hang in the sukkah and that was a big success, plenty of light and I can do fun mood lighting effects when it's not chag. I'm looking forward to playing with that for the next week.


Over the rest of the chag I spent a bunch of time by myself in the sukkah, reading and eating and drinking and hanging out. My cholent came out really well! Sunday afternoon I spent a few hours drinking beer and reading Lavie Tidhar's lovely Central Station, finally, which is a fantastic way to while away a Sunday afternoon. I also finished Georgette Heyer's Cotillion.

It was a good holiday and I enjoyed myself, and yet COVID has just set the bar for what I accept as good noticeably lower than it was before and I couldn't escape also being aware of that.


Chag sukkot sameach, everyone.

Smell the Anti-Semitism


In early 2017 I wrote a facebook post, but I think I didn't end up posting it because it didn't really feel like it was worth the argument it would provoke with my lefty friends. It was centered around a piece of math. In 2014 and 2015 each, there were about 900 anti-semitic incidents recorded by the ADL. That works out to about 3 a day. That's just normal. Obviously you don't read in the newspaper every day about 3 incidents of anti-semitism, unless you read the Jewish press, in which case you do get a barrage of news about anti-semitic incidents. And then suddenly in 2017, Trump got elected and the New York Times was reporting about anti-semitic incidents every other day, and I was seeing all my lefty goyish friends talking on Facebook about how Trump had emboldened anti-semities.

What the math means for goyim is that if you want to politicize anti-semitism, all you need to do is start publicizing it in the mainstream press. If suddenly you start putting every anti-semitic attack in the New York Times after Trump is elected President, it will seem like anti-semitism is on the rise, when it might or might not be true. (By all accounts it does seem like anti-semitic incidents rose after Trump was elected... 4 or 5 incidents a day instead of 3. Is that a notable rise? I dunno.) The Algemeiner, a right wing Jewish newspaper, wrote a memorable article in 2017 after there were a couple of Jewish cemeteries desecrated, reminding everyone that a whole bunch of cemeteries got desecrated when Obama was President, because Jewish cemeteries getting desecrated is normal, it just happens.

I wanted to warn people not to assign political meaning to the anti-semitism, it's just a thing Jews have to endure because it's probably not going to get better and it might get worse. Newspaper headlines about anti-semitic attacks are not on their own proof that Trump is emboldening the right.

But I feel like the article I linked has fallen victim to the same fallacy in spite of not pushing a specific political agenda, the fallacy of thinking that the fact that there's a lot of anti-semitism happening now that the author is aware of means that it's a new phenomenon. The reality is that Jews are just always hated. It's not new. Any year you want to make seem bad, you can dig up the Jewish Week and find plenty of examples to horrify yourself.

This is an exhausting reality.

In 2014, London was becoming an eyebrow-raising place to be Jewish (swastikas graffitied in the city, kosher food boycotted from major supermarket chains, etc.), and Los Angeles was still allegedly the golden Medina. So I jumped ship.

To this NY metro area Jew, this is crazy. Swastikas getting graffitied in the city is not a new thing, it's not a reason to flee, it's just life. The idea that London in 2014 suddenly became dangerous for Jews and it was time to leave is a sign of a bizarrely privileged Jewish identity.

American Jewry is not unaware of anti-semitism, we're not fucking sleepwalking through it, but where are we going to go that's better? And so we fortify our synagogues and pass quiet notes back and forth about threats, and we pray.

A lot of shuls have closed around here, thankfully. A few are still resisting, but I expect that resistance to wear down in the next couple days. Pikuach nefesh definitely supersedes davening as a kahal. Still, it's hard, Judaism is so much a religion about community. The whole concept of a minyan is that Judaism doesn't fully work if practiced alone. David Zvi Kalman had a beautiful piece in Tablet this week about that struggle.

My grandfather's yahrzeit is today, and my father really still wanted to say Kaddish. He found a minyan, not our normal one, that was still running, and I gave it a lot of thought both ways before deciding to go to support him and my uncle.

It was one of the weirdest prayer services I've ever been to. It was held in the hall that normally hosts Rosh Hashanah services with over 500 people in attendance, but this time it was about twenty people and the chairs were spaced about ten feet apart through that massive space. Everyone prayed and then we said goodbye from a distance and quickly scattered.

I probably still shouldn't have gone, the service probably shouldn't have happened, but I guess we made reasonable efforts to mitigate risk, and I'm glad I was able to be there for my father.

The making of Ḥanina ben Dosa: Fan fiction in the Babylonian Talmud by Monica Amsler in the journal Transformative works.


I have sort of mixed feelings about this. In general, I support this kind of playfulness with Talmudic text, and I support thinking about fanfiction as technique and how it interacts with other literary traditions, and I love the observation in the beginning of the piece about how both fanfiction and Talmud are inherently written traditions, not oral traditions, in spite of one's initial temptation to see them as oral. I'm fully 100% delighted that Transformative Works published this article.

But I think there's a tendency in the article to primarily comprehend baraita as a framing device, a literary technique, rather than first trying to see it as a device for incorporating and understanding pre-existing traditions. I believe baraita is primarily a method by which the Amoraim looked at actual known practices, as observed empirically and as learned from their own teachers, that were in conflict with the texts of Mishna and Tosefta, and reconciled them. That said, I think it is clear that sometimes baraita is a literary device, and Rav Yosef's objection at [7.3] is a pretty obvious example of that, of the Rabbis struggling to make sense of an orally transmitted literary narrative and using midrashic (fanfictional) technique to resolve a narrative plot hole. But the article's interpretive lens generally overlooks the primary purpose of baraita and its interactivity with oral and empirical tradition. It makes it seem like the Hanina ben Dosa stories in the Babylonian Talmud were constructed from whole cloth by the Amoraim as part of a textual game they were playing.

I don't know exactly what feels off about it, I've tried to explain my alternate interpretation three different times and can't quite get hold of it. I think there's a version of the explanation of how the Savoraim put together these Hanina ben Dosa stories that does a better job of acknowledging the role of mesorah in the process, that's all.

But still, fanfic and Talmud, that's cool, right?

This morning at the minyan I go to on Sunday mornings, we celebrated the 85th birthday of the minyan's lay leader. So whereas on Sundays we normally get about fifteen people, and sometimes struggle to reach a minyan, today we topped thirty. It was fantastic to see everyone and celebrate together. Especially since we lost another member of the minyan earlier in the week.

Afterward I went to my parents' house to help them schlep their new mattress up the stairs. I'll be back over there in a few hours and spending Rosh Hashanah with them.


Shana Tova, a happy New Year, to everyone.

The story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza:


There were these two people named Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, living in Jerusalem in the mid first century CE. Bar Kamtza means 'the son of Kamtza', but there's no sense in the story that these two people are related. The significance of the names in the story appears to be that they are very similar names, to the point where a person instructed to go talk to one of the people could easily mishear and talk to the other.

It's not explicitly stated, but Bar Kamtza appears to have been a Roman sympathizer, whereas Kamtza was a prominent associate of the Pharisees, the Rabbinical leaders of the day. Instead, all the Gemara says is that a certain rich and influential Jew was friends with Kamtza and hated Bar Kamtza. No reason is given for this hatred, and a traditional teaching of this Gemara is that it was baseless hatred like this that caused the destruction of the Second Temple. But that being said, the strong implication of the story is that Bar Kamtza was a Roman sympathizer and this is the reason he was hated. Which, if you ask me, is a pretty reasonable reason to hate him.

It says that the great Rabbis of the era were invited to a feast by the rich Jew, and the rich Jew attempted to invite Kamtza to the feast, but his servant mistakenly invited Bar Kamtza. When Bar Kamtza came, perhaps believing that this was a gesture toward reconciliation, he was refused by the host, even after he offered to pay for the food he would eat, and even to pay for the whole feast. The Rabbis who were at the feast said nothing and let the host throw Bar Kamtza out of the party, clearly indicating that they favored the host over Bar Kamtza.

In retaliation, Bar Kamtza devised an elaborate revenge that set the Rabbis against the Romans and ultimately led the Romans to destroy the Temple, by putting a small but significant blemish on an animal sent by the Romans as a gift to be sacrificed by the Israelites in their Temple. When they refused to offer the animal, the Romans decided to destroy the Temple to avenge the insult, says the Gemara. Thus Bar Kamtza's revenge and its result seems wildly out of proportion to the crime of insulting you at a party.

Still, the Rabbis had a chance to prevent this revenge from taking place. The Chachamim stam sought to accept the blemished sacrifice in order to prevent the destruction of the Temple, but Rabbi Zekharya ben Avkolas demurred, on the grounds that this would be a desecration of God's name and teach the people that such desecrations were acceptable. Thus, Churban.

What most fascinates me about this story is how ambiguous the moral is. The most obvious moral is that humiliating your enemies is bad, or even that having enemies is bad, but Bar Kamtza seems like the kind of person you wouldn't want around at your parties, so it seems hard to blame the host for that.

The Rabbis debate the moral of the story at the end, in typical Rabbinical fashion. Rather than pin the locus on the more obvious idea of irrational hatred, Rabbi Yochanan blames the Rabbi Zekharya ben Avkolas's decision not to accept the invalid sacrifice in the name of peace. His lesson from the whole story seems to be that preserving the Jewish people and their ritual life in Jerusalem was more important than maintaining the smallest details of the ritual law at all costs.

It was a really lovely Shavuos all around, though 3 Day Chagim are always a little bit overkill. The Shabbos beforehand was a friend's aufruf- we had a nice, whiskey-filled celebratory lunch after davening, and then I did a little learning of Pirkei Avos and got a long Shabbos nap.

I started Tikkun Leil Shavuos at my local shul, then after a few hours walked over to someone's house that hosts a bunch of people for learning and massive amounts of sugar. Davening started at 5AM and was over by 6:45, and then I finally slept.

Incoherent and Incomplete Notes on Tikkun Leil Shavuos, because I was sleepy and couldn't actually take notes during the shiurim

-The First shiur I heard was on the Rambam's justification for learning from non-Jewish philosophers. The Rabbi tried to ask if Rambam's justification was connected to R' Meir's relationship with R' Elisha ben Abuya, or Acher, the heretical Tanna that R' Meir apparently continued to learn from because he knew halakhos nobody else did. The Gemara in Chagiga discusses this problem and presents two opinions- one is that nobody may learn Torah from an apikores (and therefore R' Meir was wrong to do so) and the other is that a great person can do so because they are compared to a nut that has a hard shell of Torah to protect them from corruption, but a lesser person may not because they are more vulnerable to being led off the proper path. Looking at Mishneh Torah in the halakhos for learning Torah, Rambam only teaches the former position as the psak. The Rambam holds that it is impermissible to learn Torah from an apikores even if one is a Gadol. Nonetheless Moreh Nevuchin and even his commentaries on the Mishna are full of citations to non-Jewish scholars! The conclusion is that the Rambam considers it forbidden to learn Torah from corrupt sources, but thinks it permissible to learn chokhma from anyone, Jew or non-Jew, because chokhma is valuable whoever it comes from.

This is a little difficult because in general the Rambam's definition of Torah seems pretty broad, how do you distinguish permissible chokhma from impermissible Torah? Also, the Rambam uses the verse cited to say that R' Meir learning from Acher was okay as an epigram on Moreh Nevuchin, perhaps hinting that he did have sympathy for R' Meir's position.

In any case, the lecture than shifted from halakhic to hashkafic subjects. He made two hashkafic arguments. First, that this idea that one must learn Torah from a proper and uncorrupted source is an important idea that stems from a conception of Matan Torah as being a literally world-changing event that altered every Jewish soul in a way that makes us particularly receptive to receiving Torah. The sources we learn Torah from matter because learning Torah from the wrong place is in some metaphysical sense a denial of the change to our soul at Matan Torah. I am explaining this badly.

Second, that R' Meir was exceptional, perhaps, because of a lesson he learned from his wife Beruriah as noted in a famous story in the Gemara in Berakhos. R' Meir had enemies, and he prayed for them to die, until his wife rebuked him and told him he should instead pray for them to repent, which they did. He suggested that from this story, R' Meir learned that even the blackest sinners had space in their souls for repentance, and that's why he thought there was uncorrupted Torah in Acher to be learned. I thought this was a really nice idea to end the shiur on.


The next shiur was on the laws of B'Nei Noach and whether Jews have some sort of affirmative obligation to spread them, as the Lubavitcher Rebbe believed.

The conclusion was, probably not. The passages the Lubavitcher interpretation leans on seem much more likely to be speaking to our administration of law to non-Jews living under Jewish political sovereignty, not to a general obligation as part of being Or Lagoyim. But it was interesting nonetheless to consider our position relative to non-Jews in these terms. The Noahide laws are written about in Jewish literature in very strange ways. They're largely dealt with in the language of Jewish halakhists, but they're discussing obligations on people who don't hold by the principles of Jewish halakha, which is absurd. I discussed some of this broadly during my Daf Yomi posts, the scenario in which the law of Ever Min Hachai is stricter for non-Jews than Jews because non-Jews don't have a concept of shechita. This is a totally counterintuitive way to think about Noahide laws. (in fact, the Rambam's discussion of the Noahide laws says that non-Jews who observe them get a chelek in Olam Haba only if they have not come to them for ethical reasons.)

To justify this, the Rabbi went off on a detour about the nature of the obligation of the Noahide laws on Jews. There's two possible ways to understand Har Sinai: Either Hashem added 606 laws to the pre-existing 7 laws of B'nei Noach, or Hashem gave 613 all new commandments at Sinai which included new versions of the laws of B'nei Noach, so that Jews are not obligated in the original version of the 7. This latter version is the more aesthetically pleasing and theologically consistent, and gives an interesting frame to consider the Jew's relationship to non-Jews.


The next shiur was on the halakhic issues involved with CRISPR, which are largely the halakhic issues involved in in vitro fertilization, about whether one is permitted to discard fertilized embryos, and so on. (Probably, yes.) He then shifted to discussing the hashkafic questions involving CRISPR, whether Jews are allowed to 'play God'. There is a counter-position, as expressed in the Sefer haChinuch on the mitzvot of kilayim, that the problem with these cross-breeds is that they usurp God's position about the proper number and type of species in the world. But largely Jewish thought is aligned with the idea that we can play God, that we were created B'tzelem Elokim and it's our mission to do tikkun olam and perfect this world. So yay therapeutic applications of CRISPR, less yay possibly to other applications?


The next shiur was on the origins of marginal minhagim that everyone takes for granted.

One example was saying "L'chaim" before drinking alcohol, specifically immediately before saying kiddush. He traced that to the ancient method of execution. They'd bring the accused out in front of the beis din and hear the evidence and question the witnesses, and if innocent they'd say "L'chaim, L'chaim," and if guilty, "L'Misa, L'Misa", and if condemned they'd then give them strong alcohol to sedate them before the execution. So therefore in circumstances when we are consuming alcohol but not as part of an execution, the tradition developed to say "L'chaim" to indicate that we are not about to be executed.

And the mig'dal mag'dil difference between Birkat Hamazon during the week and on Shabbos. There's a folk legend that this came from a misprint. The pasuk with mig'dal or mag'dil appears in Shmuel II and in Tehillim, with the only difference in the k'tiv of the two psukim being mig'dal or mag'dil. So some theorized that a printer had written Mig'dal (בש״ב) meaning "In Shmuel Bet" and people had misunderstood it as an abbreviation for "On Shabbat". Which is a delightful folk legend! But this can't be the explanation because there are sources for the minhag that predate the printing press and the separation of Shmuel into Alef and Bet. So apparently we don't know the real reason.


I also learned a litle bit of Masechet Shabbos, posts on that to begin soon.