As Yourself
I noticed that parshanim explaining the chumash on the one hand, and shas and posqim showing how the pasuq is associated with halakhah on the other, often end up giving different explanations of pesuqim...
Aspaqlaria Blog
Widen Your Tent in The Jewish Tribune
The Jewish Tribune, “The Voice of Ango-Jewish Orthodoxy since 1962” ran an excerpt of Widen Your Tent in this week’s (10th August, 2002) issue. The excerpt includes the majority of section i.2. Here’s a...
Bribery
This past week I learned a piece in Or haTzafun (Shemos #30 “ההשתתפות שבין אדם לחבירו”) which focuses on the insidious nature of bribery, and from there, negi’os in general. … But I was thinking… It could be that tzadiqim are more vulnerable to bribery. Because bribery as a motivator has another element.
Sim Shalom
Rav Dovid Lifshitz zt”l (whose 31st yahrzeit is today) often spoke about the connection between shaleim as wholeness, and that of another conjugation, “shalom“, peace. Shalom is not simply a cessation of violence. That wouldn’t be an expression...
Behar: Money and Human Dignity
Parashas Behar is a list of mitzvos. The first section is all about shemittah and yovel. A family’s ancestral land cannot be sold into perpetuity. Instead, if someone is forced to sell their holdings,...
Tiqanta Shabbos
This week I’d like to discuss three seemingly unrelated questions about the words of the tephillah: The focus of Shabbos Mussaf davening is the paragraph that begins “Tiqanta Shabbos…” What most readily jumps to...
The Possible Origin of the Schlissel Challah
The week after Pesach, it’s hard to obtain yeast. Sourdough was gotten rid of before the holiday. Fleischman didn’t invent a way to make dry active yeast yet. You had to get rid of all your starter dough.
Easiest thing to do is skim the yeast off of beer. (The term for this yeast layer is “barm”, for what it’s worth.) Problem is, that’s way too much. So, you put some metal into the dough, as metal slows down yeast. Likely a key — right size, handy.
Compassionate Moshe
והיה רגיל להוכיח אותי על שראה שאינני משתתף בצערא דאחרינא. וכה היה דברו אלי תמיד שזה כל האדם. לא לעצמו נברא רק להועיל לאחריני ככל אשר ימצא בכחו לעשות. [My father, Rav Chaim Volozhiner,]...
Guest Post: An Introduction to Trop
Micha’s note: The following was a post written to the Mesorah email list by Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel zt”l, a rebbe-chaver of mine (more: a rebbe who insisted on treating me like a chaver)...
Looking to the Future
But as for me, where I get all messianic and hopeful is when I see pictures of Chareidim making tzitzis for soldiers. … We have taken a huge step forward towards the messianic ideal. I gave but one illustrative example of how much this disaster has prodded us forward. Maybe…
Is that a donkey’s hoofbeats I am hearing?
To Name the Creator
This week’s parashah (Lekh Likha), Bereishis 16:13, describes Hagar’s prayer to Hashem … Before praying one has to think about how one is relating to Hashem in that moment. …
PoseiqGPT?
Dear R Dr Bryode (Cc: Avodah),
Over Shabbos, I read your article about getting ChatGPT to discuss whether a kohein in a same-sex marriage may go up to duchen….
First, a large language model isn’t an AI in the sense of having a good representation of what it is talking about. Words are assigned strings of numbers, vectors, that do correlate to the word’s usage. So that king minus male will bring you to a similar vector as queen minus female. And GPT has a system for using context to distinguish the uses of the word “flies” in
“Time flies like an arrow, but
fruit flies like bananas.”
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