Avodah Mailing List

Volume 16 : Number 109

Tuesday, January 31 2006

• Re: Whip Cream
• Re: Whip Cream
• Re: Whip Cream
• Re: Whip Cream
• Re: Whip Cream
• Benching Gomel frequently (after flying)
• Re: Rape of Dinah
• Re: the Torah's response to sex offenders
• RE: Emunah, Perakim and the Mabul
• Re: Shiras hayam
• Re: Emunah, Perakim and the Mabul
• Re: Emunah,Perakim and the Mabul
• Re: Niftar on Shabbos
• Re: choni hameagel
• RE: Emunah, Perakim and the Mabul
• RE: Benching Gomel frequently (after flying)
• RE: Whip Cream
• RE: Whip Cream

R. Shalom Kohn had asked:
>On a can of aerosol whip cram (pareve), from one of the "heimishe" brands,
>there appeared the following admonition: "Consult your rav before using
>on shabbos".
>Does anyone know the halachic issue being raised?

The problem isn't BONEH but the tendency of people to make designs
or pictures with the whipped cream and this (according to the Rambam)
would be a tolada of KOTEV.

KT
Josh

"Kohn, Shalom" <skohn@Sidley.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know the halachic issue being raised?

Nolad?

HM

R'  Shalom Kohn asks:
Does anyone know the  halachic issue being raised?

My guess: nolad. The product is not whipped cream while it is still
in the can, but some kind of liquid that becomes cream as it is sprayed
from the can.

 -Toby Katz
=============

R' Shalom Kohn asked: 
> On a can of aerosol whip cream (pareve), from one of the "heimishe"
> brands, there appeared the following admonition: "Consult your rav
> before using on shabbos". Does anyone know the halachic issue being
> raised?

Most (all?) of such cans spray the whipped cream in a sort of "star"
shape. According to the Shmiras Shabbos K'Hilchasa 11:14, the cream may be
sprayed out only if you're not interested in making any particular shape.

Given that this star is prettier than the shape which would come out
of the can if the nozzle wasa simple circle, I can easily see why the
manufacturer suggests that you get your rav's opinion on whether this
crosses the line.

My guess was that the melacha involved is boneh, but the SSK's footnotes
there refer to a Beur Halacha about memrach.

Akiva Miller

R' Shalom Kohn asked:
> On a can of aerosol whip cream (pareve), from one of the "heimishe"
> brands, there appeared the following admonition: "Consult your rav
> before using on shabbos". Does anyone know the halachic issue being
> raised?

Most (all?) of such cans spray the whipped cread in a sort of "star"
shape. According to the Debreciner Rav, this is assur on Shabbos, and
the cream may be sprayed out only if the tip is cut to be a simple round
circle. (Source: "Piskei Hilchos Shabbos", vol 3, halacha 1:11)

Akiva Miller

In many Anglo communities in Israel there are always people traveling
back and forth to the US, either people on business, relatives visiting,
etc. Therefore, every shabbos there is a parade of people coming up to
bench gomel and there are people who bench gomel every few weeks after
they return from chu"l. I would like to analyze this both from a halachic
perspective and a hashkafic perspective.

The Gemara in Berachos (54a) states that 4 people are chayav to bench
gomel (someone who went in the desert, sea, was sick, or in jail). The
Talmidei Rabbeniu Yona (43a in the pages of the Rif) bring down the
opinion of the French Chachamim that say that one should recite Hagomel
only when one has traveled on a dangerous road. Based on this the custom
of French Jews was not to say Hagomel after intercity travel because
they did not consider travel on the roads of France to be dangerous and
this opinion is quoted in Shulchan Aruch (219:7). Accordingly, it is
the practice of Ashkenazim to recite Hagomel only after traveling on a
dangerous road.

Based on this RYBS held that one does not say hagomel on plane travel (if
one does not perceive it to be dangerous) as it is today the safest form
of travel (much safer then driving) and is the equivalent of intercity
travel of the French Jews. The Piskei Teshuvos quotes that the Brisker
Rav did not bench gomel after flying either.

R' Moshe (Igrot Moshe Orach Chaim 2:50), has a different approach. He
holds that since, if an airplane, should malfunction, the passengers would
be doomed this is by definition considered dangerous even if statistically
it is not dangerous. This is different then a car, where if one's car
breaks down, you can stop on the side of the road and be reasonably
safe. therefore, he holds that a person benches gonel after flying.

The idea of benching gomel is that we want to thank Hashem for saving
us from a dangerous situation (the Rosh in Berachos compares it to a
Korban Todah). IMHO benching gomel every few weeks trivializes the whole
thing. If you watch the people who make the beracha you can see that
there is no real emotion there, they are not really thanking Hashem,
this is understandable, nothing happened to them. What this does is
itdesensitizes people to the idea and meaning of bircas hagomel and
makes the whole thing into a bit of a joke.

I wonder if this consideration should not affect the halacha as well.
Does it make sense for someone who travels a lot to continually bench
gomel?

> Dinah and Schem brought out more than just a
> fine in how her brothers treated it. They mass murdered the entire
> town.
> So it can't just be that attitudes about rape were looked at
> differently.

I'm not so sure that the punishment of Shechem was for rape... what I
mean, it seems from a simple reading of the text that it was more about
"family honor" and was a variation of honor killings.

34:7. And the sons of Jacob came from the field when they heard it;
and the men were grieved, and they were very angry, because he had done
a vile deed in Israel in lying with Jacob's daughter; which thing ought
not to be done.

Note that a vile thing was not done against Dinah, but it was done against
Israel. And her name is not even mentioned here, she is identified as
Jacob's daughter. that was the problem!

Mark Dratch

MSDratch@aol.com wrote:
> The reason for forcing the marriage (dependent, of course on the woman's
> consent) was meant to protect her interests. In the premodern world,
> a non-virgin, especially one that was raped, was "damaged goods" and
> marrying her off was next to impossible. So, while the marriage to
> her rapist was detestable, not being married in a "man's" world was
> even worse.

I guess it is just too difficult to separate my mind from its modern
orientation. I cannot wrap my head around the idea that the Torah treats
rapists as punishibale by either forcing them to marry the victim or
fining them fifty dollars.

In fact even the other puinishment, the fine... is troubling. Can you
imagine any court today, finding a rapist guilty and then fining him
fifty dollars?

[Email #2. -mi]

Moshe & Ilana Sober <sober@pathcom.com> wrote:
> Plus there's the deterrent factor. She and her father have complete
> freedom to decide whether she will marry him, but he has no freedom to
> decide whether to marry her, nor can he ever initiate divorce. This is
> a particularly good deterrent against a higher-class boy raping a poor
> girl - he might have thought he could get away with it (her father has
> no power against him), but now that he could get stuck with her as a
> wife he will think twice. See Ramban Shmot 22: 16.

I do not understand the punishment side of this either. What kind of
father would ever considwer marrying off his daughter to a rapist that
is resentful of his now forced circumstances? What kind of husband would
he make? I cannot understand the Torah on this one. Is the punishment
to the rapist worth a lifetime of living with him?

HM

Mon, 30 Jan 2006  R' "Micha Berger" micha@aishdas.org wrote:
> The question isn't whether we have the right
> to declare something as an ahistorical allegory or not. It's whether we
> have the right to assign wildly new peshatim in contradiction to the
> mesoretic options in order to accomodate data (synthetic judgements)
> from outside mesorah.

In other words, if we are to dismiss crackpot theories in science,
why should we tolerate crackpot intepretations of pesukim?

I include myself among the many who would view as a crackpot
interpretation of the Torah the suggestion that the Flood -- which the
Torah depicts as destroying all un-Ark-protected human and animal life,
destroying all animals except those who were in the Ark, leaving only
Noach's family as the progenitors of all future mankind, and which was
always understood as being a global flood -- was merely a local flood.

Zvi Lampel

"kennethgmiller@juno.com" <kennethgmiller@juno.com> wrote:
> When I was at Ohr Somayach (around 1978-9), Rav Mendel Weinbach 
> explained the pasuk "kisvu lechem es haShirah hazos." He said that 
> the difference between prose and shir is that the ikar of prose is 
> found in the words themselves, and that the ikar of a shir is what 
> is "between the lines"....

I don't know if it's just the way the words are used in Modern Hebrew,
but shir and shirah are not the same thing. Shir means song, and shirah
means poetry. Though the example of Shir HaShirim probably provides
a counter-example.

Lisa

Mlevinmd@aol.com wrote:
> My problem with a local Mabul is that the possuk says it covered the
> harim hagevohim. But if it the waters got that high, why DIDN'T they
> cover the whole world? ....

Urartu is the Akkadian (Assyrian/Babylonian) rendering of Ararat.

But why would anyone want to answer that objection? There's no reason
to suppose the Mabul was local in the first place.

> I saw a suggestion someplace that the mediterranean basin was dry 
> and the flood resulted from the opening of the Gibraltar strait 
> with consequent flooding.

Well, without connecting that to the Mabul at all, the Mediterranean
basin was dry at one time, and it is believed to have flooded when
Gibraltar opened.

That presents many options. Eden might have been in the Mediterranean
basin. The legends of Atlantis might be based on a city-state in that
area (or not). But the Mabul was world-wide. That's what the Torah says.

[Email #2. -mi]

"Aryeh Englander" <iarwain1@earthlink.net> wrote:
> The NewChronology forum (Yahoo Group)- excellent!! Especially, check
> out the files and links! (You've got to be a member of the forum to
> do this though): http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewChronology/
> NewChronology2 (NewChronology reference archives):
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewChronology2/
> Although this forum was originally set up to discuss Rohl's 
> theories, they discuss a very wide range of revisionist theories 
> (although I have not seen Lisa's particular theory come up). 

There's a reason for that. I was invited by the listowner to join back
when the list started. But when I found that revisions other than Rohl's
were not to be discussed on the list (nor criticisms of Rohl's revision),
I left. It may have changed in the intervening years; the description
on the group's page doesn't seem to indicate it, though.

With all due respect to David Rohl, his revision doesn't work.
Nor does it help. He still has highly cultured, Biblical Hebrew
speaking, ethically lofty Canaanites, who wrote Tehillim-like poetry.
In Rohl's revision, the cities that were destroyed by Bnei Yisrael under
Moshe and Yehoshua were already ruins when we got there (just as in the
conventional chronology). The glorious MBIIB,C empire that stretched
from the Nile to the Euphrates, and which had a merchant marine that
reached as far as the British Isles, really existed, archaeologically.
But Rohl, like the conventional chronology, assigns this to the Hyksos,
and leaves Solomon with more PR than reality.

Rohl misuses statistics, and fudges items that don't fit. His attempt
to put Saul and David in the Amarna period is strange, to say the least.

Some of the work he's done in some areas has been well done. But you
should take his revision with a pretty big grain of salt.

Lisa

WRT to the discussion with RMB. 
While I don't want to get into another discussion about the Moreh,
although, as in the past, I find RMB's pshat utterly incompatible with
the pshat (an "allegorical" interpretation of the moreh... :-))

However, two points.

1. The distinction between problems that are raised intrinsically
within the mesora and problems that are raised extrinsic to the mesora,
that RMB raises as his criteria for the legitimacy, is one that protects
the traditional understanding of the mesora. The problem is, that in
the multiple discussions in the rishonim about the permissibility of
allegorizing something in tanach or the mesora, that issue is not raised.
Rather, the issue is the conflict between simple pshat in the mesora and
our reason - and that allegory is the way out. The rambam is not the only
source - see, eg, the hakdama of ibn ezra to the alternate perush on sefer
breshit (there is also, I believe, a Meiri discussing the use of allegory)

The fundamental position of the rambam is that torah, neviim and hazal
speak in allegorical terms - and the real problem is to understand when
- and therefore the fact that something seems to be clear pshat does
not mean that it is. That is the problem - the mesora is intentionally
unclear, even when it seems to be clear, and many well respected rabbanim
don't understand the real message (his allegory of the city)

This is an issue in many areas besides just history. eg, the long
debate we had over the rambam's position on astrology and witchcraft -
denying its efficacy - with no source of hazal to back it up, and many
ma'amarim against it (there may have been one rishon prior to the rambam
who held a similar position, but no hazal) - this seems clearly based on
sources extrinsic to the mesora against the mesora, and this was clearly
understood by the gra and others that the rambam was influenced by
"haphilosophia haarura"...

2. The application of synthetic versus analytic understanding is of
interest. The problem is that it is difficult to apply it, and in our
cases, one first requires a synthetic analysis to determine the facts.
Eg, the case that you cite - about the implications of the malachim not
being "gashmi" - whether that is an analytic understanding or a synthetic
understanding - it requires a synthetic analysis to reduce the malachim to
the level of aristotelian nongashmi - because one could easily understand
the malachim differently (as do most other meforshim) - and it is only
then that one can therefore draw the analytic conclusions that he does.

eg, one can analytically conclude that saying that a black object is
not black is false. However, if a word is used that may mean black or
may mean merely not white, depending on context (let me invent brack),
concluding that saying a particular object described as brack is black
requires first a synthetic analysis of the meaning of brack in the
context - and then one can apply analytic.

Meir Shinnar

I'd asked:
> Does anyone know anything about the supposed chashivus of having died on
> Shabbos?

My respondant wrote:
> Yes, it is a siman tov to die on Shabbos. The symbolism is the person
> has made Shabbos and has earned his rest.
> There is also a zchus in dying Erev Shabbos because the person has
> already prepared for Shabbos and is prepared to die. It would possibly
> be a great chasivus if the person died on Friday, bein hashmashos. Then
> you have the best of two worlds. :-)

I understand the logic behind the idea that a Shabbos death is chashuv,
since it indicates that the neshama goes straight to Shamayim. My
thinking is, though, (along the lines of my respondant's last thought)
that indeed a late erev Shabbos petirah *that's followed by a pre-Shabbos
kevurah* would be better, since the neshama would indeed go straight
to Shamayim. A death on Shabbos without kevurah would seem to be to a
nshama's *dis*advantage.

Does anyone have any sources one way or the other?

 - Yaakov Feldman

R. Eli Turkel asked: 
>I am now learning the sugya of choni hameagel...
>1. His question of dreaming for 70 years does not seem very strong.
>The fact that Jews in exile dreamt of the return for 70 years does not
>imply that one can sleep continuously for 70 years

There is a very rare disorder called Klein-Levin hibernation syndrome
<http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/omim> where patients have been found to sleep 
continuously for weeks and even months at a time.

And, no, it wasn't during a boring drasha or shmooze :-)

KT
Josh

On January 31, 2006, Meir Shinnar wrote:
> The fundamental position of the rambam is that torah, neviim and hazal
> speak in allegorical terms - and the real problem is to understand when
> - and therefore the fact that something seems to be clear pshat does
> not mean that it is.

But the Rambam doesn't say this. He is quite clear in the Moreh (2:25)
that unless there is incontrovertible evidence to the contrary (such as
the Rambam's ten proofs that corporeality cannot apply to Hashem) we are
to take the pesukim in Tanach literally. For some reason, the Rambam,
of late, has been championed as a non-literalist. In view of the above
mareh makom, I am perplexed as to how this attitude has gained a foothold.

[Email #2. -mi]

On January 31, 2006, Lisa Liel wrote:
> That presents many options. Eden might have been in the Mediterranean
> basin. The legends of Atlantis might be based on a city-state in that
> area (or not). But the Mabul was world-wide. That's what the Torah says.

Where does the Torah say this? I have always understood the mabul as
being a global phenomenon but a cursory reading of the mabul episode in
the Torah reveals that the Torah never utilizes the term "kol haaretz",
just "aretz". What is wrong with saying that the mabul afflicted only
parts of the world that were populated by mankind and animal kind? I
suppose this leads directly to a Maaseh Bereishis question. When Hashem
said Yehi in reference to animals, did He mean the entire world or
only in specific places? Did cows appear everywhere in the world where
climate allowed for such? Does anyone have anything resembling a source
(e.g. a Rishon) addressing these questions?

Simcha Coffer 

On January 31, 2006, Marty Bluke wrote:
> The idea of benching gomel is that we want to thank Hashem for saving
> us from a dangerous situation (the Rosh in Berachos compares it to a
> Korban Todah). IMHO benching gomel every few weeks trivializes the whole
> thing. If you watch the people who make the beracha you can see that
> there is no real emotion there, they are not really thanking Hashem,

What does this have to do with the halacha? If you watch people during
birchos hashachar, there isn't much emotion then either although they
are thanking for all of their daily needs and more. If one follows R'
Moshe's psak, he should train himself to recognize the benefit Hashem
bestowed upon him by allowing him to traverse without incident. I just
got back from Israel and there was turbulence. I did a ton of tshuva on
that plane. ("Lo nivriu ri'eimim ela lifshot akmumiyus shebelev"...Rabbi
Alexander I believe...)

Simcha Coffer

On January 31, 2006, Dr. Josh Backnon wrote:
> The problem isn't BONEH but the tendency of people to make designs
> or pictures with the whipped cream and this (according to the Rambam)
> would be a tolada of KOTEV.

The Debritziner Rav (Rav Moshe Stern of Boro Park) agrees with you. He
paskens that it is mutar to spray whipped cream (or any cream or icing)
on Shabbos as long as the spout doesn't have some sort of shape, any
shape. For those who have whipped cream cans with shaped nozzles, you
can cut the edge of the nozzle before Shabbos and avoid any chashash
issur. Also, it is not permissible to spray the cream in any letters or
shapes as Dr. Backnon's conclusion of Kotev implies.

Simcha Coffer

On January 31, 2006, T613K@aol.com wrote: 
> My guess: nolad. The product is not whipped cream while it is still
> in the can, but some kind of liquid that becomes cream as it is sprayed
> from the can.

Then the same should apply to ice cubes. R' Moshe paskens it is mutar
to make ice cubes on Shabbos. The same should apply to whipped cream.

Simcha Coffer

**********************


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