Avodah Mailing List

Volume 27: Number 198

Fri, 19 Nov 2010

• 1. Re: Is Turkey Kosher? (Zev Sero)
• 2. Re: Local, Non-Global or Global Flood (kennethgmil...@juno.com)
• 3. Re: Local, Non-Global or Global Flood (Micha Berger)
• 4. Re: Local, Non-Global or Global Flood (Zev Sero)
• 5. Re: Local, Non-Global or Global Flood (Micha Berger)
• 6. Re: Local, Non-Global or Global Flood (Simon Montagu)
• 7. Re: answered tfilos (Daas Books)
• 8. Re: answered tfilos (Micha Berger)
• 9. Re: Local, Non-Global or Global Flood (Zvi Lampel)
• 10. Re: Is Turkey Kosher (Rich Wolberg)
• 11. Re: Is Turkey Kosher (Micha Berger)
• 12. Re: Is Turkey Kosher (Zev Sero)

>> 1. Rishonim?  It's the Bach.
>
> If you open the MB RAZZ points to, you'll see he traces it back to
> the Rashba and the TR"Y, who I described in my prior post as "Talmidei
> Rabbeinu Yonah (if I got TR"Y correct)".

Read it again.  He does nothing of the sort.


>> 3. Even if it were rishonim, and there were a mesorah for the tarnegol
>> adumah being kosher, this is just an example of the second option: a
>> place where they mistakenly thought there was a mesorah.
>
> Yes, but a different kind of mistake.

No, exactly the same mistake.  Had your premises been correct, they
would have been mistakenly assuming that there is a living mesorah for
this bird, going all the way back, generation to generation all the way
to the days of the Yerushalmi.  How is that in any way different than
the second option already listed?

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
z...@sero.name                 eventually run out of other people?s money
                                                      - Margaret Thatcher

R' Joshua Waxman (Avodah 27:197) quoted Rav Yonasan Eibeshitz:

> And if you say that there were no men there, then even the 
> Deluge didn't descend there, for it would be to no purpose.

I was going to post a very simple and strong challenge to this, but later
in that issue R' Zev Sero defended RYE's view. I thought of a response to
RZS, and then I imagined RZS and I parrying back and forth, each of us
defending our own view, while calling the other one dachuk.

I came to the conclusion that *both* views are both reasonable and dachuk
to greater or lesser degrees, depending on one's point of view. And this
reminded me of another famous problem: The question of whether to
understand "aretz" in Parshas Noach as "planet" or "vicinity" seems very
similar to the question of whether to understand "yom" in Bereshis as
"24-hours" or "eon".

In both cases, the words seem very straightforward. ("Look! It says 'one
day'!" and "Look! It says 'the whole earth'!") But it is only upon deeper
investigation do we come to realize that we are not forced to take the
words literally, and that it can be legitimate to take them rhetorically.

It comes down to girsa d'yankusa. I grew up with the understanding that
"yom" can be understood as an eon, and this leads me to be comfortable with
many ways of resolving evolution and creation. But until recently, I never
heard of Noach's "aretz" referring to anything less than the entire planet,
and so Rav Yonasan Eibeshitz's views seem very bizarre and dachuk to me.
But R' Zev got his understanding of Noach from his Zeide, and he is very
fortunate for it.

Akiva Miller

____________________________________________________________
Cutting CPA Costs
The nice thing about trimming CPA costs is that it can be easy to do.
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3131/4ce524141d3e929b107st06vuc

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 01:02:02PM +0000, kennethgmil...@juno.com wrote:
: In both cases, the words seem very straightforward. ("Look! It says 'one
: day'!" and "Look! It says 'the whole earth'!") But it is only upon deeper
: investigation do we come to realize that we are not forced to take the
: words literally, and that it can be legitimate to take them rhetorically.

: It comes down to girsa d'yankusa...

"Yom" not meaning day has millenia of history, from well before anyone
confronted a scientific theory that said that time had a beginning, but
it was far more than 6,000 years ago. (Back in the days of the rishonim,
when they thought the earth had no beginning, no one had a motivation
to suggest that a day isn't a day.) As is an entire "this isn't literal"
approach to the pereq as a whole.

"Haaretz" in the context of the mabul not meaning the entire planet has
no such mesorah.

AND, as I wrote before, it's not just "kol haaretz". It's also leshacheis
kol basar, mitachas hashamayim, etc... There are a number of terms
of phrase that would all need to be shifted. Doesn't "lechacheis kol
basar asher yeish bo ruach chaim mitachas hasahayim" (6:17) sound like
the Author was intentionally trying to be explicit about not meaning
something regional?

But from a process and acceptability point of view, my problem is with
the creation of new peshatim where there is no TORAH reason to do so. I
find that kind of force fitting to another discipline beyond my personal
range of acceptibility. (Meaning that it doesn't even feel to me like
"a different but valid shitah".)

R' Dr Marc Shapiro, in a recent (long) Seforim Blog posting
<http://seforim.blogspot.com/2010/10/marc-b-shapiro-new-writing
s-from-r-kook.html>
(or (http://bit.ly/bcVtYC>) has the following quote from R' Shalom Carmy
in a footnote:

   [13] Shalom Carmy took note of R. Kook's comments and raised the
   following questions, without offering any answers:

       It seems obvious that Rabbi Kook doesn't advocate wholesale
       rejection of biblical statements. To do so would render Tanakh
       useless as a source of history. Under what circumstances would he
       countenance "deconstruction" of the text? Only where biblical texts
       contradict each other or rabbinic statements? Whenever the text
       appears to contradict well-attested Near Eastern documents? When
       the exact historicity is immaterial in the judgment of the exegete,
       to the import of the text? When the exegete detects rhetorical
       elements in the biblical text itself that point toward such
       interpretation?

   See "A Room With a View, but a Room of Our Own," in idem, ed., Modern
   Scholarship in the Study of Torah (Northvale, 1996), pp. 23-24.

My own position appears to be RSC's first hava amina "Only where biblical
texts contradict each other or rabbinic statements".

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             What we do for ourselves dies with us.
mi...@aishdas.org        What we do for others and the world,
http://www.aishdas.org   remains and is immortal.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                        - Albert Pine

kennethgmil...@juno.com wrote:
> In both cases, the words seem very straightforward. ("Look! It says 'one
> day'!" and "Look! It says 'the whole earth'!") But it is only upon deeper
> investigation do we come to realize that we are not forced to take the
> words literally, and that it can be legitimate to take them rhetorically.

The problem with taking "yom" non-literally is not that it doesn't fit
the words, but that it undermines the basis for Shabbos.  If Hashem
worked for six aeons and then rested on the seventh, why can't I say
I'll work for six decades and then rest for the seventh?

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
z...@sero.name                 eventually run out of other people?s money
                                                      - Margaret Thatcher

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 10:38:34AM -0500, Zev Sero wrote:
> The problem with taking "yom" non-literally is not that it doesn't fit
> the words, but that it undermines the basis for Shabbos.  If Hashem
> worked for six aeons and then rested on the seventh, why can't I say
> I'll work for six decades and then rest for the seventh?

A couple of tangential points first:

1- "Yom" literally means era as much as it literally means day. In
that sense, it's much like "eretz" meaning both the earth and specific
countries, and deciding that until now we assumed the wrong translation.
This isn't about deciding something is an allegory, but correcting
a translation.

OTOH, the Rambam's take that it's 6 causal steps, not days, eras, or any
temporal sequence at all, and thus non-literalness would be involved.
However, defences of a one week creation has to

2- Most rishonim who believe in an old universe do so by believing in
time between yeish mei'ayin and day one of the week. Not by translating
"yom" otherwise or saying the week is allegory.

I presume that the Rambam, Abarbanel, Ralbag, the Sheim Tov, the Aqeidas
Yitzchaq et al had an answer to RZS's question. However, I can only
guess at what it could be.

Halakhah mandates a commemoration using a 7 day period. Perhaps for
the same reason that the Author of Hebrew saw day and era as similar
enough to be describable by the same word. If the word "yom" captures
the concept well enough to be used in the pasuq, why wouldn't an actual
day do so well enough to be used in the halakhah?

But the commemoration (zeikher lemaaseh bereishis) needn't match the thing
being remembered more closely than that. Shabbos is a zekher leyetzi'as
Mitzrayim too -- and that didn't take a week nor even described in the
Torah as being a 7 step process. Sukkos must have sekhakh that isn't
mechubar leqarqa and can't receive tum'ah. Was that necessarily true
of the sukkos in the midbar? Especially if we follow the SA think of R'
Eliezer's ananei hakavod when sitting in the sukkah.

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 09:50:38PM -0500, Zev Sero wrote:
> In a place where there were no people, what purpose could a flood serve?

How is this a question? You know Hashem's purposes for everything that
happens, and if you can't find one you assume it didn't happen?

RMMS says something similar in his essay on the age of the universe:
    As for the question, if it be true as above (b), why did God have
    to create fossiles in the first place? The answer is simple: We
    cannot know the reason why God chose this manner of creation in
    preference to another, and whatever theory of creation is accepted,
    the question will always remain unanswered. The question, Why create
    a fossil? is no more valid than the question, Why create an atom?
                        - A letter on Science and Judaism, RMMS
                          Challenge, pg 147
Available at
<http://books.google.com/books?id=5fMBnHUiwukC&;lpg=PA147&pg=PA147#v=onepage>

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             If you won't be better tomorrow
mi...@aishdas.org        than you were today,
http://www.aishdas.org   then what need do you have for tomorrow?
Fax: (270) 514-1507              - Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Zev Sero <z...@sero.name> wrote:

>
> The problem with taking "yom" non-literally is not that it doesn't fit
> the words, but that it undermines the basis for Shabbos.
>

No more than taking "yad" non-literally in "behozek yad hotzianu miMitzraim"
undermines the basis for tefillin.
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>> > At the beginning of Shemoneh Essray, we praise Hashem for being a King
>> > Who "is" an "ozer" (One who helps us in our efforts, say, to escape
>> > harm), "u'Moshia" (One Who even saves us from harm without our input),
>> > and a "Magen" (One Who blocks the harm from even approaching us in the
>> > first place--so that sometimes we don't even know that there was harm
>> > coming....
> 
> Alternatively, we call him "King, Helper, Redeemer and Protector", including
> the word "Melekh" in a list of four nouns, rather than as a noun with three
> adjectives.
> 
> It too can fit the increasing sequence. The Melekh does what's best
> overall. The Ozeir addresses my own personal interests, the Melekh only
> would if that is part of the overall plan for everybody.
> 
> Tir'u baTov!
> -Micha

It?s a great vort, but doesn?t fit the words as well, because then it should
be ?melech, v?ozer, umashiya, u?magayn?

Since the ?ozer? has no vav, it doesn?t sound like ?melech? is part of the
same grouping.

Alexander Seinfeld
(PS... have you seen my amazing new Jewish iPhone/iPad app?
http://tinyurl.com/amazingcalendarlink)
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On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 11:44:48AM -0500, Daas Books wrote:
: > Alternatively, we call him "King, Helper, Redeemer and Protector", including
: > the word "Melekh" in a list of four nouns, rather than as a noun with three
: > adjectives.
...
: It?s a great vort, but doesn?t fit the words as well, because then it should
: be ?melech, v?ozer, umashiya, u?magayn?

Correct. Ta'iti. A list would either have a vav before all but the first word,
or only before the last one. I was thinking of the Gra's take on "haKeil,
haGadol, heGibbor, vehaNorah" as four nouns.

So, looking for lists of three...

Peri Eitz Chaim (sha'ar haAmidah pereq 3) has
"Melekh Ozeir" -- the Melekh is Binah, which is ozer tamud torah,
uMoshia - chesed, gevurah, tife'eres "hoshi'ah Yeminekh va'aneini",
          the Zero'ah
uMagein - the gimel rishonim, "she'ein lahem achizah kelal"

I don't get Qabbalah, but even on my level, it's interesting because
the Ari is also not giving a noun and three adjectives, rather a list
of three nouns, one of which has an adjective.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Between stimulus & response, there is a space.
mi...@aishdas.org        In that space is our power to choose our
http://www.aishdas.org   response. In our response lies our growth
Fax: (270) 514-1507      and our freedom. - Victor Frankl, (MSfM)

The discussion about the extent of the Mabul was already had in Volume 
16, #117-162. In my humble opinion, #146 and on are most enlightening. 
The following comments are culled from mine in those posts.

>If humans were confined to Western Asia then there was no reason for 
anywhere else to be flooded, and the Ararat mountains (the Kurdish 
mountains, as Onkelos calls them)may well be the highest in that region.<

The higher-than-Ararat Olympic mountainsthat the Ramban asked his kushya 
from, are not very far away.

>In a place where there were no people, what purpose could a flood serve?<

Without the global event of the Mabul, one might think that the misdeeds 
of humans (regardless of their numbers or geographic spread) are not 
something the Creator of the entire Universe would be very obsessed over.

So they misbehaved; is that the end of the world?

Answer: Yes, it's the End of The World.

Without a mankind that obeys Hashem's Will, there is no reason for the 
continued existence of even the animals, even the birds, even the earth 
(a third of whose depth the floodwaters eroded).... (I'm referencing 
Chazal, not my personal philosophy.) The more encompassing the 
destruction of G-d's world, the greater the lesson. [This 
demonstrates]...Judaism's insistence on the profound importance of Man 
and his deeds. This importance is a central hashkafa taught by Chazal 
and rishonim, and they see it illustrated in the Mabul event.

Indeed, the meforshim view the Mabul as a virtual return to tohu vavohu:

*Zohar 68a (in Hebrew translation p. 56/28b)--...Said HKBH: You 
[evildoers] seek to undermine (l'hach'chish) the work of My hands? I 
will fulfill your will! ... I will return the world to water as it was 
at the Beginning--water in water! From hereon I will make other berios 
in the olom who are fit to stay.

Ramban on Br. 8: 11 clearly understood the Mabul to be global (where he 
is puzzled by the Chazal that apparently asserts that EY was not subject 
to the Mabul):

"MiPshuto shel posuk zeh it is apparent that ... nis-mallay kol ha-olom 
mayyim.... The water spread itself out b'chol ha-olom and covered all 
the high mountains that were under all the heavens, k'mo shekasuv 
mefurash (7:19). And there is no barrier around EY to prevent the waters 
from entering. And so they said in Pirkei D'Rebbi Eliezer (23): the 
waters of the Mabul did not descend upon EY from the heavens, but the 
waters from the lands flowed and entered into it, as it says, "Ben 
Adam..." And so in the opinion of Rebbi Levy, since the flood rain did 
not descend in that land, and the windows of the heaven did not open, 
the trees there remained, but b'chol ha-olom they were smashed and 
uprooted by the Mabul and the showering of its strength."

If by his repeated phrase "kol Ha-olom" the Ramban meant only part of 
the earth, don't you think he would have notified of this? I do. (And 
I'm still waiting to hear from an expert what the result of a 40 
day-and-night rainstorm would be.) But at any rate, it is clear from the 
sources I brought above that the Mabul was considered a virtual return 
of the earth to its state of mayim b'mayim or tohu va-vohu.

*Kli Yakkar (Breishis 1:2)--"And the Earth was tohu va'vohu." "...Hashem 
foresaw that through the deeds of the wicked the world would return to 
tohu va'vohu, as in the Dor HaMabul."

*Rabbeynu Bechayay (Br. 1:9)-- "May the waters gather together"--Br. 
Rabbah 85,beginning: '...for what I am going to do with them in the 
future,' and inundate the whole world in its entirety with the Mabul 
(v'lishtof kol ha-olom kulo baMabul)`.

*Malbim (Amos 9:6)-- "After the world first being entirely water in water
(mayim b'mayim), [and] by Hashem's Will the dry land was revealed... the
world will return to being water in water, as He did in the Dor HaMabul,
when the rain fell from the heavens and the water covered the dry
land...to return the Beriah to tohu va-vohu."

Rabbeynu Bachayay (Br. 7:27, 8:11): "And this statement of our rabbis 
that the Mabul did not happen upon EY, means that the rain did not fall 
upon it from the heavens. And behold this is out of the kavod of the 
land and its ma'alah, that the windows of the heavens did not open over 
it, and the wells of the great deep did not break open beneath it, for 
the center line of the [Earth] below parallels the center line of the 
[Heaven] above."... "But certainly the waters of the Mabul of the rest 
of the lands entered into it, for behold the kasuv testifies here, 'And 
they covered all the high mountains that were under all the heavens."

Chazal depict the Mabul as the result of major astronomical aberrations. 
Hashem declares that from now on, he will not halt the normal course of 
seasons. Noach is told to take on the pairs of animals to prevent their 
extinction.

Doesn't sound much like a local flood.

One would think that if despite the vastness of the phrases "kol heharim 
ha-g'vohim asher tachas kol hashamayim" the Torah had always been 
understood to convey only the part of the earth where Noach was, we 
would find at least /one/ Tanna, Amora, Gaon, or Rishon that would let 
us in on this fact.

When you have one posuk that says that all the world was flooded,
and another (Yechezkiel 22:24) that says EY was not subjected to the
the rains of the great flood, a Sage concludes that Eretz Yisroel was
spared the downpour. Not because EY is insignificant in Chazal's thought,
or that it was unimportant for the posuk to explicate EY's exclusive
character during the Mabul; but because (through a posuk in Tanach)
Chazal and rishonim took it to be reasonable that the holy EY would be
a single exception to the rule.

Zvi Lampel

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In response to:
> The person who pointed me to this wrote, "According to R' Hamburger
> [author of Sheirushei Minhag Ashkenaz], Turkey has a valid mesorah."

Someone wrote (with such certainty):
> But we know beyond doubt that that isn't true.

In response to "But we know beyond doubt that that isn't true", I quote
from the end of the excellent, informative and scholarly article Is
Turkey Kosher?  by Rabbi Ari Z. Zivotofsky, Ph.D., the following: 
    Conclusion: The near universal acceptance of turkey as a kosher
    species, given the halachic quandary it presents, would indicate that
    the Jewish people have either accepted the possibility of originating
    mesorahs where none existed before or of accepting birds without the
    need for a mesorah. It is very possible that had the turkey question
    been posed when it was first introduced in the early 16th century,
    Jewish gastronomic history might have been different. It seems that
    many authorities may have initially come out against turkey because of
    its obvious lack of a mesorah. For some reason "bird controversies"
    erupted in the 18th and 19th centuries and when the turkey question
    was posed it often took the form of "why is it eaten?" rather than
    "may it be eaten?".

    As has been shown, despite the fundamental difficulty with permitting
    turkey virtually all of the responsa are permissive, and it is
    unlikely that that will (or should) change in the future. It seems
    that unless one has a specific family custom to refrain from turkey,
    to adopt such a behavior is morally wrong. The turkey is no longer
    new and its kosher status has been addressed by both the great and
    not-so-great Jewish minds over the during 250 years and has received
    near-universal endorsement. To call it into question now is to impugn
    the dozens of responsa, and more so, the millions of honorable Jews,
    who have eaten turkey for almost half a millennium. That is not the
    Jewish way.

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 10:42:26PM -0500, Rich Wolberg wrote:
: In response to:
: > The person who pointed me to this wrote, "According to R' Hamburger
: > [author of Sheirushei Minhag Ashkenaz], Turkey has a valid mesorah."
: 
: Someone wrote (with such certainty):
: > But we know beyond doubt that that isn't true.
: 
: In response to "But we know beyond doubt that that isn't true", I quote
: from the end of the excellent, informative and scholarly article Is
: Turkey Kosher?  by Rabbi Ari Z. Zivotofsky, Ph.D., the following: 

RAZZ himself says the mesorah is questionable. Here we do not mean the
pragmatic mesorah of seeing what the people are doing (which is what the
deleted quote refers to). Rather, we're asking how that got started. If
the first person to eat a turkey didn't have a mesorah that turkey
was on the list of kosher birds, would it be permissable according to
the Rama to eat it? (Section 4 discusses this requirement at length
<http://www.kashrut.com/articles/turk_part4>.

RAZZ's conclusion is that at this point, too many people accepted the eating
of turkey for the question to be open, but that's not the "valid mesorah"
in discussion. We know as a certainty that the uncertainty about how to
determine the kashrus of a bird that forced us to stick to only the known
(mesorah) kosher birds predates anyone bringing back a turkey from the new
world.

RAZZ lists ways to understand how we got to this point (in
<http://www.kashrut.com/articles/turk_part5>).
1- Error
(I wanted to split it out into two kinds of error:
    1a- the first generations sinned beshogeig, not thinking about the need for a
        mesorah, and the next generations now had a tradition;
    1b- error as to thinking the turkey was indeed an old world bird identified
        by one of the names on the list. I wanted to put the MB's labeling
        of the turkey as the tarnigoles adumah of the SA in this category,
        since the tarnigoles adumah is in the Y-mi -- a millennium too
        early to be a turkey.)

2- Arugos haBosem: The Rama's requirement for a mesorah is only when one
   cannot read the simanim of a kosher species with certainty.

3- Sho'el uMeishiv: We don't entirely follow the Rama

4- The Lubliner Rav: Mesorah is not by species, but by category -- and chickens
   and voltures are in the same category. (He might be referring to the order
   Galliformes, which I see includes also quail, partridges, pheasant and grouse.
   That's just a small sampling, but I notice they're all kosher too. More likely
   the LR isn't speakiing scientifically. But turkey and chickens aren't even
   in the same genus.)

   4b (from later in the article)- Chicken turkey hybrids do not occur naturally,
   but they have been produced and are used in tests. (As well as turkey-pheasant
   and pheasant-chicken hybrids.)

5- Perhaps we accepted the widespread Sepharadi use as a mesorah. After all, it
   was people from the Ottoman Empire who first brought the turkey to Europe.
   (Thus the name TURKey.) The mechaber is more "flexible" (RAZZ's word) when
   it comes to the need for a mesorah.

6- Otzer Yisrael-
   6a- the eating of turkey predates our acceptance of the Rama's ruling, the
       first to permit turkey simply didn't hold like the Rama;
   6b- the Rama was born in 1540, 46 years after America was discovered, and
       the ruling couldn't have been made until he grew up and made a name
       for himself. The eating of turkey could predate the ruling itself.

It is only then that RAZZ points out that the responsa were written with
the assumption that turkey is kosher, and post-facto asked how.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Rescue me from the desire to win every
mi...@aishdas.org        argument and to always be right.
http://www.aishdas.org              - Rav Nassan of Breslav
Fax: (270) 514-1507                   Likutei Tefilos 94:964

On 18/11/2010 10:42 PM, Rich Wolberg wrote:
> In response to:
>> The person who pointed me to this wrote, "According to R' Hamburger
>> [author of Sheirushei Minhag Ashkenaz], Turkey has a valid mesorah."
>
> Someone wrote (with such certainty):
>> But we know beyond doubt that that isn't true.
>
> In response to "But we know beyond doubt that that isn't true", I quote
> from the end of the excellent, informative and scholarly article Is
> Turkey Kosher?  by Rabbi Ari Z. Zivotofsky, Ph.D., the following:

A long quote that's irrelevant; having demonstrated that it's impossible
for a genuine mesorah to exist, it certainly doesn't turn around and
claim otherwise!

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
z...@sero.name                 eventually run out of other people?s money
                                                      - Margaret Thatcher


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