חלום באספמיא בגרממיא

בראשית י' ב' —
בְּנֵי יֶפֶת: גֹּמֶר וּמָגוֹג וּמָדַי וְיָוָן וְתֻבָל וּמֶשֶׁךְ וְתִירָס.

בבלי יומא י' א' —
בני יפת: גומר ומגוג ומדי ויון ותובל ומשך ותירס.
גומר זה גרממיא, מגוג זו קנדיא, מדי זו מקדוניא, יון כמשמעו...

תורה תמימה
א) וכן הגירסא בירושלמי מגילה פ"א ה"ט ובערוך ערך גרממיא, בשניהם במ"ם, ויתכן דגירסא זו מכוונת אל תרגום הפסוק ביחזקאל (כ"ז י"ד) מבית תוגרמה — ממדינת גרממיא, והגר"א הגיה בגמרא כאן גרמניא בנו"ן, וכנראה כיון לגירסת תרגום יונתן... אבל לא נתבאר לי למה הכריע כגירסת תר"י נגד גירסת הגמרא הבבלית והירושלמית וגירסת הערוך, וצ"ע.

Information on the Roman provinces of Hispania and Germania at Wikipedia.

VideoBloggage:
(videoblogging idea completely plagiarized from rabbi josh waxman)
runtime: 6:16

just ignore the 'frummy' poster falling off the wall behind me, please

וּבְנֵי גֹּמֶר: אַשְׁכְּנַז וְרִיפַת וְתֹגַרְמָה

Commentary of R' Samson [ben] Raphael Hirsch on Bereshis 9:27 —God will open [people's] emotions to Yefes,
but He will dwell in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be a servant to them.

We have here, then, three representatives of nations; they represent three main attributes of individuals and of nations. שם represents the intellect; he assigns everything a name and is able to conceptualize. In contrast to him is חם: the height of burning sensuality. The essence of שם is the intellect, which analyzes everything objectively. This requires tranquility, without המום — and certainly without חמום. In the case of חם, however, intellect is reduced to a minimum. יפת is in the middle. He represents the meeting point of intellect and sensuality — namely, emotion, sentiment.

These three forces predominate in man's inner life, and they also characerize nations. Obviously, there is no such thing as a one-sided nation that has only intellect or only emotion, etc. But in this respect nations are like individuals: All three of these atttributes are found in every individual, yet only one off them is dominant in him, and that is the attribute that characterizes him. The same is true of nations.

Noach spoke his words at the dawn of history. We, however, can survey a past of four thousand years. For us it should be easy to trace, in retrospect, the influence of these divergent forces on the course of history.

The nations that have created the greatest stir in world history are those dominated by חם, by sensuality that harnesses minds and emotions to its chariot and permits the spirit to function only as a vehicle for the physical. These are nations that conquer and destroy, and relish what they have taken. Nations rise and fall, and their whole essence is brute force, sensuality, and bestiality.

...

[Noach] saw: ארור כנען! Man will not blossom and flower by means of coarseness and burning sensuality. Nations that are absorbed in passion and controlled by base desire will lose their freedom and independence and ultimately become עבדים, slaves. Indeed, days are coming in which all awareness of man's freedom will be lost; Canaan will be an עבד עבדים, but the others, too will be עבדים. Only nations that are themselves enslaved set out to enslave others. He who wants to conquer the world and to subjugate other nations must first subjugate his own people, which must serve as a blind instrument of his lust for power. Cham's descendents produced tyrants, "hunters of men," who ruled according to the dictates of their own hearts. Lust leads to slavery, not to freedom...

Then comes Shem בשם השם, calling out to the peoples in the Name of ה׳, the one God, before Whom the enslaving gods disappear. The one God of Shem liberates man. He endows every person with equal dignity and exalts him above the forces of nature. The breath of God's spirit lives within every man, investing him with inalienable dignity. God, n His mercy and compassion, is close to every man; He calls every man to His service, which liberates, uplifts, and fills one with rapture...

Noach expresses the wish... that Canaan should be an עבד of Shem. This shall be Cham's salvation — that his antithesis should be the master. Although it is ordained that Canaan will be an עבד, let him be Shem's עבד. Only thus will כנען, too — the height of decadent sensuality — come to serve God through the mediation of Shem...

But this goal cannot be achieved at once. Yefes mediates between Cham and Shem. Cham is not ready to receive immediately the Teaching of the God of Shem. The uncivilized person must first become a cultured man... The savage who paints his skin and changes his outer appearance has thus begun to fashion his image and already stands on the threshold of culture... The culture of gracefulness, the subordination of the savage to the principle of the "beautiful and good," the kalokgathos ["the goodness of man"] of Yefes culture, is the vestibule that leads to the teachings of Shem; it prepares man to subordinate his whole heart to a higher principle of a higher beauty, so that ultimately he makes a harmony of all the aspects of his life and learns to subordinate his heart to the Will of the one God.

Whatever Rabbiner Hirsch may have thought about the interactions of nature and nurture, heredity and culture, we saw last century that any nation — no matter how much they seem dedicated to Shem-like intellect or Yefetic high culture — can fall into the depths of self-enslavement and depravity that R' Hirsch sources in an overabundance of Chamitic sensuality. When RShR"H wrote the line indeed, days are coming in which all awareness of man's freedom will be lost, could he possibly have imagined the tragic irony we feel today when we read his later comment on Bereshis 10:5?

...Let us also note that these factors of separation and unification are mentioned also in connection with Cham's and Shem's descendants... but the descendants of Yefes went further, in that they separated into איי הגוים. Among the descendants of Yefes the fragmentation was great, a kaleidoscope of different characteristics. This is known about בני יון, the Greek tribes. And if — as seems very probable — there is truth to the popular tradition that אשכנז is Germany and the Germanic tribes, then אשכנז is the second example of national fragmentation and decentralization. This fragmentation was a great boon, however, to the spiritual mission of Yefes. Small states are always careful to foster cultural values.

וּבְנֵי חָם: כּוּשׁ וּמִצְרַיִם וּפוּט וּכְנָעַן

The story of Noahh, his Box, and the Dissolving is followed by a 'Table of Nations' — a geneology of the ethnic groups and nations of the ancient world in the Ancient Near East, associating them with each other according to ethnic, geographic, and political principles.

As the Academic Tanakh commentary ‘Olam Hatanakh says,

The inhabitants of the various lands were distinguished from each other by their physical characteristics, the look of their faces and their clothing, and it is easy to identify them in artistic creations from the ancient period, especially since in many cases the characterizations of the different nations were schematized.
(translated from Hebrew)

In other words, the different phenotypes and cultural artifacts (including clothing) typical of the various peoples were recognizeable enough to be preserved clearly in pictorial representations.

For example, here we have an Egyptian fresco from the grave of Seti I (‑13th c.), presenting some different types of people familiar to the inhabitants of Ancient Egypt.

On the left we have the Egyptians themselves — מצרים as we call them — and on the right we have some of our Canaanite neighbors (כנען).


Both Mitzrayim and Kena‘an are described by the Torah as "sons" of Hham, Noahh's son who saw him naked and went out to tell his brothers. So they don't seem to look so different... the Egyptians look a bit darker than the Canaanites, but not so much, right?

Now we have another part of the fresco, representing on the left כוש — a.k.a. Nubia or Ethiopia — and on the right some Lybians with ostrich feathers on their heads, who we know as פוט.


Uh oh! These Kush people are so dark... and the Put people are so light! How could they both be descendents of Hham, along with Kena‘an and Mitzrayim?! Very simply, because the Table of Nations isn't biological. These four nations, ethnic groups, or regions were connected by geographic and political ties, not by blood.

And that whole "Hham was cursed with Blackness" nonsense? Hham was never cursed. Kena‘an was cursed. And they looked just like us.

Dissolving an Unmade Universe

Genesis/Bereishit chapter 1:

First of all, God created the heavens and the earth.

And the earth had been welter and waste, and darkness on the face of the Deep — and a wind of God fluttering on the face of the water.

And then God said, "Let there be light!" — and then light was...

And then God said, "Let there be a solid sheet within the water, and let it separate water from water."

And then God made the solid sheet, and separated the water below the solid sheet from the water which was above the solid sheet...

And then God said, let the water collect under the heavens in one place, and let the dry land appear..."

So what do we have here, in this sketch of the primordial universe?

We have Water. Tehom. The Deep.

And then the Water is split by the Solid Sheet, the Raqia‘.

And the solid sheet, like a translucent dome, separates the Water Above from the Water Below.

And then the Water Below condenses, precipitating out Dry Land or draining into the hollows of a Land that may have already existed, hidden under or within the Deep.

Over the next few days, God filled the world with life.

Bereishit/Genesis 6:

...And then the earth became destructive before God's face — and the earth became full of petty theft...

"...And me, behold I bring the Dissolving — water on the earth — to destroy all flesh which has within it a wind of life, from under the heavens..."

Bereishit/Genesis 7:

In the six-hundredth year of Noahh's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month — on that day, all the springs of the great Deep were broken through and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.

Imagine what's going on here — the first practical stage of creating a habitable world was when God separated the Upper Water from the Lower Water by means of the Solid Sheet, opening up a space between them in which life could exist. In order to wipe out that life now, God releases the Dissolving by going back and unmaking Creation. The Raqia‘ holding up the Water Above is opened up, and the earth holding down the Water Below is broken through, allowing the waters to flood back into the 'middle' Earth. The world has to be remade from scratch, and so God is pressing 'rewind' on God's heavenly DVD.

YourRevolutionWillNotBeMeTossingMyWeave

One of the ways I "flipped out" in Israel was when I jettisoned my black suede yarmulka (since suede is, at least traditionally, made of baby animal skin) and replaced it with a black knit one. However, like a gateway drug, once I wore my srugi for a while I started having color envy of all those colorful yarmulkas out there.

So, I am jumping on the bandwagon in honor of PsychoToddler's guest post at DovBear about Black hats, here is my present collection of thematic knit kippas:

Everyday	High Holy Days 10 Days of Repentence
Sukkot Shemini ‘Atzeret	Week of Parashat Bereishit
Week of Parashat Noahh	Hhanuka Yom Ha‘atzma’ut
T"U Bishvat	Purim
Pesahh Pesahh Sheini	Shavu‘ot
Fast Days The Three Weeks	T"U Be’av

A Slifkinless Science and Halakha Post

Tonight I went to Yeshivat Chovevei Torah's Henry Guttman Memorial Lecture at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. Rav Dov Linzer's lecture was titled Science and Halakha: Strategies and Sympathies, and discussed the conflicting values and sympathies that led to various halakhic authorities over time taking different strategies as to what to do when science and halakha conflict.

For example, there was (of course) the RMB"M, who valued empirical truth over defending what some see as the honor or stature of Hhazal:

You must, however, not expect that everything our Sages say respecting astronomical matters should agree with observation, for mathematics were not fully developed in those days; and their statements were not based on the authority of the Prophets, but on the knowledge which they either themselves possessed or derived from contemporary men of science. But I will not on that account denounce what they say correctly in accordance with real fact, as untrue or accidentally true. On the contrary, whenever the words of a person can be interpreted in such a manner that they agree with fully established facts, it is the duty of every educated and honest man to do so.
Guide of the Perplexed III:14

And there was RShB"A, who valued defending the honor or authority of Hhazal over observable fact:

And if this person [who testifies that an animal declared terminal by the Talmud survived a full year] holds firm to his error and says, "No! For I like to be oppositional! I know what I saw, and I will follow it!" We shall say to him, "To spread evil report against the Sages is impossible." And this witness and a thousand like him should be rejected, before we nullify one dot from what was agreed upon by the holy Sages of Israel, the prophets, the sons of prophets, and matters that were said to Moshe from Sinai.
Responsa RShB"A 1:98

What was really interesting, though, was the position of Hhakham Tzevi Ashkenazi (he who held that everyone must keep one day of yomtov in The Land and two days Outside The Land, no matter where you're from or where you're going) who granted authority to empirically-researched Scientific Fact over both seemingly-Trustworthy Testimony and Reality As Described By The Sages:

All those who say it [=a chicken that supposedly was shechted and then found out to lack a heart] is a treifa are in error. Because the matter is clear to anyone who has the heart of a wise person in him and that has a brain in his head, that it is impossible for any living creature in the world to live even for a minute without a heart, and that it should be like a healthy animal. The only case of a "removed heart" [that the Rabbis were referring to] is where immediately after the heart was cut out of the animal it was slaughtered ... And in this case the matter is clear that the heart fell when its stomach was opened, and the cat ate it. And although this is self-evident, and there is no need to bring any proof to this, but to silence the fools who jump to give rulings, beold I found in the Kesef Mishneh, Laws of Schechita, chapter 10, that he explains that Rambam did not list the case of a heart that was removed, or an animal that was born without a heart, and he writes: "Rambam did not list organs that if they are removed it is impossible for the animal to live for even one minute."
Responsa Hhakham Tzevi 74
[One must reject testimony when one knows it is false.] And it was for this purpose that the Rashba toiled in that responsum to bring clear proofs that one cannot reject the Sages' statement that the treifot cannot live under any circumstances for more than twelve months, and that one who testifies to the contrary is testifying falsely. And even if many come and testify likewise, they are all false witnesses, and this was the foundation and the root that Rashba in his great wisdom toiled to establish, as is evident to anyone who studies his words well. And I will bring futher evidence that we are not concerned for the possibility of miracles, and if witnesses come and testify against what we know to be the natural way of the world, we will say that they are false witnesses, and that Nature remains unaltered. As we say in Rosh Hashana, "If the new moon began before noon, then it was seen before sunset, and if it began after noon, then it could not be seen before sunset. Why does this matter? Said Rav Ashi, 'To contradict witnesses.'"
Responsa Hhakham Tzevi 77

The Hhakham Tzevi seemed to hold that Hhazal's inclusion of an "animal missing a necessary organ" in the list of 'terminal' (tereifa) animals only meant an animal which had an organ removed immediately before shekhita, so it was still alive — since obviously an animal missing a necessary organ couldn't survive longer than a few seconds, much less any significant amount of time less than a full year. So in contrast to R' Yonatan Eibishitz, who wrote passionately against him, he used scientific/medical knowledge to pretty much define away a halakhic category. R' Eibishitz said that such a seemingly heartless chicken would have to be a tereifa, and therefore treif, while Hhakham Tzevi said that since a healthy heartless chicken is impossible, it must only be seemingly heartless, but actually had one, and be kosher — even if reliable witnesses testified that they saw no heart when they cut up the chicken!

Another interesting source was R' Moshe Feinstein's ruling that a man who had a testicular operation to enable him to have children could marry, against an explicit Talmudic source that defined anyone with a hole in their (='his' here) testicle as a petzu‘a daka who is forbidden from marrying due to the fact that he can't have children:

We thus see that unless we are compelled otherwise, we should assume that matters that are dependant on Nature should be based on the assessment of the rabbis of every given time.
Iggrot Moshe EH 2:3

Something at the end that I found the most interesting was R' Eliyahu Dessler's opinion that when Hhazal gave a reason for a halakhic ruling, they were only giving one — but not the necessarily most important — reason, and therefore we can't change the halakhic ruling based on new circumstances:

For when it comes to the explanations based on nature, it is not that the assumption of nature was the basis for the ruling, but the opposite — the ruling (which was known through tradition) was in need of an explanation, and the explanation that the Gemara gives is not the only explanation possible for this ruling. So, if in certain cases the Gemara gave explanations that were based on the science of their times, it is our responsibility to seek out other explanations that through them the ruling can be established on a firm foundation, based on the science of our times.
Michtav mEliyahu 4 page 355 note 4

What I find particularly interesting about R' Dessler's assumption of pre-existing law is that while this opinion today seems to be more popular among the more non-rationalistic streams of Jewish legal theory, it was in the middle ages pushed by the rationalist pashtanim like RD"Q, who claimed that all of the Sages' derivations of laws from verses in the Torah was nothing more than mnemonics and asmakhta — Torah Shebe‘al Peh actually stands on its own as an independent and pre-existent code that didn't need human development.

NOTE: translations of sources are from R' Linzer's bilingual source sheets.

Public Service Announcement

In case you saw me on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, during the two days of Shemini-‘Atzeret, you didn't actually see me, just someone who looks like me. I was in Upstate New York wearing a heavy winter coat and winning a bidding war for the honor of being the Torah's groom. And not in that Shabbetai Tzevi way, either.

I «heart» New York

A brilliant bus-shelter ad from the New York City Office of Emergency Management, found around NYC and especially a few blocks from where I live. See their other public service announcements here.

I'm fortunate to have always lived in neighborhoods with a bit of altitude to them, as I found out on 6/6/6. Some other Jewish neighborhoods, though...

Yeb Yeb Yeb Yeb Yeb Yeb Yeb Yeb

A very shocking and moving article in this past weekend's New York Times magazine section on the plight of elephants in the world can be found here: An Elephant Crackup?

In short, Eve Abe, a wildlife expert who grew up in Uganda, points out parallels between the way that wars and oppression have wreaked havoc with human society in her home country, and the way that poaching and culling have wreaked havoc with the elephant... society? that lives among them.

“I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants,” Abe told me. “I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. You know we used to have villages. We still don’t have villages. There are over 200 displaced people’s camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody lives now within these camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were systematically eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin’s time, and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We are among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But the families there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced people are living in our home now. My mother said let them have it. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed — no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They don’t go to schools. They have no schools, no hospitals. No infrastructure. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost.”

Are human beings by definition the only sentient species on the planet? In the Universe? Do our spirits go up to Heaven, whereas all other animals' spirits go down into the Earth? Could Judaism handle elephants that can think? Whales that can sing? Chimpanzees that can reason? What about aliens? Would a sentient alien race — or uplifted Earthling species — count as beney adam/noahh or animals? Could they convert to Judaism... and make kiddush for humans? Could God have a brit contract with a 'chosen people' of an alien race? Maybe every sentient species has a Torah of it's own? Could they be motzi’ me in kiddush? How would we distinguish the "Yahadut" of a silicon-based aquatic radially-symmetric species that communicates by pheromones, from a false SBARSSTCBP religion, if the Torah is optimized for Homo sapiens sapiens? And what about Neanderthals?

Is the neshama an existential something on its own, or is it simply the state of being sapient/sentient? Is it something we evolved according to God's Laws of Nature, or did we have to be handed it on a silver sneeze? Is speculative fiction literature a physical manifestation of the selfish inclination to make me think of these questions?

At least we know the answer to the last question is "no"...

Gɵd is a DiqduqGeeq

An anonymous alphabetical piyut for the Repetition of the ‘Amida for the Morning Service of the Day of Atonement:
(at least in Eastern Ashkenazic texts; your makhzeirim may vary)

וּבְכֵן, אַךְ חַנּוּן אַתָּה וְרַחוּם לְכָל פֹּעַל:

אַךְ אָתִים בְּחִין לְפָנֶיךָ — כִּי אַתָּה רַחוּם לְכָל פֹּעַל!
אַךְ בּוֹטְחִים בְּחַסְדְּךָ אֱמוּנֶיךָ — כִּי אַתָּה רַחוּם לְכָל פֹּעַל!
אַךְ גּוֹעִים וּמַרְגִּישִׁים שִׁכְנֶךָ — כִּי אַתָּה רַחוּם לְכָל פֹּעַל!
אַךְ דַּלּוּ עֵינֵיהֶם לִמְעוֹנֶיךָ — חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם לְכָל פֹּעַל...

I Heart Israeli Religious HippiesAnd Upstate New York

For Yom Kippur I did not wear a suit and tie. Instead, I dressed in all white, Israeli Religious Hippie style. I wore synthetic sandals with white socks, a white knit yarmulka, a white shirt and white double-knee work pants. Why the reinforced knees? For the hishtahhawaya (prostration), of course!

I did full on-the-floor bowing for the first time in my life this year. I never did it before because my father never did it before, but then he told me that could very well be simply because in his shul growing up only the cantor ever did it; and he wouldn't consider it an affront to family tradition if I started.

In R' Avraham ben haRMB"M's Kitāb Kifāyä al‘Ābidīn (Seifer haMaspiq le‘Ovedey H') [the Comprehensive Manual for the Worshipper of God], he talks about how many Islāmic practices — particularly spiritual practices of the Ṣūfī mystics — were preserved by them from Pre-Ħurban Judaism, when we, 'in our many sins', lost track of them. One of these practices was what he calls (as pronounced by contemporary Rambamists) hishtahhawaya (השתחוויה), full prostration (not bowing at the waist as we do it today), which he mandates for many specific times during prayer, not limited to the ‘Amida and Borkhu.

In fact, either him or his father, the Rambam, explained the description in Pirqey Avot that in the Beit Hamiqdash the people would stand crowded together but prostrate themselves with room to move to mean that they would stand in long horizontal rows with space between them, the way Muslims arrange themselves when they daven!

So anyway, for Yom Kippur I went home to my "Out Of Town" adopted hometown in Upstate New York (instead of home to my parents in Brooklyn, where I was for Rosh Hashana), and did hishtahhawaya for the first time. Unlike in other shuls I've been to on the ^High Holy Days, no one put down any plastic bags or newspaper to separate between their knees (or face) and the floor — probably because the entire floor of my Upstate shul was carpeted, so it didn't count as "prostration on a bare floor".

It was amazing how packed the shul was — it was almost full! I'd never seen more than maybe at most 50 people there, and usually just a bit more than a minyan (barely a minyan on weekdays, if lucky) — but during Kol Nidrey and Ma‘ariv, and Ne‘ila there were between 250 and 300 people, men and women, packed into the shul sanctuary! Now, if only they would come to shul more often...