On Thursday evening in Park Hayarkon, Israel will celebrate the life and work of Arik Einstein on his seventieth birthday. Einstein is one of the most influential figures in the history of Israeli music and entertainment. Read this account of seeing him play in 1970 and this informative post with some funny clips from his days in comedy. Here are a few of his hits with some horrible lip-synching.
One of the great features of Israeli radio is האוניברסיטה המשודרת, The Broadcast University, which broadcasts lectures on numerous topics on Galei Tzahal, Israel Army Radio. Usually these lectures are published as books which serve as very good introductions. They have just finished a series by Dr. Thamar E. Gindin on Early Persian Culture. The most recent lecture can be listened to here. Her lectures have discussed Persian cultural and linguistic influences on Judaism, Hebrew, and Jewish literature. It is too bad that they don’t archive all of the lectures, I guess that we’ll have to wait for the book.
Ynet has an article which questions whether people should continue fasting on the tenth of Tevet, the seventeenth of Tamuz (just around the corner), and Tzom Gedaliah. By the number of comments, the writer seems to have touched upon a raw nerve (or an empty stomach). Also see this previous post in which I discussed this issue.
For over one hundred years scholars have been arguing about the different recensions of the Geonic work Halakhot Gedolot. Robert Brody described the problematic textual situation.
The textual situation is very complicated and has yet to be explored in the requisite depth. The only version available for several centuries was the editio princeps (Venice 1548), until a second recension was printed in the middle of the nineteenth century, on the basis of a Vatican manuscript For nearly a century, scholarly discussions of the text and recensions of Halakhot Gedolot depended exclusively on these two editions. One outstanding difference, which served as the basis for various theories, is that the Vatican text contains numerous Geonic responsa (by authors dating up to the turn of the tenth century), which clearly represent secondary interpolations. The presence or absence of these responsa was therefore taken as the litmus test for classifying versions of the text and as the foundation of attempts to reconstruct its history. A. Epstein, for example, considered the recension reflected in the editio princepts to represent R. Simeon Qayyara’s work and the Vatican manuscript to represent an augmented edition, while [Louis] Ginzberg saw the first recension as a reworking, by an anonymous disciple, or an original Halakhot Gedolot composed by Yehudai Gaon and attributed the augmented recension to R. Simeon Qayyara. Both these scholars agreed that the more original version of the work was used by the medieval rabbinic authorities in France and Germany, and the augmented recension by those in Spain, Provence, and North Africa; as a result, this recension was identified (not quite accurately) with the “Spanish Halakhot Gedolot” occasionally cited by Franco-German authors. The recent publication of E. Hildesheimer’s variorum edition represents a significant step forward, although there is still considerable room for improvement. Among the editor’s more important discoveries was the fact that the development of varying recensions preceded the interpolation of Geonic responsa; in fact, we now know that such interpolations were not restricted to one particular recension. The nature of the relationship between the basic versions of the two recensions, however, has yet to be adequately clarified.
(The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture, 223-4)
My teacher Neil Danzig has also written about Halakhot Gedolot and its issues, see Mavo Le-Sefer Halakhot Pesukot, 180-242. He commented that “דיון מפורט באשר לכל העדויות לס’ הלכות גדולות ויחסן זו לזו, הוא נושא מסובך שמחכה לגואלו”. (ibid., 186) After a preliminary comparison, he wrote that the recension on which the Berlin edition from the Vatican MS is based, before the Geonic responsa were added, seems to be the earliest recension that we have today. (ibid., 189) He emphasized that the subject requires much more examination. The Venice edition of 1548 can be found here and the Berlin edition here. I know that more research is being done on Halakhot Gedolot and hopefully some of the questions raised will be answered.
Eruvonline has an excellent discussion of one of the differences found between the recensions of Halakhot Gedolot, that being whether shishim ribo (600,000 people) is a requirement for a reshut ha-rabbim. (hat tip)
What the legal implications might be of differences between various recensions of halakhic works is not an easy question to answer. On the one hand, you can argue that a certain halakhic tradition may have been accepted as authoritative by certain authorities because they felt that it was reflective of the composition itself and the claim that it is not original to the composition would therefore undermine this tradition’s authority. On the other hand, you can argue that the very fact that it was accepted as authoritative is not connected to it being original to the composition. Much of this depends on whether we can even talk about authoritative recensions and editions, a subject which has discussed by numerous scholars.
It seems as if the question of Kol Isha must be in the news every few months. See here for a previous post about the issue. The most recent discussion has been the result of this article (Hebrew) by R. Israel Rosen and a recent article in Tehumin. Lastly, see this this post by Admiel Kosman on the singing of Miriam.
See this (Hebrew) interesting post by Rav Tzair on the relationship between how people live their lives and what is written in books.
From an article on privacy in a Norwegian computer magazine,
When you consider the historic attitude toward privacy rights in the Judaic tradition, Israel’s position at the forefront of privacy protection is not surprising. In his book The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America, George Washington University professor Jeffrey Rosen writes that hezzek re’iyyah is a concept in Jewish law meaning “the injury caused by seeing.”
Quoting the Encyclopedia Talmudit, Rosen says, “Even the smallest intrusion into private space by the unwanted gaze causes damage, because the injury caused by seeing cannot be measured.” He explained that Jewish law since the Middle Ages gives you the right to stop a neighbor from building a window that looks into your courtyard, because the uncertainty about whether or not you’re being watched may cause you to lead a more restricted life.
To this end, Omer Tene, a member of the Israeli Ministry of Justice Committee for reform of data protection law, says that Israel in 1981 passed the Privacy Protection Act, one of the first data-protection statutes in the world. In 1992, Israel elevated the right to privacy to constitutional status in Section 7 of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.
In m. Baba Batra 3:7 we read the following,
“A person should not open his windows into the courtyard of which he is one of the jointholders. [If] he purchased a house in another courtyard [which adjoins the one in which he is living], he may not make an opening into the courtyard of which he is one of the jointholders. [If] he built an upper story on his house, he should not make an opening for it into a courtyard of which he is one of the jointholders. But if he wanted, he may build a [new] room inside of his house, or he builds an upper story on top of his house, and he makes an opening for it into his house. One should not open up in a courtyard of which he is one of the jointholders a doorway opposite the doorway [of another resident], or a window opposite [another’s] window. [If] it was small, he should not enlarge it. [If it was] a single one, he should not make it into two. But he may open into the public domain a doorway opposite [another’s] doorway [in the public domain], or a window opposite [another’s] window [in the public domain]. If it was small, he may enlarge it. If it was a single one, he may make it into two.”
I once taught a class in which we covered some of these topics and here is the syllabus.
I recent wrote here about Berry Sakharov and Rea Mochiach’s putting of poetry by Shelomo ibn Gabriol to music. One of the pioneers of such attempts is Meir Banai of the multi-talented Banai family. In 2007 he released an album שמע קולי which features musical renditions of traditional Jewish liturgical compositions. One of the albums most popular songs is לך אלי (text) by R. Abraham ibn Ezra (12th c.) which can be heard here. Reviews of it can be found here and here. Ynet has a recent article about his tour which includes his rendition of the piyyut אל נורא עלילה. The piyyut was written by R. Moshe ibn Ezra in the 11th century. The text can be found here and traditional renditions of it can be found here and here. Here is the version by Meir Banai.
Although I never studied with Rabbi Jay Miller z”l, I was able to study for a number of years with one of his students who did his best to transmit to us the Torah of his teacher. You can read some comments about him here and below is an announcement from the Web Yeshiva about his passing:
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It is with tremendous sadness and not a small amount of regret that I mourn the passing of Rabbi Jay Miller. There are many of us from the golden age of Brovenders who will always bear his exacting brand of Torah study. He was a man unique in his talents and his flaws, but I always felt the two were inextricably tied, and as often is the case, without the other, the one would not exist either.
In the ’70’s when learning Gemara was all but closed to Ba’alei Teshuva, Rabbi Miller developed a method of learning that could achieve in a year what most day schools could not achieve in twenty, or fifty for that matter. The daily first year Mishnah class had a quality of perpetual high drama. Studying Mishnah and Gemara could only be characterized as a gladiator sport where he was always the last man standing. There would be no such thing as a slow day in Miller’s shiur.
Excited, irritated, mystically enveloped in a veil of tobacco smoke, he took Mishnas we thought we understood, and then after rendering them inscrutable, he helped us relearn them correctly. He admonished us, shrieking, “Don’t think, just do what I do!” Many of us, I’d like to believe the best of us, loved him for it.
The fierce discipline, passion and commitment belied a softer side that would emerge only when he deemed necessary. I remember when we were helping pack up his books prior to his moving from Yerushalayim to New York. At one point, he opened a can of olives to share with us. He then saturated the olives in olive oil because Chazal said that olives cause one to forget, while olive oil helps one to remember. (Horayot 13b) He explained that these are the simple ways we keep the Talmud present in our lives and actions.
I remember thinking that it doesn’t matter whether olives and olive oil contain these properties in fact, but for him it was a simple act of affection and fealty to bring what our Sages had said into the world, reminding us that remembering Torah is important and forgetting any apart of it may even be a sin. Such was his devotion, to and his compulsion for learning.
If everything we contribute emanates from the skills we are given, then Rabbi Miller singularly, selflessly and passionately was the one who taught me, and countless others, everything.
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Also read this part of a post from the Magnes Zionist:
Rabbi Brovender effected a revolution in Jewish modern orthodoxy by founding two yeshivot– one for men, and one for women — where the emphasis was on teaching beginners, or near-beginners, how to learn on their own the traditional texts of Judaism, especially Talmud. Until he came on the scene there were few orthodox institutions for beginners, and those that existed were “factories” for turning students into observant Jews, and marrying them off to newly-observant women. The idea that one could actually teach a twenty-year old college student how to learn Talmud at a high level was unthinkable. But, together with a series of great teachers, including the incomparable Rabbi Jay Miller, that is exactly what Rabbi Brovender did. He created generations of Torah learners, most of them orthodox, some of them ultra-orthodox, some not-observant at all. But what brought them all together was their ability and desire to grapple with the traditional texts of Judaism, especially the Talmud – learning it, discussing it, talking about it, and, more than occasionally, living it.
We drove down into Memphis, the sky was hard and black
Up over the ridge came a white Cadillac
They’d drawn out all his money and they laid him in the back
A woman cried from the roadside “Ah he’s gone, he’s gone”
They found him slumped up against the drain
With a whole lot of trouble running through his veins
Bye-bye Johnny
Johnny bye-bye
You didn’t have to die
You didn’t have to die
“Johnny Bye Bye,” Bruce Springsteen (Based upon a Chuck Berry song about Elvis Presley’s death.)
“Man at the top says it’s lonely up there
If it is man, I don’t care
From the big white house to the parking lot
Everybody wants to be the man at the top”
“Man at the Top,” Bruce Springsteen
