Talmud and Chaos - תלמוד וכאוס

3/31/12

Times: Talmudic Speed Limit Sign

A truly Talmudic sign from the Times Magazine:

By Hope Reeves

Road signs in a small town outside Detroit that listed six separate times for drivers to slow down in school zones have now been replaced after residents complained that reading them created a hazard all its own. The signs in White Lake Township instructed passing cars to slow to 25 m.p.h. from 6:49 to 7:15 a.m., 7:52 to 8:22 a.m., 8:37 to 9:07 a.m., 2:03 to 2:33 p.m., 3:04 to 3:34 p.m. and 3:59 to 4:29 p.m., but, thankfully, on “school days only.” The police chief, Edward Harris, says he had nothing to do with the mess. “Our only involvement was responding to the concerns raised by a number of individuals,” he says.

Talmudic Books for Kindle on the Talmud, Bible, Kabbalah and Prayer
The Kindle Edition of the Classic Soncino Talmud in English

3/29/12

StarTribune: Minnesota author publishes six books and creates an instant legacy

The Star Tribune has a moving story about self-publishing by a Minnesota author.

The author is ill with cancer. The paper reports: "With time running out, Emily Meier started her own publishing company to share her life's work - six books at once."

Quite inspiring.

Is the Jordan Think Tank Arabic Babylonian Talmud Kosher?

JPost reports that and Arabic translation of the Talmud has been published.

A think tank on Middle East affairs in Jordan has for the first time published a translation of the Babylonian Talmud in Arabic.

Middle East Studies Center based in Amman produced the 20-volume work, which took six years to complete and is the labor of 95 translators, language experts and editors.

Sketchy details leave questions open about whether the motives of the translators are kosher or not.

We will follow up as more information becomes available.

3/27/12

Special Book Event This Thursday 7:30 at the Teaneck Public Library: Six super-models that you meet in the Synagogue

Teaneck Public Library Special Book Event

Six super-models that you meet in the Synagogue - Thursday, 3/29, 7:30 PM

Not those "super-models" from the fashion magazines!

Professor Tzvee Zahavy will speak about his new book, "God's Favorite Prayers" that narrates his spiritual quest searching for perfect prayers. His talk will be on Thursday, March 29 at 7:30 PM at the Teaneck Public Library.

In his quest, Zahavy meets six ideal archetypes - those "super-models" of Jewish liturgy - the performer, priest, scribe, mystic, meditator and celebrity.

Come join and relive Tzvee's journeys and learn how to expand your own spiritual horizons.

The author will sign copies of his books and answer questions from audience.

The program is free and open to all. Call 201-837-4171 for further information.

Talmudic Books for Kindle on the Talmud, Bible, Kabbalah and Prayer

The Kindle Edition of the Classic Soncino Talmud in English

3/26/12

Jewish Action: Is Rabbi Jonathan Gross the Chief Rabbi of Nebraska?

We salute our Teaneck favorite son for achieving recognition as a rabbi in Omaha. A certain young rabbi named Zev Goldstein (our dad) served as a clergyman in that town in the early 1940's.

The Chief Rabbi of Nebraska: Rabbi Jonathan Gross
By Bayla Sheva Brenner

The richest man in the world lives in Omaha, Nebraska, according to a 2008 Forbes magazine report. Although the publication was referring to legendary investor Warren Buffet, Rabbi Jonathan Gross, rabbi of Beth Israel Synagogue, would ardently insist that the author really must have meant him.

The spiritual leader of Beth Israel since 2004, Rabbi Gross, who is in his thirties, wakes up each day thrilled with his calling. From the start, he jumped right into the heart of Jewish Omaha—a city with an overall Jewish population of 6,500—offering educational programs and youth initiatives that have sparked the interest of Jews across the spectrum. Since his arrival, the shul has grown by one hundred members, many of whom are children. Rabbi Gross says he intends to keep up the momentum and draw even greater numbers from the larger community.

Originally from Teaneck, New Jersey, Rabbi Gross didn’t plan on being a pulpit rabbi. He majored in math at Yeshiva University (YU) and after a brief, unsatisfying stint as an actuary, he thought he should “do something Jewish.” In August 2001, he participated in YU’s summer Torah Tours program, which sends students to various communities to inspire greater enthusiasm for Torah. Rabbi Gross’ tour took him to Omaha. He found the people friendly and saw real potential for growth...more... /repost from 1/19/10/

3/23/12

Crimson: Egyptology and Christianity Alive at Harvard

We guess it was a slow news week at Harvard.

The Crimson reports that a "Professor Revives Egyptology At Harvard". You can now enroll in Egyptian Aa: The Language of the Pharaohs, Egyptian 150: Voices from the Nile: Ancient Egyptian Literature in Translation, Anthropology 1250: The Pyramids of Giza, or Societies of the World 38: Pyramid Schemes: The Archaeological History of Ancient Egypt.

And you can now find Christianity at Harvard (although we thought it was there all along, they have a divinity school for heaven's sake). We are not at all sure why this is a story, "Faith Emerging: Students Find Christianity at Harvard".

Haaretz: Jerusalem Fake Yeshiva Kollel Busted

Some would say there are redundancies in this headline: "Jerusalem police arrest four ultra-Orthodox men in fake kollel scam". Fake and scam in the same title seems over the top and repetitive to us. To others, the term "kollel" refers to a scam by definition, since it is where some men are paid to sit and read books, to engage in essentially unproductive activities, making the headline triply redundant.

What surprises us is that the secular formerly socialist State of Israel pays stipends to kollel students. When did all that start?

Jerusalem police arrest four ultra-Orthodox men in fake kollel scam
Men arrested for allegedly defrauding the Education Ministry of millions of shekels through a fictitious Torah study center.
By Oz Rosenberg
Jerusalem police have arrested three ultra-Orthodox men for allegedly defrauding the Education Ministry of millions of shekels through a fictitious Torah study center.

Following the arrests on Sunday a fourth man, from Jerusalem, was arrested yesterday in connection with the nonexistent center. Jerusalem police expect further arrests in the case.

Erica Brown's Encomium of the Virtues of the Talmud

From Erica Brown, published at the Algemeiner, nice words about the Talmud while reflecting on the demise of the Britannica:

...And the pause that I took to contemplate this new era also made me marvel all the more at our Jewish equivalent of the encyclopedia: the Talmud. Produced over several countries and four centuries, the Talmud has outlived the Britannica almost ten times over, at least from its humble beginnings as passages of Mishnah. Many Jewish books have gone into hundreds of printings, but the Talmud has outlived them all as our staple of rabbinic information.
From the first Bomberg printing of the Talmud once owned by King Henry the VIII when he searched for a solution to divorce his wives to the contemporary Schottenstein Talmud, a translation from Aramaic to English produced over 15 years at roughly one volume every 9 weeks, the Talmud's lasting impact is hard to fathom.
In 2010, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who translated the Talmud from Aramaic to English, added punctuation and divisions and commentary completed his entire 45-year project.
Why wasn't there some announcement centuries ago that "the era has changed" and the Talmud would no longer be reprinted? How can it be that when the Talmud was put on trial in 1240 by the Pope and then 24 cartloads of Talmudic volumes were burned in Paris in 1242 that European Jews made sure to replace them, as did so many other scholars and students after subsequent burnings?
It is only because the Talmud, unlike my old Britannica, was and is studied every day. This August tens of thousands of people will mark the completion of the seven year cycle—daf yomi—of Talmud study, one page a day. You can download it onto your iPOD and study it in a class on the Long Island Railroad and in synagogues early morning all around the world. We have never stopped learning it. It has always needed to be reprinted, even during our darkest hours.
To me, the most remarkable printing of the Talmud took place in Munich-Heidelberg in 1948, despite a shortage of paper and the lack of a complete Talmud in Germany. Two sets of Talmud were brought to Germany from New York, and a printing plant that had formerly printed Nazi propaganda printed its first Talmud, the only instance of a national government publishing the Talmud.
It was done at the request of a delegation of rabbis all of whom were survivors and is referred to today as the "Survivor's Talmud"; its frontispiece has a picture of Jerusalem on the top, underlined by the words: "From slavery to redemption, from darkness to great light"; it almost distracts the eye from the barbed wire fencing that decorates the bottom third of the page.
The Survivor's Talmud was dedicated to the United States Army: "The Jewish DPs will never forget the generous impulses and the unprecedented humanitarianism of the American forces, to whom they owe so much."
But more remarkable still is the way the introduction described the printing itself: "This special edition of the Talmud published in the very land where, but a short time ago, everything Jewish and of Jewish inspiration was anathema, will remain a symbol of the indestructibility of the Torah."
Most Jews today do not own a Talmud. They are distant from its incredible history. Even if you never open a page, the volumes would sit on your shelves like the Jewish soldiers that they are, making a statement of pride and indestructibility by their very existence. As we say a sentimental farewell to the Britannica, we as Jews know that words can live on shelves forever, but only if they also live within us.

3/21/12

Is the Brookings ConText site a Talmud?

Like Lloyd Bentsen said of Dan Quayle in 1988, "I know the Talmud, I studied the Talmud, and the Brookings ConText site is no Talmud."

The "Center for the Constitution" with the Brookings Institution presents online "James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787" with commentary that can be augmented by users of the site.

The publishers of the site suggest that it is a lot like the Talmud.

From the American Interest blog: "The project, which aims to surround the notes themselves with columns of explanatory information, has a fascinating inspiration, explains Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings:

There is a model for this sort of thing, but it’s not a model from the American constitutional tradition; it’s the Talmud—the multi-volume exposition of Jewish law that developed after the Romans sacked the Temple in Jerusalem. The Talmud is a series of debates—and commentaries on those debates—on a text called the Mishnah. …On a page of Talmud, a passage of Mishnah is physically surrounded by layers of commentary text, more and more of them as the centuries wore on. So in the center of the page is a short passage, by tradition, of course, Divine, but often in practice dry as dust; yet radiating out from that passage is centuries of wisdom and thought. It is not merely a form of crowd-sourced scholarship, but it is a visual means of expressing that scholarship and crowd-sourcing that seemed to me to have broad application to the exposition of lengthy and difficult historical texts like the Notes.

No, we think all this is not Talmudic. The result as we see it on the site is an annotated text with two layers and five categories in separate note panes. The categories are:

H — Historical

E — Current Events

T — Theoretical/Philosophical

I — Constitutional Interpretation (this includes discussion of relevant court cases)

O — Other Commentary (also, when your particular column view does not show all available columns, commentary from “hidden” columns will appear in the “Other” pane)

These do not coincide, except in the most generic sense, with the Talmudic and halakhic modes of commenting on the Talmud text, which are not by the way "dry as dust".

And the two authority layers for comments at Brookings are contributors and scholars. Some unspecified people get Scholar-Level Access, "Approved scholars will also be granted advanced access to the site, which includes the ability to edit existing commentary. With scholar-level access, a pen icon will appear at the end of each note in the commentary panes. Click on the pen to edit text within each note." Ordinary Contributors cannot do that.

We wish the project luck, "as the centuries wear on" even if it is not Talmudic in any meaningful way. A truly open wiki-like effort would be much more welcome and more interesting to watch unfold. This looks like a pseudo "crowd sourcing" groupware effort that will be hampered, restricted and inhibited in any number of tangible ways.

Yet, as a post script, in one crucial high level way the ConText exercise and the Talmud are alike. Both are dedicated to providing life support or resuscitation for old documents to keep them alive so as to justify why things ought to stay the same as "we say" they always were because the old words (i.e., "as we interpret them") have special or even sacred meanings and great authority.

And the Brookings Institution is known both as liberal or conservative, depending on whom you ask. This ConText venture seems to us quite conservative, in that way yes, like the Talmud.

Talmudic Books for Kindle on the Talmud, Bible, Kabbalah and Prayer

The Kindle Edition of the Classic Soncino Talmud in English

3/20/12

JTS publishes over 100 podcasts via Apple's iTunes

In a welcome initiative the Jewish Theological Seminary Announced the Launch of JTS iTunes U with quality recordings of events and presentations for the public at large.

The unanswered question in this press release is how (or whether) JTS leverages iTunes and all other digital technologies for instruction of its students in and out of the classroom.

The Jewish Theological Seminary is pleased to announce the launch of the JTS iTunes U site. The site, accessible via Apple’s iTunes, makes public lectures, Torah commentaries, and select JTS courses available for free streaming and downloading.

“The launch of the iTunes U site marks a fantastic step forward for JTS’s online presence,” says Rabbi Charlie Schwartz, director of Digital Engagement and Learning at JTS. “It is now possible to easily find, download, and experience the deep and meaningful learning that happens every day at JTS.”

The JTS iTunes U site features a wide variety of content. The weekly Torah commentary podcasts are easy to find and subscribe to, as are recordings of public JTS lectures and events, such as the popular series of Library Book Talks that feature JTS faculty and other distinguished authors discussing their latest books. Collections of lectures detailing issues in contemporary Jewish philosophy, theology, and ethics highlight how JTS scholarship engages with the challenges of the 21st century. In the near future, full courses—complete with course materials—will be made available, providing access to JTS’s world-class faculty and high-level Jewish learning.

“Opening access to the wealth of learning, scholarship, and meaningful engagement with Jewish tradition that embodies JTS is core to the university's mission,” says Rabbi Marc Wolf, the newly appointed vice chancellor and chief development officer of JTS. “In the coming months, JTS will dramatically expand the ways, both innovative and traditional, that communities and individuals can be inspired by the energy of JTS,” Rabbi Wolf adds.

The JTS iTunes U site can be visited via iTunes at http://itunes.apple.com/us/institution/jewish-theological-seminary/id472010491.

Download iTunes for free: http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/.