V'dibarta Bam

@shulem My two cents is: keep at it. The more the clarity of your posts improve, the more Torah you will have imparted.

@shulem See you around!

shulem

i do it for you

lol

i am around daily but running short of posts to reply to

@shulem There's always the list of unanswered questions

So I guess since nobody gets a notification about this, I'll let people know

I have proposed a synonym for the kashrut tag

For some reason, kosher and kashrut were considered two separate tags

was there any reason for this?

@Daniel Looks like kosher was created by accident. It ought to be merged into kashrut-kosher and retained as a synonym. @msh210 @DoubleAA @MonicaCellio

@Daniel Good catch.

8:15 PM

@IsaacMoses That's how it looks to me.

The crazy thing with this whole shulem thing is that even with all of the brouhaha about downvotes, he has still managed to amass 813 rep in 9 days

That's quite an impressive clip

And he'd surpass many of the top users here pretty quickly at that rate

@Daniel Upvotes are worth +10 rep. Downvotes are worth -2 rep. Being prolific is generally good for rep.

@IsaacMoses Yeah

@Daniel thanks for the catch!

@IsaacMoses done.

8:30 PM

@IsaacMoses I think there's an unpredictable adjustment period for someone new to participating in internet forums, Q&A sites, or wikis. If someone has the passion and the ability to contribute positively, I'd be willing to be extra forbearing. (Contrast with Ali, for example).

@MonicaCellio Thanks

@Fred Good point. I agree. (Not that we weren't quite forbearing with Ali.)

@IsaacMoses Yes, quite forbearing.

@Fred What ever happened to him?

did he just stop showing up?

@Daniel I don't know. Maybe check Islam.SE?

@Daniel He was suspended for a while. I think the suspension just ended.

8:35 PM

Anyway, I'm flattered that Shulem holds me in such esteem. :)

@Fred some new users come in slowly, asking and answering a few questions and getting the lay of the land. Others dive in, and while the enthusiasm is great, if course-correction is needed it gets harder.

There's somebody on another site I frequent who has this problem too; answered something like ten questions a day for his first several days but didn't get it, and he's been hard to steer. (It's now been a couple months; the rate dropped off.) I'm seeing shades of that here, trying to learn from that and apply it here, and still struggling.

@Fred You seem to be one of the few who can understand his posts

@IsaacMoses it did.

@MonicaCellio Yeah, I was a newbie once upon a time, so I have sympathy.

@Fred thank you for working with him, and thank you everybody who's been part of chat the last two days.

@Fred we were all new once.

8:39 PM

@Fred this doesn't look terribly troublesome :)

@IsaacMoses Heavily edited since then. Anyway, I didn't mean on J.SE. :)

Q: Difference between Yegiah and Hipus

Oh, and in looking at @Fred's old stuff, look what I found, @msh210!

3

The Gemara in Megila 6b says that if someone tells you that they understood a piece of Torah and they didn't work hard for it you shouldn't believe them. The Ramha"l says in the Hakdama to his magnum opus Mesilat Yesharim about the Pasuk (Mishlei 2:4) "אם תבקשנה ככסף וכמטמונים תחפשנה, אז תבין יר...

@IsaacMoses Yeah, I remember posting the source in the comments a couple of seconds after it was suggested that no source was forthcoming. That prediction was subsequently upvoted anyway, for some reason. :)

@Fred Oh, I see. Perhaps you should [edit] your source into the answer. :) The reason I brought this post up is that we were chatting earlier this week about finding a Q&A about "Yaga'ti/Matzati," and @msh210 went ahead and posted one today.

@IsaacMoses Interesting. Yeah, I was just thinking about editing that...

... done.

8:53 PM

@Fred y"k

@IsaacMoses Baruch tihye.

By the way, does anyone think I am misunderstanding Alex's answer in my comment here?

@Fred He doesn't mean for the entire world, he means for that kehilla

@Ariel That's what I hoped he meant. Thanks.

@Ariel "the נשמה כללית, the "all-encompassing soul" of the Jewish people" doesn't sound like that.

@IsaacMoses You are reading it in reverse. To be a rebbe someone must have that kind of soul - it doesn't mean that the rebbe is the only person in the world with that kind of soul.

9:03 PM

@Ariel My confusion partially stemmed from this comment: "whereas in Lubavitch - very likely related to the נשמה כללית idea - there is the feeling that there is supposed to be strictly דבר אחד לדור ולא שני דברים לדור"

...as well as the language "being the נשמה כללית" in the answer.

@Fred I don't understand what he means by that

@Ariel Yeah, that's what I don't get. If multiple people in one generation can have a נשמה כללית, how would that be related to דבר אחד לדור ולא שני דברים לדור?

@Fred I don't get what "centrifugal tendency" means either.

@Ariel I think he is referring to a kind of inertial tendency

where once the rebbe is a son of the previous rebbe, it continues that way

Hopefully Alex will be back again soon to enlighten us!

9:23 PM

@DoubleAA I.... have never not understood so many technical jokes in one place before.....

Does anybody understand nikmasi's most recent question?

A: comparative religion questions

9

I say it depends. You know the famous story about the Rabbi who said "you're both right!"? Well @DoubleAA and @ShmuelBrill are both right! (But the third guy, you know, the one who says "But Rabbi, they can't both be right!"? He's wrong.) If someone asks a question like "How does Judaism or Jewi...

@Daniel Not I. But I'm guessing that it'd be intelligible to someone who's already familiar with the Kabbalistic concept in play.

@HodofHod :)

@Daniel The only thing I got is that AV is supposed to be אע etc for the other letters. (Not sure why V is ע.)

@Daniel I edited. Permutations is the wrong word, it's really gematrios.

Meaning, if one spells out each letter in G-d's name YKVK, one can come to different values depending on how one spells the individual letters.

9:33 PM

@HodofHod How is MaH a spelling of a hebrew letter?

@Ariel I think that is the final result of the gematria

@Ariel No. It's the numerical value of all the letters of G-d's name spelled out. A gematria, not a spelling

@Daniel Precisely

@HodofHod I see. It's an example from my question from last week or something that nobody liked :)

Unless someone has an objection, I'm going to Hebraicize everything. I think those unfamiliar with the Hebrew alphabet and numerology won't have much interest in this anyway...

@HodofHod So in whatever piece of kabbalah he's reading, one of the gematrias is called b"n instead of n"b, and he's asking why

right?

9:35 PM

@Daniel Exactly. It's actually a good question.

@HodofHod Do you know which specific thing he is citing? Or is this a general thing that "everybody knows"

?

I'm not the downvoter btw

@HodofHod You should. I also edited in a small bit of introductory text.

@Daniel It's very common in the more intricate and complex pieces of (Chabad) chassidus (but appears even in the lesser). I can't comment on classical kabbalah, having never learned that in the originals.

@HodofHod please do. That will help.

@HodofHod Is there any problem writing those out in hebrew? Are you writing hashem's name?

9:42 PM

@Ariel Not that I know of. Then again, maybe that's why I'm having such triuble with the RTL on this...... ;)

Bingo!!

Tetragrammaton

The term tetragrammaton (from Greek ', meaning "four letters") refers to the Hebrew theonym () transliterated to the Latin letters YHWH. It may be derived from the verb that means "to be", and is considered in Judaism to be a proper name of the God of Israel used in the Hebrew Bible. While YHWH is the usual transliteration of the tetragrammaton in English academic studies, the alternatives YHVH, JHVH and JHWH are also used. The most widely accepted pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) is Yahweh, though Jehovah is used in many Bibles, but in few modern ones. The Samaritans under...

@HodofHod Use &rlm; as needed (if you are not already).

Subsection "Kabbalah"

@Ariel I am, still having issues.

@HodofHod It's sometimes easier to edit if you put the hebrew on a line by itself, edit it there, then remove the newlines and merge it in.

what's the word I'm looking for here: "there are 4 different values of G-d's name, each based on different possible spellings for the ____ letters."