V'dibarta Bam

@YEZ the scripts that update your tag counts are notoriously sluggish. I've seen it take days. I don't know why. It'll show up eventually.

@MonicaCellio I felt devious doing a retag from which I benefited. But it did need the retag.

3:22 AM

@YEZ I trust your intentions.

Shokhet

@MonicaCellio FWIW, I think your question is on-topic, because the focus is on the siddur (siddur = about Judaism), and not on the mechanics of Hebrew braille (not about Judaism) .....but I understand your doubt.

@Shokhet thanks. I thought it on-topic enough to ask it, but wanted to acknowledge that some might see it as a language or publishing question and attempt to explain why it's not.

Q: Please move these comments to a chat room

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This answer has more than 20 comments, and they're old enough that the mod ability to move long comment threads to chat does not work. I think the comments here are worth keeping in some form, but having that many comments on the main site is not good. In this case, there are almost as many del...

3:37 AM

@DoubleAA It says I'm Socratic, but Stack Exchange disagrees.

3:48 AM

"Our Maimonidean task is to take the good and reject the bad from Biblical Criticism." by @GilStudent http://www.torahmusings.com/2014/09/a-maimonidean-perspective-on-biblical-criticism/

Tweeted by avitalrachel on September 8, 2014 at 2:37 AM

Looks interesting on a quick skim (need to read for real later, and thought others might be interested -- so this seemed as good a place as any to stash a link).

@MonicaCellio I think our Maimonidean task is to not trust our own intellect to be able to sift through the good and bad ideas and arrive at the truth (Rambam Hilchos Avoda Zarah 2:3).

Q: A cool icon for accepted answer

4:03 AM

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I saw the Seasoned Advice site has a silver-cover icon (as in, this one's ready to serve) to mark questions with accepted answers. Can we do something like that? Perhaps a Torah scroll icon or something else? Maybe someone could think of something distinctly Jewish that connotes being finished...

feature-request design accepted-answer

Q: Are there any active Karaite members here?

4:29 AM

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I have at least one question (probably more) that I would like to ask on Mi Yodeya, regarding the practices of Karaite Judaism (having recently discovered that they're still around). Really, I would like to get answers from practicing Karaites, if possible. Therefore, I ask -- are there any Kara...

discussion users

Q: I know A, and based on A, I'm asking B

11:33 AM

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One example of this is here, but I have seen several. If the questioner is asking B, presuming A, could a valid answer be that A is incorrect?

discussion answer-quality

12:43 PM

@YEZ Hebrew English

1:33 PM

@YEZ What other option is there?

I mean, you have to decide to trust something or someone. If you don't rely on your own judgement, you rely on someone else's. Whose? And on whose judgement did you make that choice? Ultimately, it has to come back to yourself.

Yishai

2:37 PM

@YEZ +1 My starting assumption when anyone says "what would authority X say about this" where X is something that could not have been directly addressed is that it tells me something about the speaker and nothing about the authority's opinion on the matter.

The Rambam is a frequent victim of this.

3:28 PM

@YEZ I posed your challenge to R' Student on FB: facebook.com/gil.student/posts/… @MonicaCellio

4:57 PM

... His response: "That is a good question and was the subject of debate in the first two issues of the Torah U-Madda Journal. But in the end, we can't forget that the Rambam studied and taught (in Moreh Nevukhim) Aristotle's heretical views. However, you resolve that, you can address other issues."

5:21 PM

@msh210 I just saw your deleted answer here. Isaac asked a question recently about building a sukkah with wood walls; your answer would probably fit there.

@MonicaCellio Update on that, BTW. I've designed and am building one that sacrifices "components ... smaller than 4' X 8', if possible" for simplicity of design. The components are going to be pretty heavy (~50 lb. for 1/4" plywood panel + 16' of 2x4 frame), so I'll just need to make sure my kids get big enough to carry them before I age out of that task. :) Eventually, I'll write up my plans and post an answer.

... BTBTW, It would be cool if there were a public online repository dedicated to open-source sukka plans, mods, etc. Anyone want to build one?

@IsaacMoses thanks for the update. I'm looking forward to your writeup (maybe with pictures? :-) ).

@MonicaCellio :) Yes, I do believe I'll be inclined to take a few.

@IsaacMoses arguably a community-wiki post here could be that, no? It'd have to link off-site for full documents, but the entry point could be here.

5:38 PM

@MonicaCellio Could be, but wouldn't be ideal. What I'm thinking of would have doc storage, forking, and editing, pic storage, and user comments and ratings (e.g. "I used this plan. Here's a pic. It worked well, except for X. 4 stars."), some of which, yes, could be approximated here. But also, I think the scope for entries would be more open-ended than an MY question ought to be.

@IsaacMoses ah, I see. That would be nice to have, and I agree that Mi Yodeya wouldn't be the best platform for that.

... also a native tagging/classification system e.g. frame type: wood, metal, PVC; wall type: wood, tarp, canvas, lattice; Features: lavud fence, 100% wood, against-building, shlock; Minimum size; Maximum size; etc.

6:04 PM

NYT: "New Service Offers Taxis Exclusively for Women. Eventually, urban, secular society is going to reinvent yichud rules wholesale as a means of survival.

msh210

@MonicaCellio Thanks. I'm no longer as proud of that answer as I was when I penned it. (If indeed I was. I don't recall.) It can remain deleted.

@IsaacMoses I suspect that business may be illegal in Missouri. From what I understand, the state constitution bars businesses from restricting their services to people based on sex. I'd guess therefore that SheTaxis would have to offer female drivers for female passengers and male drivers for male passengers -- or neither. But IANAL and dunno any details of that Missouri law.

Actually, I see barbershops here (Missouri) advertising "women's cut" and "men's cut" at different prices. But I suspect those are prices for different types of cut rather than prices for different customers, and therefore legal. Again, IANAL.

6:22 PM

@msh210 That's probably not hard to justify legally, though I wonder what happens if a woman with short hair asks for a "men's cut."

msh210

@IsaacMoses Hopefully, she'd be charged the men's price. And I'm guessing she would, in fact.

Q: Why were we left with boring 404 and error pages?

7:02 PM

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There were so many great ideas proposed here. How come none got implemented? My personal favorites are these for error and 404.

discussion feature-request design

7:27 PM

@IsaacMoses in my experience, a woman's haircut includes shampooing (and drying of course). I don't know why, though perhaps some types of styling/cuts work better with the hair wet? (Beats me; I never do anything more than trim. But I gather that for men's cuts it's just the haircut.)

8:13 PM

@Yishai I just deciphered what I think you meant. Was there a misplaced X in that comment?

@IsaacMoses Thanks. I am inclined to reject the assumption that any answer to his "contradiction" will answer this challenge. I think depending on the particular way in which it is addressed will greatly impact whether it has any bearing on the challenge to his presentation of the Rambam.

8:32 PM

@TRiG Well, for a believer that is an easy distinction. I am trusting someone who is a faithful follower of the tradition and a link in the chain to pass on the accurate transmission of the belief. If I trust this person to be a transmitter of tradition, then I am not accepting or rejecting his individual ideas - I am accepting his tradition, which I believe goes back to a Divine revelation. If I am sifting through opinions sourced by those who do not espouse such a tradition, and ...

hoping to arrive at the correct moral conclusion, then I am trusting my own moral acuity to determine right and wrong. Additionally, if I believe someone to have accepted the tradition and be an authority of that tradition, then I trust him to know what fits and does not fit within that system, even if it isn't an overt tradition. If someone does not even purport to subscribe to the system of that tradition, then I have to evaluate each belief and decide on my own if it is correct.

8:45 PM

@YEZ And you trust that tradition because?

@TRiG Could be a number of reasons. An intellectual acceptance that there is a G-d, G-d communicated his Will to His creations, and that communication rests with the Jewish people. But that will not be my trying to figure out what G-d's Will is - it will be figuring out who knows it. A very different question.

(There could be any number of reasons why I trust the tradition. But that is not a question of my moral decision of what G-d wants - I am not going to make myself the arbiter of that)

@YEZ Yes, the chain of logical reasoning is different in your case to what I'm used to, but it does nonetheless at some point come back to you trusting your own judgement about something. That's all I wanted to say. And I don't think you're actually disagreeing with that, so ....

@TRiG I'm not - I will trust myself that 2+2=4. I trust myself that my parents won't play a cosmic joke at my expense. But I don't know what that has to do with what I was talking about. Or, in other words, you aren't actually disagreeing with my statement (or the Rambam's) which started this conversation.

Yishai

9:22 PM

@YEZ Yes, that didn't come out right. Let me try again. "My starting assumption when anyone says "what would a given authority say about X" where X is something that could not have been directly addressed by that authority is that it tells me something about the speaker and nothing about the authority's opinion on the matter.

@Yishai That was what I had thought you meant.

Yishai

@YEZ And there you go proving my point ...

Shokhet

9:39 PM

> At the same time, I have heard that other Jews consider the aforementioned Biblical occurrences and therefore regard the requirement for biological descent to be nontraditional, leaving open the possibility of such lineage being adoptive, matrilineal, spiritual, typographic, etc. In which case, while Jesus may not have been a biological descendant, it would seem that such would not necessarily preclude him from candidacy given his multiple other means of connection to David.

Source: judaism.stackexchange.com/q/45237/5323

What does it mean to be a "typographic" descendant?

10:42 PM

@Shokhet Ah, so you're not familiar with the nuances of Christian theology. Who'd've thunk it?

10:59 PM

@Yishai I don't follow.

Shokhet

11:12 PM

@TRiG A quick Google search didn't explain that one.....what's it mean?