re: judaism.stackexchange.com/q/25946/759 I would like to delete everything in the answers section except the opening paragraph of Danield's answer, and add a statement into the question clarifying that it seeks statistics not ideology (which is accurate I think). Does anyone object? (Ping @HodofHod @shmuelbrin among others)
Now that it is possible for moderators to edit specific sections of the /about page, some folks have been discussing changes to the one on their site.
What guidelines should I keep in mind when making changes to /about?
What should go in each section?
What pitfalls should I avoid?
Proposed definition of heterodox: "Jews, groups thereof, or philiosphies thereof that do not consider Jewish Tradition / the Oral Torah to be binding."
(And by that definition, I think that would not include questions about meshichism, which, AFAIU, has no disagreement with orthodoxy about the bindingness of the Torah.)
... and this would be borderline, depending on the nature of the claims against the Zohar.
Sorry, forgot to make the above a response to @HodofHod, with pings also to discussants @DoubleAA, @msh210, and @MonicaCellio
@IsaacMoses As I understand it, that would exclude Conservative Judaism, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just not how I think the tag has been used previously.
@IsaacMoses 'twould be nice if we could deal with such ambiguities in our definition, as other questions with similar issues might crop up in the future.
1) From the top: "Conservative Judaism views Halakha (Jewish law) as normative[1] and binding.[2]"
2) From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Halakha#Differences_from_Orthodox_theology : "... Conservative Judaism does not necessarily consider portions of the halakha, and even Biblical law, as a direct record of Divine revelation. The CJLS has written that the Torah represents merely "the beginning of a relationship" rather than a final word and can be superseded by new understanding and new circumstances "as we mature".
This more liberal approach to revelation has resulted in a view that Conservative Judaism's rabbinate can overrule Biblical as well as rabbinic law believed to be…
So, "Jews, groups thereof, or philiosphies thereof that do not consider Jewish Tradition / the Oral Torah to be Divine in origin and eternally binding."?
@IsaacMoses Torah MiSinai and Binding Tradition are different things. As I understand it, they just have a more...liberal understanding of (the requirements to utilize) powers like Oker Davar Min HaTorah, Horaat Sha'ah, Beit Din Mevatel Divrei Chaveiro and the like.
@IsaacMoses Is Muktza of Divine origin and eternally binding? Yom Tov Sheni?
@DoubleAA OK, drop the "Divine" part. I think that we do consider derabanans to be eternally, or rather "unbreakably" binding, while apparently CJ considers neither derabanans nor deoraitas to be unbreakably binding.
@DoubleAA Or perhaps "Jews, groups thereof, or philiosphies thereof that do not believe in the concept of a God-given, binding Oral Torah." (Never mind about derabanans.)
@DoubleAA ... not that, under any wording, I'd insist on applying it to J4J questions. I just have no particular objection (necessarily) to applying it to them.
I think I'm most happy with this one, which not coincidentally, is the shortest.
... and it could be shortened even futher by striking "or groups thereof"
@IsaacMoses I'd still like clarification regarding CJ beyond a stirah in wikipedia, especially considering how we treat them here meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/q/1298/759 as 'closer' to orthodox than reform in some way.
"Does Conservative Judaism consider its adherents bound by a God-given Oral Torah?" sounds like an on-topic Mi Yodeya question to me, don't you think?
@DoubleAA Perhaps ironically, I intentionally chose driving to shul as part of the example in that town hall question because it was, as I understand it, a historic departure of CJ from considering Halacha binding.
@DoubleAA Could be. And I'd tag it heterodox regardless of the answer and of the precise definition of that tag, since it's trying to establish the extent of CJ's heterodoxy.
@DoubleAA IIRC, for this ruling, they rejected the opinion of their posekim and opened the question up to the rest of the JTS faculty, or something like that. (But I'm sure I don't have this exactly right.)
@DoubleAA "Four years later came the decision to allow driving to the synagogue on the Sabbath, the first official break with Orthodox halakhah." jewishideasdaily.com/4426/features/…
It seems to me that the while business is irrelevant since @YaakovPinsky's quote is only a hava amina from the footnote, which goes on to say that there's an opinion that techias hameisim will occur before the revelation of Moshiach.
@HodofHod That's not how I read it. He quotes one interpretation of the gemara which says it follows the other opinion (that ThM will occur before) but gives his own answer about the soul anyway seemingly because we don't paskin that way. ie he quotes an opinion that the yerushalmi is shelo aliba dehilchita, and then offers an explanation as to how it really is aliba dikulei alma.
Well, I'll probably want to take another look art this when I've had some sleep, but it seems that one might take the last paragraph to go on R Papa's question directly. As the footnotes finishes: see s'if gimmel.
@HodofHod Even if the last paragraph is on R Papa, it still sounds like he's treating the other opinion as shelo aliba dehilchita, and his initial paragraph stands.
@HodofHod If you don't mind my asking, I didn't see either you are ShmuelBrin complain about the tagging of the question, which is apparently now so controversial. Why is that?
Did you just not want to get involved? As you can see I'm getting complaints about it, and I wanted the perspective of a long time user who knows how tags and such work.
@HodofHod Tell me about it. I thought I was avoiding a night of dealing with long comment chains about if Chabad is treif by stemming it early. And now look at it. Apparently now I'm Big Brother pushing a Chabad agenda and at the same time not counting them in a minyan.
@HodofHod Even if the last paragraph is on R Papa, it still sounds like he's treating the other opinion as shelo aliba dehilchita, and his initial paragraph stands.
He seems to be agreeing IMO with the Rambam he quoted earlier in the first paragraph.
Though I can't say I'm an expert at his use of specific leshonos.
If you could find the author of the comment and if it was reviewed by the Rebbe that would be good.
And now I should really get some sleep before I start imagining that I have Talmidim who could come tell me to say Shema.
"Does Conservative Judaism consider its adherents bound by a God-given Oral Torah?" sounds like an on-topic Mi Yodeya question to me, don't you think?
(The quoted question, that is, not whether it is on topic.)
Isaac and I were trying to formulate a definition for heterodox which would exclude Conservative Judaism (because that was our impression for how the tag had so far been used). The current 'best' idea so far is:
@DoubleAA @IsaacMoses Wait... I thought you were trying to formulate a definition for heterodox that would include Conservative Judaism (because that's how the tag has so far been used).
@msh210 Above you can see Isaac and I going through a number of variations of "Jews or groups thereof that do not X". Our discussion centered around trying to find an X which non-Orthodox groups do not, and which doesn't leave ambiguities for the tag's application to the Zohar question and the Chabad statistics question and other future possible ambiguities.
@msh210 TLDR your intuition is right. My wording is off because of the previous discussions.
@DoubleAA I'm not sure Wiktionary's definition is standard. (No litotes intended. I'm just not sure.)
@Michoel Turns out it's Weiss in Melbourne I'm related to. I'm also related to Hedy Goldschmiedt in Sydney (owners, or they were, of Gold's s'farim store). (Yes, I know it's a long way from Melbourne to Sydney, and, no, I'm not expecting you to know people there.)
only the homepage though. if you find a publicly indexed interior page, it will still work.
Not sure why they hack random things like that. I guess they just scan for easy vulnerabilities on Jewish sites. They hacked campganisrael.com a couple time. Weirdos
@HodofHod Well, it says "Jewish" but I'm not sure I know what that means. Would he not accept a non-Jew's explanation about how to conjugate ayin-vav verbs in nif'al?
Unless he wants them to be about derivation of MH words from Gemara/Tanach
@HodofHod Jewishness could be very relevant, but as of now it's quite unclear and it sounds like he didn't really even mean Jewish at all so I've closed.
@IsaacMoses Yes. Per msh210 (with disclaimer) it can include beliefs/practices of the orthodox (lowercase) when unusual or non-standard even if not heretical.
So limiting it to technically heretical beliefs (torah not misinai) would be limiting. we can do that, we should just be aware.
@HodofHod Different people/groups tend to place special emphasis on different sets of Chazal's teachings. In my experience, this happens to be one that Chabadnikim are particularly good at.
Are we going to get tabulated results from the Community Evaluation process?
@CopilFlavius Well, if you can come up with a specific question or two to ask, you could ask them on stackoverflow.com . Then, a) you'll hopefully get answers, and b) you'll hopefully get the handful of upvotes necessary to get the 20 points you need to chat there
@CopilFlavius According to the document you linked to, you're advised to go through your previous questions and try to improve them so that they'll get some upvotes.
@Phil (not a mod) I can't address the merge, but I think you can edit your profile here to have the name Shraga, so the same account will be Shraga here and Phil there. I think you only get one name throughout chat, though.
@Phil hi. Well that answers that question; one of the mods noticed the merger and asked SE if that was by your request. We didn't do it; a person (or automatic process?) from SE did. Do you want separate accounts or do you just want the names to be different? I'm sorry for the inconvenience and the surprise.
@Shraga The latter. I was an avid reader of Joel on Software, so I followed the podcast they did in preparation for setting up the site and got my account during beta, maybe even on Day 1
Well, years ago I read this novel about a guy who managed to quantify and classify magic and it's rules through computer programming, so who knows that the future may bring...
@IsaacMoses this is, indeed, the key question to me. What are we trying to accomplish with heterodox? Questions of whether Conservative should be in or out depend on our goals. I haven't yet reviewed the 48 questions currently tagged that way, but I'm wondering if there's value to it at all.
@Shraga If anyone's qualified to do that, it's not me. I know something about programming, but less than others in this room, and nothing (as you well know :) about magic
But on a more serious note, my limited exposure to Kabbalistic literature actually created a vague similarity in my brain. My understanding (again, limited) is that Kabbala is basically an understanding of the rules which Hashem put in the world which the world runs with.
We all know a lot about nature (i.e. what happens when you drop-and-drag a folder in windows) but knowing Kabballa is like understanding the source code, which can allow you to use keyboard shortcuts which are specified in the code, but which the average user doesnt know about.
@MonicaCellio It seems to me that there is. For example, there are questions of Halacha wrt heterodox movements for which many posekim treat R, C, and Rc the same.
... now whether such questions belong in the same category as questions about unaffiliated individuals or Karaite history, I'm not sure, but I lean toward yes, at least until there are enough questions to warrant fragmenting the tags (@MonicaCellio)
@IsaacMoses How would we tag a question about whether a Conservative Jew can attend a Reconstructionist simcha? (I think we established after the town-hall question that C questions are on-topic.)
@IsaacMoses so since (we seem to believe) C is a halachic movement, you're saying heterodox because of the Rc. So, next question: a C Jew asks a question about attending an O simcha; is that heterodox? I don't think so, but I bet some would tag it that way because of the C.
So I'm wondering if we should ditch heterodox, allow movement-specific tags if applicable for questions based in those movements (like with chabad), and consider a general "pluralism" tag for the interactions.
@Shraga you're welcome! I see other people addressing you here as Shraga; I'm still seeing Phil, but maybe it's a caching issue.
@MonicaCellio The C going to Rc wedding question is definitely "heterodox: b/c the reason the C person is asking the question is presumably b/c Rc is heterodox from C's POV. I'd say the same about C from my POV. Better test question: "May I drive on Shabbat according to C?"
@IsaacMoses thinking about that contributed to my proposal. That's not a heterodox question, any more than a chareidi asking about Satmar is asking a heterodox question. It's a question about C, or Satmar, or whatever; maybe we should tag it that way.
@HodofHod it's a source (may or may not be a strong one), so it's fine on that grounds. The other factor that occurs to me is whether the rav would object to his words being shared more broadly than the original context -- if he said it in a public lecture then it should be fine, but if he said it off-the-cuff or privately that would give me pause. (And has, actually.)
I know we've had answers of that sort before, and even some of the form "my third-grade teacher taught me that..." where there's no name. Hence the comment about strength of the source.
I asked this question just this week to HaRav Zundel Kroizer. I asked if I could fly to EY knowing I would miss minyanim and kadeshim during the flight, but improve my learning here. He said the zchus of learning was far greater.
I asked this very question (for a family member) to Rabbi Gedalia Anemer, zt'l, regarding Shabboss and all yom tovim (including Yom Kippur). He said it was not a problem.
My rav is "old school", involved in kashrus and would recommend items without hashgacha based on his knowledge and experiences. Some examples:
He will buy the less expensive store-brand sodas without a hechsher since the only problematic variable in it is flavorings- which he says ruba d'ruba ...
When I was at KBY, I asked the campus Posek this question, and he said that it's OK, because the bentcher is protected by at least two layers of covering ("kli betoch kli"). He added that it may even be OK in a pants pocket without the wallet, since the fabric of the pocket and the fabric of the ...
Yesterday (on Shabas parashas Zachor, erev Purim), I asked a local rabbi a similar question, how one can best fulfill the obligation of mishloach minus. He said via the Internet.
As an answer, or perhaps multiple answers, to this question, should be a hierarchy of the tags used on the main site.
Here's a bare list, excluding synonyms, with * meaning the tag has been incorporated into an answer:
* adultery
* agriculture
* aishes-chayil
* am-yisrael-jewish-nation
* anim...
The heterodox is used for non-Orthodox movements. Would it make sense to create a separate Reform tag and a Conservative tag?
Now that it is possible for moderators to edit specific sections of the /about page, some folks have been discussing changes to the one on their site.
What guidelines should I keep in mind when making changes to /about?
What should go in each section?
What pitfalls should I avoid?
Are there any good Jewish Blogs about the Modern Hebrew language?
Yesterday (on Shabas parashas Zachor, erev Purim), I asked a local rabbi a similar question, how one can best fulfill the obligation of mishloach minus. He said via the Internet.
