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Halakhah and Phenomenology – Symbolic Logic
This will only be of interest to people who care about Symbolic Logic and about the rules of birur, of resolution of doubt in halachic questions. But I found something I wrote back in...
A Quantum of Time
There are two halachic indivisible units of time. When it comes to interruption, or for defining a single statement (e.g. when correcting oneself in davening) the unit is tokh kedei dibbur — within the...
Brisk and Telz
(Published in the December 2010 issue of Kol Hamevaser, “The Jewish Thought Magazine of the Yeshiva University Student Body”. The issue’s topic: “Derekh Ha-Limmud”. (Two additions not in the published version are added in...
Glory and Egalitarianism
I want to share, with permission, the following exchange I had with Ellen Rosen, a member of The Mussar Institute. On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 09:15:00AM -0800, Erosen1@aol.com wrote: I have a question...
Halakhah and Phenomenology – Addendum: Placebos
One more thought about my “Halakhah and Phenomenology” series…. A basic assumption behind the series is that what justifies looking at the world as experienced and as it could be directly experienced is the...
Halakhah and Phenomenology – The Unknown and Bitul
The Yerushami (Challah 3:5) discusses the case of when bread which didn’t have challah taken (or flour which didn’t have terumah taken from it), fell into a quantity of already separated bread. The gemara...
Pesaq Without Resolution
In “Invoking Tradition” I suggested that the amora’im of the Yerushalmi would not add their own interpretations to the words of the tana’im. The traditions must be preserved in their integrity. (And in “On...
When Science and Torah Conflict
(Initial post: With thanks to R’ Eli Turkel for providing some of the sources and all of the motivation for this post. (Dec 21st: Significantly expanded to include sources I dug up for further...
Explaining Tragedy
It seems to me, the overall question of theodicy and explaining why tragedy enters the lives of anyone but the most evil, can be addressed on two levels. Philosophically, the question is unanswerable. As...