Biur Chametz

Roadkill myths IV: End-of-2010 update

2011-11-07T02:38:00.008+02:00

Six years ago, back in 2005, I wrote a series of essays on road safety statistics in Israel. With six more years of data available, and the subject resurfacing lately in the Israeli media, it's time for an update.

To get the most out of this post, please read (or reread) at least the first two of my original essays. I'll be here when you get back.

Ready?

With data now available through 2010, what has changed?

As in my previous essays, we need to look at several types of statistics: 1) the total annual number of fatalities, 2) the fatality rate per capita, 3) the fatality rate per kilometer driven, and 4) Israel's international ranking in fatalities per capita and 5) per kilometer driven.

If you had asked me then what I expected the data to look like in six years, I would have anticipated a continuation of the established trends: steady, gradual improvements in the fatality rates, with occasional setbacks along the way. The trend in total fatalities is harder to predict, as it depends on the interaction between the falling per-kilometer rate and the rising total distance driven. Given the tailing off of the post-Soviet immigration, I might have anticipated a modest fall in total fatalities, but now I'm second-guessing my former self.

So what actually happened?

1) Total annual fatalities

Based on the data through 2004, I wrote: "Annual fatalities have been stuck at 450-550 for over fifteen years now." Already, we see a significant change (click image to enlarge):

In 2005, the annual fatality total fell below 450 for the first time since 1991. But that's not all. In 2007, it fell below 400 - all the way to 382 - for the first time since 1985, 22 years earlier. Then, incredibly, in 2009 it plummeted to 314, the lowest level since 1963!

Unfortunately, in 2010 the number bounced back up to 352, and it looks likely to exceed that in 2011. This is an example of what statisticians call regression toward the mean. When a statistic trends in a particular direction, sometimes it will overshoot its long-term trend and sometimes it will undershoot it. While it may appear to have gotten much better and much worse, in fact it mainly reflects random variance around its trend line. (Even while total fatalities remained largely stable between 1987 and 2004, the total changed by as much as 17.5% a year in either direction.)

Overall, between 2004 and 2010, the total number of annual Israeli road fatalities fell by an average of 5.0%/year, for a total of 27%. That's significant.

2) Fatality rate per capita

In 2005, I noted that fatalities per capita had showed a gradual improvement since 1980. The 2004 figure was 7.0 per 100,000 population, falling at an average 1.6%/year over the preceding five years. It would have been reasonable to expect that trend to continue.

But the decline not only continued, it accelerated:

Over six years, the fatality rate per capita improved by 34%, falling an average 6.7% per year. That's over four times the decline rate of the previous five years.

In 2010, it fell as low as 4.7 per 100,000 (having regressed from 2009's record low of 4.2). As the graph makes clear, values in this range are entirely unprecedented in Israel.

3) Fatality rate per distance driven

In 2004, fatalities per distance driven were at 12 per billion vehicle-km and falling at 2%/year. As with the other figures, this too showed a dramatic improvement through 2010:

Or, to zoom in on the last 20 years:

In six short years, fatalities per kilometer fell by a whopping 42% to just 7 per billion vehicle-km, an average decline of 8.5% a year. (The record low in 2009 was 6.4.)

So if anyone tells you that road safety in Israel is again getting worse, now you know the facts. The recent deterioriation is a short-term statistical fluctuation greatly overwhelmed by dramatic long-term improvements.

I'll save the international comparisons for a followup post. Brace yourself for more good news.

No, God was not punishing Obama

2011-08-24T00:34:00.005+03:00

Emerging from hibernation to address an issue of vital national importance...

Within minutes of the exceptional east coast earthquake, the net was buzzing with claims that it was God's way of punishing Obama for some disfavored policy or other. Most of these were probably in jest, but not all of them, it would seem.

We heard the same nonsense about Katrina. All the rebuttals apply, but more so. The idea doesn't make sense if you think about it for longer than it takes to send a tweet. It amounts to "Big earthquake near Washington - what more proof do you need?"

So for these misguided souls and others who may be misguided by them, I give you...

Why the earthquake was not a divine punishment of Obama:

If God wanted to punish Obama, why did the earthquake hit Washington (well, about 80 miles south of Washington) just when he was in Martha's Vineyard? Did He forget to check the president's official schedule? Or maybe God's aim is way off?

If God wanted to punish Obama, why did the earthquake hit when he was on vacation? Was he being punished for playing golf? Why didn't it hit while he was delivering a policy address, or at least busy at work in the Oval Office?

If God wanted to punish Obama, why did the earthquake cause so little damage and so few injuries? Was this some kind of warning shot? Does God even do shots across the bow? Some punishment, huh?

And then of course there's the whole ambiguity thing. Exactly what policy is God supposed to be punishing? His stance on Israel? Abortion? Gay marriage? Corporate taxes? The debt ceiling deal? What would motivate God to mete out a vague, unspecified "punishment" which didn't even hit the president, or virtually anyone else? For that matter, how do we even know this punishment was aimed at Obama, as opposed to Congress, the Supreme Court, the D.C. city council, or even Fred from Alexandria on line 1?

At this point, sensible people realize they've drawn an unsupported conclusion and admit their error. Others, though, will try to engage in sophistry to explain why in fact it does make sense to interpret this as a form of divine retribution against the president. The quake could actually be felt on Martha's Vineyard, they'll say. Washington clearly symbolized the president. And Washington was hit hard, even if not directly. What else could a historically-strong earthquake represent but divine displeasure? etc., etc.

But press them on how they can know their interpretation to be correct when none of the details are quite right, and they may explain that it's close enough - we can't expect to understand precisely how God works in this world.

Exactly. We don't understand how God works in this world. So stop claiming that you do. Especially when it doesn't make sense!

How to disperse haredi demonstrations against Shabbos violations

2009-11-22T17:51:00.003+02:00

A simple nonviolent technique: The police need to set up an electric eye which triggers halogen floodlights. No honest haredi can cross that beam on Shabbos!

The anti-Reagan feeds the beast

2009-03-01T10:46:00.003+02:00

In the Reagan years, some conservative wonks supported tax cuts not because they really believed in their stimulative effects, but because they wanted to "starve the beast" - that is, government. (See this typically biased Wikipedia citation for references.)

Government had grown too large and intrusive, and it was politically impossible to cut government programs. But tax cuts, and the ensuing revenue reductions, would force spending cuts by starving government of the revenues it needed to keep growing. With tax increases no less politically hazardous then spending cuts, growing deficits would eventually make it possible, if not necessary, to cut back the state. Tax cuts today would give rise to spending cuts tomorrow. (Or so they thought; reality was a bit different.)

I mention this because President Obama seems to have adopted the reverse theory.

He wants to "feed the beast" today, introducing an unprecedented parade of new government programs under the rubric of economic stimulus. But he knows he doesn't have the political support to pay for them with new taxes, and even if he did they couldn't be imposed during a looming recession. But over time, as the new programs develop entrenched constituencies and become politically impossible to cut, the enormous and growing deficits will create irresistible pressure to increase taxes to cover the gap. Spending on new programs today will give rise to new taxes tomorrow.

Or so he thinks. Reality has plenty of time for the final word.

Haveil Havalim #20X

2009-02-16T01:19:00.004+02:00

It's been a long time since I've appeared in Haveil Havalim, the Jewish/Israel blog carnival. This week it's at Here in HP, by Leora. I've been away so long I haven't the faintest idea who or what that is, but well done Leora!

The real reasons Israel can't play the violin

2009-02-05T02:35:00.003+02:00

"Doctor, when my arm heals will I be able to play the violin?"
"Sure - I don't see why not."
"Great! I could never play it before!"
-- A bad joke with an important point.

Israel is afflicted with diplomatic "doctors" like the one in that joke. They identify one reason why Israel has not achieved peace - sometimes a true and important reason - and then jump to the groundless conclusion that solving that issue will therefore bring peace. But like the patient who won't be able to play the violin even after his arm heals, Israel will not have peace even after the alleged cure, because the state of war is due to fundamental conditions it fails to address. If you never learn to play the violin, it doesn't matter how healthy your arm is.

So we read, time and again, self-proclaimed analysts explaining that "the settlements make a peace deal impossible." That may be true, I admit. But it does not imply that removing them would make a deal possible. Just as evacuating Gaza (or Lebanon) did not bring peace any closer there. The state of war was not a result of Israel's presence in Gaza, but if anything a cause of it. Eliminating the effect cannot remove the cause.

"Israel will not have peace without dividing Jerusalem." Again, that may be. But neither will we have peace if we do divide Jerusalem, God forbid.

"There is no military solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict." Perhaps. But that doesn't mean there is a potential diplomatic solution.

"Syria won't agree to peace without the entire Golan." Probably not. But all indications are that even forfeiting the entire Golan would not bring peace with Syria.

"The Palestinians can't strike a deal as long as they're divided between Fatah and Hamas, West Bank and Gaza." True again. But there's no evidence that they could strike a deal were they undivided either.

The worst culprits tend to be those Western liberal academics who tell us that "the terms of a final-status peace agreement are known; what's missing is the political will on both sides to implement it." As if there's a well-defined set of legalistic, logistical and structural arrangements which could yield peace were they only implemented.

If both sides were comprised of Western liberal academics, that may be the case. But we're not, on either side. Israelis and Arabs have fundamental differences in our attitudes to this land and our rights to it. That's what the so-called experts dismiss as "political will." But all the tunnels, bridges and international forces in the world can't bridge those gaps in attitudes and goals. Peace is not being blocked by the lack of logistics, but by essential and apparently unbridgeable differences of outlook.

Ultimately, Israel will not have peace until its Arab neighbors come to accept that we have the right to sovereignty here as a Jewish state - or at least that we're not going anywhere in the foreseeable future, and so they have more important things to do than continue fighting us in vain. Without one of those changes in Arab mindset, all the arm-healing in the world won't teach them to play the violin. None of the other alleged obstacles to peace is relevant so long as the core grievance remains.

If we have to choose between 34 parties, can't we have at least three votes?

2009-01-29T00:10:00.001+02:00

Who should I vote for, 2009 version

2009-01-28T20:51:00.003+02:00

In March 2006, last time national elections came around, I discussed how I perceived the choice of parties and which one I decided to vote for. Time has come for another round of Wheel of Proportion(al representation).

Rereading the old post, it's interesting how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same. On the one hand, the constellation of major parties likely to enter the Knesset has remained the same, except for the fissioning of the NRP/National Union. On the other hand, most of them have replaced their leaders.

The biggest changes, though, have been in the geopolitical situation. Oddly, these changes are only somewhat reflected in the political campaigns; many of the parties seem to think they can keep hitting their old themes and slogans without reacting to the changes around them.

In 2006, remember, Olmert's Kadima ran on a promise of further unilateral territorial concessions, including substantial withdrawals from Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. This time around, after Hizbullah's success in Lebanon and the Hamas occupation of Gaza, no one's talking about that. We've given our enemies enough rocket launching areas, thank you very much.

But rather than reach the obvious conclusion that there is no diplomatic solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Olmert and Livni have been busy negotiating with Abbas under the Annapolis process. Even in the unlikely case we could reach a deal with Abbas, what good will it do as long as Hamas controls Gaza and the Palestinian parliament? On that, Livni is mum.

Labor continues to talk about war and peace as if nothing of interest has changed. It's also shamelessly exploiting the Gaza campaign to score political points. What, are they trying to confirm the cynics who claim Barak went to war because of the elections? Heck, I'm not sure I'd put it past him myself.

Considering the choices of right-wing parties I briefly flirted with Lieberman and Yisrael Beiteinu. But seeing his campaign, which is solely based on fanning the flames of hatred towards Israel's Arab citizens, he holds no appeal to me whatsoever. I have no illusions about the challenges Israel faces from its Arab population, but we gain nothing by deliberately demonizing them. Disgusting.

Shas is striking a hawkish note, attacking Livni for refusing to rule out negotiating over Jerusalem. Okay, but everything short of that is okay with them? I expect so.

Which narrows me down to the usual suspects: Likud, NRP (now "the Jewish Home"), and the National Union. (By coincidence, I know at least one of the candidates in a realistic slot in each of the three parties.)

From the Likud this time around I hear a substantial - and refreshing - change of tone. No more talk about working for a negotiated settlement or expectations of peace. Netanyahu is talking soberly about the challenges we face and the hard choices to be made. No more "I'll bring you peace with security, or security with peace." Netanyahu has put forward a plan for "economic peace", suggesting that in the absence of real prospects for a diplomatic agreement we work on agreed steps to help the Palestinian economy. Frankly, I think that's a crock, but it's a potential way to maintain a diplomatic track which doesn't entail unrealistic expectations or unacceptable demands. In other words, it may be a way to buy time while filling the diplomatic void with something concrete.

I'm less sanguine about his economic program. It's nice to hear him talk about tax cuts - no one else is - but it's plain that his promise of a 20% cut over four years is unrealistic, especially with global economic crisis. Why set himself up for failure, when he could set a more modest but achievable goal?

Do I trust Bibi? Do I look forward to his leadership? Not particularly. But I'm still in general agreement with his positions, more so than any of his rivals. And Likud has plenty of good candidates who are reliable security hawks, including representatives of Feiglin's Jewish Leadership faction. Likud may actually elect more religious Knesset members this time around than either of the religious-Zionist parties.

Then there's the NRP. My natural political home, one would think. Yet, when you get past the flags and knitted kipot, what exactly do they stand for? What is their record of legislative effectiveness? Why do they think it makes sense to populate most of their list with novice politicians? They're opposed to territorial withdrawals, but stayed in the Sharon government until the last moment. Their economic platform seems to confuse Judaism with socialism. Their educational program is generally based on increased budgets for religious schools, but does anyone think the real problems with the religious schools are financial? I love Uri Orbach, and I respect the records of the rest of the list, but what do they plan to accomplish in the Knesset? Wrest the rabbinate from Shas? Unlikely.

And the National Union. Again, I admire Ketzeleh, but what legislative experience does he have? I also have a serious problem with the partnership with the neo-Kahanist crowd, and in general with the factions which have started to turn against the legitimacy of the state. And there's virtually no chance of them joining a coalition - in the current diplomatic climate, no government will openly agree to funding the settlements. So a vote for them might only help drive Bibi into a unity coalition; he'd rather prop up Labor against Kadima than be seen as caving in to the demands of radicals. Finally, I'm still disappointed with Uri Ariel for splitting the religious-Zionist camp - though I'm aware it might also salvage thousands of votes which would otherwise be wasted on fringe right-wing parties.

All that said, I have to decide how strongly I want Netanyahu to lead the next government. The stronger the Likud, the more likely he is to get the nod. Unlike in the old two-party days, today the "centrist" Kadima can always claim the ability to form a government, since it can reach out either left or right. To trump that, Likud needs a solid lead in mandates. Voting for the religious parties won't help that. If I didn't feel more strongly about Likud v. Kadima, I'd be more inclined to vote NRP. (Before you vote for a small party because you're certain Likud will win the election, read this.)

So once more I'm leaning towards the Likud. For different reasons than last time, but nonetheless.

What he said!

2009-01-11T08:22:00.003+02:00

Following up on my last post, take a look at Anthony Cordesman. (Hat tip: Larry Johnson.)

I hope our leaders have something up their sleeves.

If Hamas survives, Israel has lost

2009-01-11T00:33:00.005+02:00

To adapt an old joke about lawyers:

Q: What do you call 300 killed Hamas "operatives"?

A: A drop in the bucket.

With all due gratitude and admiration for the IDF, it's becoming increasingly clear that the current operation is running out of steam. If it ends now without advancing to the next stage - apparently entry into urban areas, with all the risk that entails - it will have failed to achieve any long-term goals.

Killing hundreds of Hamas terrorists, including a handful of senior officers, is welcome. So is destroying tunnels, blowing up offices and command centers, and just plain frightening them into thinking hard before assaulting us in the future.

(Though I wonder if those 300 include the Hamas police cadets killed at their graduation on the first day of the airstrikes? And if the total death toll is over 600, who were the rest of them - we've been told the vast majority of the dead have been combatants?)

But as long as Hamas leaders continue to issue threats and set conditions for a truce, they have not been defeated. And unlike Hizbullah, which is a Lebanese political party and bears some public responsibility for bringing down Israeli wrath on Beirut, Hamas is itself the government in Gaza and faces no apparent public pressure to desist, to say the least.

No, the only way to deter Hamas is to depose them. Whether that means wreaking such havoc on its ranks that there's no Hamas left to govern, or moving in and occupying their seats of power, is secondary. If this campaign ends with Hamas in charge of Gaza it's hard to see how it will be considered a success.

I don't see Hamas budging from its positions as long as it still breathes. If we're afraid to remove them from power for fear of what comes next, then they hold the winning hand in any confrontation with Israel. The only conceivably effective deterrence against a militantly ideological terrorist enemy is to demonstrate that if they attack us they won't survive to tell the tale. Not as individuals, but as a movement.

We're presented with nightmare scenarios of "Somalia in Gaza", a chaos of warring factions with no central government or effective regime. This would be less than ideal, no doubt. But it takes an effective central administration to gather international funds, import heavy weaponry, organize a military, launch an information effort. Gaza has countless long-range rockets because it has an effective central regime - one hostile to Israel and devoted to fighting us. A chaos of warring factions would not yield security for Israel, but it would be a far less potent threat.

Fear of "what if" must not deter us from fighting "what is". Whatever that demands.

Call me a radical, right-wing, scaremongering overoptimist

2008-12-31T23:53:00.006+02:00

I remember when those of us who, in protest against proposed Israeli territorial concessions fifteen years ago, distributed maps like this one were derided, scorned and mocked as hysterical, scaremongering radical right-wing extremist nuts.

But even we didn't dare suggest a threat map like this, or this, or this, or this. That would have been certifiably insane.

So, after all these years, it pains me to admit how wrong we really were. All we right-wing extremists, clutching to scaremongering scenarios of doom should Israel hand over strategic territory to our enemies, were way off base.

Turns out we were at least an order of magnitude too optimistic. The small comfort is that they haven't managed to get rockets into the "West Bank". Yet.

(Doesn't that 20.4km Katyusha range look quaint?)

Mitzvot that crack my back

2008-10-20T08:35:00.004+02:00

1. Sleeping in the sukkah - can anyone recommend a good portable mattress? I've tried sleeping bags, folding cots and air mattresses (which are better), but I still wake up pretty stiff.

2. Standing in shul on Yom Kippur. (Not exactly a mitzvah, but still!) From my shoes to G-d's ear, I hope.

3. Pesach cleaning - specifically crouching to clean the oven and fridge.

Am I missing any?

Chag sameach, and farewell to the sukkah for another year.

I won't be voting this year

2008-08-26T00:41:00.003+03:00

As a dual US-Israeli citizen, I usually make it a point to cast my ballot in the American elections. It's my legal right and (arguably) civic obligation, so long as I retain the rights and obligations of an American citizen.

But this year I don't plan to vote.

A Zionist epiphany? A bout of political disillusionment? Dissatisfaction with the choice of candidates?

No, none of that. I retain my Republican sympathies and, with all his flaws, I'd like to see McCain move in to the White House next January.

But I can't work up the motivation to go out of my way to engage in a meaningless gesture.

As an overseas resident, I cast my vote in the state of my last legal residence. As it happens, it's about as left-leaning as a state can be without being in Europe. It hasn't voted for a Republican candidate for president since 1988. If it were even conceivable that it would break Republican, it could happen only if (as in 1988) the Republican candidate were so far ahead nationally that it wouldn't matter anyway.

Which means my lonely absentee ballot would be about as influential as Hillary's roll call vote, but without the symbolic significance.

If I were visiting the old hometown anyway, I'd stop by the polling center to cast my vote. No big deal.

But to have to fill out an absentee ballot request, post it at my expense overseas, wait expectantly for the ballot, seal it in the requisite number of envelopes and signatures and attach another round of airmail stamps - just to cast a vote which won't change a thing? Not this time.

Maybe next time there will at least be a close race for Congress. Otherwise, I'm sorry I didn't live in Pennsylvania or Florida.

Yom Ha'atzmaut is political

2008-05-07T17:41:00.005+03:00

Yom Ha'atzmaut is political, they say, and thus has no place in our religious liturgy.

They are half right: Yom Ha'atzmaut is indeed political.

Furthermore, the story of Avraham is political.

The stories of Yitzhak, Yaakov and Yosef are political.

The story of Moshe is certainly political - Pesach is political.

The books of Bamidbar and Devarim are political.

Sefer Yehoshua is political, as are Shoftim, Shmuel and Melachim.

The latter prophets were political too.

The first Rashi on the Torah is political. So is the first Ramban.

Rosh Hashana is political. (Read the middle brachot of the Amidah.)

Purim is political.

Chanukah is political.

Tisha B'Av is political. As are Shiva Asar B'Tamuz, Asarah B'Tevet and Tzom Gedaliah.

The books of Ezra and Daniel are political.

The benching is political. So is the daily Amidah.

The rabbis of the Talmud were political. Some of them were even politicians.

Bar Kochba and Rabbi Akiva were political.

The mission of the Jewish people, from Abraham on, has been to develop a sovereign nation in its own land which sets an example for mankind - a light unto the nations - by worshiping God according to the Torah. Our story has been one of steps forward towards that goal - events of redemption - and of unfortunate failures and defeats - events of destruction and exile.

Yom Ha'atzmaut celebrates the most significant accomplishment towards our national mission in some 2000 years: reestablishing Jewish sovereignty over our homeland, a necessary prerequisite for the possible fulfillment of our national destiny. Its achievement on the heels of one of our greatest tragedies in history made it all the more miraculous.

We don't know what the state will bring in the long run. Will we fulfill our highest visions, or once again, God forbid, lapse into failure and ruin? We can't know that, any more than newlyweds can know whether their marriage will thrive or wither. That's no reason not to celebrate the achievement and thank God for making it possible.

Yom Ha'atzmaut is political. It is a major milestone in the achievement of our timeless national purpose as set out in the Torah. To leave it out of our religious liturgy would be a sign of ingratitude and historical blindness.

Chag sameach!

A moment of silence

2008-05-01T10:00:00.002+03:00

Make matzah, not chametz

2008-04-24T01:19:00.004+03:00

What's the difference between chametz and matzah?

Don't all answer at once.

Seriously, bear with me here. What's the basic, chemical, cookbook-recipe difference between chametz and matzah?

Simple. To make chametz, just mix flour and water and leave the dough alone. After a modest amount of time (halachically, we assume 18 minutes), the dough will begin to ferment as invisible yeast cells found naturally in the environment get to work on it. The surface starts to glisten and crack. Voila, chametz! (Interestingly, the first recorded evidence of leavened bread comes from ancient Egypt.)

To make matzah, bake the dough thoroughly before it has time to ferment.

Chametz, then, is the natural end result of the process begun when flour and water are mixed. Flour + water + time = chametz.

Matzah, on the other hand, is the result of a deliberate intervention to prevent the fermentation process from developing.

If you've ever visited a matzah bakery, you know how much easier it is to produce chametz than matzah. Chametz happens. Matzah must be made. The natural progression of dough into chametz must be stopped.

We can see this intervention into the development of chametz as a metaphor for divine intervention into history. The midrash famously describes the Israelites in Egypt as having descended over the years of assimilation and slavery into the 49th and lowest level of tumah (impurity or depravity); any longer and they would have been beyond redemption. So God intervened, taking them out of Egypt so they could be rededicated to His service.

The flour of Israel had spent a dangerously long time fermenting among the waters of Egypt. It had to bake in the fiery desert before it irreversibly became chametz.

Or we can see the creation of matzah as a metaphor for our personal spiritual lives. It is easy for us to go with the flow, to persist in harmful patterns of behavior or life situations, even though they will naturally worsen until they cause us irreversible damage. "Baking the matzah" is intervening in our lives or those of our loved ones to fix those errors before it's too late.

You can't turn chametz back into matzah. Chametz is natural, it's easy, it requires no effort on our part to create. Only benign neglect and the passage of time.

Making matzah requires alertness, careful action, prompt intervention into a developing process. It's much harder than making chametz. It needs some assistance from heaven.

Hey, no one ever said Pesach was easy.

Update: I forgot one last point:

You can't make matzah without making dough. Matzah is not simply non-chametz; it is almost-chametz. Unless you start with flour and water made into dough, you can't end up with matzah any more than you can end up with chametz.

The same goes for the Israelites in Egypt. They were enslaved, both physically and spiritually. No one would have chosen their situation voluntarily and consciously. Given more time, they could have been forever doomed. Yet it is only as a result of their sojourn as slaves in Egypt that they could emerge as the newly-born nation of Israel. They could never have become matzah had they not been at palpable risk of becoming chametz.

And in many ways, that is the essence of Jewish national identity to this day. We are the anti-slaves, anti-enslavers, dissidents to tyrants throughout history. We freely worship the one God who created all men as equal reflections of his divine image. Could the Jews be who we are today had we not endured slavery ourselves?

Without the potential of chametz, you can't make matzah.

My annual surge

2008-04-24T00:08:00.004+03:00

My, has it only been a year since my last post? It seems like so much longer. (I suppose it has been much longer since I've been blogging regularly. And I'm not planning to start now.)

So what happens to a dormant blog whose barely-relevant title happens to refer to an actual annual event? The answer is below:

You can hardly tell that April 18 was the date of biur chametz this year, can you? (Well, technically it was the 19th, but that was Shabbos.)

Chag sameach!

Remembering the fallen

2007-04-23T08:06:00.001+03:00

From last year's archives: Time to mourn.

Yom Hazikaron, Israel's Memorial Day.

McCain casts aside an age-old tradition

2007-02-19T14:15:00.001+02:00

I don't have strong feelings about John McCain or his candidacy for the Republican nomination. But I have to comment about his website.

McCain has long been trying to position himself as an unconventional Republican candidate, which is fair enough. So his team has designed a somewhat unconventional website, which you may or may not care for. (Personally, I don't see the point of campaign websites, however designed.)

What irks me is the description. Both the home page and the press release call the site "a departure from the traditional campaign website".

Traditional?

The web has been around for under fifteen years. The first campaign websites were probably online in 1996 at the earliest. Ten years of graphic design fashion - is that what passes for a tradition these days? And for a Republican presidential candidate, no less?

I'm not sure campaign websites have been all that similar to begin with, or, if they have, that McCain's is all that different from them. I might be willing to grant him "unconventional". But "a departure from the traditional campaign website"? Please.

Soccer Dad's finally lost it!

2007-02-05T09:34:00.002+02:00

A salty tale of intellectual property ferment

2006-12-18T13:16:00.001+02:00

The life of brine
I haven't made pickles in a long time. I'm crazy about half-sours and garlic dills, and when I'm visiting the States I consume an inordinate quantity of Ba-Tamptes. But, to my constant sorrow, such delicacies are almost unheard of in Israel. Most pickles are canned, and even the fresh refrigerated ones can't compare with the ones I grew up on.

There are a handful of small delis that make their own American-style pickles, and I stock up when I can, but none of them are near my home. So the only choice is to make my own, like my grandmother used to do when I was little.

In fact, it's not hard and not much work either. I have a few cookbooks with suitable recipes, including two which specialize in pickling and preserving. I'm always afraid I'm doing something wrong, but they almost always come out terrific.

The main problem is finding the cucumbers. To make a good batch of pickles, you have to start with the freshest, firmest possible cucumbers. Since I don't find perfect cukes in the supermarket every day, my pickle making is always an on-the-spot thing, dependent on a confluence of circumstances: A good supply of cucumbers on a day when I expect to have the time to make a batch of pickles.

(The worst was when I found perfect pickles towards the end of Chol Hamoed. On Chol Hamoed, you can only prepare food you need for the current festival, but the pickles wouldn't be ready until afterwards. Bummer.)

So it's an all-too-rare pleasure when I'm in the produce section and I find myself face to face with perfect cucumbers. I load up a couple of sacks, add some garlic and fresh dill, and shlep them home, eager to find the time to brine them.

This week, for the first time in ages, the cukes were gorgeous, and I got to work. But it had been so long since my last batch that I did a bit of recipe googling first, to refresh my memory and inspire my imagination.

The case of the modified recipe
Along the way, I discovered this recipe for dill pickles on allrecipes.com. I don't do vinegar pickles, so I'm not planning to use it, but what caught my eye was this comment by the original submitter of the recipe, one Sharon Howard:

SUBMITTED BY: SHARON HOWARD
This is my recipe and it has recently been changed by the All Recipes site. I do not use a water bath, that's what causes them to lose their crispness. I think All Recipes added that step when they chose this recipe as one of the top ten recipes. I imagine they added it to comply with USDA recomendations. I have emailed All Recipes asking that they either change back to the original recipe or remove my name. I am so sorry that you had the results you did.

Outrageous, no? Allrecipes.com apparently took Sharon's submission, changed it in a significant way that harmed the resulting product, and kept it up on their site, continuing to identify her as the submitter. Can they do it? Is it legal? Is it consistent with their terms of use?

I accept!
Like most of us, I routinely click-approve Terms of Use forms for Internet services without bothering to read them. This time for a change, I clicked on "Legal" at the bottom of the page and was treated to the site's Terms and Conditions of Use Notice. The more I read, the more outraged I became. Only a lawyer could come up with this stuff. A delusionary lawyer, for that matter.

Take the opening:

Welcome to Allrecipes.com (the "Website"). Please read this Terms and Conditions of Use Notice ("Notice") carefully before using the Website. By viewing or otherwise using this Website, you agree to the terms and conditions in this Notice.

By viewing the website, I agree to the terms and conditions in the notice? Seriously! I can't even find the notice without viewing the website. Guess it's too late by then. I've already agreed to it, whether or not I've found it or read it. I don't even have to click to accept it. How can the mere viewing of a website be tantamount to agreeing to its terms of use? (Answer: It can't. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not stupid either.)

It continues:

We reserve the right in our sole discretion to change, modify, add or delete portions of this Notice at any time. We will provide notice of such changes only by posting the updated notice on our Website and changing the "last updated" date listed above.... We encourage you to review our Notice each time you visit our Site to see if it has been updated since your last visit.

What a pleasure! Every time I visit the site, I must review the terms and conditions notice to see if it has been updated. Otherwise, for all I know, I may be agreeing to sacrifice my first-born to the sun goddess. (Note to self: Before reading pickle recipes, check to see if terms of use have changed since yesterday.)

Positive comments only, please
Then there's the bit about hyperlinks:

You are granted a limited, nonexclusive right to create a hyperlink to the homepage of this Website only, provided such link does not portray Allrecipes.com or any of its products and services in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise defamatory manner. This limited right may be revoked at any time.

How considerate of them. They grant me the right to link to their site! Well, provided I don't make fun of them. Oops! Better remove that link... it's only legal to denigrate Allrecipes.com if you don't link to them!

Finally, we get to submissions:

By submitting, disclosing or offering any recipe, review, photograph, image, "favorites" list, comments, feedback, postcards, suggestions, ideas, notes, drawings, concepts and other information, content or material, or other item... you hereby grant to Allrecipes.com an irrevocable, nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free right and license to use, display, publicly perform, modify, reproduce, publish, distribute, make derivative works of, sublicense and otherwise commercially and non-commercially exploit your Submitted Items and all copyright, trade secret, trademark or other intellectual property rights therein, in any manner or medium now existing or hereafter developed (including but not limited to print, film or electronic storage devices), without compensation of any kind to you or any third party.

Translation: Anything you send us belongs to us. We can do anything we like with it. We owe you nothing in return. Forever! Har, har, har!

And they claim the right to modify user submissions in any way. If this "agreement" holds legal water, the site was within its claimed rights to change Sharon's recipe without consulting her and while continuing to represent it as her original submission.

I'm passing this story on to some law-bloggers in the hopes of more enlightening comments. Stay tuned.

Finding pshat

2006-11-26T09:05:00.001+02:00

It happens every time. I'm reading the weekly parasha, and I'm intrigued by some questions of pshat, the literal interpretation of the text. Naturally, I peruse the classical commentators for some insight. But nothing.

Generally, the mepharshim focus on the micro level: Explaining an unfamiliar term or grammatical construction, or citing a midrashic approach to explain an odd turn of phrase. But rarely do they seem to ask or answer the story-level questions that any thoughtful reader might pose.

Take yesterday's reading. So many questions are raised by the interactions between Yaakov and Esav.

Take, for example, the birthright. Is it possible to sell one's birthright? Presumably, you could sell the property after you inherited it, but can you sell the right to it ahead of time? If so, was this even a valid sale? Yaakov exploited Esav's hunger to force him to sell; is that not a sale under duress? And surely the price (apparently, the food he served) was far from sufficient. Clearly, Esav would have strong grounds to contest this sale when the time came to inherit his father - why doesn't he?

Then there are the blessings. Why did Yitzhak have to have a meal before he could bless Esav? Why did he ask for game rather than any other kind of food? Is that really how a blessing works: A great man lays his hands on your head and blesses you, and whatever he pronounces comes true? If so, does the blessing irrevocably apply to whoever happens to be under those hands, even if he lied and cheated and deceived to get there? (One could ask the same question about Yaakov's subsequent marriage to Leah, an episode with parallels to this one.) Yaakov was worried that when his deception was found out, his father might curse him - why didn't he? His mother promised to bear his curse for him - is that even possible? And if Rivka could have borne the curse due to Yaakov, that means curses are portable. Why aren't blessings? (So Yitzhak could correct the misplaced one.) Was this whole series of deceptions appropriate behavior for the father of a nation? And was the result worth the long-term provocation of Esav's wrath?

I could go on. And on. And I could suggest plausible answers for most of these questions. But most of them, as obvious as they seem, are not even alluded to by the classical Torah commentators.

Reading the commentaries, one gets the impression of a series of disjointed comments, somehow or other tied to the text of a given verse, but with little effort to explicate the narrative as a story. This is, in large part, why the teaching of Chumash in day schools is generally so poor: There's no coherent message, just a choppy collection of mini-interpretations and selections of midrash.

Why is this? Why the apparent lack of interest in basic pshat?

Any ideas?

(And if you're curious, I haven't been blogging because I've been busy, not becuase I haven't had anything worth writing.)

Gmar chatima tov?

2006-10-03T17:07:00.001+02:00

Dave the language guy at Balashon writes about the seasonal greeting Gmar Chatima Tova, approvingly citing Passing Phrase, which translates it as meaning "Literally: A good final sealing".

There's just one problem. The grammar of the phrase doesn't support that translation.

"A final sealing" is "gmar chatima". This is a compound phrase (semikhut for Hebrew grammar mavens), in which the base word is "gmar", meaning "sealing". (Correction - I meant to say: "gmar", meaning "finalization".) The gender of the phrase should therefore be the gender of "gmar", which is masculine. But that would demand a masculine form of the adjective "good", yielding "gmar chatima tov"! (Fast talkers sometimes correctly shorten the phrase to "gmar tov", "a good finalization". Adding "chatima" doesn't change the gender of "tov".)

To maintain grammatical correctness, the phrase should be translated a bit differently, as wishing "A final good sealing". As if the "good sealing" is presumed already to exist, and one is wishing for that to be finalized. This is a plausible interpretation after Yom Kippur, when one's fate has already been sealed. But during the preceding ten days of penitence, it is hard to justify. In any case, it is not the common way the phrase is understood.

Rather, I would stick with the original translation, and assume the phrase is simply grammatically incorrect. As a folk greeting which developed over time, either it was originally formed incorrectly ("gmar chatima tova" just sounds right; "gmar chatima tov" doesn't) or grammarians were simply less pedantic about such details as noun-adjective agreement.

Evidence for this understanding is provided, conveniently, by the common pre-Rosh Hashana greeting: "K'tiva Vachatima Tova", "A good inscription and sealing". Since the noun here is compound, the adjective should be plural: "K'tiva Vachatima Tovot"! The singular form properly translates as wishing "An inscription and a good sealing" - an unlikely interpretation, to say the least.

Perhaps "K'tiva Vachatima Tova" just rolled off the tongue (it rhymes!), and "K'tiva Vachatima Tovot" didn't. Or the phrase began as "K'tiva Tova" and the "Vachatima" was added later, inserted with blatant disregard to grammatical technicalities.

I find this all a bit ironic, since I remember as a youngster being very careful to pronounce the precise greeting specified in the Machzor for each type of recipient: "L'shana Tova Tikatev V'techatem" to a man, "...Tikatevi V'techatemi" to a woman, and so on for plural groups. Today I casually rattle off a holiday greeting which is just grammatically wrong. Oh, well.

However you say it, I wish you a final sealing for good. On Yom Kippur we're sealed, but sometimes God has been known to sneak open the envelope for a last minute adjustment on Hoshana Raba, the last day of Sukkot. Or so I'm told. So we continue to wish a "Gmar Chatima Tova" until then.

Of the blogging of many books there is no end

2006-09-28T17:56:00.001+03:00

Am Echad has tagged me with the book meme. What could be more appropriate for Jewish bloggers?

(I know, it peaked in mid-August and he tagged me a month ago. So I'm late. Again. So what?)

There's only one problem: How can I name just one? On the assumption that no one reads long blog posts anyway (since they're all busy reading books!), I'll limit myself to the "one book" requested, even though most of the questions have many possible answers. No added commentary, either. If you have questions, just ask!

1. Name one book that changed your life:

Horeb, by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch

2. One book you've read more than once:

The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov

3. One book you'd want on a desert island:

SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea, by John 'Lofty' Wiseman

4. One book that made you laugh:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

5. One book that made you cry:

Probably Cyrano De Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand. Made me laugh, too.

6. One book you wish you'd written:

The Dawn: Political Teachings of the Book of Esther, by Yoram Hazony.

7. One book you wish had never been written:

The Invention of Ancient Israel, by Keith Whitelam

8. One book you're currently reading:

Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy, by E. G. West

9. One book you've been meaning to read:

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Whom to tag? Everyone else has probably already done it. So if you're reading this and you blog, consider this an invitation. A personal, warm and sincere one.

Oh, and gmar hatima tova.

Government by the brambles, for the brambles

2006-09-20T17:00:00.001+03:00

Writes Hillel Halkin (hat tip: Am Echad):

For years now, fewer talented young Israelis have been going into both politics and military life as the attraction and glamour have declined along with the ideal of public service in general.

The Israeli political system has been increasingly dominated by self-serving careerists. A new, up-and-coming generation of capable future leaders with a true sense of national responsibility is hard to discern.

Etcetera, etcetera. "For years now"? Try "For thousands of years now". The People of the Book need to open it more often. In particular, Judges 9:7-20, commonly known as the Parable of Yotam (Jotham):

The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive-tree: Reign thou over us. But the olive-tree said unto them: Should I leave my fatness, seeing that by me they honour God and man, and go to hold sway over the trees?

And the trees said to the fig-tree: Come thou, and reign over us. But the fig-tree said unto them: Should I leave my sweetness, and my good fruitage, and go to hold sway over the trees?

And the trees said unto the vine: Come thou, and reign over us. And the vine said unto them: Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to hold sway over the trees?

Then said all the trees unto the bramble: Come thou, and reign over us. And the bramble said unto the trees: If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shadow; and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.

The eternal truth: People with genuine skills, talents, creativity and productive ability generally don't go into politics. They have better things to do with their lives. This leaves the political realm dominated by unclever, self-important, self-serving seekers of power and glory. (Hence the overrepresentation of military careerists in Israeli politics.)

This is the way of the world. In Yotam's terms, most politicians have been, are now, and will be brambles. Fortunately, most of them don't do too much damage beyond scratching your ankles. The good ones even manage to provide a bit of shade. Unfortunately, some of them catch on fire and "devour the cedars of Lebanon". Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Any plan to save Israel which depends on the arrival of a selfless, capable and responsible generation of leaders is not a plan, it's a prayer. The appearance of such a leader is a supernatural event, in the sense that it contravenes the way the world normally works.

That's why we pray for the arrival of Mashiach - because it's not possible to plan it and we can't realistically expect it.

Until then, we'll have to manage with the leaders we have to choose from in the real world. However brambly they may be. (Though I agree that our current crop is even more brambly than usual.)

Heads up - new cheesemaking comment

2006-09-20T05:47:00.001+03:00

A thoughtful new comment has appeared to my two-year-old post on making cheese from non-kosher animals.

Time to Boogie?

2006-08-27T18:15:00.001+03:00

Anyone touting former Chief of Staff Moshe "Boogie" Yaalon as Israel's Next Great Hope should pay close attention to this story from the Washington Post.

It was a fateful day. The entire Hamas leadership, according to Israeli intelligence, had gathered in a single home in Gaza:

The air force chief was on the line, assessing the likely impact of the bomb. He said there was a problem.

A half-ton bomb wouldn't finish the job, the air force chief said. A one-ton bomb would blow out the neighboring apartment building, which was filled with dozens of families.

Immediately, Dichter and Yaalon began to argue. Dichter favored the heavy bomb; Yaalon wanted to abort the operation. They both had worked for decades in counter-terrorism, had served in the same secret commando unit and had, as Dichter put it, "traveled together without passports deep into Arab lands."

But they had emerged with different conclusions. For Dichter, "the barrel of terrorism has a bottom." If you captured or killed enough terrorists, Dichter believed, the problem would be solved. "They deserved a bomb that would send the dream team to hell," Dichter said. "I said, 'If we miss this opportunity, more Israelis will die.' "

Yaalon disagreed: "We won't get to the bottom of the barrel by killing terrorists. We'll get there through education. Dichter thinks we'll kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. That's it -- we've won. I don't accept that."

While Yaalon said the army had to consider the support of the Israeli public -- unlikely to favor civilian deaths -- and international legitimacy, Dichter said that from an operational point of view, a one-ton bomb made sense. "There is no fair fight against terrorists," Dichter said. "Never has been. Never will be."

The debate lasted for hours, observers said, and grew louder and larger. The prime minister's adviser, Gallant, sided with Dichter. The defense minister, Mofaz, sided with Yaalon. Dichter recalled: "If you didn't have a strong heart, you'd have a heart attack."

"How can we look in the eyes of our pilots if they kill innocent people?" Yaalon argued.

"And if the terrorists walk out alive, and tomorrow another bus explodes, how do we explain it to our people?" Dichter said.

....

Only once, Yaalon said, did he knowingly authorize a hit that would also kill a noncombatant, the wife of Salah Shehada. Shehada helped found Hamas's military wing, which had asserted responsibility for killing 16 soldiers and 220 Israeli civilians. In 2002, the air force dropped a one-ton bomb on his home. The blast also destroyed a neighboring house, which Yaalon said he had thought was empty. Fifteen civilians were killed, including nine children. It felt, Yaalon said, "like something heavy fell on my head."

When Yaalon makes this kind of decision, he said, it must pass "the mirror test": At the end of the day, will he be able to look at himself in the mirror?

There's more. It's a fascinating article. But the inescapable conclusion, if the report is accurate, is that Yaalon consistently favored the enemy's civilians over our own, however critical the terrorist being targeted.

He may have opposed disengagement (at least behind closed doors), but that doesn't make him a hawk. And neither does it qualify him to join the ranks of Israel's leadership.

Israelis are furiously debating...

2006-08-15T13:46:00.001+03:00

...exactly which of the country's political and military leaders must resign or be dismissed.

In the government: Just Olmert? Olmert and Peretz? Olmert, Peretz and Livni? What about Hirschson and Bar-On?

In the IDF: Halutz? Kaplinsky? Adam? Hirsch?

How low should we go?

I have yet to meet an Israeli who believes we won this war. I have yet to find anyone who thinks this government should stay in office any longer than is necessary to replace it. It's not about left or right. This was a war of national consensus, and it has left us with a new national consensus: They must go.

We just have to work out exactly who, and how to get rid of them.

Then we have to figure out who should take their places.

And we have to do it fast, since in the wake of our glorious victory Syria, Iran and the Palestinians are already issuing new threats against us.

There's no time to lose.

Time to mourn

2006-08-11T00:26:00.001+03:00

Last week, I attended my first military funeral in Israel.

This week, I attended my second.

The first was in Jerusalem, the second in Tel Aviv. The first family was religious, the second was secular.

The first was for a young soldier in his regular, mandatory army service, barely out of school. I know his father.

The second was for a man my age, an officer in the reserves called up for this war, a father of young children. He was a colleague of mine at work.

There is nothing more heartbreaking than hearing a father say Kaddish for his son.

Except hearing a young wife and mother who faces raising her kids without their father.

There is no war without casualties. Still, Israel's wars have a way of cutting down too many of our best and brightest young men.

There will be other opportunities to discuss the management of this campaign, including the errors made by our political and military leaders. There will be plenty of time to assess its outcome and debate its ramifications.

First of all, we must not forget to take the time to mourn.

Bunker busting or mosque deconstruction?

2006-07-25T21:03:00.001+03:00

Last week, Israel bombed a claimed Hezbullah command bunker in southern Beirut, with dozens of warplanes dropping some 23 ton of explosives on the building. Hezbullah, for its part, said the building was nothing more than a mosque under construction, and not a military target of any sort.

As a civilian and a layman, I have no way of assessing these claims. They may both be true: the mosque construction site may serve as cover for the bunker. Or Hezbullah may be lying. Or Israeli intelligence may have been wrong.

Fortunately, the Middle East is blessed with a plethora of objective journalists to help us sort truth from fiction. (Yes, that was sarcasm.) So I watched eagerly a few days later as a CNN reporter was allowed to visit the site of the attack.

To be fair, he noted that Hezbullah had refused access to journalists for the first day or so after the bombing, so the area seemed to be sensitive. And he couldn't know what may have been removed from the scene before he arrived.

But the pictures he broadcast showed, very clearly, a mosque under construction. Somewhat damaged, but substantially intact. And, he noted, there didn't seem to be much more than a basement underneath it. There was damage to the surrounding buildings, as well. But no bunkers in sight.

Case closed?

Not quite.

I've never seen a building which had been bombarded with 23 tons of explosives, so I can't tell you what it would look like. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't look like a mosque under construction. Whatever it had looked like the day before.

Going after Hamas terrorists in Gaza, Israel can typically destroy a building with a quarter-ton to one-ton bomb. This attack was supposedly 20-100 times more powerful than that. Granted, a mosque may be larger and stronger than a typical residential building, but remember Israel was aiming to destroy a complex of reinforced bunkers underneath the building. After an assault like that, is it conceivable that the half-built mosque on the site was still recognizable as such?

There are only two possible explanations. Either Israel didn't really drop 23 tons of bombs on the building (Could most of them have missed? Unlikely) - or Hezbullah took the journalists to the wrong site.

Guess which I think is more likely.

You know you haven't been blogging lately when...

2006-07-24T23:37:00.001+03:00

...your blog's URL doesn't show up among your browser's auto-completion options!

Really. It's been that long since I've even opened my own homepage.

Meanwhile, a few things have happened:

I've actually gotten things done at work.
Josh in The Styx has returned from a year-long blogging hiatus with a rapid-fire burst of energetic blogging.
Leiah from Letters from Israel has returned from a nearly two-year hiatus with new letters, and a new blog site.
At least two more people have discovered who I am. Serves me right for dropping too many hints.
My learning progressed, then stalled again.
The baby started talking and walking, and continues to daily amaze her worn-out parents.
Israel went to war against Lebanon. You may have heard about it.

I'm not going to say much about the war, since there's too much to say and everyone else is saying it. Overall, I think Israel's leaders have been doing a good job so far, with God's help. I didn't vote for Ehud Olmert or Amir Peretz, and I oppose their long-term visions for Israel, but I have to give them credit for the way they've handled the current crisis so far. I only hope and pray they succeed in achieving as many as possible of Israel's strategic objectives with the minimum possible casualties.

The best analyses I've seen of Israel's military and diplomatic strategy have been from Stratfor. The site features free daily podcasts, and you can subscribe to their free commentaries. Their main error has been in underappreciating how reluctant Israel is to launch a major ground invasion of Lebanon, due to our painful experiences in the past.

Military tactics aside, I suspect one of the reasons the IDF has focused on air attacks and minor ground incursions has been to demonstrate to the Israeli public that Hezbullah can't be defeated that way, thus gradually accustoming the public to accept the need for a ground campaign. Also, while going in on the ground may yield the best results, it also carries the greatest risk. Too many casualties and we could turn our current modest success into a perceived defeat, ending worse off than we started.

It's all so complicated, the interplay between the military, diplomatic and domestic fronts. I said I wouldn't say much, so I won't unless people really want to hear it. Enough for now.

Here are some of the topics I have tentatively lined up, time permitting. Let me know what interests you, and I'll bump it forward. (Though the first one will presumably be first, for obvious reasons.)

Remember Israel's assault last week on a supposed Hezbullah bunker in Beirut? I've got some thoughts about it.
Was the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 a mistake?
Did you know children's cartoons in Israel employ linguistic advisors? Really!
Some questions about food and drink in the Talmud
Simchat Bat - How do/should religious families celebrate the birth of a daughter?
More about road accident statistics ("A leading cause of death in Israel?")

Or maybe you didn't miss me in the first place, and wish I'd crawl back into my hole. Whatever you say. You're the audience.

Israel and the Palestinians playing the game of Hex

2006-06-12T19:13:00.001+03:00

Has anyone ever played the game of Hex? Quoth Wikipedia (ellipses are mine):

Rules
Players have two colors, say "Red" and "Blue".... They take turns placing a piece of their own color on a hexagon. Red's goal is to form a red path connecting two opposite sides of the parallelogram, and Blue aims to connect the other two sides....

Strategy
The game can never end in a tie, a fact found by Nash: the only way to prevent your opponent from forming a connecting path is to form a path yourself.

I was reminded of Hex when I saw the headline on this report from Ha'aretz and AP:

Olmert: Israel ready to create 'contiguous' Palestinian state
LONDON - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday that Israel is "prepared to pull out from most" of the West Bank and create a "contiguous" Palestinian state.

Either Olmert didn't say that, or he doesn't know what he's talking about (or he's being deliberately obfuscatory). As even the New York Times has finally realized (hat tip: Soccer Dad), Gaza and the West Bank are not contiguous. The only way to create a contiguous Palestinian state is by splitting Israel in two, granting the Palestinians a sovereign corridor between the mountains and the sea (as they have consistently demanded).

As in Hex, "the only way to prevent your opponent from forming a connecting path is to form a path yourself." Only one state can be contiguous. All the talk about "two states, living side by side" (Bush) or "a Palestinian state alongside Israel" (the "road map") is meaningless. The choice is between a Palestinian state sandwiching Israel, a Palestinian state bisecting Israel, or a Palestinian state partly encircled by Israel. There is no other way to make a Palestinian state. (Veteran readers know I don't believe there will ever be one, but that's beside the point.)

So what did Olmert mean? The Jerusalem Post has a more extensive quote in its version of the story. It quotes Olmert as saying, "...we will have to move forward... to separate from the Palestinians, pull out from areas of the West Bank to realign Israelis to other parts of Israel to leave a very large contiguous territories for a state to be formed by the Palestinians."

That's different, isn't it? It doesn't specify that the Palestinian state will be contiguous, only that it will comprise "very large contiguous territories." Now, I'm not pleased with that prospect, and furthermore I don't believe that the Palestinians will create a sovereign state no matter how much contiguous territory Israel evacuates. But at least it's geographically possible.

Unfortunately, Olmert wasn't nearly so coherent last month in Washington. He spoke before Congress about "a Palestinian state, side by side in peace and security with Israel." At the White House, he referred to "a contiguous territory that will allow the Palestinians to establish their own Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel." Whether "side by side" or "alongside", it's still physically impossible.

So, which will it be? Will the Palestinian state be contiguous, or will Israel remain in one piece?

I hope our leaders are good at Hex.

(Incidentally, the game of Hex is also an apt analogy for the strategies of Jewish and Arab settlement in the West Bank, as well as land development in the Negev and Galilee. But I don't have time to go into that here.)

Cryptic comments

2006-06-07T15:40:00.001+03:00

Every blogger no doubt gets the occasional strange comment. But suddenly I've had three in the same week, all sent by anonymous e-mail without any identifying information. All have been a single line of text in poorly-written English, indicating to me that the author(s) is/are not native English speaker(s).

I understand that some may resort to my e-mail form rather than comment directly using Blogger, which requires registration (an anti-spam measure on my part). But please: If you comment on the form, let me know what the heck you're talking about! At least mention which post you're responding to.

Since last Wednesday, I've received the following three e-mails:

Best of the text i read about a problem.

We are wellocme to it's configuration.

Wellcome to the real world.

The similarities in style and spelling hint to me that these are all from the same reader. I don't really care who it is. I'd just like to know what on earth he/she is referring to.

Any ideas?

The answer is...

2006-05-31T18:22:00.001+03:00

Only one taker for the Hebrew calendar quiz?

Well, if you want to work on it yourself don't read past this point. Spoilers follow.

Start with the axioms, as the mathematicians call them. Each month in the Hebrew calendar is either 29 or 30 days long, usually alternating between them, since the lunar month averages about 29.5 days. The first day of each month is Rosh Chodesh, and the 30th day of each 30-day month is also Rosh Chodesh for the following month. So a 29-day month has one day of Rosh Chodesh, while a 30-day month has two.

Consequently, between the end of one Rosh Chodesh and the start of the next, there are always exactly 28 days: days 2 through 29 of each month. That's four whole weeks. As a result, the next Rosh Chodesh always starts on the succeeding day of the week from the end of the previous Rosh Chodesh.

If Rosh Chodesh for month m ends on Tuesday, Rosh Chodesh for month m+1 must start on Wednesday. It may or may not extend to Thursday, depending on the length of month m.

How many days of Rosh Chodesh are there in a year? Twelve months, half of which have 30 days, should yield an average of 18 days of Rosh Chodesh. A couple of days either way don't affect the answer, though, since whether there are 15 days or 21 days, the number is more than two weeks' worth and no more than three weeks.

No matter what day you start, 18 successive days of the week (or 15 or 21) must include at least two Shabbatot, and no more than three. That's the answer to the first question: Either two or three.

The precise answer for a given year will depend primarily on which day Rosh Hashana starts. If it starts on Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh Heshvan starts on Sunday and the remaining days of Rosh Chodesh for the year will include only two Shabbatot (note that Rosh Hashana itself is not generally considered to be Rosh Chodesh, even though it technically is). If R"H starts on Friday, Heshvan will start on Shabbat, and three Shabbatot will fall on Rosh Chodesh that year. And so on.

The bonus question is indeed more difficult, and I'll leave it open for now. Partly to give you something to think about over Shavuot, partly because I haven't worked it out completely myself yet.

Chag Sameach!

Hebrew calendar quiz questions

2006-05-29T15:16:00.001+03:00

Without looking at a calendar, how many times a year can Rosh Chodesh fall on Shabbat? Give the minimum and maximum possible in a single Hebrew year (Tishrei through Elul). I'm looking for the reasoning here, not primarily whether or not you have the right answer.

Bonus question: How many times a year is the "Machar Chodesh" haftarah recited?

Lag Ba'Omer is based on a typo!

2006-05-14T22:41:00.001+03:00

Every Israeli schoolchild knows that Lag Ba'Omer celebrates Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (Rashbi), the Mishnaic sage who died on that day. The schoolchildren, it turns out, have been misled by an ancient typo.

Reporting in last Friday's Makor Rishon, Hagai Segal describes the research of Rabbi Avraham Kosman of Jerusalem. Having finally gained access to fascimiles of original manuscripts, Rabbi Kosman discovered that the day which was originally described in the writings of the Ari, R' Yitzhak Luria, as "Rashbi's celebration" was transformed via scribal error to "Rashbi's death".

This goes some way towards explaining the odd phenomenon of a Jewish festival celebrating the death of a sage.

Furthermore, he has uncovered evidence that Lag Ba'Omer may have originally been a fast day associated with an aborted attempt to build the third Beit Hamikdash - and that it may have even earlier roots back to King Solomon's day.

The article, available only in Hebrew, is here.

I don't suppose it will have any effect on the volume of smoke released into Israel's atmosphere tomorrow night. Close the windows! Cough, cough

The problem of celebrating a national-religious Yom Ha'atzmaut

2006-05-10T13:19:00.001+03:00

As a "national-religious" Jew, I celebrate Yom Ha'atzmaut in a twofold manner: As a national holiday of the State of Israel, and as a religious holiday of the Jewish people. Like all Zionist Jews, I celebrate the founding of the state and its accomplishments over the years, while as a religious Jew I also thank God for bestowing on us such a precious gift and for the salvation the Jews have enjoyed through it.

The problem is that the modes of these two celebrations do not always coincide.

As a national holiday, Yom Ha'atzmaut is celebrated with public concerts and fireworks, with music and dance in the evening and barbecues in the afternoon. As a religious holiday, Yom Ha'atzmaut is celebrated with festive prayers, featuring additional psalms and songs of praise to God, and, at most Zionist synagogues, the recitation of Hallel in the morning, and at some in the evening as well.

I've lived in Israel for about ten years, but I have yet to find a pragmatic balance between these modes of celebration, particularly in the evening when the festival begins.

Consider the schedule. The sun sets. The synagogue fills up for the festive Maariv prayer, which lasts about half an hour. As we disperse, crowds are gathering in the city's central park for the main event, with performances and fireworks. But with a religious holiday beginning, I feel the need for a festive family meal. Granted, there is no obligatory religious feast for Yom Ha'atzmaut, but this is how Jews celebrate, with festive meals.

If we go to the public party, what will we eat? We'll crowd in with other families trying to get the attention of an overworked fast food vendor, and end up chowing down on pizza or burgers in the park, while hyperactive kids dash back and forth spraying silly string and shaving cream on each other to the amplified boom of the music from the stage. This is hardly civilized, and is certainly far from traditional Jewish modes of religious celebration.

Alternatively, we can go home first and sit down for a proper holiday meal. (Some even hold what they call a "Yom Ha'atzmaut seder", at which they recount the history of the State of Israel and the miracles with which God has blessed us through it.) But by the time we get home, eat, and go out again, we've missed most of the concerts and most of the fireworks. The kids (at least once they're older) are disappointed, and even the adults feel they've missed the big event, as if by having a family meal we haven't shared in the communal celebration of this national holiday.

With a child in the house, I'm more acutely aware of this dilemma than before, and more eager to find a pragmatic solution for coming years. What do other national-religious families do? What is the "tradition" for celebrating Erev Yom Ha'atzmaut, as both a national and a religious festival?

Help me out, folks. Thanks!

The same blatt gemara?

2006-05-08T14:06:00.001+03:00

I just received the following e-mail (with typos corrected):

Am I mistaken, or have you always been learning the same blatt gemara? Anyway, I enjoy your comments.

In the absence of a return address, I'll respond here.

First, kol hakavod on noticing! As far as I can remember, you're the first reader ever to comment on my "What I'm learning" sidebar.

Second: No, I haven't always been learning the same page. If you go back to last June, for example, you'll see I've made some progress since then.

Since July, though, my learning time has been severely curtailed by the demands of a small but frenetic individual, who brings joy to every day of my life.

Furthermore, between my intermittent learning and intermittent blogging, I've forgotten to update the learning sidebar lately. So you'll be pleased to hear that I've actually finally finished Mesechet Megilla (at least at the level of depth on which I was learning it) and held a siyum on it (hadran alach v'hadrach alan!).

I've also started moving on in Berachot, currently holding at Daf 43a. And I've started a new masekhet, Shevuot, in which I've already finished the mishnayot and I'm just starting the gemara (Daf 3a). I'm currently prioritizing Berachot, so I might not make much progress in Shevuot for a while. (For the uninitiated, Shevuot is about oaths, not the festival of Shavuot.)

I'll update the sidebar soon to reflect my progress. Meanwhile, you can click on some old posts to see how stagnant I've been lately!

Finally: Thanks for the kind words. Anonymous blogs deserve anonymous fans.

More followups

2006-04-26T18:52:00.001+03:00

As long as I'm following up on old postings...

1. Roadkill myths
Final numbers for 2005 (see the official statistics - PDF) indicate that road fatalities fell significantly in Israel (448, down from 480 in 2004), to the lowest absolute level in the last 14 years. Taking into account the continued population growth, the fatality rate per capita fell to its lowest level ever, at 6.5 per 100,000. Fatalities per distance driven, the most meaningful way to assess road safety, fell below 11 per billion kilometers for the first time (previous low: 11.6 in 2003).

My series on road accidents in Israel can be found here: I, II, III

2. Women and Torah reading
As noted earlier by Shira (Leibowitz) Schmidt, the respected Prof. Eliav Shochetman has published a rebuttal of those who claim that halacha allows women to be given aliyot (Sinai journal, vol. 135-136, 5755/2005). It has also been published separately as a 78-page pamphlet.

I haven't seen the article, but a summary can be found (in Hebrew) by columnist Shaul Schiff of the religious newspaper Hatzofeh.

My series on women reading the Torah can be found here: 0, I, II, III, IV, V, VI

I hate to say I told you so...

2006-04-26T17:36:00.001+03:00

1. Biur Chametz, Wednesday, September 28, 2005:

But it's hopelessly naive to think that Israel has the power to unilaterally determine its permanent border. A border by definition has (at least) two sides. So long as the Arabs refuse to accept our self-declared border, it will remain up for grabs.

Take the Golan Heights, for example. Or eastern Jerusalem. No country recognizes Israel's sovereignty over them, despite decades of formal annexation to Israel. And no country will until our enemies do. Until such time, they're on the negotiating table, whether we like it or not.

Unilateral withdrawals, aside from destroying Israel's military deterrence and undermining those among the Arabs who support a negotiated agreement, simply cannot achieve the objective of finalizing Israel's borders. The Arabs do not recognize the Israel-Gaza boundary as an international border, and, following them, neither does the United Nations or any individual nation.

2. Haaretz, Wednesday, April 26, 2006:

Sources: U.S. won't view pullout line as final Israel-PA border
By Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz Correspondent

WASHINGTON - The United States will not recognize a border created after a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank as Israel's permanent frontier, senior U.S. administration members said in unofficial conversations.

...

However, a number of sources said unofficially that they believed the administration would probably support such a withdrawal, but would not recognize it as one "after which there would be no more need for negotiation," according to one source.

One official said he believed the U.S. would agree to see the post-withdrawal line as a temporary border, "which would become permanent, obviously with slight changes, following future negotiations between Israel and the PA."

...

If the Israeli withdrawal receives the blessing of the international community, "it will be assuming that any reduction of the occupation is good for both sides, but it certainly won't be support for a new border," a source in Washington said.

Any reasonable interpretation of international law, a legal expert said Tuesday, "cannot allow recognition of a border that was determined unilaterally."

Indeed. A "unilateral border" is an oxymoron. "Following future negotiations between Israel and the PA" means the Arabs have a veto over any international recognition. Israel simply will not have "permanent borders" until our enemies agree to them. And there's no prospect of that happening without a major geopolitical upheaval.

If Olmert thinks we have a compelling national interest in destroying more Jewish communities, let him make that case. But don't try to sell us fantasies about "setting Israel's permanent borders".

That A-Z meme

2006-04-17T16:53:00.001+03:00

Tagged by Soccer Dad, who brings me out of hibernation now that all my chametz has been biured.

Accent:
Accent? What accent? Everyone else has an accent!

Okay, call it an Average American, national news anchor accent. Mild enough that Brits have thought I was Canadian (yuck!).

Booze:
Mostly wine: dry red, semi-dry white. Don't drink beer - never tried it. An occasional whiskey, though I'm not sure what the big deal is. Fruity liqueurs are nice.

Chore I Hate:
All of them. Mostly, though, cleaning the house. It never ends!

Dogs/Cats:
I can stand them when others take care of them. Won't pet them myself.

Essential Electronics:
The Internet. All of it. What did I ever do without it?

Favorite Perfume/Cologne:
They're all the same to me.

Gold & Silver:
Waste of money. Wife disagrees.

Hometown:
See Siblings.

Insomnia:
Depends on my bladder.

Job Title:
Software Engineer. Maybe even "Senior" Software Engineer, for what that's worth.

Kids:
One. Not including me and my wife.

Living Arrangements:
Apartment with unaffordable mortgage.

Most Admired Trait:
Ability to explain complex things clearly. And simple things obscurely.

Number of Sexual Partners:
I thought it usually involved two?

Overnight Hospital Stays:
None, thank God.

Phobia:
Opening bills and bank statements.

Quote:
Kermit: Bear left.
Fozzie: Right, frog!

Religion:
Jewish, Orthodox (Modern).

Siblings:
See Zodiac Sign.

Time I Usually Wake Up:
The word "usually" doesn't make sense in that context.

Unusual Talent:
Playing The William Tell Overture by tapping a ballpoint pen against my front teeth.

Vegetable I Refuse To Eat:
Spinach.

Worst Habit:
All of them.

X-Rays:
Now and then. I like to see what's going on in there.

Yummy Foods I Make:
Cholent.

Zodiac Sign:
See Hometown.

I tag: Jack the Shack ("Jack not name - Jack job!"), Am Echad (the blogger, not the defunct political party), Trilcat (just married, and currently at a juggling convention?).
Whaddayasay?

Before you vote: Why not to trust the polls

2006-03-28T03:08:00.001+02:00

The Israeli elections are over. Kadima has them locked up. Why are we even bothering to vote today?

That's the message Israelis have heard from their media for months now. So my message today is: Don't trust the polls. Anything could still happen.

Here's why.

1. Strategic voting

This year more than most, I get the sense that many Israelis are voting strategically. That is, they plan to cast their ballots not for the party which best represents their views, but for one which will either influence the structure of the Knesset in some direction, or will "send a message" of protest.

Strategic voting effectively relies on the accuracy of the opinion polls. That is, a voter who supports Kadima may assume that Kadima has the election locked up (as Olmert foolishly stated a few weeks ago), and thus feel free to vote for a different party to raise other issues of importance to him. Ironically, Kadima's success in the polls is probably responsible for the recent boost in support for Labor. No one wants to see Amir Peretz as prime minister, but if Olmert is prime minister, many voters (though not me!) would like to see Peretz have significant influence in the coalition.

The problem, of course, is that the strategic voter implicitly assumes that no one else is voting strategically, that all other Kadima supporters (for the sake of this example) will continue to vote Kadima, so he can safely vote Labor without affecting Kadima's victory. This is obviously absurd. If everyone tries to influence Olmert by voting for their second preference party, Kadima won't win in the first place.

It's what scientists call a feedback loop. People decide how to vote based on what yesterday's polls say other people decided. Solving those equations would tax the greatest practitioners of chaos theory.

Strategic voting, I suggest, explains much of Kadima's recent fall in the polls. Once voters take Kadima's victory for granted, more of them feel comfortable switching their votes to other parties. If Kadima slips too far, though, voters will shift back to it. How many will do each? We'll know that only on Wednesday morning.

2. Small parties

This year more than most, several small parties have been hovering near the threshold of votes needed to enter the Knesset. Strategic voting and feedback loops are at play here too. Many voters would like to support some small party or other, but they are reluctant to waste their votes on someone who will fail to pass the electoral threshold. If all the supporters of Green Leaf, or the Pensioners, or Baruch Marzel, were to vote for those parties, they would clearly succeed. But the chance of failure deters enough voters that "can't pass the threshold" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Each small party which does or doesn't get in shifts at least 2-3 Knesset seats, possibly affecting the coalition balance.

The big unmentionable in this realm affects the Arab parties. Polls see three Arab parties getting 8-9 seats in total, meaning 2-3 seats per party. This is dangerously close to the threshold (which is higher than last time), and some detailed surveys have indicated that one or even two of them may fail to get in. This could crush the Arab factions to just 3-6 seats, enlarging all the other parties proportionally.

3. Voter turnout

All the indications are that turnout this year will be lower than ever. More and more voters are disillusioned with the parties (I know I am), and many of them apparently do not plan to vote, or will vote for parties guaranteed to fail. This is a new phenomenon in Israel, where until 2001 turnout had consistently been over 80%, effectively including nearly all able-bodied resident adults.

As a result, Israeli pollsters don't have much experience developing a turnout model, that is, a way to forecast who will actually cast a ballot. Turnout is likely to depend on one's political and religious orientation, one's ethnic background, and other unknown factors. The pollsters don't know enough about it to give meaningful results.

4. Undecideds

Another unusual factor this year is the high rate of undecided voters this late in the campaign. Though I've already stated my preference, I still toy with the alternatives and have reconsidered my choice several times over the last few days. (Though so far I've ended up in the same place.)

How will people actually vote? All the pollsters can say is that "the undecideds generally break down like the rest of the population". But will they? No one knows.

5. Kadima, etc.

It's the elephant in the room. Kadima is an unprecedented phenomenon, perhaps in any democracy. A popular prime minister breaks away from his own party a few months before the election and establishes a new one, in cooperation with leading members of the opposition. Then he falls ill and is succeeded by his unloved deputy.

And have we mentioned the rise of Hamas? And the aftershocks of disengagement, which undermined many people's faith in Israeli democracy in general, and the mainstream parties in particular?

Too much has changed in Israeli politics to rely on the usual determinants of voter behavior. Opinion polls ask people what they would do if elections were held today. No one can predict will people actually will do behind the curtain.

6. The polls don't agree

How many seats will Yisrael Beitenu get: 7 or 15? Depends on which poll you believe. Maagar Mochot said 15; Dialogue said 7. (Dahaf and Teleseker said 12.)

Will NU/NRP get 8 or 12? That's a big difference in influence, but just about 3% of the votes.

It's hard to get an accurate forecast of the Knesset, since small changes cause large effects. A typical survey of 500 participants has a sampling error of 4%, or 5 seats in the Knesset. And that's without considering all the other sources of error in election polling. How can small parties be meaningfully forecasted with such tools?

Ultimately, it comes down to the methodologies of the different polling companies. They can be more important than what people actually tell the pollsters.

7. The polls' record is poor

In Israel's last election, in January 2003, you probably remember the polls as being pretty accurate in forecasting a landslide for Sharon and Likud. But how accurate were they really?

In the following chart, the first column of numbers is the result of the 2003 elections (in Knesset seats); the second column is the range of results of opinion polls taken the week before the elections.

Party	Results	Polls
Likud	38	31-33.5
Labor	19	18-19
Shinui	15	14-17
Shas	11	11-13
NU	7	7-11
Meretz	6	7-9
NRP	6	4-6
UTJ	5	4-5
Arabs	8	8-10
Am Ehad	3	0-4
Israel BaAliyah	2	3-5
Right/religious bloc	69	64-69
Left/Arab bloc	33	34-37
Center	18	16-21

Notice that in most cases the polls underestimated support for the right - substantially in the case of Likud itself - and overestimated support for the left and the Arab parties. None of the polls gave Likud anywhere near 38 seats.

Likud had been slipping in the polls in the runup to the election; that may have induced supporters to vote Likud on Election Day. Kadima's recent slide may also be good for it at in the polling booth. Or it may reflect a genuine drop in support. The opinion polls don't distinguish between these effects.

And let's not mention that Shimon Peres is today the head of the Labor Party, having defeated Amir Peretz as the polls indicated. This came ten years after he was elected prime minister over Binyamin Netanyahu, as the polls indicated.

Right?

8. Message: Make your vote count

My point is this: Nothing is over until the votes are cast. Make yours count. Vote for the party you most wish to see represented in the Knesset.

If you give up and throw away your vote, you're letting the pollsters determine the election.

How to let "chametz" pass your lips

2006-03-26T22:06:00.001+02:00

Considering the season and the recent launch of Balashon, I thought I'd finally bite the bullet and address a Frequently Asked Question I've long been evading (unlike the Frequently Unasked Questions I addressed a while back). Judging from the search referrals to this site, a lot of people out there are wondering:

Q: How is the word "chametz" pronounced?

A: If only I knew....

Seriously, though, it depends on one's dialect of Hebrew. Like all languages, and especially 4000-year-old languages, Hebrew has many dialects and accents. This goes back at least to biblical times, and is the origin of the English word shibboleth.

To tell you how to pronounce "chametz" I'd have to know what Hebrew dialect you're speaking. Actually, there are even multiple ways to spell "chametz" using English letters, depending on what aspects of the original Hebrew (חמץ) you're trying to capture best. (See another way to spell "biur chametz" here.)

In fact, among common Hebrew dialects today, the only sound in the word "chametz" that everyone pronounces the same is the "m". The two syllables are even accented differently.

Without further ado, I'll try to describe how to pronounce the word in three different contemporary Hebrew dialects, including two of the most common. Since I'm not a linguist (and, chances are, neither are you), I won't bother with phonemes and pronunciation symbols and other technical jargon. Anyway, I couldn't do it if I tried.

1. Israeli Hebrew
The most common Hebrew dialect today is the one spoken by most Israelis.

The word "chametz" is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable: cha-METZ. Taking it one sound at a time:

ch - as in "Bach" - a rough guttural sound like when you clear your throat (but briefly)
a - as in "father", but briefer
m - as usual... how else can you pronounce m?
e - as in set, though perhaps with a bit of "ay as in say" mixed in
tz - like the "ts" in "pets"

Except for the first sound, it's similar to how a baseball fan says "the Mets".

2. American Ashkenazi Hebrew
This is the way most American Jews pronounce Hebrew (at least those who haven't adopted the Israeli accent).

The word "chametz" is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: CHA-metz. This is actually a violation of the rules of Hebrew grammar, but it is common for Ashkenazim to change the accenting of Hebrew syllables.

Most of the sounds in the word are the same as for Israeli Hebrew.

ch - as above
a - like the "u" in "hug", or sometimes with more "o" in it, like the "o" in "more"
m - as above
e - a very short, indistinct vowel sound (shewa), like the "e" in "wallets"
tz - as above

Except for the first sound, it's similar to how an American says "summits".

3. Yemenite Hebrew
This is probably the closest contemporary dialect to the way Hebrew was spoken in ancient times. Other Sephardic dialects are similar to the Yemenite dialect in many ways. Even Yemenite Jews who have adopted Modern Israeli Hebrew for everyday speech usually maintain Yemenite pronunciation for prayer.

It's hard to describe some of these sounds to English speakers. I'm also less familiar with it, and I may be wrong on some of the subtleties.

The word "chametz" is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable: cha-METZ.

ch - as above, but much softer. Instead of a harsh, grating sound like clearing the throat, it's a gentle rush of air through the back of the throat. Like an "h" with a bit of sandpaper. I can't explain it better than that!
a - as in "father", but briefer
m - as above
e - as in set, more or less
tz - like an emphasized "s", with a bit of a hiss. No "t" sound or "z" sound in it at all.

No matter what you do, it isn't similar to the way an American pronounces anything. (An Arab, on the other hand...)

Now, don't get me started on the word "biur"!

Tongue twisting

2006-03-22T18:28:00.001+02:00

A big J-Blog welcome to Balashon, the "Hebrew language detective" (if you can't tell, that's a double pun in modern Hebrew).

Dave, an amateur linguist, covers a topic close to my heart: the origins of words and phrases in Hebrew and other Jewish tongues. Take a look at his great list of sidebar links! (He could use a blogroll, though. Hint, hint.)

I hope he joins the campaign to save Hebrew's vowels!

A floating voter settles down. Maybe.

2006-03-20T23:53:00.001+02:00

In between not blogging, raising a baby, and actually getting things done at work, I've occasionally noticed that Israel is having elections next week.

(Meanwhile, I've usually been reading only Soccer Dad and Hirhurim. Before I continue: Make sure to learn some Nach Yomi for my friend Avraham Norin, may he get well soon.)

I'm still not sure who I'll vote for. Though I'm firmly on the Israeli right, the multiplicity of right-wing parties makes me a floating voter in general elections. Since making aliyah, I voted for the National Union in '99 and the National Religious Party in '03, and there were three or four other parties I considered along the way.

Still, my choice is usually final by a month or two ahead of Election Day. This time, I'm even less sure than usual.

For starters, none of Israel's political parties agrees (at least officially) with my fundamental analysis of our situation: That there are no feasible solutions to our conflict with our Arab neighbors.

Kadima (to start with the biggest fish) admits that Israel has no apparent negotiating partner among the Palestinian Arabs. So far so good. But they conclude from this that we should give the Arabs 95% of their perennial demands on us, gratis. Not only will this not solve anything (as even honest leftists agree!), it will only entrench the Arab view that there is no point in talking to us, since we'll ultimately give in if they wait long enough. Does anyone doubt that Sharon's "disengagement" was substantially responsible for the political success of Hamas?
There's not much point in discussing Labor and parties to its left. My political and economic sympathies are firmly on the right: I'm pro-settlement, skeptical of territorial compromise, and believe the only prospects for peace are in the very long term, through persistent Israeli military and economic strength and national steadfastness. Need I say more?
Likud has some points in its favor. Most of the pro-disengagement gang disengaged to Kadima, leaving the Likud mostly anti. "Mostly", though, still includes a good number of disengagistas. And the "antis" themselves didn't come through in the crunch. Self-declared opponents like Netanyahu, Livnat and Shalom actually voted for the disengagement bill in the Knesset, and backed down on their threat to collectively resign from the government over it. So why should I trust them in the future?

At least Netanyahu can take some of the credit for Israel's economic recovery; I support his general outlook and most of his specific reforms. But his overall record as a leader of Israel has been mixed.
Taking another step to the right, we have the merged National Religious Party / National Union. On the surface, they are close to my position on diplomatic issues, though they don't quite come out and say that there are no real solutions. They are also my natural sectoral home as a nationalist-religious voter. And their candidates are generally decent, well-meaning people, untainted by scandal.

Unfortunately, they haven't exactly been very successful at promoting their platform in government. They waste inordinate amounts of energy on ideological infighting - aside from the NRP and Moledet, the current merged list includes two separate factions which broke away from the NRP over recent years. They failed to stop or even slow down the disengagement, or even to force a referendum on it.

Their economic program reeks of Labor socialism - not even a mention of tax cuts. And on one of their flagship issues - the Jewish character of the state - their voice has rarely been heard. Where were they when Shabbat shopping became the rage? The Likud has introduced more Jewish content into the secular schools than the NRP ever dreamed of. And where were they when the Ministry of Religion was dismantled, leaving thousands of mashgichim and burial workers emptyhanded, without anyone clearly responsible for paying their salaries? Oh, yeah - they were in the government, participating in the process.

For this I should vote NRP/NU?
Is Yisrael Beiteinu still a right-wing party? Lieberman these days talks mostly about crime, and rarely mentions his controversial diplomatic statements. He's clearly positioning himself to be a junior coalition partner of Kadima, endorsing whatever diplomatic plan Olmert proposes. And he's adopted a secularist platform to boot. No thanks.
Shas and Yahadut Hatorah are purely sectoral parties for the Sephardi and Ashkenazi haredi communities. While I have sympathy for some of their goals, they won't stand up for what I believe in. That's just the way it is.
Which leaves only the perennial cranks and assorted misfits who insist on founding parties that can't possibly make it into the Knesset. They can't even manage to join forces! The only attraction of such parties is that they afford a protest vote to those who can't bring themselves to support any of the mainstream parties, and who would otherwise stay home. But I'm not interested in wasting my vote - I'd rather help the pragmatic right wing than vote for a hopeless cause.

Incidentally, I think you'll find that neither of these parties agrees with my no-solution analysis. Both claim to propose solutions to the Israel-Arab conflict. Both are hallucinating. I won't feel comfortable until my leaders are willing to speak the obvious truth. We can't solve our problems by expelling the Arabs, or by negotiating with them, or by supporting a Palestinian state (which won't be established anyway), or by unilaterally redrawing our borders, or by any other practical moves. Not until they change their attitudes towards us. And that's out of our hands.

So, who am I voting for?

My current inclination is towards the Likud. Not because I expect any great results from them. But I'm broadly in agreement with Netanyahu's free-market economic program (I know not all of the Likud supports it); I'm broadly sympathetic with their no-unilateral-concessions platform (I know they might not stick to it); I'm satisfied that they're the only major secular party which is sympathetic to Jewish tradition.

More important, though: The Likud is the only party which can conceivably lead a center-right governing coalition. If the Likud collapses, the political center-right will be leaderless. Kadima is (realistically speaking) center-left; Labor is clearly on the left. No religious party will be forming Israel's government for the foreseeable future. The Likud must be supported if we are ever to expect the right to return to power.

True, Kadima may collapse over the next four years. But I'm not willing to bet the country on that prospect. We need a strong Likud. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am.

You're welcome to try to persuade me otherwise.

Update (23 March): My friend Evie Gordon also makes the case for voting Likud, even more strongly than I do.

Honk if you enjoy personal guarding

2006-01-16T16:25:00.001+02:00

Despite all my reservations about Ha'aretz (often described as "Israel's New York Times", but compared to Ha'aretz the NYT is a responsible, conservative publication), I must admit they put together a serious, quality newspaper.

At least in the original Hebrew edition. The English edition has been problematic since its founding about a decade ago. It's generally even more left-wing than the Hebrew original, often trimming inconvenient balancing material from the translated articles.

But more important than its ~~bias~~ slant, there is the minor matter of language. Ha'aretz in English reads like it's been translated by a team of trained monkeys. Native Israeli monkeys, at that.

Next to simultaneous translation, translating the web edition of a daily newspaper must be one of the most challenging jobs for a translator. But that's no excuse for publishing gibberish and calling it English.

Take today's short item about Netanyahu's new job as leader of the Knesset opposition. Writes the translator:

Netanyahu is replacing Peretz because he now heads the largest opposition faction, which counts 27 MKs. Labor only counts 21 MKS.

Funny. I didn't know parliamentary factions could count. Presumably the Likud numbers 27 MKs, etc. (I'll forgive them that pronoun/antecedent problem...)

Then we learn this tidbit, apparently about Netanyahu's hobbies:

...the opposition leader enjoys personal guarding...

Sounds fun! What on earth is "personal guarding"? A form of martial art?

Not quite. The whole sentence reads:

According to law, the opposition leader enjoys personal guarding, which Netanyahu already has as a former prime minister.

Aha! The opposition leader is entitled to personal bodyguards. Why didn't they just say so?

If you sent me this e-mail, please write again!

2006-01-15T08:58:00.001+02:00

A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail which read something like this:

Someone told me to link to your blog. Do I know you?

I intended to reply, but the terse correspondent neglected to leave a name, reply address, URL, or any other form of cyberidentification. So if it was you, please write again with a return address!

My answer, in any case, would be:

Please feel free to link to my blog. Whether or not you know me, of course, depends on who you are. I can't help you with that question.

Howdy!

2006-01-15T08:08:00.001+02:00

Yep, I'm in Texas. Hard to believe sometimes, but it's the truth.

I've never been to Texas before, and I haven't seen much of it, but it's been a bit surprising (and disappointing) to discover that (so far, at least) it's not that different from anywhere else in the United States.

I suppose Texas is just like the rest of America, only more so. The roads are a bit wider, the cars a bit bigger, the landscape a bit flatter, the language a bit more Spanish. But you could wander through a suburb of this Texas city and not know what state you're in. At least not until you came across a patch of wild cactus, or a stray armadillo.

There's no way you could mistake it for anywhere in Europe, though, let alone Israel. Even though Israel has the same cactuses (the famous sabra cactus were originally imported from the American southwest), that's about the only similarity between the landscapes. That, and the absurdly mild winter. Both Israel and Texas are currently suffering drought conditions.

The longer I've lived outside the U.S., the more I feel like an outsider when I visit. Americans - most of whom have never left the continent - tend to envision the rest of the world in one of two ways: 1) It's just like here, but they speak funny, or 2) It's incomprehensibly different, quaint and primitive. They're both right and both wrong, but neither is terribly useful in understanding the world.

So what's different about America? Some odd thoughts and observations:

Where's the flavor? I think I've worked out why Mexican food is booming in the U.S. It's not because of all the Mexicans - though that surely helps. It's because American fruits and vegetables are utterly tasteless. Cucumbers, tomatoes, watermelons, lettuce - they all taste more or less the same. Like chewing on a water-soaked towel. No wonder Americans buy so much salad dressing and salsa. Come to Israel, where cucumbers taste like cucumbers!

Discount shopping. It's hard sometimes to appreciate that the land of wealth and opportunity is also the land of the big bargain. If you find cheap clothes in Israel, chances are there's a reason they're cheap. Israeli retailers seem to think 10-20% off is a low-low-price. Maybe it comes down to sheer economies of scale, but shoppers seem to have it much better in America.

Ice machines. What is it about Americans and ice makers? They're in refrigerators, hotels, drink machines. I'm all for ice, but how much do you need? How convenient does it have to be? What's so hard about putting an ice tray in the freezer?

Have a nice day! This annoys many Israelis - why should a total stranger in a shop care what kind of day I have? I disagree. I'd rather have an assistant with a phony smile than one with a genuine scowl, as too many Israeli shop clerks have.

But it's not just a symbol of superficial American customer service; Americans are genuinely smiley. This is a nation of optimists, and popular culture simply reflects that: The cheery breakfast shows, the bookstores and infomercials brimming with guarantees of self-improvement. Americans expect every story to have a happy ending, and every problem to have a workable solution that people of good will can achieve through hard work and compromise. That's (in part) why they can't understand the Middle East.

Or Europe. To oversimplify, Americans look around them and see boundless space and plentiful opportunity. Europeans look at life constantly aware that we will all eventually die.

And Israelis? Israelis see threats all around them, never sure how long they as individuals or as a nation will survive in a hostile environment. But they also see how much they have accomplished over the years despite that. People grow up, marry, have kids, acquire property, see the world. Cities are built, and highways, and forests and farms and universities and yeshivas. Ultimately, there's nowhere else on earth a Jew can feel so comfortable being a Jew. So they soldier on, in every sense of the phrase.

Looking forward to getting back home soon!

More on camel coagulation

2006-01-03T22:12:00.001+02:00

Following up on last year's posts on non-kosher milk and whether or not it coagulates, I recently came across this shiur by YU's Rabbi Shmuel Marcus, in which he addresses the subject in the course of discussing the question of Chalav Yisrael.

That's the way it is with these high rollers

2005-12-22T16:22:00.001+02:00

Easy come, easy go!

Easier than shooting fish in a barrel...

2005-12-22T16:15:00.001+02:00

...is finding anti-Israel bias at the New York Times.

But seriously, folks, just be thankful it's not the BBC!

Let the campaigns begin

2005-12-22T14:09:00.001+02:00

With elections approaching, I'd like to offer each of the parties a winning slogan or theme. No need to thank me, just make out your checks to cash.

Without further ado:

Kadima
Rockets on Ashkelon. Bombs in Netanya. Weapons smuggling in Gaza. A terror state in the making, right on our doorstep. With the success of disengagement echoing through Sderot, Israel needs a strong leader who will never give in to terrorism: Ariel Sharon.

Likud
Netanyahu: Not as bad as Sharon. Not as bad as Peretz. Not as bad as you remember him.

Labor
Vote for us or Amir's friends will shut off your electricity.

Meretz
We have no choice; Israel must negotiate with Arafat.

Shinui
Will somebody please vote for us? Mom?

National Religious Party
You don't have to be nationalist or religious, you just have to love to party!

National Union
Seven Knesset members, eight factions.

Agudath Yisrael
Best beards on the ballot!

Hadash
We're a communist party, not an Arab party, insh'allah

United Arab List
The only Arab party except for all the others

Update: How could I have forgotten about...
Shas
Let Rav Ovadiah do your thinking for you.

Following in the old man's footsteps?

2005-12-07T15:15:00.001+02:00

Sharon is often compared to Ben Gurion, Israel's founder and first prime minister, and he has been known to make the comparison himself. It is somewhat exaggerated, to be sure, but there are a number of points of similarity.

For Sharon's own thinking, see the speech he gave this morning at the annual state memorial ceremony for Ben Gurion. (Unfortunately, the translation's a bit sloppy.)

He recalls Ben Gurion's strengths - indeed greatness - while implying that he sees himself following the "old man"'s path. At the same time, if you read between the lines, you'll also find Ben Gurion's faults - which Sharon indicates he also admires and aims to emulate. Try this paragraph:

David Ben-Gurion understood that the public's trust is given to a leader in order to lead, determine clear goals and make difficult decisions. The fate of the people and the good of the State guided him, not polls, media treatment or measures of prestige. "I do not know what the people want," he once said, "I know what is good for the people." That was the secret of his power. That was his great virtue.

To paraphrase a questionable saying, I guess one man's vanity is another man's virtue.

Gammon Chick will double your cube

2005-12-07T13:34:00.001+02:00

How would you like to get paid to play backgammon all day? Meet Jewish blogger Gammon Chick, who seems to want us to think that she does just that.

Keep reading, though; it's not quite that simple. She's actually developing websites. I think.

DovBear LIED!!!!!

2005-12-07T13:29:00.001+02:00

In a clever (though self-admittedly pathetic) attempt to avoid paying for his own wife's birthday present, DovBear has invited his generous readers to chip in for a gift by buying a BlogAd on his site. He's so desperate he'll "even tolerate Republican slogans". (Here's one: Down with the Queen!)

But why should his fan club be so indulgent to Mrs. DovBear? For putting up with DB's intensive blogging, of course. After all, writes the smarter-than-average Bear:

As you've no doubt noticed, this blog takes up quite a bit of my time.

Does it, now? Less than two months ago, in response to readers badgering him to explain how one man could possibly blog so much, DovBear protested vehemently:

Why do you think it takes me a long time to do this? It really doesn't.

Moved by the civic spirit of MoveOn.org, inspired by the subtle wit of Daily Kos, I hereby proclaim: DovBear LIED!!!!

Of the two most obvious explanations, I'm not sure which is more disturbing. Either DovBear lied in September, denying how long he spends blogging in an attempt to exaggerate his writing abilities and enhance his image, or else he lied yesterday, in a pathetic ploy to earn more sympathy for his wife and get those dollars rolling.

The third explanation is less plausible: That over the last two months blogging has become significantly more time-consuming for Dubie. The fourth explanation may be more likely: That over the last two months, Mrs. DB has grown increasingly fed up with his time wasting, and he feels a need to placate her.

With a record like this, it's no wonder public support has collapsed for DovBear's war on Cross Currents.

Too many topics, too little time

2005-12-02T01:48:00.001+02:00

Every day there's something I want to write about, but there are always more pressing responsibilities.

So blogging's on hold for a while. At least I'm getting more work done!

The shameful plight of the Gaza refugees

2005-11-22T17:18:00.001+02:00

In other news: Cows still don't jump over moon

2005-11-21T20:38:00.001+02:00

Sharon: Arab world still doesn't recognize Israel

The president, the pope and the J-blogs

2005-11-10T16:34:00.001+02:00

I don't believe for a minute that the protests of Jewish bloggers had any impact whatsoever on the parties to this non-agreement, but I do consider it noteworthy that this is the first time I can remember a mainstream Israeli newspaper even mentioning the J-blogs in a political report.

Katsav won't ink David's Tomb deal next week
By GREER FAY CASHMAN

Beit Hanassi has issued a statement categorically denying that President Moshe Katsav will sign a land transfer agreement with Pope Benedict XVI when they meet on November 17 giving the Church control over the room of the Last Supper.

The reports, which have appeared in various media outlets in the world and raised a storm among Jewish bloggers on the Internet, claimed that in return the Vatican would cede to Spain's Jewish community the site of what was once an ancient synagogue in Toledo.

Spot that moustache

2005-11-10T14:26:00.001+02:00

Match the faces to the descriptions:

a) Newly elected leader of Israel's socialist Labor Party
b) Star of 1970s hit sitcom "Welcome Back Kotter"
c) Former president of Iraq, leader of socialist Ba'ath Party
d) Harvard Law School professor and pro-Israel author

(Sorry, I couldn't resist!)

Sharon won't set Israel's borders

2005-11-09T16:18:00.001+02:00

While I've been busy catching up on my work, Sharon has reportedly decided that he wants to be reelected to be the prime minister who determines Israel's final borders, whether through negotiations with the Palestinians or, if that fails, unilaterally:

"Sharon thinks that only he can do it because he knows the land and this is his historic mission. He looks around and sees no other potential Israeli leader who can do it. It will be difficult, but it's what the nation wants and it's what the world wants."

Ambitious? Sure. Realistic? Not very.

On the one hand, there is still no indication that there is any conceivable basis for a negotiated agreement between Israel and the Arabs. Where will the border run in the Jerusalem area, for example? Will the Arabs agree to forfeit the Old City? Or will we?

On the other hand, as I wrote a few weeks ago, "it's hopelessly naive to think that Israel has the power to unilaterally determine its permanent border. A border by definition has (at least) two sides. So long as the Arabs refuse to accept our self-declared border, it will remain up for grabs."

Sharon is a man of vision and ambition. But even he can't do the impossible.

There is currently no conceivable solution to the Israel-Arab conflict. No negotiated solution and no unilateral solution. Will our leaders ever stop promising us the impossible?

Cough... Sneeze... Remembering 1995 again

2005-11-04T09:14:00.002+02:00

I've been holed up in bed with a cold for most of the last few days, poking my head out occasionally to follow the blogs. I actually wrote a substantial post yesterday, but I foolishly composed it in Blogger and it was promptly swallowed up by the abyss. I'll try to reconstruct it shortly.

Meanwhile, as today is the tenth (secular) anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, it is an appropriate time to link back to my rebuttal of claims that the Rabin murder was responsibility for the collapse of the Oslo peace process. That's not how I remember 1995.

Holiday pet peeves

2005-10-31T18:00:00.001+02:00

With the holidays over, it's time to think back about all the things that annoyed me - most of which bug me every year. Let's start with...

The words

"Eloha selichot": This is wrong. God's name is never pronounced "eloha". The final hey follows the patah, like the chet in "sameach". The correct pronunciation is "e-LO-ahh", with the accent on the "lo" and with the hey pronounced at the end of the word, aspirated with a puff of air. Remember: If you pronounce it wrong, you're not saying God's name!

"Beena hagigeinu": In "shma koleinu" during selichot, the word "beena" is correctly pronounced with the accent on the first syllable: "BEE-na". Israelis often get this wrong, reading it "bee-NA", since they mistake it for the noun which means "insight" or "understanding". In this case "BEE-na" is a verb, in the imperative, pleading with God to "heed" our expressions of repentance. The word should really be "been", but the poetic form used here adds a superfluous hey to make it "BEE-na" (in parallel with "ha'azeena" in the first part of the verse). If you say it "bee-NA", you're not making sense; instead of saying, "Hearken to our utterances, God, heed our expressions," you're saying, "insight our expressions."

The actions

Waving for the "Hodu"s: In the "Hodu" paragraph of Hallel, the Chazzan waves his lulav for each of the first two verses (Hodu and Yomar Na), but the congregation should wave four times, each time they respond with "Hodu". Many congregations mistakenly follow the Chazzan and only wave the first two times.

Waving for "Hatzlicha na": Both Chazzan and congregation should wave lulavs for "Ana Hashem hoshia na" but not for "Ana Hashem hatzlicha na" (since we don't hold like Beit Shammai!).

The music

Lively Unetaneh Tokef: This is one of the most somber of the high holiday prayers, but I've noticed an (increasing?) inclination to put at least parts of it to lively tunes. One melody popular in Israel includes a lilting march for "umalachim yechafezun...", and I've also heard upbeat melodies used for "Adam yesodo me'afar..." ("Man comes from dust and goes to dust"). The popular (in Israel) Yair Rosenbloom melody is wonderful, but it suffers from the same flaw in places ("V'chol baei olam..."). Save your lively marches for Kedusha, please!

Hodu in unison: The Hodu paragraph of Hallel is meant to be recited or sung responsively, with the chazzan saying one verse and the congregation responding, "Hodu Lashem ki tov...". This has become so rare that I feel relieved when I see it done right. Not every song in the davening needs to be sung in unison!

The wrong hakafot songs: Simchat Torah celebrates the completion of the Torah. When I was young, we would dance to songs about the Torah or about joy, and all was well. Lately, though, it seems Simchat Torah is losing its theme.

First, they started with "T'hey hasha'ah hazot" - a slow, contemplative song pleading for God's mercy. It's a beautiful song, sure, but hakafot are a time to celebrate, not to plead! This is a hora, not a kumzits! Other kumzits songs like "Hamalach hagoel oti" came next. Come on, folks: If you want to meditate, do it at seudah shlishit!

Then, more recently - and I don't know if this is just my shul or if it has taken hold more widely in Israel - the Yamim Noraim songs appeared. "Mareh Cohen" is an inspiring hymn, but it's about the Cohen Gadol leaving the Kodesh Kodashim on Yom Kippur! And I simply don't get "Areshet Sefateinu" - when's the last time anyone blew a shofar on Simchat Torah? (Forget I asked; that's all I need...)

We have beautiful songs and we have meaningful festivals. What's so hard about matching them up correctly?

Has Shmuley been reading DovBear again?

2005-10-30T16:00:00.001+02:00

Quoth Shmuley:

Blaming human sin for the recent hurricanes in the United States is all the rage, and countless religious Americans, over the last few months, have given me some variation of my friend's diagnosis for the surge in hurricanes. But if it is true that God is punishing the US for its corruption and if it is true that natural disasters are a sign of divine displeasure, I have but one question. Where is the big hurricane that should have destroyed Riyadh, the capital of a country that has funded religious hatred and sponsor terrorism, for decades?

Where, by the same token, is the big earthquake that should have taken out the regime of Kim Jong Il, which starves North Korea's children, even as he feeds his army goons? Where is the tornado that should have scooped up the Janjaweed militias of Sudan, perpetrating a horrific genocide in the Darfur region?

Where, indeed?

Soul of Fire: A Theory of Biblical Man

2005-10-29T20:59:00.001+02:00

If you read only one essay this decade on biblical interpretation (pshat), this should be it (free registration required):

Soul of Fire: A Theory of Biblical Man
by Ethan Dor-Shav
Our common fate as water, earth, wind, and fire.
Azure No. 22 (Autumn 5766 / 2005)

A teaser:

Contrary to the Christological tradition (dominating biblical lexicography through the nineteenh century and beyond), the Hebrew canon does not uphold the dualist body-soul doctrine, submitting instead three soul terms: Nefesh, ruah, and neshama...

In what follows, I intend to show that the original Hebrew terminology was both distinct and consistent, and that the very absence of visible souls in the Hebrew Bible points to a more commanding alternative conception of man’s inner being. I also intend to show that while the Bible does not uphold the soul-body dichotomy – which most critics have considered prerequisite to a belief in the persistence of the soul after death – it does demonstrate the presence of a four-element structure of both matter and spirit that supports a belief in life eternal. This structure has been either overlooked or confused with Aristotle’s schema to the point that the spiritual implications of the biblical usage have gone undiscovered.

Thus, scholars searching the Hebrew Bible for signs of an interest in the afterlife have been looking through the wrong intellectual lenses, and have therefore missed the Hebrew Bible’s profound teaching concerning man’s constitution and destiny.

Along the way, the author sheds light on the biblical creation story (read this morning in synagogues) and, directly and indirectly, on many familiar and less-familiar biblical passages. I'm not sure I'm convinced of all his points, but his analysis is impressive and compelling.

A great way to start the new cycle of Torah readings. Yasher koach!

Livni's chance to redeem herself

2005-10-27T11:44:00.001+02:00

Whatever her other accomplishments, I will never forget Justice Minister Tzipi Livni for her key role in advancing Prime Minister Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza, a mistake I fear Israel will regret for many years to come. But there is one realm in which Livni can perhaps redeem herself, one achievement which could be enough a force for good in Israel to nearly outweigh the harm of the disengagement.

As Justice Minister, Livni bears ministerial responsibility for judicial appointments in Israel. Unlike in the U.S. and other democracies, judges in Israel are appointed by a committee in which the government has a distinct minority of the votes, and in which sitting justices of the Supreme Court are the largest voting bloc, substantially enabling them to select their own successors.

Livni is standing firm, though, against Chief Justice Aharon Barak, in insisting on the appointment of Hebrew University Prof. Ruth Gavison. Gavison, one of Israel's leading constitutional experts, is perhaps the most prominent critic of Barak's jurisprudence, and would bring much-needed balance to a court which today is nearly homogeneous in judicial outlook, not to mention socioeconomic, ethnic and religious makeup.

The court has three vacancies; Livni refuses to convene the appointments committee unless she has secured Gavison's appointment. Reports the Jerusalem Post:

Because of the strength of her personality, Barak fears that Gavison will dominate the court after he retires next year and undo all the changes he has accomplished during his years as head of the judicial pyramid.

Livni, for her part, believes that one of the most crucial tasks for the Minister of Justice is to help mold the Supreme Court. She is not ready to leave that job to Barak, who has generally dominated the appointments to the court during his tenure.

In any other realm of government, Barak would be the first to cry foul if a single perspective were to dominate a state institution, with prominent opposing voices excluded. In the courts, though, what he says goes. We can't let differences of opinion confuse the clear, unambiguous meaning of Israel's unwritten constitution!

Most striking, watching the confirmation battles for the U.S. Supreme Court, is how little the subject has engaged the Israeli public. The issue is rarely debated, and usually relegated to the back pages. That's what happens when the public's representatives have almost no say in the appointment of the men and women who will be among the most influential in shaping the country's future in the years to come.

Tzipi, stick to your guns! This is a fight we can't afford you to lose.

What giveth at Yahoo! Mail?

2005-10-26T15:25:00.001+02:00

If you have a Yahoo! Mail account, you've recently been subjected to some strange ads on the login page. Here's one which made me cringe:

Ouch! If you're going to use Elizabethan English, at least get the grammar right!

Yes, the English used in Shakespeare's time had rules, too. You can't just write "giveth" wherever you feel like it. It conjugates like this:

Singular:
I give
Thou givest
He giveth

Plural:
We give
You give
They give

So "SpamGuard taketh away" is correct (third person singular). But "Spammers giveth" is cringe country. "Spammers" is plural, and must be combined with "give", just like in today's English. At best you could say, "The spammer giveth."

But why would you want to? Why would Yahoo! want to evoke the King James Bible in an ad for e-mail spam blocking? Are they using an algorithm developed by Francis Bacon?

Like, what giveth?

What must Microsoft Israel's employees think?

2005-10-25T18:33:00.001+02:00

Say you're Bill Gates, and you're scheduling your first-ever visit to Israel - a country where you sell millions of dollars worth of products and employ 400 people. Your schedule is tight. Which of these two events do you prefer?

Visiting the Microsoft research and development center in Haifa, and meeting with the 150 people you employ there

or
Conducting a workshop with Israeli teenagers, who will present their ideas and questions to you

Gates has apparently picked the latter.

And to think I once almost went to work for them!

Meme Seven (and the transmission of mesorah)

2005-10-23T17:10:00.001+02:00

"Meme Seven" has been working its way through the Jewish blogs for a few weeks now, and I've recently been tagged to continue by DovBear. (Update: Alleged gratuitous insult has been deleted.)

Before I get to it, a few words are in order about memes and the Jewish problem. A meme, briefly, is an element of culture transmitted by imitation. That is, it's something people do because other people have done it. In Jewish lingo, we call that minhag ("custom") or mesorah ("tradition").

When referring to material transferred among blogs, a meme is also something else: a text. As with (l'havdil) traditional Jewish texts, a meme can be altered in transmission, either carelessly or deliberately. And so it has been with Meme Seven.

Seven appears to have infected the J-Blogs via Matza and Marinara, who I will treat for the purposes of this discussion as the original, "authentic" text. M&M presented a seven-by-seven matrix of categories: "Things I plan to do before I die", "Things I can do", "Things I cannot do", "Things that attract me to the opposite sex", "Things that I say most often", "Celebrity crushes" and "People I want to do this".

Next, Mirty reordered the categories, from light to serious. Rabbi Neil Fleischmann, appropriately enough, excised the inappropriate categories ("opposite sex" and "celebrity crushes"). Steg received it from Neil, and passed it on to OrthoMom, who changed (in typical Jewish fashion) "Things I plan to do before I die" to the more upbeat "Things I Hope To Do In My Life". Finally, before passing it on to me, DovBear (intentionally or not?) dropped the category of "Things that I say most often".

(I should also note that the number of people tagged to continue the meme has been altered capriciously from seven to whatever number the blogger had in mind.)

Received tradition or restored authenticity?
So, as one faithful to the traditions, which version should I do? Should I transmit the meme as I received it, remaining faithful to my place in the chain of tradition? Or should I aim to ascertain the original, authentic form of the meme and restore it to its rightful glory, correcting any distortions which have taken hold in the meantime?

On the one hand, tradition only bears authority to the extent that it is preserved as it has been transmitted. Within the framework of tradition, I can carry on the practices of my father or my teachers. But the moment I adopt someone else's practices, someone with whom I have no direct authoritative relationship, I am not being traditional. I am being arbitrary and autonomous.

If I follow Hassidic customs because my father is a Hassid, or because my rebbe is a Hassid, I am continuing the tradition. But if I do so because they sound nice to me, or I find them inspiring or meaningful, I am acting of my own accord and have severed any link I might have to the chain of tradition.

On the other hand, where it is possible to determine that the tradition has gone awry, that authentic practices have been lost or distorted, and foreign ones substituted, is it not my duty to restore authenticity to the tradition, discarding any errors in transmission which may have crept in - no matter for how long they have taken hold? I am not being arbitrary and autonomous - I am restoring truth to the tradition!

Which brings me to Gil's meme. Also tagged by DovBear, he restored two of the three missing categories, "Things I Say Often" and "Celebrity Crushes", though leaving the latter marked "N/A". He failed to restore the "opposite sex" category, and kept OrthoMom's wording of "Things I Hope To Do". So Gil took steps towards restoring the authentic meme, though he failed to do so completely and (contrary to the usual practice of textual emendations to Jewish texts) he failed to note the emendations. Coincidentally, in his very next post, Gil discussed the question of textual changes to the prayers, concluding that though it may be desirable to restore the authentic original texts, it is probably impossible. Did the same thinking guide his approach to the meme?

Ultimately, I have decided to propagate the meme as I received it from DovBear. Who am I, a lonely individual in the chain of tradition, to decide it must be altered? My link to the revelation of the meme is only through DovBear and his chain of transmission. Restoring the original, authentic text may be an interesting question for researchers (Wissenschaft des Blogentums), but it should not affect halachic practice.

Without further blather:

7 Things I Can Do:
- Design and build a working object-oriented software system using C++ and/or Perl
- Lein the Torah accurately (with a modest amount of preparation) and lead most of the high holiday services
- Play the William Tell Overture on my teeth using a pen or my thumbnail
- Smell a cigarette from across a large restaurant
- Spot an artificial satellite traversing the night sky
- Sing beautifully (or so I'm told)
- Research the medical journals to reach an informed decision on health issues

7 Things I Can't Do:
- Wake up at the same time each morning
- Basic household repairs
- Watch soccer for more than a few minutes
- Open an envelope containing a bank statement
- Work without noshing
- Pursue a consumer complaint effectively
- Conceive of a workable solution for the Arab-Israel conflict

7 Things I Hope To Do In My Life:
- Have more kids and raise them successfully
- Study for semicha
- Get my finances in order
- Finish writing the drasha this blog is named after, and get it published
- Lead Mussaf on Rosh Hashana
- Maintain a clean home
- Get into shape - and stay there

People I'd like to infect with this meme (alphabetically):
- ADDeRabbi
- Am Echad
- Cosmic X
- David B.
- Out of Step Jew
- Rachel Ann
- Sharvul

Hilchos Camping Out

2005-10-23T15:16:00.001+02:00

Rabbi Zvi Sobolofsky of Yeshiva University discusses the halachic aspects of sleeping in the sukkah in this audio shiur.

The real schedule for tonight's Hoshana Rabba learning

2005-10-23T14:01:00.001+02:00

The OU Israel Center / Yeshiva University in Israel have organized an all-night learning program tonight in Jerusalem for Hoshana Rabba. The official schedule (PDF):

8:30pm - Rabbi Sholom Gold (Israel Center Wolinetz Family Shul)
9:30pm - Rabbi Reuven Aberman (IC Wolinetz Family Shul)
10:30pm - Rabbi Meyer Fendel (IC Wolinetz Family Shul)
11:30pm - Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Poupko (IC Wolinetz Family Shul)
12:30am - Rabbi Eddie Abramson (IC Wolinetz Family Shul)

10:00pm - Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm (Dan Panorama Hotel)
11:00pm - Rabbi Meir Goldvicht (Dan Panorama Hotel)
12:00am - Rabbi Hershel Shachter (Dan Panorama Hotel)
1:00am - Rabbi Dovid Miller (Dan Panorama Hotel)

2:00am - Rabbi Kenneth Brander (Israel Center Levmore Family Sukka)
3:00am - Rabbi Asaf Bednarsh (IC Levmore Family Sukka)
4:00am - Rabbi Binyamin Wolff (IC Levmore Family Sukka)

The real schedule:

8:30pm - Rabbi Sholom Gold (Israel Center Wolinetz Family Shul)
9:30pm - Rabbi Reuven Aberman (IC Wolinetz Family Shul)
10:30pm - Rabbi Meyer Fendel (IC Wolinetz Family Shul)
11:30pm - Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Poupko (IC Wolinetz Family Shul)
12:30am - Rabbi Eddie Abramson (IC Wolinetz Family Shul)

10:00pm - Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm (Dan Panorama Hotel)
11:00pm - Rabbi Meir Goldvicht (Dan Panorama Hotel)
12:00am - Rabbi Hershel Shachter (Dan Panorama Hotel)
1:00am - Rabbi Dovid Miller (Dan Panorama Hotel)

1:30am - Houston at Chicago, World Series Game 2 (in your hotel room, home or nearest sports bar)

Sorry, Rabbis Miller, Brander, Bednarsh and Wolff!

Ritter: Israel secretly guided UN Iraq inspectors

2005-10-20T23:45:00.001+02:00

William M. Arkin, who writes on national security issues for the Washington Post's website, reports a story which hasn't had much attention among pro-Israel blogs: According to a new book by Scott Ritter, formerly head UN weapons inspector in Iraq, the whole inspection regime was secretly guided by Israeli intelligence.

Now, Ritter clearly has his axes to grind, having switched from head UN inspector to leading defender of Saddam. His credibility is somewhat questionable, one could say. But whether or not this story is true, it has the potential for a major PR disaster. Watch this one carefully.

Not camping out

2005-10-20T23:25:00.001+02:00

As much as we'd love to, we're not sleeping in the sukkah this year - at least not so far. The baby still needs a lot of nighttime attention, from both parents, and it's been too chilly to take her into the sukkah with us. So we're sleeping in bed for now.

It's supposed to warm up over the weekend here, and I'm hoping we can manage at least one or two nights in the sukkah. The last time we had a Sukkot without sleeping in the sukkah was a few years ago when it rained the whole week through.

Roadkill myths III: Unmasking a mythmaker

2005-10-19T15:24:00.001+02:00

For the next installment in my series on road accidents in Israel (I, II), I had planned to discuss the claim that they are "a leading cause of death in Israel." That will have to wait, however, since a rare opportunity has presented itself: The chance to deflate one of Israel's leading mythmakers on the subject of traffic safety.

Dr. Elihu Richter of the Hebrew University is an "injury epidemiologist", who researches alleged harm from environmental pollution, cellphone use and other population-wide causes. He is, though, something of an alarmist, capable of finding injury risks regardless of the evidence - or lack thereof.

On the subject of road accidents, he is particularly fanatic, asserting (without evidence) that draconian speed enforcement could eliminate a high proportion of Israel's road deaths. I hope to address the question of speed and speed limits in a future installment in this series. For now, I want to show how Richter, by selective and inappropriate use of data, creates a misleading impression of Israel's road safety record.

Before I continue, I should note that despite my vehement disagreement with Richter on the subject of road safety, I am happy to give the man credit for defending Israel's March 2002 Defensive Shield anti-terrorism operations from one-sided assault by campaigners for "public health" and "human rights" in the European Journal of Public Health. As important as it is to improve our accident record, defending Israel from its enemies remains far more important. Kol hakavod.

Richter's latest missive

Back to our subject. Richter periodically spills his wrath on Israel's supposed poor road safety record in opinion pieces he writes for the Jerusalem Post. His latest missive appeared earlier this week.

Readers of my previous two installments know that in fact Israel's road safety record is not bad at all, and it has improved substantially over recent years, even compared with other Western countries at far higher levels of economic development. Let's see how Richter uses selective statistics to give the opposite impression.

Writes Richter:

...in Israel, road death tolls have actually risen over the past 15 years

Richter can only be referring here to raw fatality numbers. Have they in fact risen over the past 15 years? Richter's basis for comparison is presumably 1990, which saw the lowest number of fatalities in recent years: 427 (according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics). Since the last full year of data is currently 2004, with 476 fatalities, there was indeed an increase of 11.5% over that time.

But what if Richter had chosen his endpoint slightly differently? The previous year - 1989 - saw 475 fatalities, virtually identical with 2004's total. The year before that, 1988, recorded 511, some 7.4% higher than 2004. Overall, yearly fatality totals are volatile. Indeed, since 1986 Israel has seen year-on-year increases in total fatalities as high as 18% and decreases as high as 14%. By comparing two arbitrary years you can prove nearly anything.

Regardless, as readers of this series already know, the raw total of fatalities is not the significant statistic here. Since 1990, total fatalities have not changed much, but Israel's population has increased by 45%. That is a significant safety improvement by any standard. More impressively, total distance driven in vehicle kilometers has more than doubled, indicating an even steeper decline in road safety per kilometer. Against this backdrop, to claim that "road death tolls have actually risen over the past 15 years" is misleading, to put it mildly.

Richter continues:

mainly from speed creep and urban sprawl.

This is nonsense. I argued earlier that total fatalities should be broken down into fatalities per kilometer (i.e., how safe the roads are) and total kilometers driven (i.e., exposure to the risks of driving). Fatalities per kilometer have been steadily falling, while kilometers driven have been steadily rising. Total fatalities can be reduced only by reducing either fatalities per kilometer or kilometers driven.

By blaming "speed creep" for the stubborn fatality rate, Richter implies that the roads have become less safe due to speeding drivers. If this were true, we would have seen a rise in the fatality rate per kilometer. The reverse is true; fatalities per kilometer continue to drop, nearly every year.

If speeds are increasing, then, it is only because the roads are becoming safe enough to support higher travel speeds. Good drivers drive more slowly on twisty, narrow roads than they do on straight, clear roads. When they speed up because the road conditions are better, they aren't being reckless. They're being sensible.

Speeds in Israel are rising because the roads are becoming safer, as the statistics clearly show. That's a good thing, not a problem.

By mentioning "urban sprawl", Richter refers to the second of the two statistics I mentioned, suggesting that the total distance driven is increasing faster than necessary. If Israelis drove much more than their counterparts in other countries, he might have a point. But we've already seen that the reverse is true.

Israelis drive much less than do Brits, Frenchmen or Australians. With increased economic development, God willing, Israelis will only continue to drive further each year; we are a long way from catching up with most other Western countries. If Richter thinks that increasingly-affluent Israelis can be persuaded to leave their cars at home and take the train en masse, he is woefully naive.

Richter again:

During these years, tough nationwide speed-camera enforcement reduced deaths by nearly 50% in Australia, and by 40% in the UK and France.

Again, by discussing speed enforcement Richter implicitly focuses on the per-kilometer fatality rate. Look again at the charts of per-kilometer fatalities by country: The fatality rate has fallen substantially in virtually every country reporting it, with Israel showing a greater improvement than most. To attribute that drop to a single policy (speed-camera enforcement) in any country is highly questionable, but all the more so when the improvement has taken place across the board, even in countries which have not adopted that policy!

Of course, Richter ignores the most salient difference between Israel on the one hand, and Australia, the UK or France on the other. From 1990 to 2003, Israel's population grew by some 44%. Over the same period of time, Australia grew by 15%, France by 6.2%, and the UK by just 4.3% (see here and here).

Is it any wonder that, while road deaths fell by 40-50% in those countries, they remained level in Israel? With its burgeoning population, Israel had to improve by over 40% just to stay in the same place! To cite these raw total figures while ignoring differences in population growth is to do a disservice to Israel's safety record. If Richter took his readers seriously, he wouldn't engage in such manipulations of the statistics.

Final thoughts

As he has done before, and as he did before the road even opened, Richter blames the new Trans-Israel Highway, Israel's most advanced roadway, for contributing to the road fatality rate. But here, Richter's own arguments work against him: Since the road was opened, total annual road fatalities in Israel have fallen every year, sometimes significantly! Hardly any fatal accidents have taken place on the new road itself. If anything, the Trans-Israel Highway should be credited with improving road safety in Israel, by providing a safe new motorway and channeling traffic away from unsafe old roads. But for Richter, no road is a safe road.

Unlike Richter, I hope Transport Minister Meir Shetreet agrees to raise the national speed limit next month, so that we can continue to drive at safe speeds on Israel's highways without being branded lawbreakers. Surely drivers would be better off keeping their eyes on the road, rather than focusing on their speedometers and scanning the shoulders for hidden cops.

Several times, Richter refers to the possibility of "zero road fatalities" in Israel. Since we are only human, accidents will continue to happen whatever we do. Reducing fatalities to zero would require either reducing the per-kilometer accident rate to 1/400th of its current value, or reducing the number of kilometers driven by 400 times, or some combination of the two (such as lowering each to one-twentieth of its current value). Such changes are inconceivable, and unprecedented in any developed country. If we really want to improve road safety in Israel, we can start by setting realistic goals.

To close on a positive note: The statistics bureau announced last week that, according to preliminary data as of the end of September 2005, road fatalities in 2005 are down 13% over the same period last year. If this trend continues, 2005 may see fewer road deaths, God willing, than even 1990. Odd that Richter didn't bother to point that out.

Haveil Havalim #41

2005-10-16T15:29:00.001+02:00

"What gain is there to man in all the labor which he labors under the sun?"
(Blogging, as described in Ecclesiastes 1:3)

This is a very special installment of Haveil Havalim ("Vanity of Vanities"). First, it is the final edition before the annual synagogue reading of Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), the book from which its name derives. More significantly, though, 41 is also the numerical value (gematria) of the Hebrew spelling of "blog". (It is, however, not the answer to life, the universe and everything. A shame.)

There were lots of great submissions this week, which I've supplemented with picks of my own. As promised, I've preferred posts touching on the holiday season. Keep up the great work everyone, and have a wonderful Sukkot! (Or Sukkos. Or Sukkoth. Or Succoth. Or Succos. Or Succot. Or Sukkes. Or Feast of Tabernacles. Or Ingathering Festival. Or...)

Pre-Yom Kippur

Cosmic X recalls the Selichot experience in the eyes of a ba'al teshuvah: "The bottom line of this post is that you get out of the selichot what you put into them." Amen. (On the other hand, Selichot at the speed of light make him miserable.)

DovBear likes piyutim, those long, drawn-out poems used to pad out the prayer services on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. So I assume he wouldn't mind reading mine for me while I take a bathroom break.

Josh Cohen at Multiple Mentality wishes us a Happy New Year before explaining why he doesn't go to shul. Even for the High Holidays. Sorry to hear that, Josh.

Rachel Steinfeld celebrated Rosh Hashanah in Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, where she is stationed for two years on a Harvard University research project.

Psycho Toddler sees new and unusual evidence that we're losing the PR war. As if we needed any.

Elie of Elie's Expositions partakes of a Pre-Yom Kippur Smorg. Pass the carrot sticks, please.

Yom Kippur

Elisson at Blog d'Elisson contemplates Hineni, the chazzan's prayer before Mussaf on the High Holidays and one of my personal favorite prayers in the liturgy. I hope to recite it myself some day, God willing.

Muse at me-ander whispers during the last minutes of Yom Kippur.

Thinking randomly in his shack, Jack had a meaningful Yom Kippur. Thanks for sharing, Jack.

After Yom Kippur, Ezzie from SerandEz appropriately thinks about death.

Krum as a Bagel has been assigned the task of editing the Yom Kippur machzor for next year. Unfortunately, he seems to think next year was 89 years ago. And I thought I was behind!

Sukkot

~~Succah~~ Soccer Dad is building his custom-ordered sukkah, step by step: 1, 2, 3.

Akiva at Mystical Paths brings us a Lulav shortage update. Ze'ev at Israel Perspectives reacts to the Lulav Monopolization Scandal, asking whether such lulavim remain kosher. I sure hope so - I already bought mine!

The Charedi Wannabe poses some Succos trivia questions.

Mirty says Sukkot is a Man Thing. Isn't that obvious?

Aside from dramatically not changing his blog name, Gil of the blog now and formerly known as Hirhurim has been wondering why a bris must be held in a sukkah. (Would that still hold if someone is vomiting? I need to know, Gil. Your new banner graphic turns my stomach.)

Israel

Barak Moore at IRIS credits the Bush administration with reports that Afghanistan plans to recognize Israel, and wonders what's up with Syria.

Daled Amos sees Israel's Gaza policy and is reminded of the Cat in the Hat. Too true.

Yisrael Medad at My Right Word shows us how the Western Wall Plaza might look In the Not-So-Distant-Future. If you build it, Winkie, will they come?

Religious

Tzemach Atlas at Mental Blog discusses the intriguing suggestion that rabbinic enactments which fall out of practice could be subject to formal abolition by a rabbinical court. Radical? Extreme? Could be, could be.

Tovya Benyon at Zion Report feels the pain of exile, and yearns to be free from Galus. You're welcome here any time.

Yaakov at AliyahBlog observes people who come to shul late, leave early, and socialize in between, and asks, Why Do They Even Bother?

Sundry

Greg Gershman at Presence points out that Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann, an Orthodox Jew, has published papers about game theory in the Talmud. (Greg's title, "Shall We Play a Game?" is a reference to one of my favorite childhood movies, one whose plot revolves around game theory.)

Gail at Crossing the Rubicon2 brings us Polish-Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb.

Chayyei Sarah worries that she's losing her touch, in part because she hasn't been mentioned in Haveil Havalim lately. Don't be sad, Sarah! You made it this time! Just for being unbearably cute!

Josh from Chakira shows us How to Get a Lakewood Internet License. What are they afraid of? That kollelniks will consult Rabbi Abadi?

At Ortho-blawg Judge and Jewry, Jeff Ballabon wonders about Harriet Miers and the Jewish problem. Weird.

Chag Sameach

This is the last HH for two weeks when it will resume at Shiloh Musings. Over to you, Batya.

Haveil Havalim (The Jewish/Israeli blog carnival) can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.

Technorati Tags: Blog carnivals, haveil_havalim, Israel, Judaism.

The mysterious list to end all lists

2005-10-13T22:17:00.001+02:00

No, I'm not referring to the one we mentioned today in Unetaneh Tokef, the one about "who will live and who will die." I'm referring to a far more significant topic: Jewish blogging.

First Gil complained he was left off a list. Then Miriam wondered why on earth he should care. DovBear seconded that, and offered a list of his own. Regretting that decision, he took himself one step further and offered another (only to regret that too, it seems).

Meanwhile, I've stumbled across the ultimate list of (Orthodox) Jewish blogs. More precisely, it purports to be a list of Frum 'n' Cool Blogs, in which "Links Should: 1. LINK! 2. Be of interest to Frum Jews 3. Be Blogs". If all of the hundreds of links on the page in fact meet those criteria, we may as well give up now. No one could possibly keep track of the goings-on among Orthoblogs with so many to follow.

This megalist raises several mysteries:

1. Who is the owner, "Ms. Space Cadet", who apparently owns no other blogs?

2. How often is the list updated, by whom and on what basis? There seems to be just one post, with a changing date.

3. Why on earth is the website called dreamsandrants.blogspot.com?

4. Why am I the only blogger who merits a direct link to a posting? (Thanks!)

Does this universe hold greater mysteries than these?

Update (Sept. 14): Amazing. Gil still cares about that silly list.

Call for submissions: Haveil Havalim #41

2005-10-11T11:57:00.001+02:00

The rumor is true! I have (graciously? I suppose) volunteered to be this week's host of Haveil Havalim, the Jewish/Israel related blog carnival.

Given the season, priority will be given to posts related to Sukkot or Yom Kippur.

Either submit your (self-)nominations via the Conservative Cat's submission page or e-mail me at biur_chametz at yahoo dot com. Submission deadline is 2pm Sunday Israel time (8am EDT).

This is the last HH for two weeks when it will resume at Shiloh Musings.

Last week's edition can be found here.

Finally, to set the record straight: we're always kvelling!

Camping out can be a mitzvah... or not

2005-10-10T18:01:00.001+02:00

Last year I wrote (here and here) about the biblically-obligated but, these days, oddly rare practice of sleeping in the sukkah over Sukkot. Though the festival doesn't start for a week, this seems a good time to revisit the topic. Maybe I can inspire someone to give it a try.

I bring it up because I was talking to a friend the other day about plans for Sukkot. As it happens, over chol hamoed they're planning a family camping trip to the Negev desert. So he called ahead to the campsite to ask whether there will be a sukkah. "Certainly - we have sukkot on the premises year round."

Knowing the flexible way non-religious Israelis can define a sukkah, he tried to ascertain whether there would indeed be halachically acceptable walls and skhakh, and considered whether they should bring some extra skhakh of their own in case the shade cover was inadequate. The logistics could be difficult, and they could be disappointed to discover that the sukkah they expected to find was far from being kosher.

"Sounds like a challenge," I said, "but it's worth it. It's wonderful to sleep in the sukkah."

"Sleep?" he responded. "No, we're just looking for a place to eat. I never sleep in the sukkah. We'll be sleeping in tents."

I was at a loss to respond. They're going on a camping trip to the desert, where they're going to great lengths to make sure there will be a kosher sukkah, but they intend to sleep in tents? The only difference between sleeping in a tent and sleeping in the sukkah is that in the former you're camping out, but in the latter you're also doing a mitzvah d'oraitha!

"Yes, but what if it rains? We're better off in tents."

I might note that the chance of rain in the Negev in October is only slightly higher than the chance of snow. The desert is generally characterized by a distinct lack of rain.

So how do I explain this odd behavior, in which religious people make every effort to do what the halacha requires on Sukkot, except they'd rather sleep in a tent than in a sukkah, specifically avoiding the very mitzvah central to the festival? Is it, as I suggested, the "weird factor" or the "bourgeois factor"? Sleeping in a sukkah is hardly more weird or less bourgeois than sleeping in a tent. Is camping out fun and exciting in a tent, but onerously obligatory in a sukkah?

I don't get it. All I can suggest is that, for many Orthodox Jews today, sleeping in a sukkah is the furthest thing from their minds - even when they're sleeping in a tent next to a sukkah.

Top Ten New Mottos for Yeshiva University

2005-10-09T14:34:00.001+02:00

In the spirit of YU's new Madison Avenue-style slogan (see here, here and here), I'd like to offer my own suggestions. Maybe Richard Joel will offer me a job?

From our head office on Amsterdam Avenue...
The Top Ten Mottos for the Rebranded Yeshiva University:

10. Putting the modern in Modern Orthodox

9. Torah for a new generation

8. Dude, where's my Torah?

7. Torah U'Madda: Two great tastes that taste great together

6. Bringing Torah to Spanish Harlem

5. As modern as possible (given the rabbinic faculty)

4. If you've got the time, we've got the Rav

3. Brighter than a burning bush

2. The same great YU taste with half the chumras

And the Number One Motto for the Rebranded Yeshiva University is:

1. This is not your father's Shulchan Aruch

Desecrating Atonement and Bicycle Day

2005-10-09T13:51:00.001+02:00

What do bicycles have to do with Yom Kippur?

If you haven't been in Israel for Yom Kippur in the last ten years or so, you might think this was an obscure riddle. Unfortunately not. What for traditional Jews is the holiest day of the year, the climax of the season of introspection, repentance and atonement, has an additional identity in contemporary Israel. It has become National Bicycle Day.

Out of respect for the sacred day and for their neighbors, Israeli Jews, however non-religious they may be, do not drive on Yom Kippur, from the start of the fast at sundown until its end at the next day's nightfall. The roads are eerily quiet, from local byways to major highways.

Or at least they used to be. Nature abhors a vacuum, and apparently so does asphalt. Once, those who were not in synagogue would stay home to watch rented videos (since the television stations don't broadcast), read the holiday supplements of the paper, or go for a walk. Today they, or at least their kids, strap on helmets and knee pads and ride through the streets on bicycles, skateboards, scooters and rollerblades.

Most of the ambulance calls on Yom Kippur are for either fasting-related weakness or bicycle accidents. The pre-holiday sales feature microwave popcorn (for video watchers), paperback novels, and bicycles. Truly the stuff of holiness.

So we were perhaps thoughtless when last year, having moved further from shul since the previous Yom Kippur, we did what would have been unremarkable in the diaspora: we decided to take it easy and drive to Kol Nidrei services. After candlelighting, we hopped into the car in our Atonement garb and scooted over to the synagogue.

We had plenty of time before the day would properly begin, along with all its halachic restrictions. After all, the sun was plainly visible above the horizon. And once the fast ended, we would have the car right there, avoiding that last trek home on empty stomachs.

As it happened, though, moments (or so it seemed) after the published candlelighting time, the streets were already filling up with bicycles. We drove carefully, making our way through the crowds of surprised cyclists. It might still be tosefet yom tov for us - that optional time period after candlelighting when the holiday has not yet halachically begun. But the celebrants of National Bicycle Day were apparently stricter than we on such subtleties. For them, the day had begun, and we were desecrating it.

You could see it on the shocked expressions on their faces, and on those of passersby. It was hard to tell which aggrieved pedestrians were religious but, ignorant as to the halachic status of the pre-sundown period, thought we were actually desecrating the most sacred day on the calendar, and which were not, but zealously guarded the prerogatives of non-motorized two-wheeled vehicles. We had no time to argue. We had to get to shul without hitting any. Which we did, I might add, with plenty of time to spare.

Though I don't believe we did anything wrong last year, I expect we'll follow the more conventional approach this time. I can't think of any halacha we could have violated by driving to shul before the start of the holiday, but why needlessly antagonize people? Even if they feel antagonized only due to their own Jewish ignorance.

As shocking as it might seem to the uninitiated, bicycles may ultimately save the national character of Yom Kippur in Israel for generations to come. In a society where religious-secular tensions continue to grow, where contempt for religion continues to strengthen, where once-banned Shabbat shopping has become a national pastime for the secularists, could Yom Kippur have maintained its car-free status for much longer? Wouldn't it have inevitably been transformed into another day of family hikes and picnics?

Not now. After the fast ended a few years ago and we left shul, the last of the cyclists was clearing out of the road. (Apparently they also hold by tosefet yom tov at the end of the day!) A mother explained to her young daughter that she had to get out of the street, since Yom Kippur was over. "I wish it was always Yom Kippur!" she replied, sadly. "Don't worry; Yom Kippur will come again next year," said her mother.

Who would dare drive on Yom Kippur and ruin the fun for all the nation's children? Not us!

Quick index to my high holiday blogging, 5766

2005-10-06T14:21:00.001+03:00

My posts about repentance and introspection:
My posts about the shofar and its significance:
My posts about the high holiday prayers:

Impressively prolific, no?

My excuse: My wonderful new daughter has somewhat restricted the amount of time I have for such important activities as learning Torah, leaving me bare of pre-holiday inspiration.

A suggestion: Why not take a look at my holiday posts from last year?

Rosh Hashana and the New Moon (no, I never wrote a sequel)

Emulating the Angels (regarding Yom Kippur)

May you be sealed for a good year!

(And while we're on the subject: I'm with Ben Chorin on this one. I haven't made it to Selichot once this year, and I don't feel I'm missing anything.)

Update (Oct. 10): Why didn't anyone tell me I had the year wrong! 5756 indeed!

Wrong nursery rhyme!

2005-10-06T13:53:00.001+03:00

Mother Hubbard's accident problem
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

Children growing up in large families are more likely to be injured in a preventible accident and to arrive later at an urgent care center or emergency room for treatment.

Jerusalem researchers who studied this "Mother Hubbard" syndrome, in which parents have "so many children they don't know what to do,"....

Note to researchers: If you're looking for a clever, media-friendly name for your new syndrome, first make sure you're citing the right nursery rhyme!

Compare:

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor dog a bone.
But when she got there
The cupboard was there
And so the poor dog had none.

versus:

There was an old woman
Who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children
She didn't know what to do.

With a mistake like that, they expect people to take their research seriously?

"Oh ye Dry Bones, hear the word of the Blog"

2005-10-02T11:35:00.001+03:00

Yaakov Kirschen, one of Israel's best-known political cartoonists (especially among English-speakers), has brought his long-running cartoon, Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37), to the world of blogs. At the Dry Bones Blog, you'll find new cartoons and golden oldies, along with the stories behind the cartoons.

Personally, for years I read the Jerusalem Post (International Edition) for Kirschen's cartoons before I was old enough to be interested in the articles.

Welcome to blogging, Mr. Kirschen, and Shana Tova to Shuldig and Doobie.

Washington Post discovers strudel in Israel

2005-10-02T08:12:00.001+03:00

That's shtrudel, as in Hebrew slang for @, generally known in English as the "at-sign". Wondering what it's called in other countries? Post editor Nancy Szokan has the scoop (or slice, as the case may be).

The source her article is based on is here.

Winkie, were you her Israeli source? Just wondering.

Update: Yes, appparently he was. And he reminds us that the official Hebrew word for the at-sign is krukheet.

Disengagement II: When will we ever learn?

2005-09-28T19:26:00.001+03:00

I don't know whether or not Eyal Arad's latest trial balloon reflects the prime minister's thinking, though it seems likely. But it's hopelessly naive to think that Israel has the power to unilaterally determine its permanent border. A border by definition has (at least) two sides. So long as the Arabs refuse to accept our self-declared border, it will remain up for grabs.

Take the Golan Heights, for example. Or eastern Jerusalem. No country recognizes Israel's sovereignty over them, despite decades of formal annexation to Israel. And no country will until our enemies do. Until such time, they're on the negotiating table, whether we like it or not.

Unilateral withdrawals, aside from destroying Israel's military deterrence and undermining those among the Arabs who support a negotiated agreement, simply cannot achieve the objective of finalizing Israel's borders. The Arabs do not recognize the Israel-Gaza boundary as an international border, and, following them, neither does the United Nations or any individual nation.

If, as Arad suggests, Israel adopts "continuing unilateral disengagement" as a long-term policy, we will only confirm to our enemies that we plan to salami-slice ourselves out of existence. That may buy us some quiet as long as the slicing continues (or it may not), but it certainly won't bring us long-term security and stability, let alone international recognition of our "permanent border".

A final note: While our allies reluctantly accepted and eventually applauded our unilateral disengagement from Gaza, they would not have done so had the plan included the annexation of areas of territory adjacent to Israel. A "disengagement" plan for the West Bank such as Arad describes, which includes the annexation of settlement blocs, would not even achieve the support of our closest allies, including the Americans. (Bush's letter about settlement blocs refers to the position the U.S. would take in the context of final-status negotiations with the Palestinians; the U.S. has never accepted Israel's right to annex settlements unilaterally.)

Israelis have an apparent infinite capacity to believe that this next plan will finally solve our problems. Will they ever learn?

Ein simcha bikhfar ha-botz

2005-09-28T16:03:00.001+03:00

If you understood the allusion in the headline, you probably agree with Michael Freund:

Why Israel needs baseball

Should we sing "Buy me some peanuts and sunflower seeds"?

Plia Albeck, of blessed memory

2005-09-27T15:52:00.001+03:00

The little-known Plia Albeck, perhaps one of Israel's most influential lawyers in the 1970s and 1980s, passed away today aged 68.

Albeck, as this brief obituary notes, was the Israeli civil servant responsible for determining the legal status of land in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). On the basis of her legal opinions, over 100 Jewish settlements were established on lands she determined to be ownerless state land.

I had the privilege of meeting her once. She was possibly the leading expert ever on the complex legal issues affecting West Bank land, where the applicable laws derived from the Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli legal systems.

Ha'aretz profiled her in this April 2004 interview.

May her memory be blessed.

Yeah, that'll show them!

2005-09-26T15:19:00.001+03:00

IAF renews Gaza strikes, bombs open spaces as a deterrent

I was more impressed when we were bombing empty buildings!

Roadkill myths II: Israel is worse than any civilized country

2005-09-25T15:56:00.001+03:00

In this second installment of my series on road accidents in Israel, I promised to address international comparisons. This brings me straight to the second prevalent myth.

Myth II: Israel is worse than any other civilized country

This is a bit trickier to tackle than the first myth, since international comparisons are a tricky thing. For example, different countries have different definitions of what it means to be a traffic fatality. How soon after the accident does a victim have to die to be considered a road death?

Also, different countries gather and report different pieces of data, and use different methodologies in collecting them. Who gathers the statistics and how reliable are they? When data must be estimated, on what basis is the estimate made?

Finally, countries vary greatly in their road infrastructures, in vehicle use, in general levels of development and prosperity. What constitutes the typical "civilized country" Israel should be compared with? The wealthy U.S., with its high levels of vehicle ownership and low fuel prices? Other countries with Israel's level of economic development? Countries where most driving is on empty rural routes or in jammed urban areas?

Keep such factors in mind when evaluating the data. You can't draw meaningful conclusions from narrow statistical differences. That doesn't mean you can't assess the general trends, though. Let's see what we can do.

Per capita first
As before, there are (at least!) two main ways to compare fatality rates: per capita or per distance driven. As before, we'll look at both.

Per capita rates tell you how likely an average individual is to be killed in a road accident in a given year. In a sense, it answers the question, "How dangerous is it to live in this country?" with regards to traffic accidents.

Here's the answer for 2003:

Data is from this source; note the comments at the bottom of the page and remember the limitations of this sort of data. I've left out very small countries due to volatility of data. Incorrect Israel data point in this source has been corrected; Israel data for all graphs is from the Central Bureau of Statistics.

For easy identification, I've shown Israel's data in green, and a handful of major western countries in orange. Of the 45 countries shown, Israel ranks 6th. That is, only five countries had a lower fatality rate per capita. The United Kingdom placed 2nd, Japan 7th, Germany 13th, Canada 16th, France 18th, Italy 23rd, the United States a lowly 35th, and South Africa 44th between Russia and Malaysia.

In fact the U.S. fatality rate was more than double Israel's. The average person is twice as likely to be killed on the roads in the U.S. in any given year than in Israel. Israel's fatality rate is 16 percent higher than that of the supersafe U.K., though.

Surprised? Doesn't everyone know the roads are dangerous in Israel? Isn't it obvious to any American visitor, for example, that drivers are less cautious, cars are not as solid, and the roads are not as well maintained as they are at home?

All of that may be true, but that relates to how much risk is involved in driving a particular stretch of road. That is, as I explained in the previous installment, it's about not fatalities per capita but fatalities per distance driven.

Now per kilometer
Let's look at that next. The number of fatalities per distance driven answers the question, "How many people are killed in an average-distance trip in this country?" Again for 2003, the fatality rate per billion vehicle kilometers (fewer countries report this data, yielding a smaller but no less enlightening graph):

Data is from this source. Note that overall nationwide kilometers driven can be difficult to estimate, and methods may vary among countries.

By this measure, Israel fares less well. Out of 23 countries reporting, Israel places 15th. On the other hand, we're in good company. France, Ireland, Japan, Austria and New Zealand are within 10 percent of us. Israel's fatality rate is 23 percent higher than that of the U.S. but 21 percent lower than that of Belgium. Compared with the top-ranked U.K., we're 52% worse.

As you expected, the roads in Israel are, on the average, not as safe as those in the U.S. But the gap is not enormous. Clearly there's plenty of room for improvement. Still, we are far from having the worst road safety record of any developed country.

If Israel's roads are more dangerous than America's, why are so many more Americans killed per capita than Israelis? Simple: Americans drive much more than Israelis - over two and a half times as much on average. Cars in Israel are much more expensive, as is fuel, and the average salary is significantly lower. So the average Israeli spends much less time on the road than the average American, and thus his exposure to the risks is much lower.

From the above statistics, we can compute the average distance driven per capita in each country:

All else being equal, the less people drive, the fewer accidents there will be!

As time goes by
I mentioned the need for improvement. As we saw last time, road safety in Israel is improving over the years. But other countries aren't standing still. How does Israel's record stand up over time?

Again, let's start with the per capita data:

Data is from here.Again, incorrect Israel 2003 data point in this source has been corrected.

Sorry about the messy graph, but the overall picture is clear enough. Per capita fatalities are improving in most countries, some faster than others. Many, you can see, have improved faster than Israel (in green); on the other hand, most had a much worse starting point. Israel was one of the countries with low per-capita fatality rates in 1988; it remains so today. In the interim, though, the gap has narrowed.

Let's simplify that data by looking at just the percentage improvement:

Israel's fatality rate has dropped by over 40% in fifteen years, while other countries in the middle of the pack also improved by 35-40%. The biggest improvements were over 50%, yet all of the countries with massive improvements were the ones with the worst starting points - they had the most room to improve.

To round out our picture, let's see how per-distance fatality rates have changed over the years:

Data is estimated from the graphs in this PDF file; I haven't been able to find the raw statistics. View the file to see the yearly improvements by country.

As the data show, Israel's safety record was poor back in 1980, about twice as bad as developed countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Scandinavia. By 2003, though, as we saw above, Israel was only 52% worse than the U.K. Note also that all the countries in the sample had safer roads in 2003 than even the best of them had in 1980. This demonstrates the power of gradual improvements over time.

For a better focus on Israel's improvement over time, let's plot that on its own:

Israel is among the leaders here, with an improvement of over 70%, more than the U.K. As with the per-capita improvements above, the countries which improved the most (including Israel) were generally the ones with the worst starting points.

It's all about economics
How could Israel show one of the biggest improvements in per-distance fatalities, but place below average in improvement in per-capita fatalities? I don't have the statistics, but there's only one possible explanation: Compared to other countries, Israel has had a far greater increase in road use per capita. Israelis drive much more today than they did in 1980, and that has kept the per-capita fatality rate from falling nearly as fast as the per-kilometer rate.

As long as Israeli economic growth continues at a strong pace, this will continue to be the case. Economic growth has two effects: Society can afford more road safety, but individuals can also afford to drive more. As the roads get safer, the public's exposure to the risks of the road rise, moderating the impact of the safety improvements. I demonstrated this point in the previous posting, but the international comparison highlights it again.

To summarize: Israel's per-capita road fatality rate is lower than average for developed countries, while its per-kilometer fatality rate is higher than average. The discrepancy is due largely to Israel's low rate of road use. It's safer, on average, to drive a given distance in the U.S. than in Israel, but people do it far more often.

Most importantly, over time Israel, like other countries, is making substantial improvements in road safety, gradually closing the gap in per-distance fatalities. It would be great to improve even faster, but Israel's record is nothing to be ashamed of.

Which brings me to one last point, and one last graph. Note that most of the other countries in these comparisons are much wealthier than Israel per capita. Like everything else in the physical world, safety costs money: Better roads, better cars, better driver education, better enforcement. All else being equal, rich countries can afford more road safety than poor ones. We can see this by ranking countries by GDP per capita:

GDP figures from here.

Of the countries near Israel's level of economic development, Israel has the lowest rate of fatalities per kilometer driven. In fact, we're well within the range of road safety parameters achieved by some far wealthier countries, such as France, Austria, Japan, Ireland and Belgium. While there's still plenty of room for improvement, I'd say Israel makes a pretty good showing. By no means are we "worse than any other civilized country"!

I'm still thinking about what issues to address in future installments in this series. Suggestions are welcome.

Update (Sep. 26): In a comment, David Boxenhorn of Rishon Rishon asked for a graph related to the last one. I've taken the liberty of answering with what he really meant, not what he asked for. The question is: How safe are the roads in different countries relative to their GDPs? That is, if richer countries can afford more road safety, how well are countries doing considering how much they can afford?

"The amount of road safety" is the inverse of fatalities per kilometer: the average number of kilometers driven per fatality. The higher the figure, the safer the roads.

David asked for one graph; I'll give him two. First, a scatter plot of kilometers per fatality versus GDP per capita, along with a linear regression estimating the relationship between them. (I haven't tried any sophisticated econometric analysis; this is the standard regression function built in to my spreadsheet.)

The distance of each dot from the line indicates how much better or worse the country's safety record is relative to what one would expect based on its GDP per capita. The United States, Belgium, South Korea and Greece, for example, are significantly below the line, indicating a poor level of road safety relative to GDP. Significantly above the line are Israel, the UK, Finland, the Netherlands and Australia, among others, indicating a low fatality rate relative to national income.

To summarize this variation in a single statistic, we can divide the amount of road safety by GDP per capita. I've decided to call this the Bang for a Buck Index: Kilometers per fatality divided by GDP per capita. The higher the index, the more road safety "bang for the buck":

Israel has nothing to be ashamed of. Not at all.

Caution - Slow blogging - Road work ahead

2005-09-22T18:30:00.001+03:00

I haven't posted anything lately because I'm working on the next installment of my series on road accidents in Israel. As promised, next time I'll compare Israel's record with that of other countries.

Stay tuned. And drive carefully.

Gaza: The densest journalism on earth?

2005-09-20T16:17:00.001+03:00

Is it true that Gaza is "one of the most densely populated places on earth"? Why do journalists mention it so often? What do they mean by it? Does that make sense?

Last August, David Margolis of the Jerusalem Report asked those questions, and answered them. Read the article here (sorry about the lousy formatting).

For the lazy and illiterate, the answers in brief: No, not by far. Because they're lazy. That Gaza is an unpleasant place to live. Not really - ask millions of residents of high-density Manhattan.

An'-ge-la Mer'-kel

2005-09-19T15:01:00.001+03:00

I don't know much about German politics - I can't even figure out their electoral system - and I don't care much about who wins, beyond a vague philosophical preference for conservatives over socialists. But there's one thing I love about CDU leader and candidate for chancellor, Angela Merkel. And that's her name.

Compared to recent German leaders - the guttural roughness of Gerhard Schroeder, the heavy, plodding Helmut Kohl - Angela Merkel positively trips off the tongue. Poetry!

Opening with the "a" of "father", Angela Merkel then plunges into a quick cluster of hard and soft consonants pronounced in all parts of the mouth, strung together by quick vowels which are essentially variants of the schwa. What a workout for the tongue.

She's even got meter (dactylic). She could be a character from a nursery rhyme (try substituting her for Little Miss Muffet), or Dr. Seuss:

Angela Merkel
Slipped on a hurkle
Under Schmerkellestrasse...

Or a magic phrase: Abracadabra! Open Sesame! Angela Merkel!

I may be an obnoxious foreigner, but it saddens me that Merkel's supporters have taken to nicknaming her Angie, with a soft "g". It doesn't have the pizzazz.

Keywords: Angela Merkel, poetry

J, P, E and D - meet Dov and Bear

2005-09-18T15:27:00.001+03:00

DovBear yesterday issued the blogging equivalent of a subscriber marketing survey, breaking down his nearly 2000 posts into ten main categories and asking readers which they like best.

And that got me thinking (after briefly noting that I don't care for any of them): Can one man really write 2000 blog posts - many of them substantial and nontrivial, some even well-researched - in about eleven months? Seriously, that's an average of over 40 posts a week - and he's shomer Shabbos! And has a wife and kids!

Then I considered his list of categories, and the picture became clearer. Would the same man engage in "Partisan poo-throwing" (category 1) and discourse on "Torah / theology / history"? Would the same blogger alternate "Pope pounding" with "Stray thoughts and observations"? Of course not.

The explanation is simple: The DovBear Documentary Hypothesis. DovBear, as his dual moniker suggests, is in fact written by two separate bloggers.

The first - for convenience, let's refer to him as "Dov" - is an intellectual Orthodox Jew, middle aged, who long ago gave up on completing his Ph.D. He discourses on Torah, theology and history, points out interesting news articles and editorials, tosses around stray thoughts and observations, and engages readers in the comment section.

The second - "Bear", natch - is younger, probably still working on his bachelor's, who learned to write from TV sitcoms and likes to make fun of strangers in the street. He takes pleasure at poo-throwing (partisan and non-), clobbering Cross-Currents, lacerating Lazer Brody, Paloozing Toby and in general assaulting and offending anyone at hand in between bursts of toilet humor.

Further research is necessary, but clearly our current text of DovBear was redacted by an editor who attempted to reconcile the obvious disparities between these two traditional sources through stylistic editing of both, such as inserting blatant spelling mistakes, and adding cross-references between them.

There is no other reasonable explanation.

Update (Sept. 19): Friend and ally Soccer Dad has identified a third documentary strand in the multifacted writings redacted by DovBear. He calls this author "P", for reasons which will become clear.

Supply and demand in the Jerusalem Post newsroom

2005-09-18T13:39:00.001+03:00

I've never worked for the Jerusalem Post, thank God, unless you count an occasional op-ed. But I've known Post employees off and on over the past fifteen years. It's hard to live in Israel as an English speaker without knowing someone who works for the Post. And, without exception, they have all attested to how awful a place it is to work.

It always takes outsiders by surprise, especially now that the Post has become (seriously) an excellent newspaper. Quality-wise, the Post has been good at times, barely adequate at others, but management's treatment of its employees has, at least according to the workers, ranged among various degrees of lousy.

When I was younger, I once contacted a friend who was then high up on the paper's editorial staff to ask about the possibility of an internship. He said he could probably arrange it, but I really, really didn't want to do that. Not if I had any self-respect.

Why should Israel's leading English language daily, seventy-plus years old, treat its staff like dirt? I explain it in economic terms: supply and demand. Israel has a constant stream of English-speaking immigrants, many with journalistic experience or aspirations, most of whom lack the language skills to work in the Hebrew media. There is a chronic surplus of Israelis desiring to earn a living writing in English relative to the number of jobs. (Unpaid amateur hacks like me surely don't make it any easier for them!)

As a prestigious international newspaper, the Post is especially attractive. However the Post treats its employees, however chintzy the holiday gifts and however often they cut their pay and however many they fire, there will always be newbies eager to fill their shoes.

So, while I don't begrudge them the right to kvetch, I don't have much sympathy for former Post staffers like Allison and Miriam as they gloat over the continuing Post-related legal disputes. The Post's working conditions were never much of a secret, certainly not to anyone in the business, and they could have made a point of finding out before signing on the dotted line.

They've had their time in the spotlight. Time to give some newbies a chance to be exploited.

Remembering 1995, or Who killed Oslo?

2005-09-15T21:31:00.001+03:00

Tuesday was the twelfth anniversary of the festive White House signing of the Israel-PLO Oslo Accords. On the occasion the Jerusalem Post published two relevant opinion pieces.

Former Post managing editor Avi Hoffman takes the opportunity to lambaste the indulgent prison treatment of Yigal Amir, the assassin who murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. First, though, he credits Amir with sole responsibility for the destruction of Oslo's prospects for Middle East peace:

Yigal Amir is one of the most successful assassins in history. Ten years ago Amir's victim, Yitzhak Rabin, was riding a wave of glory.

Great and small nations of East and West were enthusiastically endorsing the Israeli premier's peace process with the Palestinians. Rabin was firmly navigating his country and the region into the promising waters of the "New Middle East." Rabin was the star of the Amman economic conference. Delegations from the Far and Near East, North Africa, Europe and the Americas vied for his attention. His keynote address was the main focus of the event.

Relations with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world had never been better.

Then Amir shot Rabin in the back.

As the murderer had intended, the peace process crumbled. Palestinian terror escalated into new levels of outrage. Palestinians and Israelis were thrust into a vortex of terror and counter-terror.

It probably didn't bother the assassin much that hundreds of Arabs were killed in the collateral fallout from Rabin's killing and the death of the peace process. But it might have given him some pause that hundreds of Jews were killed as well.

The story of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin is the stuff of high tragedy. What if Rabin had not been killed? Would he have succeeded in bringing peace to his people and the region?

So everything was beautiful on the road to peace under the leadership of the beloved wise leader Yitzhak Rabin, until Yigal Amir gunned him down, plunging the region into unstoppable violence. Right?

Set aside the rhetorical question of how genuine that peace could have been if it depended on the leadership of a single man. Sticking to the facts: the situation of 1995 Israel was far from Hoffman's description.

Already failed
By late 1995, the Oslo agreement was already viewed by most Israelis as a failure. Suicide terror bombings in Israel had begun with the 1994 launch of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and Jericho; 1995 had seen bombings outside Netanya, in Kfar Darom, in Ramat Gan and in Jerusalem. Arafat took no action to stop these attacks, and frequently spoke in praise of them. Clear majorities of Israelis opposed the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the remaining Palestinian cities, as called for in the Israel-Palestinian agreements.

Internationally, Israel and Israeli leaders may have been feted at conferences, but when negotiations broke down, Israel was always the one held accountable for not being "generous" enough. As long as there were more concessions on offer, they loved us. We may have won friends, but not allies.

Meanwhile, Rabin's government had also lost its majority in the Knesset; it governed with minority support. The second phase of the Oslo plan, including the withdrawals from the rest of the cities, passed the Knesset by a single vote, thanks only to two right-wing legislators Rabin had bribed with plum cabinet appointments.

On the popularity front, Rabin trailed steadily in the polls behind Likud head Binyamin Netanyahu throughout 1995: see here, here, here, here and here. We all know the limitations of polls, especially more than a year before the elections, but the mood was clear: Israelis had turned against Oslo and Rabin, disillusioned by the upsurge in terror and the repeated bad faith displayed by Arafat and his minions.

In short, it was not Amir who destroyed the peace process. It was already in tatters by the time he made his move. This does not make his action any less heinous, but clearly the Oslo process was already doomed by that time. If anything, the public backlash against Rabin's murder lent new support to the policies he had backed and anger at the opposition, who were tainted by Amir's association. Netanyahu immediately plunged in the polls, and only managed to pull even with Peres due to another wave of deadly suicide bombings - bombings triggered not by Amir or by the death of Rabin, but in response to Peres's decision to assassinate Palestinian bombmaker Yehya Ayash. Would Rabin have done any less?

Update (Sept. 16): Arguably, Amir saved Oslo. Had Netanyahu defeated Rabin, it would rightly have been seen as a public repudiation of the entire Oslo process. After the assassination, though, rejecting Oslo became tantamount to giving the murderer a victory. Instead, Netanyahu campaigned on a platform of insisting on reciprocity in Oslo's implementation, thus granting the agreement the Likud's retroactive stamp of approval.

For a different recollection of late 1995, see Emanuel Cohn's commentary from the same day:

Gaza, 1995. Though my tank brigade is stationed in the Jordan Valley, I am deployed to Rafiah. Rafiah lies in the Southern Gaza Strip, on the Israeli-Egyptian border. Together with some of my colleagues, I am charged with the mission of delivering weapons to the Palestinian Authority. Some of my fellow soldiers refuse this job, but I volunteer for it.

Read the rest. That's the 1995 I remember.

Postscript: Regarding Hoffman's main topic, I have no sympathy for Yigal Amir or his rights in prison. But the rule of law - worshipped dutifully by the Israeli left - demands that prisoners be treated equally, punished in accordance with their sentences as determined by law and the courts, however detestable their acts. This whole farce would be spared us if only Israel could mete out the only appropriate and just punishment for premeditated murder: the death penalty. But that, apparently, would be inhumane. The criminal deserves civil rights he never accorded his victim. Go figure.

Keywords: Israel, terrorism, peace, Palestinians

And they wonder why the public is cynical about rabbis...

2005-09-13T18:54:00.001+03:00

From In Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Post's local supplement for Jerusalemites, comes a tale of politics and religion, scandal and blackmail - in the mehadrin (extra-stringent) department of the city's kashrut certification department. It disgusts me too much to repeat any of it here - Read it yourself.

Personally, there is an upside. Since I'm not one to succumb to rabbinically-decreed economic boycotts, this might be a good opportunity to dine in one of those always-crowded mehadrin establishments that are now being shunned by the haredi masses.

Ultimately, anyone who relies on occasional inspections and signed certificates to ensure kosher enforcement is somewhat naive about the restaurant business. The owners can easily outsmart the mashgiach if they feel the need. The upshot, as the owner of Angelo's restaurant notes in the last line of the article: "I think you need to trust the owner of an establishment more than the piece of paper on his wall." Very true.

Leftists making sense - III

2005-09-13T16:50:00.001+03:00

It's been a while since my last installment of Leftists making sense. Admittedly, that's more my fault than theirs. Leftists have continued making sense - by which I mean agreeing with me! - without my recognition. Shame on me.

A good place to find leftists making sense is often the Washington Post, whose opinion pages generally showcase what one might call the sensible left. Today I'm happy to recognize veteran Post columnist Richard Cohen, writing with wit and perceptiveness about the lawlessness taking hold in Palestinian-ruled Gaza. The best paragraph:

At the recent Ambrosetti conference of Italian and other notables in Cernobbio, Italy, both Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, and Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, warned against blunt talk. Moussa insisted that anyone who questioned whether Arabs could have a democracy was a "racist." And Erekat, for his part, insisted that the term "Islamic terrorist" was likewise an expression of bigotry. This caused the plain-talking Sen. John McCain, a conference attendee, to suggest that the word "banana" be substituted for "Islamic" while I, exhaustively searching for the proper PC term, chanced upon "persons of terror." That cannot offend anyone.

On Sunday, it was columnist Michael Kinsley's turn, skewering claims that American politicians should have anticipated the New Orleans flood long ago and seen to adequate defenses. Writes Kinsley in "Hindsight: A User's Guide":

But just Google up a phrase like "commission warns," or "urgent steps," or "our children's future" -- or simply "crisis" -- and you may develop a bit of sympathy for the people who stand accused today of ignoring the warnings about anything in particular. Far from being complacent about potential perils, we suffer from peril gridlock.

Keep writing like that, guys, and your colleagues might revoke your Leftist Licenses.

Ravaging Gaza's greenhouses

2005-09-13T13:49:00.001+03:00

This week's Carnival of the Capitalists linked to my commentary on the folly of expecting that the Gush Katif greenhouses can continue to be profitable after transferring them to Palestinian ownership. I wrote, skeptically:

Don't expect Palestinian laborers to receive much benefit from them. If they even stay in business for long.

Looks like I was overoptimistic. Barely a day after Israel's departure, and Palestinian mobs are looting the greenhouses:

During a tour of Neveh Dekalim, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei implored Palestinians to leave the structures intact, even as people scavenged through debris elsewhere in the settlement.

"These greenhouses are for the Palestinian people," he said. "We don't want anyone to touch or harm anything that can be useful for our people."

Just minutes away, crowds of looters in the Gadid settlement overwhelmed hundreds of guards trying to protect the greenhouses. Guards acknowledged that in many cases, they were unable to stop the looting.

"They are taking plastic sheeting, they are taking hoses, they are taking anything they can get their hands on," said Hamza Judeh, a Palestinian policeman.

He said about 80 percent of the greenhouses were still intact, but looters walked off with lighting fixtures, cables and wires. Many were undeterred by the police presence. Police said one man dropped his loot only after he was beaten by security forces.

Someday, maybe, the Palestinians will learn to prefer building to destroying. Maybe.

What's wrong with Roberts

2005-09-12T19:45:00.001+03:00

The formal hearings are just beginning, but I like what I've seen of John Roberts. He is eminently qualified, widely respected, personally likable, principled but not dogmatic. He is an excellent nominee for the nation's highest court, and Bush should be commended for breaking with the post-Bork custom of nominating justices deemed unobjectionable due to their mediocrity. Judicial appointments are among a president's most important decisions, and nominations like this one easily outweigh my gripes with Bush's moves on assorted other issues, domestic and foreign.

I must register one note of protest, though: John Roberts is too young to be appointed to the Supreme Court, let alone as Chief Justice.

It's not about his qualifications, which are unimpeachable. Primarily, it's about the dignity and prestige of the court as the nation's highest tribunal. Serving on the Supreme Court should be the pinnacle of a distinguished career, not a mid-career promotion for a young jurist, however brilliant. Let Roberts continue to serve his country (or his clients) for another ten years or so before he joins the nation's senior court.

For Bush, Roberts's age is reportedly a plus. It gives him the chance to influence the court for a generation, health permitting. That is precisely the second reason to object to young justices. Lifetime appointments give the Supreme Court an important stability over time, with members replaced incrementally and sporadically. But that stability must not become rigidity; a modest rate of turnover of justices is healthy for the court and for the balance of the national political system, as different presidents and different political pressures contribute to shaping the court's contours.

The current vacancies on the court are the first in over ten years, the result of previous presidents themselves nominating young justices. On the most recent court: Rehnquist took office at age 47, Stevens at 55, O'Connor at 51, Scalia at 50, Kennedy at 51, Souter at 51, Thomas at a sprightly 43, Ginsburg (the oldest) at 60, and Breyer at 56. (Interestingly, Clinton's nominees were the oldest of the group.) It's telling that O'Connor is the first justice to leave the court who was appointed since 1980.

Of course, I'd rather have an excellent nominee such as Roberts despite his youth than a more senior but mediocre nominee. But it would be nice to have both.

Still, I can hardly fault Bush for doing the same as all of his recent predecessors. The fault is the system of life appointements, which tempts presidents to appoint young justices. The simple solution, as others have proposed: A term limit for justices. An eighteen year term would be long enough to ensure judicial independence and a fruitful career, while ensuring an average turnover of one justice every two years.

However brilliant or wise, no one should spend longer than that as one of the nine individuals empowered as the ultimate interpreters of the U.S. Constitution. That's enough absolute power for one lifetime.

Postscript: My pet pick for the court is a brilliant jurist and political thinker, combining wisdom and erudition, a man who is easily qualified to serve as chief justice: Robert Bork. I don't know if he'd accept the nomination, but today's Senate could easily confirm him, and doing so would give conservatives great satisfaction by succeeding where Reagan failed. I can dream, can't I?

American Zionist trivia answers

2005-09-11T18:13:00.001+03:00

The answers to the American Zionist trivia questions have been posted in the comments to that post.

Thanks to everyone who played!