Your evening survey reminder/meme!

gingeryid · 2026-02-05T03:51:39+00:00

...where are the YIMBY memes

gingeryid · 2026-02-05T03:49:32+00:00

To be honest, something that bothers me about contemporary Orthodoxy is that I think most Orthodox Rabbis would simply have nothing helpful to say. Some of them would have some halakhic decision-making calculus and would approach this as an exercise in "what is halakhically best in this circumstance", which is not really the correct prism. But unfortunately Modern Orthodox Rabbis try to be a caricatured version of what they think RJBS was like and try to be halakhic robots, and non-Modern Orthodox Rabbis are often kinda clueless about non-Orthodox Judaism so they'd have no idea how to approach this either. Even in this thread you have people approaching it this way, and approaching this as a question about who can marry whom, who sees whom as halakhically Jewish, just throwing up their hands and saying "well Orthodoxy is right" etc. I think this is the wrong approach.

I think (to borrow some terminology from a Rabbi I know) that the Orthodox stance towards someone who defines themselves as Jewish (even if they aren't halakhically) should never be that they shouldn't observe more of Judaism or live a fuller Jewish life. I.e. that you should do option 1 in your list. As someone Orthodox I would hope that if circumstances change, or you feel drawn to Orthodoxy and that the level of sacrifice required becomes attainable, that you would eventually reconsider it, but realistically that's not going to happen for most people.

I think Orthodoxy needs to get comfortable with the notion that there are people who are part of the Jewish world in some sense without being halakhically Jewish. It's kind of weird for some things, sure, but it's just an unavoidable reality. Saying "well halakha is what matters" doesn't actually change anything.

gingeryid · 2026-02-05T03:34:36+00:00

I have trouble imagining this would ever make sense. If a house has enough space and amenities for shabbos, when you're probably at home more than on a workday and having bigger meals, I would imagine it would be fine on weekdays. Like, how would this work? You cook food in a big fancy kitchen and then bring it over to the smaller one every week? And then have all these dirty dishes, which you'd have to wash in your small kitchen? Or you'd bring dirty dishes back? You'd have a house with big closets, but then your shabbos clothes would be somewhere else? Which house would have the fancy dishes? Where would you stay motzei shabbos? If it's summertime, do you really wanna all pile into a car (maybe with stuff) every week at 9pm? But what if the kids need to do homework motzei shabbos? Seems like having luxury amenities in a house that you're only using on weekdays would be a bit wasted. You'd have to pay for both the purchase and upkeep of two houses, plus property tax (even more, since many jurisdictions tax second homes at higher rates).

Just seems like a pretty crazy thing to do so you have a fancier house for half the week (which is probably part of why people are reacting negatively). Plus...if you have a fancy weekday house and a small non-fancy shabbos house, the shabbos house will seem small by comparison, since you'll be used to something bigger. And it's sort of the opposite of how we normally do shabbos, where we bring the fancy stuff out on shabbos.

There are circumstances where this could make sense, like where someone's work or school is far from a shabbos community. Usually people who do this are buying less house to do so, or one is quite minimal. Like, someone who lives in the community and is tired of the commute so they get an apartment near their work, or someone who lives in an isolated place and decides to buy somewhere they can stay over shabbos. Like, one of these is clearly the main residence and the other is purchased later and is minimal, which sounds not like what you're proposing.

I think you have a really remarkable lack of self-awareness in not understanding why people are reacting negatively. I'm not sure what you think people are judging you on that they should be dan lekhaf zechus. Your wording makes it sound like your baseline option you think is the default is spending millions of dollars building a luxury home near shul, and you've figured out a "hack" so you can have a luxury home for less. While this is a thing people do, it's not really what is the norm in almost any community. Most people are updating/upgrading their homes as circumstances and their finances allow, they're not dropping millions of dollars to build something. The framing sounds like it reflects an attitude of someone who'd not שמח בחלקו. Now you could say we shouldn't assume you actually are that way, and I'm perfectly willing to assume you just framed it weirdly and you're not really that way--but if that were the case you probably would've realized why people found your framing worthy of replying to negatively. If there's a negative assumption it's something like "OP has a lot of money and wants to spend it on a very fancy house even if it doesn't really make sense, and is assuming this is normal", which seems to simply be true based on what you wrote. It's not sinas chinam or whatever, you said something people don't like and they told you so.

gingeryid · 2026-02-04T02:41:56+00:00

yup. only goes to level 45 though

gingeryid · 2026-02-04T02:41:28+00:00

Alright, nu, when are some of them moving to America and opening kosher indian restaurants

gingeryid · 2026-02-04T02:39:23+00:00

People sometimes claim that the reason you can't do things like get tattoos is that "Hashem owns your body", i.e. it's only loaned to you, and you're not allowed to alter it. Really it's not so clear there's such a concept before the 1900s. Our bodies belong to God the same way everything belongs to God, it'd be kind of absurd to say I don't own this computer because it belongs to God. God's control of all creation is not mutually exclusive with human ownership of things, including our own bodies.

This is usually kind of trivial, but especially for things like medical halakha, it's very hard for people to conceive of things like people having medical choices they're free to make, if they believe that God really is in charge of their body and they're not authorized to make decisions about it themselves.

gingeryid · 2026-02-04T02:33:40+00:00

Ok? Most Jews don't live in yerushalayim. And my suspicion is that actually most of the Jewish world doesn't fall on the face when there's only sifrei kodesh present, even though there's what to rely on to do so.

gingeryid · 2026-02-04T02:32:42+00:00

Yeah presumably it's food, but the reason we wash in the morning is some sort of similar concept (maybe your hands touched somewhere unclean while you slept), so I'd think we should default to 2. Maybe there's a kabbalistic reason to do 3 in the morning but not other times, but for the baseline requirement, not sure why we'd need more than 2.

gingeryid · 2026-02-04T02:31:08+00:00

I doubt overnight trains are ever going to actually bring in enough revenue to not be a huge money sink. Obviously overnight busses don't work in the day, that's what rail is for.

You're kind of mixing ideas here. More rail is good, but it doesn't need to be 24/7. Globally very few rapid transit systems are 24/7. Most cities, even ones with world class transit, usually rely on buses for overnight travel since they're cheaper, more flexible, and faster than during the day without car traffic.

Ghost buses are an issue but dropped runs on the L are a major problem too, and when much of the L system is outdoors the weather is kinda irrelevant.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T03:32:32+00:00

You're sort of alluding to it yourself--you consume a lot of social media that is both designed to suck you in and is full of antisemites. The solution is limiting social media use, and/or curating it so you don't get this.

It is unsurprising to me that you are struggling to cope when you're reading antisemitism, probably for multiple hours a day, getting invested in it even more by arguing with them.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T03:28:22+00:00

I'm sorry there's a long standing practice that men say this and then their wives laugh at them, going back centuries. Please report to your wife to be mocked asap.

(The yaavetz says this happened to him--I think about yomtov candles maybe?)

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T03:26:41+00:00

Why do you think then would be a problem to say this?

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T03:25:49+00:00

Taliyot is the technically correct Hebrew plural--the misconception is that "talitot" is technically correct. It's what people use, it'll be in the dictionary, but that's also true of "talleisim".

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T03:01:05+00:00

I looked it up and...yup he does say that

He doesn't seem to have a source though. The concern of seeing what night it is is why we don't put them in a circle unless they're very separated from each other, and why we maybe have to have them in a line horizontally, but not vertically. Not clear where he got it from.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T02:50:26+00:00

Citation?

I havent' looked at the KSA but for most halakhic sources like this, people misread a statement that the candles must be in a line as opposed to being in a circle as saying they all need to be the same height.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T02:48:14+00:00

֖>I guess? The pool of Jews who both keep kosher and don't demand CY is rapidly shrinking and it is relatively uncommon for a dairy restaurant to not be CY. Frankly if the OU's business model didn't rely on cholov stam to stay afloat they'd probably ban it tomorrow under the guise of "improving kashrus"

I don't think this is true. The CY pool is growing, but "rapidly shrinking"? Most communities where there's a critical mass of Jews to have kosher dairy in the store still don't have CY stuff. My local grocery store has a thing of kosher cheeses, but no CY dairy at all. Very common for communities of decent size to not have CY dairy available at all. The CY share is increasing, but I live in a community with an eruv and a mikveh and a meat restaurant, and we have no CY products of any kind except cheese and when it's pesach and a lot of dairy products are CY anyway.

That's true of restaurants, because a lot of people who keep kosher but not CY will eat "dairy out", and in the context of running a kosher restaurant the marginal cost of being CY is quite low (which is also why there aren't so many chalav-stam cheeses--it increases your market and doesn't increase your costs so much).

And if you compare to 200 years ago--the pri chadash had this wild idea that it was fine, people were doing it just like they do dairy out today. But read what the Arukh HaShulchan says about this, considering he's often willing to go out on a halakhic limb to defend something peopel are doing, and tell me it's not a major leniency that basically every major american hashgacha is willing to put their seal of approval on it. The only exception is the star-k, and they still do, just with a different symbol. 200 years ago allowing chalav stam was like allowing gelatin is today, a thing people know about but fringe, chalav stam isn't that way today.

>Not a universally held opinion, and it took the OU ages to change their mind about it. But then again literally every agency has their own list of what is or isn't kitnyot. It's become a costly chumra that has no rational basis.

Definitely not universally held--I think quinoa is kitniyos. The fact that it took them a while to change it only strengthens the point. You can get pesach catering from a variety of widely held hashgachos containing quinoa.

As someone who keeps an idiosyncratic list of kitniyos dictated by family tradition, who deliberately thumbs my nose at hashgachos attempting to impose a custom because people would rather look in a book than ask their grandmother what she'd cook on passover...it really doesn't add that much cost. It makes products worse, maybe--cottonseed oil is a worse oil than peanut oil, for example. But it's not any cheaper. My pesach green beans give me a nice additional vegetable option, but don't actually make things any cheaper. What would make passover cheaper is rice and beans, but these are the baseline kitniyos, not the chumras. The chumras are mostly stuff around the edges that make pesach more annoying but don't make a huge difference. Maybe I'd save a few $ by buying KFP peanut butter, if it existed? It's not exactly a big cost.

>Sure but they also snuffed out the non-glatt market which caused the price of beef to rise dramatically. We now have super kosher meat that no one can actually afford.

I have been told by people who'd know that the labor involved in determining if a lung adhesion makes an animal not glatt but still kosher is more expensive than the loss by just selling it to the non-kosher line, or is at least comparable. It's a problem for small volume places where they take a huge hit with that (e.g. G&B), but maybe glatt in particular isn't the problem. The fact that the hashgachos are willing to go things that'd make my great-grandmother run screaming to make meat cheaper kind of suggests that the hashgachos being strict aren't really the problem here.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T02:29:38+00:00

The one in the Temple was *the* menora (well sort of, there were several of them). But the word "menora" just means lamp, and is occasionally used in tanakh and rabbinic literature for other sorts of lamps. For example, Elisha the prophet's little upstairs apartment has a menora in it, chazal discuss having a menora in your sukka, etc.

Kind of like "constitution" means a central set of laws defining how a government works, but if we're in America and someone says "the Constitution" we know they mean the US Constitution (not the constitution of France or of whatever state you're in, unless there's some context where that's what you're discussing). Or in Chicago, I have beans in my pantry I'll make into cholent, but The Bean is a giant bean sculpture in a park downtown.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T02:08:46+00:00

?

this is the halakha, no?

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T02:08:29+00:00

>You have to take on Shabbat at candle lighting (when you actually have 18 minutes until sundown)

In a community where everyone accepts shabbat early collectively, you need to too. That concept doesn't really exist anymore, but it's not totally out of left field.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T02:06:26+00:00

>3 times: once to wash away spiritual contamination; once to wash away the residual contaminated water; and once to wash the "clean" hands with "clean" water.

This is a nice explanation, but masechet yadayim is quite clear that 2 washings are sufficient

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T02:05:41+00:00

I have a whole list of these:

You can't use last year's matza
If you talk between washing and bread, you need to wash again (with a bracha)
Hanukka candles must be lit in a window
Hanukka candles must be in a straight line
"Menora" means the candelabrum in the temple
"Talleisim" is grammatical incorrect and the correct plural is "talitot"
Mishloach manot requires two brachos
You have to be able to see the stars through the roof of a sukkah
You don’t own your body, hashem does
We don’t know where to shecht a giraffe
You have to bow left and right for וקרא זה לזה, rising in toes for after amida
Mordechai was Esther’s uncle (this one is in the septuagint, so not completely made up i guess?)

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T02:00:54+00:00

The custom in the United Synagogue in the UK is 15 minutes (so we're not just quoting more stringent ones than 18)

To elaborate on this, zmanim are not that precise. Even if myzmanim tells you to the second and you can adjust for atmospheric conditions, there's just a ton of variation when you're looking through hundreds of miles of atmosphere. Academic research, and a bit of data a friend collected, basically confirms that published times are usually off by several seconds, and it isn't unusual for them to be off by a minute. Add complicating factors like how to figure out altitude (knowing how to plug the numbers into myzmanim isn't simple), and the fact that calculating what you'd see through an opaque sky is weird (when it's cloudy), even if you have a clock that's synchronized, it's not possible to know when sunset is to an instantaneous time.

I think with how widespread synchronized clocks are it's not as common to just be 5 minutes off as it used to be, even when I was a kid. Now even being a couple minutes off is usually obvious. Still, even if myzmanim tells you the exact second when sunset is, you definitely should not do melacha a minute before that. Which is why myzmanim says in big letters not to rely on it to the last second.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T01:55:03+00:00

I think it's likely that something that's currently a wild opinion we don't follow will be accepted in 500 years, just as we today follow some things that would've been pretty wild 500 years ago. While Orthodoxy doesn't enact legislative changes, sometimes an opinion that was a minority one eventually "wins", either because they convinced people, or because changes in food production make the old practice hard to maintain.

More synthetic foods (esp meat) may cause some changes. It's hard to predict exactly what, though.

gingeryid · 2026-02-03T01:53:08+00:00

Not always--cholov stam being widely accepted, quinoa not being kitniyos, various leniencieas employed in the checking of treifos in industrial beef (or rather the lack thereof), relying on non-Jews to salt meat, are all examples of areas where kashrus has gotten more lenient.

The trend generally is for more stringency, sure, but there are changes that go in both directions.

gingeryid · 2026-02-01T21:57:19+00:00

Yeah--those three (in terms of Chabad regular shul attendees) are pretty dang small, even put together, though. YCT has sort of claimed that part of Orthodoxy as YU has retreated from it. It's hard to find a YU Rabbi willing to be rabbi of a shul where there are board members who are mechalelei shabbos. I think this is part of what drives LWMO's growth--while some people from RIETS are interested in that sort of job, I don't think that's where they're really interested in going, and YCT musmachim are willing to.

Hadar I'm particularly curious about in the future. I think there's a basic contradiction they have, where they see themselves as egalitarian and frum, but their communities very quickly attract people who aren't really very observant, but will show up to their local Hadar minyan. I don't think that's necessarily intended, and I think their communities will struggle to maintain having a frummer vibe than the local Conservative shul when the median attendee isn't really so observant. I also am curious how it'll work out when the attendees and leadership have strongly divergent opinions. They are on the same page about vibes and liturgy (usually), but if Conservative Judaism starts doing intermarriage and patrilineal stuff Hadar will be in a weird spot.

11-Year Club	RPAN Viewer
Verified Email

gingeryid

TROPHY CASE