nebach attempts at cartography

According to one nebach, "people pray to ... Uganda". While it is true that geocentrist New Yorkers praying eastward aren't aligned with the shortest route to Jerusalem, the shortest curve between their feet and the longitude of Israel is probably going to be intersecting that longitude (about 35°E) in Mozambique, well south of Herzl's promised land. (A perfect eastward curve ends up in Turkey, not that far north from Mt. Ararat.) I'm also not sure if the nebach intends straight lines pasted on google earth as proofs of the shortest routes. If he does...here are two more such maps to chew on:

The shortest route to Israel:

unless it's:




hmmm...
Which just demonstrates, tzitzis strings and a globe are still the most precise method for measuring curves.

(Of course, his point is right... this far from Jerusalem, Nova Scotia is en route...)

Left Wing Modern Orthodox: 26%
Right Wing Modern Orthodox: 62%
Left Wing Yeshivish/Chareidi: 64%
Right Wing Yeshivish/Chareidi: 33%

This means you're: Huh?

What does it mean?

I give up. What are you?

The Rise and Fall of FrumYU

immanent eschaton mourns the passing of FrumYU, whose short life has come to a tragic close. In its short lifespan, FrumYu reached that pinnacle of blog-achievement, the ability to generate controversy. FrumYU did not fear and even in the face of the all powerful, the Commentator, it did not cower. All who knew FrumYU will retain fond memories of its comments section. Yehi Zichro Baruch.

2 versions of a story

The first is from R' Rakeffet:
We'll close with a story which was also told in Rav Lichtenstein's hesped for the Rav. In the summer of 1969,shortly after Tonya died, his talmidim went to study with him sothat he shouldn't be alone, including R' Menachem Genack. TheRav said, "How can I give you some emotions?" He started toteach from the Likutey Torah of the Alter Rebbe. Genack asked,what do we need from the Lubavitchers? The Rav told him a story:my great-grandfather had a chasidic relative, who asked why washe so anti-chasidic? Come to a tish, and see for yourself. Therebbe talked, and as he talked, the ground outside (in the middleof winter) bloomed as if it were spring. The Beit Halevy noticedit was getting late, and said "vu darft men davenen mincha" [wehave to daven mincha]. The world collapsed back to normal.Genack, you are like my great-grandfather.

The second is from a Lubavich blog (and was posted in the comments to the next post)
Rav Soloveitchik of Boston would give a Shiur in Likutei Torah, the Ma'mar Ani L'dodi, during the month of Elul while vacationing in the country in Massachussets. I don't remember whether it was Cape Cod or Martha's Vineyard. This shiur became more intense as time went on, and it took more of the time from the Shiurim in Nigleh. There was one Talmid who was irked by the fact that the Rav was so excited by a Chassidishe Sefer, especially at the expense of "real" learning. One day he spoke up and voiced his concern to the Rav. "Why are we wasting our time with this, wouldn't it be better if we stuck to the learning of Gemoroh Taysfes?The Rav regaled them with the story by Yiddish writer --------------- of the Simchas Teyreh spent together by the Brisker Rov and the Bialer Rebbe, (characters may be different) where the joy of the congregation and townspeople reached the heavens. The dancing and merrymaking continued very late into the day, with nobody paying attention to the clock. Late in the afternoon the Brisker Rov began to get nervous about Mincha, but the dancing and singing would not subside. When he could not wait any longer he jumped out of his seat, banged on the Bimah, and yelled "MINCHA!" which immediately caused the dancing to halt.The Bialer Rebbe was quite unimpressed with this outburst, albeit for a good and just cause. He was to say: "Az Yidden Tantzen un Freien Zich Tzuzamen, un es kumt einer, takeh mit recht, un shtelt es op, iz dos Choshech!" The "Rav" turned to Menachem Genack and said to him: We sit here and learn this Maymer, and we bask in the glow of the light of Toras HaChassidus and you come and try to stop it. Du, Genack, Du bist der Cheyshekh!

Another Reason to Believe Jimmy Carter is Unversed in Gan Shoshanim

opinionjournal:
A Religious Problem
Jimmy Carter's book: An Israeli view.
BY MICHAEL B. OREN
Tuesday, December 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

"Several prominent scholars have taken issue with Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," cataloguing its historical inaccuracies and lamenting its lack of balance. The journalist Jeffrey Goldberg also critiqued the book's theological purpose, which, he asserted, was to "convince American Evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel."
Mr. Carter indeed seems to have a religious problem with the Jewish state. His book bewails the fact that Israel is not the reincarnation of ancient Judea but a modern, largely temporal democracy. "I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures," he recalls telling Prime Minister Golda Meir during his first tour through the country. "A common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of the Labor government."
He complains about the fact that the kibbutz synagogue he enters is nearly empty on the Sabbath and that the Bibles presented to Israeli soldiers "was one of the few indications of a religious commitment that I observed during our visit." But he also reproves contemporary Israelis for allegedly mistreating the Samaritans--"the same complaint heard by Jesus almost two thousand years earlier"--and for pilfering water from the Jordan River, "where . . . Jesus had been baptized by John the Baptist."
Disturbed by secular Laborites, he is further unnerved by religiously minded Israelis who seek to fulfill the biblical injunction to settle the entire Land of Israel. There are "two Israels," Mr. Carter concludes, one which embodies the "the ancient culture of the Jewish people, defined by the Hebrew Scriptures," and the other in "the occupied Palestinian territories," which refuses to "respect the basic human rights of the citizens."
Whether in its secular and/or observant manifestations, Israel clearly discomfits Mr. Carter, a man who, even as president, considered himself in "full-time Christian service." Yet, in revealing his unease with the idea of Jewish statehood, Mr. Carter sets himself apart from many U.S. presidents before and after him, as well as from nearly 400 years of American Christian thought...

Identifying with the Jews, a great many colonists endorsed the notion of restoring Palestine to Jewish control. Elias Boudinot, president of the Continental Congress, predicted that the Jews, "however scattered . . . are to be recovered by the mighty power of God, and restored to their beloved . . . Palestine." John Adams imagined "a hundred thousand Israelites" marching triumphantly into Palestine. "I really wish the Jews in Judea an independent nation," he wrote. During the Revolution, the association between America's struggle for independence and the Jews' struggle for repatriation was illustrated by the proposed Great Seal designed by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, showing Moses leading the Children of Israel toward the Holy Land.
Restorationism became a major theme in antebellum religious thought and a mainstay of the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches. In his 1844 bestseller, "The Valley of the Vision," New York University Bible scholar George Bush--a forebear of two presidents of the same name--called on the U.S. to devote its economic and military might toward re-creating a Jewish polity in Palestine. But merely envisioning such a state was insufficient for some Americans, who, in the decades before the Civil War, left home to build colonies in Palestine. Each of these settlements had the same goal: to teach the Jews, long disenfranchised from the land, to farm and so enable them to establish a modern agrarian society. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln said that "restoring the Jews to their homeland is a noble dream shared by many Americans," and that the U.S. could work to realize that goal once the Union prevailed.
Nineteenth-century restorationism reached its fullest expression in an 1891 petition submitted by Midwestern magnate William Blackstone to President Benjamin Harrison. The Blackstone Memorial, as it was called, urged the president to convene an international conference to discuss ways of reviving Jewish dominion in Palestine. Among the memorial's 400 signatories were some of America's most preeminent figures, including John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, Charles Scribner and William McKinley. By the century's turn, those advocating restored Jewish sovereignty in Palestine had begun calling themselves Zionists, though the vast majority of the movement's members remained Christian rather than Jewish. "It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist State around Jerusalem," wrote Teddy Roosevelt, "and [that] the Jews be given control of Palestine."
Such sentiments played a crucial role in gaining international recognition for Zionist claims to Palestine during World War I, when the British government sought American approval for designating that area as the Jewish national home. Though his closest counselors warned him against endorsing the move, Woodrow Wilson, the son and grandson of Presbyterian preachers, rejected their advice. "To think that I the son of the manse [parsonage] should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people," he explained. With Wilson's imprimatur, Britain issued the declaration that became the basis of its League of Nations mandate in Palestine, and as the precursor to the 1947 U.N. Partition Resolution creating the Jewish state.
The question of whether or not to recognize that state fell to Harry S. Truman. Raised in a Baptist household where he learned much of the Bible by heart, Truman had been a member of the pro-Zionist American Christian Palestine Committee and an advocate of the right of Jews--particularly Holocaust survivors--to immigrate to Palestine. He was naturally inclined to acknowledge the nascent state but encountered fervid opposition from the entire foreign policy establishment. If America sided with the Zionists, officials in the State and Defense departments cautioned, the Arabs would cut off oil supplies to the West, undermine America's economy, and expose Europe to Soviet invasion. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would have to be sent to Palestine to save its Jews from massacre.
Truman listened carefully to these warnings and then, at 6:11 on the evening of May 14, he announced that the U.S. would be the first nation to recognize the newly declared State of Israel. While the decision may have stemmed in part from domestic political considerations, it is difficult to conceive that any politician, much less one of Truman's character, would have risked global catastrophe by recognizing a frail and miniscule country. More likely, the dramatic démarche reflected Truman's religious background and his commitment to the restorationist creed. Introduced a few weeks later to an American Jewish delegation as the president who had helped create Israel, Truman took umbrage and snapped, "What you mean 'helped create'? I am Cyrus"--a reference to the Persian king who returned the Jews from exile--"I am Cyrus!"
Since 1948, some administrations (Eisenhower, Bush Sr.) have been less ardent in their attachment to Israel, and others (Kennedy, Nixon) more so. Throughout the last 60 years, though, the U.S. has never wavered in its concern for Israel's survival and its support for the Jewish people's right to statehood. While U.S.-Israel ties are no doubt strengthened by common bonds of democracy and Western culture, religion remains an integral component in that relationship. We know that Lyndon Johnson's Baptist grandfather told him to "take care of the Jews, God's chosen people," and that Bill Clinton's pastor, on his deathbed, made the future president promise never to abandon the Jewish state. We know how faith has impacted the policies of George W. Bush, who is perhaps the most pro-Israel president in history."

Some, like R' Genack, have accused Carter of plagiarizing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is certainly the case that Carter's book demonstrate complete ignorance of the Gan Shoshanim where R' Genack points out that the Rambam in recounting the miracle of Chanukka lists as one of the consequences "and the monarchy was reinstated in Israel for more than two hundred years." But why is this a good thing, as many of the Hasmonean kings were extremely wicked? We see from here, says R' Genack that it is better to have Israel being ruled by even wicked Jews than its being ruled by gentiles. (R' Ausband of Telz, Riverdale reportedly enjoyed the whole book except for this part.) Still, I think Carter sounds more like Neturei Karta.

YU Professor is Famous

As a communist apologist...oh well

From OpinionJournal (Jan '06)

"To plow through the evidence for the millionth time: While the trial of the Rosenbergs was flawed by technical improprieties, their crimes are not uncertain or unresolved. Julius Rosenberg, with Ethel as his accomplice, was the head of a sophisticated spy network that deeply penetrated the American atomic program and relayed top secrets to Stalin's Kremlin. In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev noted that the Rosenbergs "vastly aided production of our A-bomb." Joyce Milton and Ronald Radosh wrote a damning account of their activities in "The Rosenberg File" (1983). And the Rosenbergs' guilt was corroborated by the 1995 declassification of the Venona documents, thousands of decrypted KGB cables intercepted by the National Security Agency in the 1940s.

The notion that anyone would today deny their fundamental complicity in Soviet subversion is extraordinary, almost comically so. But comedy was not quite the mentality at the Rosenberg event. "Ambiguity is the key word, I think," said Mr. Doctorow, regarding our understanding of the past, though in this instance ambiguous is precisely what it is not.

Mr. Kushner argued the Rosenbergs were "murdered, basically." Mr. Doctorow went further, explaining that he wanted to use their circumstances to tell "a story of the mind of the country." It was a mind, apparently, filled with loathing and paranoia--again, never mind the truth of the charges against the Rosenbergs or other spies of the time. "The principles of the Cold War had reached absurdity," he continued. "We knew that the Russians were no threat, but we wanted to persuade Americans to be afraid" and so impose "a Puritan, punitive civil religion." Pronounced Mr. Kushner: "Our failure to come to terms with a brutal past, our failure to open up the coffins and let the ghosts out, has led to our current, horrendous situation."

The enduring artistic influence of the Rosenberg case, then, seems to be primarily allegorical. Guilt and innocence drop away (rather, guilt is converted to virtue) and the Rosenbergs are made into victims of "American fascism," to use Ethel Rosenberg's own phrase. Or to borrow the exquisite formulation of the scholar-apologist Ellen Schrecker, the Rosenbergs were guilty only of "nontraditional patriotism."

Other Blogs Imitate This One

An obvious takeoff on our "Practical Dictionary" feature:

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS:
"If, when reading an article about the debate over Iraq, you come across the
expression 'the realist school' and mentally substitute the phrase 'the American
friends of the Saudi royal family,' your understanding of the situation will
invariably be enhanced."
(Via Mike
Rappaport).
posted at 07:04 PM by Glenn Reynolds

Understandable riffing though. Considering they're desperate for what 99.9% of what the web's content lacks.

Did anyone see this new yu blog FrumYU?

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal mourns the rise of the blogs:

"The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

[Blogs are] also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought--instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition.

Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line. Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions--John Kerry always providing useful material--while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq. Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.

Leftward fatuities too are easily found: The fatuity matters more than the politics. If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad's judgment of newspapering--"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"--they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.

Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses. And part of it, especially in politics, has to do with conservatives. In their frustration with the ancien régime, conservatives quite eagerly traded for an enlarged discourse. In the process they created a counterestablishment, one that has adopted the same reductive habits they used to complain about. The quarrel over one discrete set of standards did a lot to pull down the very idea of standards."

And he wonders why no one reads the paper anymore.

A Practical Dictionary of Political Science

While in class one day, the subject of separation of church and state was raised. The teacher noted what he saw as the irony in the fact that the United States which professes separation of church and state is more religious in its politics than the UK with its established state religion. While this may have left some scratching their heads wondering what exactly having secular politicians has to do with separation of church and state, I for one realized that the scratching head approach would not get anyone anywhere. It was necessary to do something so that in the future, students would have no difficulty understanding where their teachers are coming from. It was with this in mind that the Practical Dictionary Of Political Science was conceived. The first entry:
separation of church and state: the doctrine under which a politician is free to worship if and only if his gods are favorable towards abortion

Whereas this may not be the traditional definition, I firmly believe that this will serve as a much more practical definition towards understanding the term at hand.
In this vein, I recall a related incident in which a teacher apologized for referring to "third world nations", an epithet for what are referred to as third world nations. The preferred choice, he explained, is developing nations. Again any possible confusion at the use of this term could be avoided if the proper definition was provided:
developing nation: a nation in which the rate of development is or approaches zero and in which this rate has remained constant since, at least, the Middle Ages

The time has come for this blog to take a stand on one of the most important issues now facing our nation, namely: what is the best anagram that can be made from the letters in the name "Barack Obama". The inestimable importance of this issue, as well as the general cold shoulder treatment it has received in the mainstream media have combined to the point that we are willing even to sacrifice our reputation for single-minded focus on the media and politics angle. (We do however retain our scrupulously non-partisan aversion towards doing more than recounting what have become one side's talking points.) As an attempt to begin the discussion/debate I offer some of my own candidates:
"Rack O' Bamba"
"Back-Ab-Orama" (my personal favorite so far)
However, in no way is this issue a sealed one. I sincerely hope that this modest attempt at tackling this issue will reverberate and be heard across the blogosphere. Please add your own thoughts and forward the issue to your friends. For this is no time to remain silent.

$$$

Inexplicably, Annan and Egeland are suddenly scheduling vast expansions for their mansions and villas.

How Devastating

For my inaugural post, I will attempt to "exchnage" the excessive and irritating focus on the "media/politics angle" for a broader one emphasising the current turmoil surrounding recent events in the Hareidi sector. http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/anoticevys67.htm Hard to believe. What will we do? (Hat tip: The-Ongoing-Ad-for-Yashar-Books)

Why We Need More Right Wing Professors

Harvard's conservative", Harvey Mansfield, on "The education Americans need":

"I take excellence to be the sum of goodness. Since good things can be great or small, one can be excellent in small things such as personal grooming. Not in all small things: picking your nose with skillful delicacy does not qualify for excellence. Well, why not, since it is done well? The reason, I believe, is that this activity does not accord with human dignity. Greatness is the kind of excellence that has to do with human dignity, and when a certain excellence is against human dignity we are reluctant to call it good, let alone great."

So as not to be accused of simply recounting what have become one side's talking points, I must note that rhinotillexomania is, in fact, a scrupulously non-partisan phenomenon.

Like most articles in Commentary Magazine, this one is extremely long. However, reader, do not despair! I have carefully selected the choicest excerpts, and even those have been interspersed with my own commentary. This pre-election article discusses a perennially-favorite topic of ours, the history and prospects of American liberalism viewed from an socio-political perspective. Ostensibly a review of Peter Beinart's new book, the article contains a brief history of the liberal movement :

"It was largely Ronald Reagan who in the 1980’s managed the remarkable feat of rewriting the terms of our national political debate. The New Deal dichotomy—compassionate liberals pitted against heartless conservatives—was transformed by him into a struggle between, on the one side, statist ideologues and economic sentimentalists and, on the other, Americans sensibly attuned to market realities and committed to an ethos of personal responsibility. Although Democrats still poll better than Republicans on issues of economic security, even in this area they have increasingly had to play by conservative ground rules. It was thanks to conservative pressure that Bill Clinton was brought to declare, memorably if not quite accurately, that the era of big government was over. The dramatic reduction in dependency brought about by Clinton’s most notable domestic achievement, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, has easily overshadowed the defections of those on the Left for whom the New Deal paradigm still defines political reality. (Emphasis added)
Democrats have also suffered from the perception that they are on the wrong side of a whole range of social issues: crime (the death penalty in particular), gun control, late-term abortion, affirmative action, school prayer (and the overall role of religion in public life), same-sex marriage. On at least the first two of these, and possibly the third, they have largely given up the struggle. The latter three they mostly prefer not to talk about, or they re-describe them as “wedge issues” that should not be allowed into public discourse. More ambiguous is the political resonance of other social issues—abortion in general, assisted suicide, stem-cell research—but no serious analyst doubts that in general the culture wars, as they have come to be called, work against the Democrats."

The author expresses what those-who-wish-this-wasn't-so call the "conventional view" of the Democrats discordance with American public opinion. In this respect, the author does not so much offer a new argument as much as succinctly re-state "an inconvenient truth" be it that it may not directly affect the Polar bear. This history leads the author to the following analysis of liberalism's current quandary:

"Liberal and left-wing Democrats supported Clinton, but they did so because he was a winner (and also because, due to acts of astonishing personal recklessness in the later stages of his presidency, he needed to be defended against conservatives determined to bring him down). But Clintonism was not and is not where their hearts are. Their problem is that they cannot expect to make a comeback if they allow themselves to say what they really think. This leads to frustration, which leads in turn to curious forms of rhetorical excess.
I say “curious” because, in historical terms, actual disagreements between liberals and conservatives are less pronounced today than they have been for most of our post-1960’s past. George Bush, as Republican Presidents go, is not all that conservative, while congressional Democrats, for their part, are less likely to flirt with outright radicalism, foreign or domestic, than was the case with their counterparts during the Reagan years. Yet it often seems that mutual animosity between the parties—and between liberals and conservatives in general—has never been more strenuous."

The author shines most brightly, however, in his suggested explanation for the above phenomenon:

There is yet another element at play in the rhetorical vehemence displayed by many liberal Democrats. Recent election results notwithstanding, liberalism retains a prestige status in American society and culture. Our educational, media, and intellectual elites are mostly liberal elites, and it puzzles and galls them that their otherwise secure control of leading American institutions no longer extends to the political arena as well. Instead, the reins of power have slipped into the hands of those lacking either the traditions, the competence, or the wisdom to manage the country’s affairs. Conservative rule, in this reading, is illegitimate rule by definition, and all the more infuriating for that. (Emphasis added)

In light of the subsequent midterm elections some may dismiss the author's conclusion as retrospectively foolhardy. However, others may find this author's cool-headed conclusions hauntingly unsettling:

"The wrecking of liberalism in the 60’s wrecked the Democratic party; for now—even all these years later—rehabilitation does not seem a likely prospect."