There is no question in my mind that the Best Overall and Best Religion Blog awards should go to Hirhurim and not Cross Currents. Hirhurim has consistently been a positive and interesting place for Jewish topics just about every day. Cross Currents is an effort to create a positive development in the Jewish Blog world. But unfortunately it has not met expectations. I like Yaakov Menken and admire the great work he has done for the Jewish internet. But I think that Cross Currents has a long way to go before it deserves an award more than Hirhurim. Some tips: Push Rabbi Adlerstein to blog more, and get one or two more contributors who think in a similar way, i.e. who are intellectually honest, frum and that I don't get the feeling reading them that they were briefed by Central HQ before posting (the feeling I get when I read JR's pieces.) If you wish, I will help you out a bit.

I am still one of Seraphic Secret's biggest fans and endorse it for best personal Blog.

"I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people out there — professors, lawyers, doctors, philosophers, scientists and other journalists who also happen to blog. Again, they know who they are. But we should beware and resist the rest of the ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction.

We can't silence them, but for civilization's sake — and the integrity of information by which we all live or die — we can and should ignore them. "

I know that this post will subject me to his ridicule. But that is nothing new. I know that he has seriously insulted and offended regular people, whose feelings have been seriously hurt, and who don't have the layer of fame that frequently excuses people from attacking others.

That this sheigetz deserves condemnation is nothing new. What is newly deserving of condemnation is Gil's benign tolerance of such scum.

Forget kovod harav. Where's kovod?? Just a sense of respect for another human being!

I am seriously upset over this.

I was visiting Ner Israel a couple of summers ago when I saw the sign up in the hallway of the Beis Medrash announcing Ariel’s petira. When I saw Ariel’s photo on the website I started to cry as both pieces of the puzzle came together.

Seraphic Secret has become the blog I follow most often. I check it more than once a day for updates. I think the mechanics of empathy are that a person imagines himself in the scenario of the suffering person and thus feels the pain of the suffering person. I don’t know how he manages. If something like that were to…I can't type it... I envision going catatonic with pain. I have imagined that if Robert were to ever be in the same city as me, I would find him and just hug him for a very long time. (I recently purchased the Avrech’s “Book of Ariel” and read through it. The lighter entries that discuss the Avrechs’ courtship are, as Karen Avrech put it, a delightful diversion from the chronic pain they endure.)

The “dilemma” is a strange one. I was in Baltimore recently and in the course of the days I spent there separately saw two men who have recently lost a child. I was not especially close to either man when I lived in Baltimore, but I know them and I am sure that each knows my name as well. Each provides a service that I have used more than once as a consumer, so they know me. I saw each one in a shul or store once when I was in Baltimore.

I wanted to go over and say something, embrace them, cry. But they weren’t crying. I thought I would look silly. I was paralyzed with fear and the pain I subsumed as my own. I didn’t know what to do. So I did nothing. And the moment passed. Did they think I was avoiding them? Did they think I was staring at them and wonder, “Why is he staring at me?”? What was I supposed to do? Should I have gone over? I think that I should have gone over and say, “I’ve been thinking of you.” But would that have come across sounding stupid?

Robert, I’m sorry. Ploni, I’m sorry. And Almoni, I’m sorry too.

"If your ideas about _______ are the right ideas, they will prevail in the free market of ideas."

Whatever the merits of the theory, history and experience have shown this to be patently false. It sounds catchy, but is an outright lie.

Any attempt to compare the curricula, syllabi or teaching methods of the classical yeshiva of over 70 years ago to a yeshiva of today, or to base the latter on the former, is therefore inherently ridiculous and criminal from a chinuch standpoint. It is akin (l'havdil) to comparing an Ivy League University Advanced English Literature course of 200 years ago to a lower-level 10th grade English class in a low-level inner-city public High School.

I have had a yearning to write for a long time. My blog is an outgrowth of that desire. But it clearly requires a patience and perseverance that I often lack. First of all, I find it easier to write longhand. But that is for the dinosaurs. (Please don't put me in cheirem! I mean the dinosaurs that were wiped away in the flood less than 5000 years ago!) I get the feeling that anything committed to paper will be lost to the future.

Then again, the way computers crash nowadays, real ink on paper might last longer. In thirty years, when our current computers will possess the dazzle of today's Commodore 64, and people are reading information off some newer high-tech acronym, the disk with the information I put on a .doc file today might be an undecipherable piece of plastic.

Technology is just an excuse though. If I want to write, I'll WRITE. I do wish that the yeshiva had encouraged writing along with the hours upon hours of reading we were encouraged to do.

Are there any writers out there? If anyone has tips on writing, please comment, send an e-mail or IM me.

Let the party begin. The comments section will be open for people to post their congratulatory messages.

Mazel Tov. Mazel Tov.

Federalist Paper Number Six got me thinking about Sefer Shoftim. “Why?” you ask. Well, it’s fairly obvious. Anyone familiar with Nach knows that the overriding theme of the Neviim Rishonim is the evolution from a loose conferederation of shevatim to a united 12-sheivet monarchy. Sefer Shoftim outlines in narrative form the faults of the confederation system, showing why it is insufficient for Klal Yisrael to survive and thrive, militarily and morally, under such a loose framework. The system endured for almost four centuries before it gave way to a national monarchy.

On the other hand, l’havdil, the American experiment in loose confederation effectively lasted for five years. Officially it went from 1776 to 1790, but the u.S.A. was busy fighting a revolution till 1783. And by 1788 they saw it wasn’t going to work out to their satisfaction. Even that system lasted for only seventy years, until the North ended any pretence of federation and established its dominance.

The Fed #6 ends with a fascinating quote:

"NEIGHBORING NATIONS (says he) are naturally enemies of each other unless their common weakness forces them to league in a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC, and their constitution prevents the differences that neighborhood occasions, extinguishing that secret jealousy which disposes all states to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their neighbors.'' This passage, at the same time, points out the EVIL and suggests the REMEDY.”

I have a longer essay on this topic that I have on my computer at work.

This is the great paradox of any civilization that aims to be fair: On the one hand you want to give everyone a fair chance. On the other hand, as soon as you give people a fair chance, it will only take a generation before some people come out way ahead and others come out way behind. The next generation is then full of people who through no fault of their own are not given a fair chance. But to level the playing field to once again give everyone a fair chance renders meaningless the liberty and equality you gave the previous generation.

Fair-minded people will therefore refrain from leveling the field in each generation. However, the strain will be felt after several generations, especially if a situation has delevoped by which it is nearly impossible for those who have been left behind by generations of being at the rear, and especially when those people left behind comprise a plurality of the population.

So a fair doctrine will consist of a system whereby the leader attempts to guarantee that those extremes are not reached. And when those extremes are on the horizon, to do something "unjust", such as the remission of debts honestly incurred.

A line from "The Good Earth' by Pearl Buck highlights this. When the protagonist is in the big city, he witnesses and then almost inadvertantly participates in a revolt or revolution. In the days before the revolt, someone tells him that there is a time when the rich get too rich and the poor get too poor and that's the time when something drastic occurs. A friend quoted a professor he knows who said that the USA as it stands will not have a revolution anytime soon because its middle class is too large. Same idea.

The Torah initially sets up this "reset button" system through a number of mitzvos. 1-Shmittah Loan Cancellation 2-Yovel return of land to ancestral owners 3-Slavery limit on Eved Ivri to six years, or at most till Yovel 4-Slavery limitations for women 4-Prohibition of lending with interest.

These laws inhibit massive economic expansion, but also had the effect of making sure that even the poorest of the poor, or their families got a second chance in life. Revolution inhibitors. Much of Teddy Roosevelt's presidency was about that as well.

Plutarch also attributes to Numa an iconoclastic streak, in his ban on idols in Temples. He remained polytheistic, but with a more abstract understanding of the forces that he saw governing the world than his generation’s regular-variety paganism.

As High Priest-King of Rome, he was titled Pontiff, or Pontifex Maximus, a title which was taken by the Popes of the Roman Catholic Church hundreds of years later. This fits in with what I have learned about the RCC borrowing elements of the Roman religion into itself in order to have it accepted by the people of the Roman Empire. I had heard of their use of December 25, but not of the pontiff title.

He also fiddled with the Roman Calendar quite a bit. One passage sounds very familiar to Jews. I will quote verbatim:

"Numa, calculating the difference between the lunar and solar year at eleven days, for that the moon completed her anniversary course in three hundred and fifty-four days, and the sun in three hundred and sixty-five, to remedy this incongruity doubled the eleven days, and every other year added an intercalary month, to follow February, consisting of twenty-two days, and called by the Romans the month Mercedinus. This amendment, however, itself, in the course of time, came to need other amendments."

He also had the months of the year begin in January, whereas March had formerly been the first month.

Reading his life reminded me of the David-Solomon succession. There are obviously many differences. The common feature is that of one king who is busy with conquest and expansion followed by a king who takes it easy, devotes himself to quieter pursuits of establishing national forms of worship. That second king’s peaceful reign is unfortunately not followed by succeeding generations of peace and religion, but by divisiveness and strife.

Numa also believed in the basic idea of “Torah she’baal peh”, l’havdil. His books where he had recorded his teachings were for himself, but “had so long inculcated the contents of them into the minds and hearts of priests, that their understandings became fully possessed with the whole spirit and purpose of them; and he therefore bade that they should be buried with his body, as though such holy precepts could not without irreleverence be left to circulate in mere lifeless writings.

“For this very reason, they say, the Pythagoreans bade that their precepts should not be committed to paper, but rather preserved in the living memories of those who were worthy to receive them…”

I wonder if those who ridicule the concept of Torah sheBaal Peh realized that it is an idea with a history that exists beyond the Jewish people, they would be more accepting of it.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention Numa’s wise organization of the city into guilds according to profession, rather than ethnic lines. It is smart, whenever feasible, to try to erase ethnic divisions. In many countries, the ethnic divisions are too pronounced to do anything overt. Each tribe will revolt against the attack on its culture, religion customs etc. Witness the attempt to create a Nusach Achid in Medinat Israel.

His idea of sharing wives with consent is obviously at odds with the Torah’s condemnation of such a practice, both in the prohibition of marrying an ex-wife who has since re-married, and in the Midrashic identification of the pre-flood immorality as taking other people’s wives. Collectivism and the doctrine of equality seem to go hand in hand with an aversion to private kinyan of property and wives. (Yes, the Torah mandates the kinyan (kicha) of a wife, which is not translatable into the English word purchase).

His negative attitude towards money is redolent of later systems that downplayed the significance of gold and silver, such as Plato’s dream of making bedpans and such out of gold. Very much at odds with Jewish thought that attributes primary value to kesef. Goods are merely “shaveh kesef”. Rabbinic literature even attributes to Abraham the innovation of coinage. This is an idea I have shared in Yehupitz but not yet committed to blog. Yet Plutarch blames the reintroduction of gold and silver to Sparta as the cause of its downfall.

Plutarch claims that Lycurgus' system of government lasted 500 years. I find that hard to believe. The modern era has shown that Collectivist societies don’t last very long at all.

Lycurgus refused to write his laws down, and the Adler edition of Lives p.38 explains his refusal in a way that is parallel to the arguments Jews used to defend the ancient and now lapsed practice of not putting Torah she’Baal Peh to writing.