Hot answers tagged rabbis
19
We are concerned with being the cause of somebody else erring. Parshat Kedoshim tells us "do not place a stumbling-block before the blind", which is interpreted to mean not only what it plainly says but also "don't be an enabler for a bad outcome". Causing somebody else to unknowingly transgress what God wants us to do is a pretty serious "bad outcome".
...
18
My understanding (no source) is that, yes, twentieth-century rabbis kept copies. It wasn't necessary to type twice: they used carbon paper. I don't know about older rabbis, though.
Update: However, see the comments on this answer.
16
Because "Alfasi" is really "al-Fasi". "Al-Fasi" is Arabic for "the Fezite" (Fez being the city in Morocco where he lived).
So kind of like how the word "of" gets swallowed in "USA", the word "the" got swallowed in "Rif". Wouldn't have made much sense to make his acronym stand for "Rabbi Yitzchak The".
15
In a sense it goes back at least to the Gemara. R' Sherira Gaon points out that the names of some Amoraim that begin with ר (for example: Rabbah, Rava, Rafram) are actually shortened forms of "Rav" plus their personal name: רב+אבא=רבה (or רבא); similarly רב+אפרים=רפרם; and so forth. Also "Reish" (Lakish) is a similar short form for רבי שמעון.
15
First look up the sources people quote, so that you know what they're saying inside.
Then, when you ask you Rav, tell him I had this question and did some research. This is what I found, what is the practical Halacha?
You can tell him where you got the idea about which sources to look up, but at that point it shouldn't matter. You're not telling him that ...
14
Anecdotally, I've heard that it is common for shluchim, as one of their first acts upon arrival in a new community, to purchase burial plots for themselves - thus demonstrating that they intend to remain there for the rest of their lives. Most of them do in fact do so. One example is R' Yehuda Leib Raskin, shliach in Casablanca, Morocco, who passed away in ...
14
"Emunat Chachamim" Comes from Avot 6:6 where a list of 48 ways of achieving Torah wisdom are mentioned. There are many commentatries on Avot in general and this mishna in particular, all saying slightly different things. However..
Traditionally, this phrase is meant to mean that you must trust those people who are wiser than you to give over the tradition ...
14
In the days before copy machines and email it was certainly a common process among many letter writers Jewish and non-Jewish alike to write out copies of their own letters that they were sending. Not everybody did it but it was quite common. You can therefore find collections of letters sent by many people famous and not famous in historical collections. The ...
13
There is no one simple answer for this; however, if you had to pick the one biggest name among Sefardi rabbis living today, that would be Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, shlit'a.
While not all Sefardim follow him all the time, his word is definitely given a great deal of weight. Is that who you had in mind?
The Shulchan Aruch (written about 450 years ago) is ...
13
Rabbi Yissachar Dov Illowy (Rabbi Dr. Bernard Illowy), a talmid of the Ksav Sofer, was the Rav of New Orleans at the time of the Civil War, and commented favorably on the right of the Confederacy to secede from the Union. For more information about him, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Illowy
and
http://www.yieb.org/schedules/classes/187.html
...
13
Be'er Hagolah at the end of Yoreh Deah 334 lists the following:
Not to marry more than 1 wife.
Someone who is in Cherem should not be a Shaliach Tzibur.
A person should not be away from his wife more than 18 months.
Not to rent a house from a non Jew if a Jew is living there.
Not to cut off a page of a Sefer, even to write on it.
Not to embarrass a Baal ...
12
I think that by the Lubavitcher Rebbe the secretaries used to make a rough draft, send it in to the Rebbe for proofreading, get the Rebbe to write notes on it, retype the letter and send it. Therefore, the secretaries had the original copy in manuscript.
Later, when the Rebbe stopped writing full letters, He used to respond in Ksav Yad on the margins of the ...
12
Shemaya and Avtalyon, two great rabbis from the 1st century BCE, are identified in the Talmud (Gittin 57b) as converts. So it seems that converts can become rabbis, and even important ones. I know of no sources that imply the law on this matter was different before that point.
See also this question: Can a convert be a prophet?
11
It was certainly very common, but I can't find a requirement in the talmud (which was written in the few hundred years around your target timeframe), and I find two one talmudic counter-example:
Sotah 4b says that Ben Azzai was unmarried. (See comments: not a rabbi.)
On Kiddushin 71b R. Yehudah of Pumbeditha is asked why his son, R. Yitzchak, is not yet ...
11
There's an interview with Rabbi Tendler where he indicates that normally Rabbi Feinstein would write many responsa out, longhand, in both a letter to the questioner, and a gray-speckled-paper notebook for his own copy (and later publication). He was meticulous about his responsa.
It's also not unheard of, after the death of a great rabbi, for editors to ask ...
11
I would say the biggest explanation ahead of its time was not by the rabbis, but by the Torah, steadfastly defended by even the most rational rabbis in the face of prevailing secular thought. Up until 1929 (and perhaps even as late as 1949), the leading view in astronomy was that we lived in a steady-state universe with no beginning and no end. People often ...
11
If someone is born to a Jewish mother, regardless of her affiliation or observance, that person is 100% Jewish and allowed to marry another Jew. There is no conversion involved. I guess that this rabbi, in this situation, wants documentation that demonstrates that your friend's mother, and therefore your friend, is indeed Jewish. There are various ways this ...
10
Haym Solomon in a teshuva of the Pnei Aryeh
http://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2010/09/haym-solomon-of-philadelphia-in-18th.html
also see here
http://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2010/12/prayer-service-of-rabbi-nosson-adlers.html
10
Okay, I'll address part of part ("Does it have value to the modern... math-learning audience?") of question 6, and part of question 5, for now.
I've read chapter 1 only (and the main text only, not the marginal notes) so far, and it has definitions, postulates, and theorems from elementary plane geometry, lumping postulates and theorems together (i.e., not ...
10
In the Torah, priests are called kohanim (singular: kohen), and are defined as the direct male descendants of Aharon HaKohen. There are many laws concerning kohanim specifically
that do not apply to other Jews, such as not marrying a divorcee or not becoming ritually impure. The Kohanim conducted all the services that were required to be done in the Temple.
...
10
What I find interesting about the Rosh is that he remained an Ashkenazi-centrist, even in his host country. He started a Yeshibha based on the Ashkenaz model, married his sons, exclusively, to members of his own extended family (although he did marry his daughters to Sephardim, probably students at his Yeshibha..).
Another interesting thing to point out is ...
10
Here are a few, off the top of my head:
Often there are factors that you may not think are relevant when asking your question, but could certainly be. You may have looked up some kosher-kitchen question about vegetables, not knowing that onions have very different laws than potatoes.
There are plenty of gray areas in halacha where the conclusion may be ...
10
This article (PDF) says:
Credit for being the first "legitimate" Hasidic rebbe to settle in the
United States appears to go to the Ukrainian Twersky family. R.
David Mordecai Twersky, a descendant of R. David Twersky, the Tolner
Rebbe, settled in New York in 1912.
Earlier in the article, though, he mentions reports from 1893 in New York and 1894 ...
10
Not all the "Bar Papa"s mentioned in the list are the sons of the Rav Papa from the Bavli.
The Sefer HaEshkol, written by Rav Avraham Av Beit Din (father-in-law of the Raavad) brings a statement of Rav Hai Gaon (and a proof) that the ten Bar Papas are not all sons of the Rav Papa the student of Rava: HaEshkol Hilchot Sefer Torah 14.
They did not all live ...
10
On a practical (halachic) level, there was the consideration that amei haaretz (or at least a significant minority of them) were known to be careless about separating maaser from their produce (most of Maseches Demai deals with the ramifications of this), and about the laws of tum'ah and taharah (which, in fairness to them, can be pretty complex).
So just ...
10
According to the Yeshiva World News, a few weeks ago HaRav Haim Kanievsky Shelit"a said this Beracha when he went to visist HaRav Elyashiv ZS"L.
At about 36:00 minutes in this video someone blessed the blessing over Hacham Ovadia Shelit"a entering and everyone answered Amen. If you look intently Hacham Yitzhak Shelit"a nodded when he heard the Beracha and ...
10
HodofHod gives a pretty good example and explanation as to why our tradition is important, but I'll try to expand on that a bit to explain what the tradition is and where it comes from (and explain it in a bit more of a straightforward way).
Judaism relies heavily on generation-to-generation, teacher-to-student, parent-to-child tradition. This is known as ...
10
Ralbag (Gersonidies) has the earliest known use of a proof by mathematical induction in his mathematical work Maase Hoshev (1321 CE).
Source: Rabinovich, N. L. (1970). Rabbi Levi Ben Gershon and the Origins of Mathematical Induction. Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 6(3), 237-248. Available in JSTOR here.
(For comparison, the prevalent thought ...
10
There has never been an official Chief Rabbi of the United States. Jonathon D. Sarna (in his American Judaism: A History. Yale University Press, 2004, page 105) explains this phenomenon thus:
But since there was no parallel Christian religious authority—no chief Protestant minister, no archbishop, not even a Catholic cardinal with nationwide ...
9
A couple of other possibilities:
"the Lubavitcher Rebbe zt"l (or some other appropriate honorific)" - my preferred form on this site and elsewhere
"the late Lubavitcher Rebbe"
In conversation with non-Lubavitchers, "the Lubavitcher Rebbe" is probably unequivocal enough for most purposes (and in conversation among Lubavitchers, "the Rebbe"). It's much the ...
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