The Evolving Jew

I know this is from September , but I had a thought I wanted to share. “I see vaccinations as the problem,” Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky told the Baltimore Jewish Times in a story published in late August. “It’s a hoax. Even the Salk [polio] vaccine is a hoax. It’s just big business.” Kamenetzky argued that schools should not exclude unvaccinated students, as they currently do under public health laws. He also claimed that school janitors would be spreading disease if vaccines worked. “They are mostly Mexican and are unvaccinated,” the rabbi said. “If there was a problem, the children would already have gotten sick.” This is the inevitable result of taking the idea of "Da'as Torah" way too far. Men like R Kamenetzky have no expertise whatsoever outside of their deep Torah knowledge and their piety. And they live fairly cloistered lives, so are unaware of responsible literature on science, medicine, and many other fields. But when your followers believe that being a

Kashrut.org is a long-standing site belonging to R Yitzchak Abadi and his sons. The site has an extensive Q&A section about kashrut with many unusual answers, which indicate that in many cases hechsherim aren't necessary, and that that one can be "kosher by ingredients", so to speak. For example, this answer that allows eating certain sandwiches at Subway . Unsurprisingly, the site is somewhat controversial, but I know people who depend on it. (Leaving aside the kashrut issues themselves, I personally have issues with the site because of the one or two word answers often given that can lend themselves to ambiguousness.) There's one reader comment on the site from 2003 that has a bit of cult status. That comment , which attempted to explain the rationale of the Abadis' stance, is by Dr Marc Shapiro, of Seform Blog fame, and author of books like "The Limits of Orthodox Theology" and the just released "Changing the Immutable". I won&

Pet peeve: When the Yeshivish community declares that we did this or we didn't do that "in Europe". As if "Europe" was one small shtetl populated by frum Jews with long beards. Europe is a large continent with many countries. And Jews there came in many different stripes. Jews lived in Europe for well over 1000 years. When people talk about how things were done in Europe, what era and region are they referring to? They probably have a vague notion that's based on a romanticized version of some shtetl in Poland in the 1890's. That's not "Europe". That's just one small place at a particular moment in time. This isn't' just semantics. It promotes ignorance about the beautiful and rich tapestry of a Judaism that spanned centuries and had many different practices across many different lands.