Then I proceeded to connect three stories of the parasha to two contemporary events and to a commentary I read online. Abraham argued with God, trying to convince the divine that he should not wipe the town of Sodom off the Earth if there was 50 righteous people in it. Ha hassled God down to 10, so  God agreed not to kill off the whole city if there was ten good people. (In the end they didn’t find that many…)  This reminded me of the “Ground Zero Mosque” polemic. The planned Islamic cultural center is not at Ground Zero but several blocks away. People against it say it is too close to the sacred ground. But they would be hard pressed to define what’s not too close.   The number games can also be turned around. Would you bomb a whole madrasa if you know that half of them are terrorists-in-training? How about if only 10%, or only 2 people? Mixing math and morality is a tough game built in muddy grounds. Any principle can be turned around, against to your original point.

Earlier this week a rabbi ruled that it is kosher for a (married) Jewish woman to sleep with man, if he is an enemy of the state (of Israel) and she can gain valuable information to defend the state. The ruling referred to two Torah sources. One of them is in this week’s parasha: Abraham said about Sarah, his wife, that she really was just her sister, when they went to live in the kingdom of Abimelek. (The king ended up not sleeping with Sarah as God informed him  about the nature of the situation in a dream just  in time.) The argument goes that if it was OK for Sarah to pretend to be available, it must be ok for today’s spyesses.  I know that a rabbi’s ruling is not necessarily binding and possible only his followers adhere to it. Nevertheless I found the assumptions underlying this ruling highly problematic.

First it shows the theocratic tendencies of Israel. Why does “honey-trapping” even need a religious justification? (I am aware that the answer is, so religious women could be spies too. So they would believe that they comply with halakhah when proceeding in their national duties.) Second, what about the other way around; is it OK for a man to sleep with a woman, who is an enemy of the state? It doesn’t  mention the reciprocal situation. This ruling is misogynistic. Third, how can you define who is an enemy of the state? What if later it turns out that s/he wasn’t? The question of whose interest is served needs to be looked at both in the Torah story and in the rabbi’s ruling.

Last I quickly summed up Rabbi Irwin Kula‘s article on Autonomy Vs. Heteronomy In The Covenantal Relationship: “Abraham’s responses to the destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah and to the command to sacrifice Isaac provide two models of challenge and submission that must co-exist in our covenantal relationship with God.” In short there is a time/place/occasion to challenge God’s word (like when Abraham fought for the possibility of saving Sodom) and there is need to submit to God’s will other times (like when Abraham went with the attempted sacrifice of his own son.)

In the end I drew my lessons learned for the board in the realm of principles influencing our decision making:

• When/if deciding what programs/facilities we support within the shul we need to be careful when we look at the numbers of how many people it serves. Can we sacrifice a program with low attendance, knowing that it is meaningful for the participants?
• We always need to look at whose interests our decision serve: the board’s the membership or s subset of the membership (like women only, or seniors, or people with families.) We need to asses how different subgroups of our community would be affected.
• When making important, large scale decisions we may want to fight trends that work against us, but we also need to know when it is time to submit to the winds of change.

My drash was well received by the board and I felt inspired to do something similar in the future.

Shabbat Shalom! (FYI: I am posting this a few hours before Shabbat is upon us.)

• Publisher’s preface: written by Chaim Kramer, explaining why Rabbi Alter of Tepik “gathered all the writings of Rabbi Nachman and his disciple, Rabbi Nathan of Nemerov, that dealt with meditation (hithbodeduth) and published them in a single book… Hishtapchuth HaNefesh (“Outpouring of the Soul”).
• Translator’s introduction: written by Aryeh Kaplan, essentially a short history of the development of Jewish meditation and its connection to prayer. (Sidenote: In the edition I read the date of this introduction is printed as 5780 (2020) and not as the correct 5740 (1980).)
• Author’s introduction: a 12 page long essay on the history and need for prayer/meditation. As is customary in Jewish rabbinic literature the current ideas were put in the context as promoted and practiced by earlier authoritative figures. In this case Rabbi Nachman describes how Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jacob’s sons, Moses, Samson, Elisa, Daniel, Ezra and the Baal Shem Tov all meditated. Why bother?: “He will learn how to ask God for all that he needs, both materially and spiritually. This is the only way that one can receive divine help at all times.”
• The bulk of the book (42 pages) contain 52 lessons, stories, practices or outpouring if you wish.
• The book concludes with a fairly comprehensive index for such a short book, a list of biblical quotations, and a list of the publisher’s other books.

The 52 lessons, the essence of the book range from 4 page length(#1) to 2 lines. (E.g. #21: “After true contrition comes joy. A sign of true contrition is when one is later truly happy.”) Each entry is numbered, has a title and for most,  the original source is cited. A few entries are made up from multiple sections from various sources (1, 2, 14, 17, 27, 28, 30, 39, 42, 48.

With the above I am done with the easy part of the review, where I describe the book’s format and structure. The more interesting part is of course the content itself. That’s where I have a bit if a difficulty. One obstacle is that it is all written in third person masculine: he must/should do this or that. I am male, so I can identify with that, but I also feel that this non-gender neutral language is excluding half of humanity. When I am reading such lovely and tempting thoughts the lack of harmony between the meaning and this exclusion bothers me.

My other challenge is that as I have never practiced meditation this is all reads as a theory to me. The ideas here presented as guidelines on how/why/when meditate, therefore reading it as literature is not its intended use. But that’s they way I accessed it and as such it reads a bit of a closed indoctrination system. Closed, because looking at it from the outside it seems to have circular logic: If you meditate you will be happier, which will make you want to meditate more. Meditation is presented both as a mean and as an end. Nevertheless I found the language and the concepts tempting. I experienced inner calmness and relaxation just reading about the topic. It is clear that both the author and the translator had enormous charisma and skill with words.

But the book didn’t convince me to change my lifestyle. What it did was to awaken my curiosity to ask for more. So I will periodically return to this book to read a page or two to “meditate” on. The book is an excellent resource for seekers because of its modular structure. I just need more time to internalize what I can from it. Reading from cover to cover, the way I did it is not recommended.

The book at Amazon

The sayings in Yiddish are printed with English letters so you could read them aloud even if you don’t understand a word of them. Just the sound may create a warm and fuzzy feeling in you if you have positive associations with Yiddish, but don’t speak the language.

One can read the whole thing in half an hour. The real work starts only aftewards. You will notice which of the ideas resonate with you as a parent and which don’t. You may want to think why did you dislike the latter ones; how do they conflict with your existing value set. This reflection allows you to compare your way (and location and era) of life with those who came up with these sayings. This way you can learn both about yourself and those of old not to mention hopefully making you a better parent.

Tonight at services in shul, Reverend Ann Gray Byrd will speak about the African American experience in Santa Rosa. The apropos is that Monday was Martin Luther King day. The library has six items related to African-American Jewish relations. They are all ready to borrow. Let me say a few words about them:

Willis Barnstone: We Jews and Blacks: Memoir With Poems
According to his homepage Barnstone is a poet, translator, scholar, and anthologist. This, book is a series of parallel stories, following a double chronology. One hand the book is structured around human development from childhood, through adolescence, to the major events in adults’ lives. On the other hand it collects stories from different periods of history, both American and world. In the process he finds many connecting points in terms of experiences and feelings. At the same time almost every second page has a poem, which enriches the narrative and creates a more intimate feeling than a simple history book.

Norman H. Finkelstein: Heeding the Call: Jewish Voices in America’s Civil Rights Struggle
The book covers almost four hundred years of history (1619-1968) of how Jews worked against slavery, racism, and discrimination. Often together with African Americans, because of the shared history and challenges they both faced. Amongst others we learn the story of Rabbi David Einhorn(, a fierce abolitionist, who was forced to leave Baltimore for his outspokenness), Lilian Wald(, who helped to found the NAACP, by being one of the people who signed the original Call for it.), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel(, who marched together with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). The ten year old book is categorized as juvenile literature, because it has plenty of photographs and the font is slightly larger than most non-fiction books’.

Jonathan Kaufman: Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America
Kaufman describes and analyses what went wrong in the two groups’ relationship. In the 1950′s Jews were at the forefront of civil rights struggle. By the time of the late 1980′s, when the book was written, they were mostly estranged and antagonistic. The section titles show the stages of the process as Kaufman sees it: cooperation, confrontation, competition and conflict. Some of the reasons he notices include increase in urban crime, the assassination of Martin Luther King, debates about affirmative action, disputed over Isreal….

Michael Lerner and Cornel West: Jews and Blacks
The subtitle of the edition of the book the library a has, reads, “Let the healing begin“. The version I found on Amazon.com reads, “A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America.” Either way it takes up in 1995 where Kaufman finished in 1988. Co-authored by a prominent African American and Jewish thinker this tome covers their discussion on such topics as cultural identity, civil rights movement, black and Jewish nationalism, Jewish racism and black anti-Semitism… It is the transcript of an honest discussion intended to uncover the issues and heal them through mutual understanding of the details of the others’ position.

Jack Salzman, Adina Back, and Gretchen Sullivan Sorin: Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews
The last third of this large format book, published by The Jewish Museum in New York in 1992, is a visual essay, containing about a hundred pictures from the museum archives, which were part of an exhibit to “remind those of us who are older, and teach those who are younger, what Black people had faced in the early years of this century. It will allow us to learn about those who helped and hindered us.” The topics of the 14 essays, from 15 authors, are very diverse, but they all relate to the issues and help in the same process.

We also have a VHS copy of a 1992 documentary titled “Black to the promised land” that follows a group of African-American high school students from Brooklyn who go with their teacher to work on a kibbutz in Israel for a few months.

This is one of the most confusing website I have seen in a long time and I don’t just mean architecturally, design-wise and navigationally. I don’t have a problem with people believing whatever they want as long as it doesn’t harm anybody. So if the authors of this site decide that the Earth is fixed and Copernicus’ idea was a hoax, fine with me. I think they only harm themselves and their own reputation and not Copernicus’. I am even amused by the text in big red letters on the front page: “Read all about the Copernican and Darwinian Myths (and their many ramifications going all the way to Kabbala-based Big Bangism!)”

The site has eight pages dedicated exclusively to fight “Kabbalah.” I admit I didn’t manage to read through them. I was primarily looking for references, trying to figure out what the author based his claim on. I didn’t find much in this regard in the first half of the pages, which mostly sound as repetitive rants. But later this gem aroused my interest: “Both the Ramban [Nachmanides]…and the Rambam Moreh Nebuchim…agree that there was only a single act of creation, at the first moment of the ‘six days’, and everything else, (light, stars, moon, life) was created from that primordial creation.”

I tried to check upon his resources, but none of the links leading to external sites were working. I am still hoping to find Ramban’s writing on the topic. That might be more interesting, than this site. The look and feel suggests not just a non-professional editing, but also that the site was created a long time ago. My guess is that this (datedness) is the reason the links are broken.) According to archive.org it has been around at least since March 1998.

Another pointer I will follow up time permitting is this little quote: “Nechunya ben HaKanah, a 1st century Kabbalist, asserted that if you knew how to use the 42 letter name for God you could decipher a lengthy time between the creation of the universe and of man.”

But for now I think I wasted enough space and time on this site. If it does not have a big following I consider it harmless. But if lots of people believe it or see support for their own wild theories in it than I would recommend to create an anti-site rebutting this site’s claim. I don’t think it is worth the effort now, but I am not a proponent of censorship neither. Thus I would not get this site taken down.

The proposed system would consist of five elements.

1. The solution assumes that each packaged food item in a supermarket will be tagged with an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chip.
2. Information about the products–including type of hechser, if any–is stored in a frequently updated database.
3. The information from the database is available in store via wireless network.
4. A multiple function add-on hardware to Apple Inc’s iPod would act as an RFID reader and as a wireless modem to access the database mentioned above. The device could be called kPod, a play on the “kosher iPod” idea.
5. Software for the iPod would
1. read the RFID chip information of the product the device is pointed at
2. match the product in the database access via the wireless network
3. display the product information on the iPod, based on the user’s preference.

The first assumption is based on current trends and research supported by the food retail industry itself. An alternative for the second and third points would be a database that the user could download into the iPod at her home. The advantage of this method would be that the kPod would not need to act as a wireless modem. A disadvantage is that it places the burden on the user to gather/update the information in the device before visiting the store.

My paper will focus on the latter two elements, with special attention to the software component. I will use Value Sensitive Design method to investigate the conceptual, empirical and technical aspects of the solution. I will explore and explain the stakeholders’ interests, values and their implications on the product and process. The primary stakeholders are the users and the supermarkets. The formers’ values include privacy, trust, and attention to the details of special dietary needs based on their religious belief. The latter would set up the first three elements of the proposed system, because their interest is to provide excellent and speedy service. The service offered would place them in a new market niche, setting them apart in a competitive market economy.

I will place the product into the context of Alfreda E. Chatman’s Small World theory. The orthodox Jewish community can be construed as a small world, where “everyday happenings occur with some degree of predictability.” I will examine to what extent Chatman’s concepts (social norms, worldview, and social types) apply to Orthodox Jews and how they influences the design of kPod.

The paper will include the design description of the software to be used on kPod, including the reasoning for particular features and behaviors. I may cover the expandability of the product, because the same technology can be used for displaying nutritional information, for those with special dietary restrictions.

AskMoses.com is an “online resource offering instant advice from the qualified men, women and Rabbis on our team of expert scholars.” It offers a solution for those who value privacy, courtesy, trust, and authenticity.Privacy may be important for a number of reasons for those who ask questions at/from AskMoses.com. They may be observant Jews, needing specific information, who would be ostracized in their own community if the hole in their knowledge would become known. The user might be someone asking an intimate question that she did not have anyone to ask from her immediate network without revealing her problem. One might need advice in making an important decision, which would influence his financial or physical wellbeing. AskMoses.com satisfies the need for privacy for any of the above (and all) reasons by providing an anonymous service. Users can reveal their identity and contact information if they wish so, but it is not necessary to use the service. This aspect, anonymity, is emphasized in the first sentence of the mission statement: “AskMoses.com provides one-on-one spiritual guidance to people of all backgrounds in a confidential, real-time forum with no required registration or fee.” It is also incorporated into the design of the site, by the virtue of the fact that one can ask a question right from the homepage without any registration.

Courtesy is another factor the people behind AskMoses.com value and recognized as a value to the clientele too. The text over the box where users can ask their questions says “Someone is waiting to answer your question.” This inviting sentence sets the tone for most of the conversations. The rabbis, who answer the questions, pay special attention to maintain a jovial tone. It is important for them to be sociable, because it helps to maintain their and the site’s reputation, causing visitors to return and provide words-of-mouth marketing. They make a point of being polite and try to treat every visitor with consideration. In return they get treated with respect as well most of the time.

Trust and authenticity are two important factors when providing such a personal service. Users have to trust the people they are asking if they want to get answers for their questions that they could consider authentic. To gain the trust of the users each scholar has a profile posted on the website. The profiles include information about the person’s background, location, and affiliation. These details help the users to believe that the scholar is a real person. This is important in a virtual environment where anybody can pose as anybody else. One can also find on the site the list of articles the scholars wrote. For those who need visuals to trust somebody a stylized picture of each scholar is also presented. It is easier to talk to somebody if one sees the face of the person. These factors, built into the design help to develop the initial trust of the visitors.

However the real work only starts with the conversations. The trust gained has to be maintained with authentic answers offering a coherent and cohesive worldview. They, as professionals, have to have a high level of integrity to be (and not just to appear) authentic. Based on the posted transcripts and articles they have this integrity and the necessary knowledge. (Taken into consideration the transcripts not posted one might reach a more balanced, and potentially not 100% positive pictures. However I don’t have access to those files.)

The primary, direct stakeholders of the site are the visitors. The site was designed focusing on the visitors and their envisioned needs and values, including the four I analyzed above (privacy, courtesy, trust, and authenticity.) The degree of these values may vary for each visitor, e.g. for some privacy may be more important for others courtesy is central, but the site is shooting for the highest value in most of these areas. Living an orthodox Jewish lifestyle requires knowing a lot of information. Jewish law, (halacha) regulates every aspect of daily life. It can be difficult to navigate amidst the complex rules as they developed over several thousands of years and contain lots of possible interpretations. Therefore the site’s primary target audience is the orthodox Jewish community. However the site and the scholars provide answers to any and every one who asks.

The same set of values is important for the other set of primary stakeholders the scholars. The design is based on their worldview, defined by the belief system of Orthodox Judaism. However they have less privacy, because personal information about them is posted online. This is the result of the necessary trade-off to build trust in the visitors. Also, they may not be treated with courtesy all the time, for example when hostile or obnoxious visitors ask questions. Despite that they have to maintain courtesy throughout.

A secondary, indirect set of stakeholders is the people whose life the answers visitors get is touched. Visitors asks questions, make decision based on the answer and their friends, families, colleagues are affected by these changes. Another stakeholder group is the organization behind the site, Chabad. It is a branch of Judaism, who is outgoing and active in the effort to help/make Jews live a halachic, lifestyle, according to Chabad’s interpretation. From their perspective this site is one of many tools helping to accomplish this goal. The design of the site must ensure that their reputation is not tarnished and that it serves the goal in an appropriate form.

On a final note I would like to mention a potential value conflict. Some visitors may expect “freedom from bias.” While the site does not keep its affiliation with Chabad a secret, but it does not make it explicit enough. One can gain this information only from reading into secondary and tertiary pages. On the surface the site presents itself as a generic Jewish site and casual visitors may believe it is free from bias. It is not, it clearly represents the Chabad perspective, which is just one of many within pluralistic Judaism.