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From the Scotsman

Rabbi Rules on Sticky Problem

Your chewing gum has just lost its flavour, but there is no rubbish bin in sight. What do you do?

According to Jewish law, get ready to swallow it.

A prominent Israeli rabbi has ruled that spitting gum on a pavement or hiding it under a desk is a violation of Halacha or Jewish law.

“Gum cannot be thrown where others are liable to be disgusted by it,” said Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the rabbi of the holy city of Safed.

Improperly discarded gum may appear to be hidden, but ”God knows” where it is, Eliyahu said.

Swallowing the gum is a better solution, the rabbi said, though he criticised the use of chewing gum in general.

“Chewing gum is the practice of lower forms of life. It expresses inner tension and lack of control. People with self-respect do not chew gum except on special occasions because of special circumstances,” he said.

JERUSALEM – Israelis honored legendary New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, revered by many in the country for his strong Zionist sympathies, by naming a Tel Aviv street after him. The problem is, they can’t seem to spell it right.

Eager to correct a long-standing mistake in the Hebrew spelling of the street, Tel Aviv municipal officials consulted the highest authorities before rendering the verdict on a new spelling – only to get it wrong again.

Many foreign names on Israeli street signs are misspelled, reflecting the fundamental incompatibility of Hebrew’s 22 letters with the Latin alphabet. Lincoln, for example, usually comes out as “Linkolin.”

LaGuardia Street, a major thoroughfare in south Tel Aviv named for the man who led New York from 1933 to 1945, has been known to generations of Israelis as “LaGardia Street” because the original misspelling – reflecting the lack of a “u” in Hebrew – was never corrected.

The offending signs mark the off-ramp from a major highway into LaGuardia Street.

After getting letters and phone calls pointing out the error, Aviva Avigail, chairwoman of the Tel Aviv Municipal Street Sign Committee, sought the advice of the American Embassy and the prestigious Academy of the Hebrew Language to come up with a proper spelling.

The new signs produced by the commission still got it wrong – rendering the street “LaGvardia.”

“I contacted them and asked how this could have happened,” Avigail told Israel Army Radio on Monday.

Her interviewer, Yaakov Elon, seemed impressed by her forcefulness.

“So in any event, starting today, it will be LaGuardia, as we always should have said it, after Fiorello LaGuardia,” he said.

“Right,” Avigail said. “Fiorello LaGardia.”

Michigan alum’s passing seen as end of an era
Saturday, February 12, 2005
BY ROGER LELIEVRE
News Arts Writer

The death of Arthur Miller, University of Michigan Class of ’38 and the man long considered the country’s most important playwright, marks a milestone for American theater – and U-M.[…]

Growing up in New York, Miller worked between 1932 and 1934 at various jobs, including truck driver, radio singer and clerk in his father’s warehouse, to earn money for college. According to a U-M biography, he came to Ann Arbor by bus with the $500 he had saved to attend college.

During a 2004 campus appearance he recalled that he was attracted to U-M because “this place seemed to me, because of the Hopwood Award, to take writing seriously. I wanted to be a writer in a vague way and thought this was the place to go.”

As an undergraduate, Miller stayed in a rooming house at 411 N. State St., and wrote for the Michigan Daily. Another outlet for his writing was the student humor magazine, Gargoyle, where he used the name Art Miller.

Miller won two of U-M’s prestigious Hopwood Awards for play writing. His first was for “No Villain,” written in 1936 during a week’s spring vacation from classes and produced in 1937 by the Hillel Players at U-M under the title “They Too Arise.”[…]

Last November, a full house of 1,300 University of Michigan alumni and friends gathered at New York City’s Richard Rodgers Theatre to honor Miller at “Michigan on Broadway: A Tribute to Arthur Miller,” a revue-style homage by School of Music faculty and U-M alumni.

Planning continues on the long-planned Arthur Miller Theater, to be built on the University of Michigan campus (see related story).Meanwhile, Brater said Miller’s legacy is secure.

“Plays like ‘A View from a Bridge,’ ‘The Crucible,’ ‘All My Sons’ and ‘After the Fall’ … works like this will be done as long as theaters are functioning anywhere in the world. These plays are done regularly not only in the English-speaking world but they are done in Japan and China and Israel and all over South America and Europe.[…]
© 2005 Ann Arbor News

“Show Me the Bread”
by Rabbi Jason Miller

This week’s Torah portion opens with the repeated instructions for building the Tabernacle, God’s physical dwelling place among the Israelite nation. The detailed narrative calls for the creation of the contents of the Tabernacle (k’lei hamishkan), including the table that would stand across from the menorah in the inner court. Upon this table would be the lechem panim, the “showbread,” or better defined as “the bread of display” that was to be before God at all times (Exodus 25:30).

According to Bible scholar Nahum Sarna in the JPS Torah Commentary, the Hebrew lechem panim has been variously translated, depending on the understanding of panim, which usually means “face, presence or interior.” Commentator Ibn Ezra understood it literally that the bread was to be perpetually set out before the Lord. Rashi took the phrase figuratively as “bread fit for dignitaries.”

There were to be 12 loaves (two rows of six) on the table at all times, perhaps symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel. The Levitical clan of Kohathites were the ones to bake the bread and then arrange the loaves on the table, where they remained untouched for the entire week. On Shabbat the loaves were replaced by freshly baked ones and the old loaves were eaten by the kohanim (priests) in the holy precincts.

Even if you are on a low-carb diet and not eating bread, there are still several lessons for all of us to learn today from the ancient ritual of the lechem panim practiced in the Tabernacle and then later in the Temple. Everett Fox, in his commentary on the Torah, explains that the “table and its implements, like some of the other features of the Tabernacle, are holdovers from a more blatantly pagan model, where the gods were seen to be in need of nourishment.” While our ancestors employed some of the conventions common throughout the ancient Near East, the fact that the lechem panim in the Tabernacle was eaten by the kohanim was a clear way of differentiating Israelite worship from pagan worship.

This is one unambiguous way for us to understand that God does not desire nor need our gifts of food. Rather, we can nourish God with our acts of lovingkindness, performance of mitzvot, tzedakah and prayer.

In Second Temple times, the baking of the lechem panim became the job of Beit Garmu. The Garmu family members were experts in baking this bread in such a manner that it did not become moldy, even after sitting out for six days. They were an interesting group who maintained a family policy to never eat fancy bread, so that no one would accuse Beit Garmu of feasting on the lechem panim that they made (Tosefta Yoma 2:5).

The Garmu family understood and was skilled at this tradition. However, they kept their expertise secretive, refusing to teach others how to properly prepare the lechem panim. The rabbis of the Mishnah include Beit Garmu among others who refused to pass along the instructions of Jewish ritual to future generations. The memory of these people was to be recalled for disgrace according to the Mishnah (Yoma 3:11).

The lesson for us is that no one person or group of people should hold a monopoly on Jewish tradition or the intricacies of Jewish rituals. We must keep our rich traditions from dying out by practicing “open source” Judaism, providing future generations with the recipe for Jewish living. If you know a great trick to blowing shofar, you should share that trick with a few other people. You should encourage your Bubbie to pass along her delicious gefilte fish recipe. Perhaps your family has some nice Pesach Seder innovations that you could teach to other families.

We are not a secretive religion, nor have we ever been. So when you look at the two loaves of challah sitting on your table this Shabbat, serving as memories not only of the double-portion of manna delivered on Shabbat in the desert, but also of the lechem panim, consider the importance of bequeathing your family’s customs and traditions to the next generation.

What are ways that you and members of your family provide “nourishment” to God?

Are the rabbis of the Mishnah too tough on Beit Garmu and others for holding a monopoly on information?

What are customs (religious or secular) that you feel are important to pass on to your children and students?

Prepared by Rabbi Jason Miller, assistant director, University of Michigan Hillel

(c) Rabbi Jason Miller | http://blog.rabbijason.com | Twitter: @RabbiJason | facebook.com/rabbijasonmiller

Great article from November’s Wired Magazine that Jeremy Fogel just sent my way. We actually have a General Electric stove with the Shabbat setting. The first time I saw such a thing was at Rabbi Danny & Lynn Nevins’s home a number of years ago on Shabbat.

Danny and I both delighted in the fact that Sabbath observant Jews seemed to “have arrived” as far as GE was concerned, but we were dismayed that the user’s manual stated that the Sabbath function was “for Orthodox Jews who do not cook on the Sabbath” similar to the statement in the second paragraph of the article below. Should I be upset at the snub of non-Orthodox Jews observant of Halakhah like myself or, rather, should I only wish that it were true that only Orthodox Jews were forbidden from all the melachot of Shabbat?

The Geek Guide to Kosher Machines

By Michael Erard

Wired Magazine



Jonah Ottensoser leans over the white stovetop to tweak its settings, giving me a full view of the black yarmulke on his head. But he’s not about to bake a cake. Ottensoser, a large genial man with a gray beard, is an engineer, not a cook, and he’s brought me to the kitchen in his Baltimore office to show off his proud creation: a stove that Jewish consumers will buy just to please God.

From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, Orthodox Jews are forbidden to work, write, and drive. In all, 39 activities are off-limits to those complying with the Torah’s fourth commandment, to keep the Sabbath holy. In the home, that means no cooking or fire lighting – or its modern analog, moving electricity through a circuit.

For decades, observant Jews have found ways to work around Sabbath restrictions in the kitchen. They taped down the button on the refrigerator door frame to keep the light from turning on. Or someone unscrewed the bulb before Friday sunset. They turned on an oven in advance – that way, they could warm food on the Sabbath without altering temperature settings. In recent years, however, well-intentioned appliance makers have been installing safety features that automatically shut off ovens after 12 hours. That meant a unit turned on at dusk Friday would be cold before lunch on Saturday. When companies learned this was complicating dinner preparation for some Jews, they supplied an optional override. Thus, a rudimentary “Sabbath mode” was born.

But as appliances got more high tech – gel-pad touch controls; LED screens with temperature and burner settings; digital humidity gauges – creating a Sabbath mode became more difficult. Mayer Preger, a salesman at the Manhattan Center for Kitchen and Bath, noticed a problem when fridges started using sensors instead of simple light switches. “You can’t hack the new refrigerators like you used to,” he complains. “There’s all these computer chips in them.”

That’s where Jonah Ottensoser comes in. He doesn’t hack the fridges so much as work with manufacturers to give appliances a kosher seal of approval. A retired helicopter engineer who is himself Orthodox, Ottensoser teaches Sabbath law to technical teams at companies like General Electric, Electrolux, and Viking. His job: to guide them in building electronic brains and mechanical guts that are Sabbath-compliant.

Ottensoser works for Star-K, a nonprofit that certifies food products as kosher. Of several hundred kosher agencies in the world, Star-K is the only one that certifies technology, and Ottensoser is the firm’s only appliance consultant. That makes him the world’s lone kosher geek, the man tasked with certifying that the movement of every electron in an appliance is sanctioned by God.

Since he was hired seven years ago, Ottensoser has helped nine companies design Sabbath modes for more than 300 types of ovens and stoves, and dozens of refrigerators. When the feature is enabled, lights stay off and displays are blank; tones are silenced, fans stilled, compressors slowed. In a kosher fridge, there’s no light, no automatic icemaker, no cold-water dispenser, no warning alarm for spoiled food, no temperature readout. Basically, Ottensoser converts your fancy – and expensive – appliance into the one your grandma bought after World War II.

One of the hardest parts of Ottensoser’s job is explaining to engineers the intricacies of Jewish law. He starts by focusing on the concept of indirect action. Sabbath law prohibits Jews from performing actions that cause a direct reaction; that would qualify as forbidden work. But indirect reactions are, well, kosher. In Hebrew, this concept is called the gramma. There are two types of grammas, Ottensoser tells me. Say you hit a light switch, but it doesn’t come on immediately – that’s a time delay, a time gramma. There’s also a gramma of mechanical indirectness, like a Rube Goldberg contraption in which a mouse turns a wheel that swings a hammer that turns a key that launches a rocket. You can’t claim the mouse actually launches the rocket.

Ottensoser gets manufacturers to build the easier time gramma into their products. Rabbis differ on how much of a delay is required; the Star-K rabbinical authority, Moshe Heinemann, authorizes a 5-second lag. To be on the safe side, Ottensoser increased the delay to 15 seconds and a random wait of as much as 10 seconds. Why? “An indirect action is one where you can’t predict what’s going to happen,” he says.

He explains it to engineers with the following example: Opening a fridge seems like a harmless action without consequence. But every time you open that door, you let warm air in and cold air out, changing the temperature inside. So the compressor switches on to compensate, and you’ve effectively turned on the appliance and engaged in work. Mechalel shabbos – you’ve desecrated the Sabbath. For a while, observant Jews tried a mechanical solution, putting their fridges on a timer. “But it killed the refrigerators,” says Ottensoser.

Engineers at GE faced another problem: Their freezers have an auto defrost mode that switches on after the door has been opened a set number of times. That results in a direct reaction – mechalel. Ottensoser suggested that the engineers rework the controls to trick the refrigerators into emulating a model from the 1990s, when defrost modes were on a predetermined cycle. “There was no easy workaround,” says Valinda Wagner, a product manager at GE. “We had to redesign the control algorithms.”

With 900,000 Orthodox Jewish households in the US and millions overseas, offering the Sabbath mode makes good business sense. It’s also part of a trend among tech companies, who are acknowledging cultural and religious values to tap emerging markets overseas and become more competitive in niche markets at home. GE offers a five-burner stovetop popular with Hispanics, who use the extra burner to warm tortillas. And Intel’s smart home team has put ethnographers into Asian kitchens to look at technology use.

Aside from the coffeemaker, Ottensoser rarely uses kitchen appliances at home, where he leaves the cooking to his wife. “I’m kinda macho that way,” he says. But not too macho to trade in a career building helicopters for fixing kitchen appliances. “From a technical viewpoint, there’s not much difference,” he shrugs. “Electricity is electricity, and mechanics are mechanics.”

But back in the Star-K staff kitchen, where Ottensoser is demonstrating the Sabbath mode on a Kenmore stove, things aren’t so simple. Holding a page of instructions, he pushes button after button and mutters to himself, “OK, so I hit this.” Nothing. “OK.”

Consumers who have bought high-end appliances in the last few years should be relieved by Ottensoser’s difficulty in activating Sabbath mode, even though many modern ovens come with this feature. The functionality is buried in the appliance, well hidden behind a choreography of button-pushing. That means you’re not likely to accidentally trigger it – and have to call for repair service when the oven light won’t come on.

Finally, Ottensoser hits the right buttons on the Kenmore, and the LED display reads “SABT.” Now it’s a kosher oven. I ask if he has a Sabbath mode oven at home. “Three of them,” he says. How about a Sabbath fridge? He scoffs. Who wants a fridge so high tech that it requires a Sabbath mode? “They’re too fancy. Why do I need to know what the temperature is inside my refrigerator? Why do I need a light in my crisper?”

MICHIGAN DAILY

News

By Karl Stampfl, Daily Staff Reporter

Tobacco companies and apartheid South Africa are two institutions from which many universities, including the University of Michigan, voted to withdraw investments. Members of the University of Wisconsin at Platteville’s Faculty Senate hope to add the state of Israel to that list.

On Jan. 25, the senate voted to recommend that the University of Wisconsin system divest from companies that provide the Israeli army with weapons and other supplies.

The senate recommended that the Board of Regents remove investments from six companies — Catepillar, General Dynamics, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Northrop-Grunman and Raytheon — from the university’s trust fund.

There were two reasons for the recommendation, said Mark Evenson, UW-Platteville’s faculty senate chairman. “First, we don’t want to be making money off human rights offenses,” he said.

Evenson said the Israeli army has been accused by many groups of war crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The second reason involves language in UW’s policy that prohibits holding investments in companies that deal with organizations that discriminate against certain groups on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity. Evenson said Israel would fall under that category.

“I think it’s both symbolic and practical,” he said. “Frankly, the holdings in these companies are not huge. It really won’t change the U-W trust fund.”

The decision to recommend the Wisconsin system divest from Israel was passed by a vote of 7 to 6, with one abstention. Evenson plans to send a letter to the Wisconsin Board of Regents suggesting it consider divestment soon.

“We’re a relatively small campus, but in some ways this hasn’t happened on a big campus anywhere in the country,” Evenson said.

At the University of Michigan, the pro-Palestinian campus group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality leads a campaign to divest from Israel. SAFE is planning to make some kind of formal recommendation to the University that it divest from Israel, said fifth-year LSA student and SAFE vice-chair Salah Husseini.

Husseini said he would not go into details as to what channels SAFE plans to use because it does not want to reveal its strategy to opposing groups, but he reiterated why SAFE supports divestment.

“We should have a moral basis for our investments,” Husseini said. “We shouldn’t invest in things that result in the killing of people.”

SAFE has had several speakers on the subject of divestment this semester, Husseini said.

“It’s not a political issue for us,” he said. “It’s really an issue of human rights. It shouldn’t matter what side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you’re on. There are millions of Palestinians whose rights are being violated and our money is helping to do that.”

But only on rare occasions does the University let politics determine its investment options, University spokeswoman Julie Peterson said, citing the University’s 1978 divestment from South Africa because of apartheid and the 2000 divestment from tobacco companies. On both of those occasions, holding those investments threatened the University’s values and mission, Peterson said.

“There is not enough evidence that that is happening in Israel to divest,” she said.

The issue has come up before at the University, most notably in Fall 2002, when students from more than 70 universities drew national attention by gathering on the Diag to protest universities investing in Israel. The rally prompted University President Mary Sue Coleman to release a statement saying the University had no plans to divest. At the time, of the University’s $3.4 billion investment portfolio, it had stock in two companies directly located in Israel with a total value of about $500,000.

In 2003, the issue came up again before the Michigan Student Assembly. Two students sponsored a resolution to suggest to the University Board of Regents that the University divest from Israel. MSA voted the resolution down by a near two-thirds majority.

“The vote was overwhelmingly against,” MSA President Jason Mironov said. “Since then there’s been some discussion, but no votes to pass resolutions have occurred.”

Divestment has not come up much on campus since then, said Rabbi Jason Miller, assistant director of the University of Michigan Hillel chapter.

“This is old news,” he said. “No universities will actually divest from Israel, which is a good thing because there’s a lot to gain from business partnerships with Israel.”

Jessica Reisch, co-chair of the American Movement for Israel, said divesting from Israel would hinder the peace process.

“It counteracts any steps toward a lasting and viable peace,” she said. “It will hurt not only the Israeli’s economy but the Palestinian’s economy because it’s dependent on the Israelis.”

Reisch also said that divesting from Israel is a form of prejudice against Jews.

“I personally think that divesting from Israel is anti-Israeli and that it’s also anti-Semitic,” Reisch said.

To paraphrase an old joke: “20% of Chassidic men sing in the shower, the other 80% daven. Do you know which prayer they daven??”

JERUSALEM (AFP) – A former Jewish grand rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu, has laid down the law on amateur operatics under the shower: you can hum but you can’t sing.

“You will not sing in the shower,” the former leader of Israel’s Sephardic Jews instructed a listener inquiring about Talmudic laws on an ultra-Orthodox religious radio programme.

Eliahu explained that the Hebrew language, holy to the Jewish religion, was not to be sullied by use in a bathroom, Wednesday’s edition of Yediot Ahronot newspaper reported.

But the rabbi, considered a religious authority in world Judaism, went on to soften his stand. “To hum without a word in Hebrew crossing your mind is acceptable,” he conceded.

From The Forward

Ali G’s Jokes Aside, Report Lauds Kazakhstan

By Rick Harrison



When Jewish organizations lobbied for a law requiring the U.S. Department of State to issue an annual report on antisemitism around the globe, they probably weren’t looking to do a favor for Kazakhstan.

The Central Asian country is a frequent target of “Da Ali G Show,” the HBO program in which British Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen portrays the character of Borat Sagdiyev — a genial, mustachioed Kazakh reporter who paints a portrait of his homeland as a wild den of misogynistic dog-shooting Gypsy- and Jew-haters. Perhaps the most notorious Borat segment had the disguised Cohen leading patrons at an Arizona country music bar in a rousing chorus of “In My Country There Is Problem” — a catchy song that had the room clapping and singing along to such lyrics as, “Throw the Jew down the well/so my country can be free.”

The Kazakhstan Embassy in Washington has objected to the show, claiming it defames the country on many fronts and ignores its solid record of religious tolerance. And now, in its recently released Report on Global Anti-Semitism, the State Department has taken this Jewish question by the horns, as it were, releasing the former Soviet territory from claims of widespread prejudice against Jews. Apparently, in Borat’s country, there is no problem.

The government report, released January 5, mentions antisemitic leaflets distributed by a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, but otherwise states that no problematic acts were reported during the observation period. In fact, in August the chief rabbi of Kazakhstan told an international religious conference in Brussels that he never had witnessed a single case of antisemitism in his decade living in the country. In September, Kazakhstan dedicated the largest synagogue in Central Asia, with the chief rabbi of Israel in attendance.

Roman Vassilenko, the press secretary of the Kazakhstan Embassy, said of the report: “It is a fair assessment of the situation on the ground in Kazakhstan and the efforts of our government to promote religious harmony.”

Baron Cohen was unavailable for comment when contacted through an HBO publicist.

Vassilenko said that he can laugh at the jokes, but wishes Baron Cohen had chosen to poke fun at an imaginary country, like Krakozhia, from Steven Spielberg’s “The Terminal.”

“I do have a sense of humor,” Vassilenko said. “But it’s not quite helpful and perhaps harmful to portray a country where ‘Throw the Jew down the well’ is a famous folk song.”

The State Department report sheds no light on Borat’s assertions that Kazakh women are kept in cages and that the wine there is made from fermented horse urine.

Copyright 2004 © The Forward

From the Jerusalem Post

On Tuesday, during her opening remarks at the Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice said, “The world should apply what Natan Sharansky calls the ‘town square test’: if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a ‘fear society’ has finally won their freedom.”