Q&A: How Are You
How Are You
Question
Hello Rabbi!
When I was searching for something in Akdamot, I saw your name, started reading, and remembered that you had moved to Lod.
Did you suffer during the riots in Lod?
Did you leave Lod?
Blessings,
Answer
Hello.
We definitely did not leave. The reports about mass departures from Lod are, in my opinion, exaggerated. The overwhelming majority of people here are not really afraid. There are departures every year, and now perhaps a bit more. Nothing alarming.
Life has returned to its regular course, but of course the nationalist tension remains in the background, just as it was even before the riots.
I met Aviad in Mazkeret Batya a few months ago.
Many thanks for your concern,
Discussion on Answer
People here have weapons, and I haven’t heard of any additional arming.
The weapons among the Arabs are mainly for criminal purposes. There was almost no nationalist use of them.
When I was searching in Akdamot, I found an article of yours: Conversion Gates — On Violence and Good Intentions.
You asked: is there really an opinion according to which one can forgo acceptance of the commandments in conversion?
You wrote that no: “A position like theirs simply does not exist at all in Jewish law.”
Afterward you wrote about “marriage-motivated conversions”: “But the assessment was that in this conversion there definitely was acceptance of the commandments.”
Maybe I did not read Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann’s responsum carefully enough [you know I come from German-Jewish families], Melamed LeHo’il, vol. 3, siman 14, and even more so siman 8.
Doesn’t “acceptance of the commandments” include acceptance of the laws of punishment — that is, isn’t “acceptance of the commandments” essentially joining the covenant of the Holy One, blessed be He, with the Jewish people — a covenant that includes many commandments, with details on the order of 613 squared?
Therefore they inform him only of “some” of them, and acceptance of the commandments is acceptance of the yoke of obligations, and agreement to suffer if the Jewish people suffer. Therefore the convert says, “I am not worthy.” He accepts being obligated — just as all the Jewish people are obligated.
And just as most of the Jewish people today are — perhaps — some kind of traditional, he too will be some sort of traditional Jew.
[Those who observe the commandments are a minority; those who hate the commandments and customs are a much smaller but far noisier minority.]
Blessings!
Those remarks of mine were written in response to the nonsense of Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar, who explained in a foolish and confused way that acceptance of the commandments is an invention of the 19th century and never existed.
And indeed, the words of Rabbi David Zvi Hoffmann are the only example of a different opinion, and I was already familiar with it when I wrote my remarks. Afterward there was a debate about this with Professor Arye Edrei, who pointed to it and to several other sources in order to refute what I wrote. I wrote to him that all the other sources did not say this, but in Melamed LeHo’il there really is such a meaning. But even if there is, as far as I am concerned this is a mistake. Not everything printed in Rashi script is a halakhic opinion. This also led me, in several places, to clarify the difference between an academic approach (like Edrei’s), for which anything printed by a halakhic decisor is a Torah position, as opposed to someone who sits around the halakhic table and participates in the game itself: if he sees an obvious mistake, then from his perspective this is not a halakhic opinion but an error.
See here, where I discussed all this:
I heard that in the United States, after the riots and attacks by blacks and their supporters against Asians [even though they are not white; but ignoramuses hate Torah scholars], Asians are buying large quantities of weapons.
Are the Jews of Lod also arming themselves legally?
After all, the Arabs are arming themselves illegally.
On the other hand, a Jew who defends himself with a weapon will be put on trial, because he threatened the one who attacked him.
Am I mistaken?