The farce of prohibiting music on the omer

The omer is a tough time for me because music is so important to me. To go 40 days without music and then not long after another 3 weeks is difficult, especially during the spring and summer when there are so many more opportunities to hear live music.

I also never understood how a capella music is acceptable. If the omer is a mourning period, how does a capella music change anything? Musical instruments don't inherently promote joy and a capella music is in fact often joyous (and terribly kitschy in the modern Ashkenazi world).

I looked up the source of this minhag and was surprised at the result. The ban against music is not found anywhere in the Mishnah, Gemara, or even the Shulchan Aruch. The earliest source is found in a 17th century commentary on the Shulchan Aruch known as the Magen Avraham who argues that celebrational dancing is forbidden. In order to prevent people from dancing in a celebratory way, such as at a wedding or a bar mitzvah, he included that any type of music that brings people to get up and dance is also impermissible. But the logic would follow that music that doesn't encourage shaking your booty, but rather is downtempo, reflective, and most importantly spiritually exalting, is permitted (and maybe even encouraged since it evokes an atmosphere of mourning). Thus, the custom of not listening to music at all is only a chumra (an extra stringency) and the custom of only listening to a capella music is simply misguided.

This leads me to argue that the later rabbis who invented this chumra of only listening to a capella music didn't understand music at all and probably didn't really listen to it themselves. While a capella music can certainly be spiritually exalting (just ask a Catholic - in fact the term itself is Italian for "in the style of the church) it isn't necessarily, and if you have ever heard some of the "omer friendly" music they are trying to sell in music stores here in Jerusalem, you might just lean over and wretch - an act that I would consider not spiritually exalting. They aren't just bad, they also are upbeat and dancy - just because there are no instruments doesn't mean a song with a good rhythm won't encourage you to get up and dance.

It means that unfortunately, I will not be listening to any funk, disco, or electro for the next 40 days, but uplifting genres like classical, post-rock, ambient, maybe some Bon Iver, these are genres I feel comfortable listening to. I'm still deciding which category jazz falls into - I would love to hear some opinions on the matter.

Thanks so much to Rabbi Chaim Brovender at the WebYeshiva for bringing these sources to my attention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKjYVdH-kAM

Why the western media doesn't seem to care

These past two weeks have been somewhat difficult for me as I have been watching the political situation escalate between the IDF and Hamas.

Recently there was a terrorist bombing near the central bus station in Jerusalem, at a specific bus stop that I am at more than anyone else I know. Thank G!d I wasn't there but I heard the explosion from my house because it is only a 20 minute walk from my front door.

Then on Thursday a Hamas splinter group fired an anti-tank missile at a school bus, seriously injuring a 16 year old boy. That one bothered me all weekend long as it was hard for me to process such intentional evil. Shooting a katyusha, as terrible as it is, can't be aimed directly at anyone in particular. It shoots in a general direction and they hope it lands somewhere where it causes damage. But firing a short range missile directly at a school bus is a level of immorality that I can't possibly comprehend. Similar to the Fogel murders - I can't imagine someone making the moral calculation to take out a weapon and kill a child.

As I was trying to wrap my head around that kind of evil, I spent Shabbos with my girlfriend's brother in Beer Sheva and I had my first experience with a Red Alert. At around 11:00 a siren went off and we had to run into the bomb shelter because a rocket was being fired towards Beer Sheva. Thank G!d the Iron Dome is online - it shot the rocket down while it was en route, but we heard the explosion. What an awful and unique sound it is to hear an explosion from a weapon that was violently directed towards you. I heard two this month.

In order to help me absorb these questions I have been having as of late, I spent some time perusing different news websites to see who posted about the rocket fired at the school bus last week and to see how it was interpreted by the western media. I found that some had no mention of it whatsoever (the Guardian) and others mentioned it only in the context of Hamas responding to it by calling a ceasefire (the BBC, the New York Times), where the actual event of shooting the school bus was a minor part of the article. This made me pretty upset because in contrast, whenever the IDF strikes a target in Gaza or when the Israeli government permits more housing units to be built in the West Bank, it is heard all over the world. (Disclosure: I am also against building in the West Bank, but I think it should be clear to anyone with rational facilities that firing an anti-tank missile at a school bus is far more morally reprehensible than unilaterally building on contested land).

My difficulty with the one-sidedness of western media led me to a conclusion about why they choose to report only one side of the conflict: it is a way of trying to reconcile their own regrettable history by projecting their guilt into blame on another western nation.

All of the news stations that the western world relies on comes from countries with colonial pasts - USA, England, France, etc. Now that we live in the seemingly post-colonial age, the progressives of those countries do their best to fight what they see as colonial paradigms around the world (a powerful western nation beating on a developing non-western nation) - the best example of which is Israel and Palestine. In their eyes, Western nations are held responsible for their actions because they are enlightened nations that represent democracy, human rights, free speech, etc. but an Arab nation cannot really be held accountable as they are not western and don't hold by the same values as us. Thus when a Palestinian does an act of terror that is deemed immoral by western values, it can be brushed off as not news since we cannot assume that Arabs hold humanistic ethics similar to us and therefore it is not important to cry out to the world about that act. But if a democratic, educated, western nation does an act that even slightly goes against the morals of western society, they can be blamed for it as we hold them to the same standard as every other western nation. So when the IDF kills Palestinian civilians as collateral damage who are being used as human shields to defend terrorist targets, the western world can supposedly rightfully blame Israel for not holding the highest standards of human rights and doing everything they possibly could to avoid those casualties as a technologically advanced western nation who is morally accountable for their actions.

But in fact what is actually going on in the minds of these western nations is aderaba. The reality as I see it is that this mentality of western nations claiming to be post-colonial are in fact guilty of the exact colonialist mindset that they are claiming to be fighting.

A true postmodern political scientist would claim that value for human life can be found in all nations and does not necessarily come from western intellectualism. In fact it can even be argued that there are some situations where the west was ethically less concerned with human rights than other non-western nations. By claiming that one nation is a beacon of intellectual ethics and the other is uncivilized is a textbook definition of colonialism.

So when the western media does not report on a moral attrocity caused by an Arab, they are basically saying: "These animals can't be expected to understand our moral and intellectual tradition, they are just barbarians who can't be blamed for their amoral tribalist ways." If we were living in a different era, the next step would be to baptize them or to occupy them in order to force democracy on them. I guess nowadays we support them by assuming their "barbaric nature" and by condemning militaristic responses to it.

Therefore, when the western media covers immoral actions by Israel and ignores even worse actions by the other side, they are projecting their own guilt at failing to be post-colonialist onto another western nation. Why deal with your own problems when you can place them on someone else? They claim to be post-colonialist because they are supporting the underdog, but the rationale for their support is grounded in colonialist rhetoric. If they held both sides equally accountable for human rights abuses and breaking international laws of war, then they would be acting philosophically consistent with the political ideology that they claim to uphold. But unfortunately, it seems that colonialism has shifted from trying to save the barbaric nations to assuming their barbarism and only holding other western nations accountable.

The Scientific Dilemma of Modeh Ani

Lately I've been reading a lot of Rabbi Nosson Slifkin's blog: Rationalist Judaism. He's the Zoo Rabbi who got put in cherem by the Lithuanian Haredi community for saying such controversial things as "the world is older than 6000 years" and "science has disproven spontaneous generation." But he writes a great blog where he discusses the scientific opinions of Chazal and whether or we should take a literal approach to those views when they contradict modern scientific findings, and he also writes really intelligent critiques of anti-rationalist rabbis.

Here's an email I wrote to him with a rationalistic halachic problem that started to bounce around in my head after reading his blog, along with my not so rationalistic solution:

"Dear Rabbi Slifkin,

I've been subscribing to your blog for a couple weeks now, and hearing your opinion about how Chazal was wrong in their understanding of certain aspects of biology and astronomy raised a question in my head about the halachot related to waking up in the morning.

I was taught that the reason we wash our hands in the morning and say a bracha on awakening and having our souls returned to us was because sleep is so closely related to death that just as you are teuma when you go near a corpse, you are also teuma when you go to sleep. Thus we wash our hands when we wake up just like we wash our hands when we leave a cemetery.

But scientifically, as I understand it, sleep is not at all related to death. No one simply passes away in their sleep. An old person dies in their sleep because of medical complications or organ failure, they don't simply pass away for no reason or because their souls did not return to them. Similarly, when I go to sleep at night, I don't actually believe that I won't wake up the next morning. Of course external forces could cause me to die in my sleep (an intruder, a natural disaster), but nothing in the way I think Chazal traditionally understood it.

Therefore, can the argument be made that Chazal held the worldview similar to other nations that sleep actually was a form of death, and that they were mistaken in that claim? If so, would that have any ramifications for the halachot of awakening such as washing hands or saying birkot hashachar?



Additionally, what would your opinion be on using Hume's Problem of Induction as a solution to this problem? The Problem of Induction states that causality is not explained through reason but actually induction, and that the effect of a cause can only be explained by referring to other occurrences of that effect, which never justify each individual effect. For example: When you drop an egg at a high altitude, you know that that egg will break not because of the elasticity of the shell reacting to gravity and the hardness of the ground, rather you believe it will break because you have seen other eggs break in the past in a similar way. Therefore you cannot actually know that an egg will break before you drop it; it is only after the egg has already broken that you can claim that it broke because of scientific properties - science can only explain the broken egg a posteriori, whereas Hume argues that a priori, reason has no weight on the fragility of that egg.

Applied to waking up in the morning, this modern philosophical problem can give a possible solution to the issue of dying in your sleep. Though modern science would claim that there is no reason you should not wake up the next morning, the Problem of Induction states that just because I woke up the previous day and all days before that does not necessitate that the next day I will wake up. So the brachot still stand because every day I can still thank G-d for waking up in the morning, as one can never empirically know that he will wake up the next day.

What is your opinion on applying the Problem of Induction to Chazal if they were mistaken about the nature of sleep while still subscribing to the halachot that they required? Do you think it's a practical solution or is it misguided? As a self-described rationalist, you probably disagree with the Empiricist school of thought, of which Hume was a proponent, but I am interested in hearing your response since I respect your opinion a lot and I really enjoy reading your thoughts.

Thanks so much,

Eric Salitsky"

UPDATE:

Rabbi Slifkin responded to me with this link (and as I imagined, he was not into the inference solution):

Netilat Yadayim: Ritual of Crisis or Dedication? (PDF)