Cholov Yisroel

Someone requested a post on Cholov Yisroel but i dont know enough about it and dont have time to write one. There's an issur d'rabanan against drinking milk from a gentile b/c of the fear he may have added non-kosher milk. There are many reasons to be meikil nowadays in America:
It's like a Jew watched it since the Government would punish any farmer who mixed in other milk. (This is R' Moshe's reason). It would be impractical or impossible for farmers nowadays to mix in other milk. A farmer of old whose cow didn't produce enough milk might be tempted to add some milk from the donkey, but nowadays there are thousands of cows who get milked by machines (it's not even milked by a gentile so may be muttar technically), and there are no other animals milked nearby (anothe reason to be matir).

There are also reasons to be machmir.

See here for a discussion of the issue that has R' Moshe's responsa in hebrew and English.
A 3-part series fom R' Jachter on cholov yisroel: Meikil, Machmir, Part Three

Taanis Esther

Q: Why do we fast the day before Purim? No tragedy happened, and its not even the right date!

A: On purim we rejoice and get drunk, so we might forget how serious the threat was and why the Jews were saved. We have to remember that the Jews were threatened with anhilliation and the reason they were saved was because they fasted and did teshuvah. There are still those who seek to destroy us, so to make sure we don't celebrate Purim too light-heartedly, we fast the day before and do teshuva.

Age of the Universe

If a person calculates the age of the universe based on the Torah, he'll get an age under 6,000 years. If a person studies the Earth and universe scientifically he'll get a much larger age (around 14 billion years). At first, religious people just dismissed the evidence of a much older universe by saying the science was wrong, but as the evidence grew they accepted Gosse's Theory. Gosse's Theory basically says the universe was created as an old universe. It's not 14 billion years old, it just was created looking like that, it's really 6,000 years old. One problem with this is there have been stars over 6,000 light-years* away that have exploded (supernovas) and become invisible from Earth. If the universe was created old, it means these stars never existed. There was simply a fake beam of light and a fake supernova. A pretty strange idea. There are many other problems.

I think that the whole claim is meaningless anyways. What a person sees is what exists, even modern physics recognizes that. If in every single way a scientist looks at the universe, its 14 billion years old, than how in the universe is it not 14 billion years old? To who? G-d? G-d is beyond time. There's no such thing as saying it has an absolute age of 6,000 and just looks like 14 billion. That's the same thing as saying it is 14 billion years old. To make my point clearer, imagine if the theory was that the universe is 6,000 years old, just the first second had 14 billion years compressed into it. Clearly, no one could claim this second is a second in any way. A 14-billion year second is 14 billion years. The same for a moment, and the same for no moment at all.

Q: But what about the Torah? Now you're going to claim 6 days aren't literally 6 days? You wouldn't have said that before this scientific evidence, it's a forced answer!
A: No, not at all. How could 6 days be 6 days if there were no people, and for the first few days, not even a sun or moon? The only way they could be literally six days, is if scientifically that is the age determined. It's not, so the six days are clearly something much deeper.

But why did G-d make such an old universe? Why couldn't He have done it in six days?
I may discuss this further in another post, but I think the key may lie in the Mishna in Avos (5:1) that asks why G-d created the universe with 10 ma'amaros (utterances)**, He could have just created it with one ma'amar! The mishna answers that G-d did it to take retribution from the resha'im who are destroying the universe that was created with ten ma'amaros and to give more reward to the tzadikim who are sustaining (she-m'kaymin) the universe that was created with ten ma'amoros.

A similar answer may be applied here. A universe that took 14-billion years and ten ma'amaros to create is inherently more consequential than a universe that was created in an instant.


*A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. So if you look through a telescope and see a star a million light-years away, you're seeing how it was a million years ago. If you see the star explode, it means it exploded a million years ago. If the universe is only 6,000 years old, it means the star could never have existed and what you saw was just an illusion.

** The beginning of B'reishis says 9 times "and G-d said" + "B'reishis bara E-lohim" = 10 ma'amaros. (Bartenura) But why couldn't G-d just have said created everything with one ma'amar?

Learning Gemara with Artscroll

Many people object to people using artscroll gemaras. They have two problems:

• If one uses artscroll, he won't develop the skills and vocabluary to read a gemara properly.
• Torah is something one is supposed to struggle with. If uses artscroll, it's too easy.

The first argument only applies to someone who hasn't learned how to learn yet. It is a valid objection. But I think a person can use artscroll as a tool, not a crutch, to help him learn the vocab and reading skills of gemara. Artscroll puts the hebrew and english together on the translation side. You read the hebrew, then the english, and you can learn a lot more. You can review it by just looking at the gemara side, and looking at the english if u don't understand something. This way you can learn a lot more than by just trying to read the gemara side and you learn how to learn too. Also, the footnotes tell a beginner things he wouldn't have been able to learn at all without Artscroll.

I'm not sure what to think about the second objection. Should a person try figuring out everything the gemara will say about the mishna before reading it? Why is it OK to use Rashi? Obviously, your'e supposed think hard when you learn a gemara, but what's wrong with having it explained clearly so now you can think about the issues without having to figure out where the period is?

Which brings me to a third point. Why don't people use punctuated gemaras? Why don't they make a new gemara with a redone daf now that they have computers instead of using an old hand-set format printed by some gentile a few hundred years ago?

I think they attack artscroll for the same reason they don't use punctuation.