Judge Judy

Have you seen some of the behavior Judge Judy displays towards her litigants? It's absolutely outrageous! Not to mention there are serious ethical & moral issues with a judge who gets paid $30 million dollars a year to conduct an "entertaining" courtroom experience and a show who's producers coax litigants to appear by paying them off and promising to cover their costs.... at the very least you realize the serious conflict of interest in her awarding plaintiffs a money judgement since that money will directly come out of the pocket of her employers!! The whole thing is ridiculous and sad that this gets passed off as judicial process.

Judge Wapner put it very well:

Joseph Wapner criticized Judge Judy's courtroom behavior, stating, "She is not portraying a judge as I view a judge should act. Judge Judy is discourteous, and she's abrasive. She's not slightly insulting. She's insulting in capital letters... She is a disgrace to the profession. She does things I don't think a judge should do. She tells people to shut up. She's rude. She's arrogant. She demeans people. If she does this on purpose, then that's even worse. Judges need to observe certain standards of conduct. She just doesn't do it and I resent that. The public is apt to gain the impression that this is how actual judges conduct themselves..."


Related links:
 http://judgejudyisascam.com/
 http://www.rateitall.com/i-25569-judge-judy.aspx

I and Me

I found parts of the George Herbert Mead concept of "I and Me" to be fascinating and thought they could offer deeper understanding in the concepts of אור ישר ואור חוזר

See how beautifully it works within the context of an earlier blog, Versions of the Truth i.e. in my knowing that my listener "can't handle the truth" I am in turn forced to readjust to a version that he will be capable of handling. That need for readjustment on my part is exactly me being impacted by him i.e. his אור חוזר

Just a thought, I'm not much of a kabbalist.

[Note Berachot 55a :  אין מעמידין פרנס על הצבור אלא אם כן  נמלכים בצבור שנא׳ ״ראו  קרא ה׳ בשם בצלאל אמר לו הקדוש ברוך הוא למשה משה הגון עליך בצלאל אמר לו רבונו של עולם אם לפניך  הגון לפגי לא כל  שכן אמר לו אף על פי כן לך אמור להם הלך  ואמר להם לישראל הגון עליכם בצלאל אמרו לו אם לפני הקדוש ברוך הוא ולפניך חוא הגון לפנינו לא כל  שכן]

[I realized afterwards something very beautiful. The hebrew for 'I' and 'me' is אני and אותי. Now אותי is actually a referencing of the person by way of his sexuality/penis (אות see Zohar below), his "lower half", whereas אני is referencing the veritable initial existential core of what a person is, the "upper half" as it were (אין) so that "I and me" or אני ואותי are essentially Top-Down and Bottom-Up respectively i.e. אור ישר ואור חוזר... Very beautiful.


זוהר סוף חקת  ויאמר יי' אל משה אל תירא אותו וכו'.... מיד אמר קודשא בריך הוא אל תירא אותו, לא תדחל לההוא את דיליה וכו' עיין שם]

Genie - Feral Child

See a famous essay of Maya Pines entitled "The Civilizing of Genie" about an abused girl who was essentially tied up and deprived of all verbal interaction up until  ~12 years old.

Excerpts:

Unlike normal children, however, Genie never asked questions, despite many efforts to train her to do so... Among human beings, four-week-old babies can recognize the difference between some 40 consonants that are used in human languages, as shown by how their sucking and heartbeats change when different consonant sounds are presented by audiotape. That ability seems to be innate, since babies respond to many more consonants that are used in their parents’ language—English, for example, has only 24 consonant sounds, yet babies of English-speaking parents react to the consonants present in Japanese. Babies lose that ability as they grow up. By the age of six, when children enter school, their ability to hear the difference between sounds to which they have not been exposed in their own language is severely reduced.....Genie, unlike 99 percent of righthanded people, seemed to use the right hemisphere of her brain for language.... extraordinary attention to the visual world....All of her first two-word phrases were about static objects. While normal children usually start talking about people and actions or about the relations between people and objects, Genie spoke primarily about the attributes of things: “black shoe,” “lot bread.”

If I were to give an analysis from my way of thinking I'd lay it down thus:

Given that the act of birth is an introducing of an already extant existential being, and the living of Life being only the process by which that existential being comes to manifest/actualize itself, a feral child having been cut off from living life's processes will consequently be "stuck" in the existential state i.e. things are as they are, visual, static.

Questions are superfluous in such a mindset because there's no need for the process of discovery innate in questioning. 

[Questioning btw being at the very begining of bnei yisrael's birth at Pesach as well] 

Furthermore, the actions that objects perform, to a person with a purely existentialist mindset, will be of lesser significance compared to the existential state of what those objects are i.e. black shoe, lot bread.

I personally would have thought that engaging in a loving sexual relationship would be the best course of rehabilitation for such a child. Namely because sexual intercourse and interaction is the epitome of process as opposed to stasis, Becoming as opposed to Being. My unprofessional abstract philosophical 2 cents, nothing more. Moreover, the essay does in fact mention that Genie masturbated excessively...

Freud: Life and Death Drives; Becoming v. Being

See Freud's postulations regarding the Life and Death drives, Eros & Thanatos.
I think he's dangerously close to the conceptual duality of Becoming v. Being, חיים  v. הויה, Process v. Existential Truth/Fact, Essence v Phenomena/Manifestation, etc

[Note "becoming" having libidinal associations both in the Torah ביאה and להבדיל בין קדש לחול in it's vulgar usages]

והלא דבר שכינה פרויד לדרגא הפנימי ביותר בשם
"id"
דהיינו בדיוק מלת ז"ה כנזכר בספרים

[הנה באה ונהיתה נאם אדני יהוה -- יחזקאל כא ויחזקאל לט]

Intro to Sociology - מושל מקשיב על דבר שקר כל משרתיו רשעים

Started a course in Sociology. My textbook (John Macionis) begins with explaining Sociology as (my loose translating from Hebrew to English)

Sociological insight is essentially the recognition that the social world guides our actions and choices similar to the change in seasons affecting our manner of dress.... and since the sociologists have abundant knowledge as to the modes of action of the society, they can analyze and foresee with a certain degree of precision how we (individuals) will act in the future.

There's of course a lot more to quote but I like to keep my writing brief. In any event, my thought being that the verse in Mishlei 29 is really appropriate to Sociology.

  מושל מקשיב על דבר שקר כל משרתיו רשעים  because the individuals within any system, by definition, must function within the underlying foundations of that system, be they good or bad. On the micro level, of course, each individual has free choice for good or bad, but there's no escaping his place in the larger scope of the system that he's in... and if that larger scope is a system of מושל מקשיב על דבר שקר then he is, on that level of scale, a משרת רשע.   (See Chullin 4b)

In general, it seems to me that Sociology deals heavily with the issues of ספירת מלכות as explained by R' Matis in his Sefirat HaOmer shiurim among others...

[I would further throw out the possibility (most probably out of aarogance and carpriciousness) that the 3 Paradigms of Sociology: (1) Structural Functionalism, (2) Conflict Theory, and (3) Symbolic Interactionism are essentially loose emphasis' of different dimensions in מלכות--  aיסוד שבמלכות, bגבורה שבמלכות, and cמלכות שבמלכות, respectively. Needs further thought...]

Rav Yosef Tendler z"l

After writing my last post I got to thinking about Rabbi Tendler again and I realized just how much I owe him and am indebted to him.

I don't necessarily agree with him on some of his  השקפות but facts are facts: I am forever indebted to him for what he gave me and did for me.

There wasn't really much reason to accept me. I was coming from a modern orthodox high-school, modern-orthodox community, modern orthodox family asking to join in for 11th grade. I'm sure R' Tendler knew at the time (as opposed to my innocent naivete) that I wasn't going to fit into Ner Yisroel or my particular classmates with the smoothest of ease. It was definitely going to be a kink in their program.

But he took me in nonetheless. And when he saw things were going difficult for me he tried to help me. He would learn with me b'chavrusa in the middle of the beis medrash just to "put me on the map" with the other guys and help facilitate their warming up to me (atleast that's what I surmise was his motive). At the time I didn't think anything special of it but looking back I realized how outrageous it was for the Rosh Mechina to be sitting among the Mechina desks in the back learning with a "newbie" talmid.

And those years in Ner Yisroel were probably some of the best of my life, where I grew in just about everything on account of chaverim, rebeim, avreichim, hanhala, and the yeshiva atmosphere in general. All this from R' Tendler.... and I never really took the opportunity to express just how shamefully indebted I am to him for what he gave me.... Thank you Rabbi Tendler. Truly.


Hesped of R' Tendler

Tactile Needs and God, He vs It.

Note the subtle deviation in pronunciation by english speakers for the word "Hashem" . Instead of people pronouncing it correctly as Hasheim (with a tzerei under the 'shin') which would then carry the meaning of "The Name" everyone pronounces it as "Hashem" with a segol (which doesn't then carry any meaning other than sounding like someone's name).

My opinion. Man's subconscious need for The Creator to be personified. Something we can touch. Something we can get our arms around. As humans we have such a difficult time with worshipping an entity of Prime Existence (י-ה-ו-ה), an 'it", that we go out of our way to make that "it" into a "he".

So whereas the Torah and Chazal were sensitive to describe the creator as an "it":
"The Holy One, Blessed is He הקדוש ברוך הוא", "The Name השם"

we go out of our way in our daily language to personify that Prime Existence as a "He"

e.g. "Hashem did this and Hakadosh Baruch Hu did that", to the point that every word for Prime Existence or The Creator becomes bastardized as a regular person's name: Hashem, God, Allah, Moe, Larry, Curly, etc

I never asked him his reason but I now really appreciate how R' Yosef Tendler in Ner Yisroel used to always say "The Kadosh Baruch Hu" and not the standard "HaKadosh Baruch Hu" like everyone else.

To be fair though, personification of The Creator as a "He" rather than an "It" may not be so far off the mark as you might think since in truth every "He" is a description of an existential "third-person" dimension that can't be accessed directly --(הוא (הויה

[ועיין שבועות כט ע"א "משום דעבודת כוכבים נמי אקרי אלוה", ועיין תוס' שם דאפילו בשם המפורש]