Rabbinic Popularity in the Mishnah IV: סדר נזיקין

Continuing on the project I begun last week of counting up the most commonly appearing rabbis in the Mishnah (previously: סדר זרעים ,סדר מועד & סדר נשים), next up in the series is Seder Nezikin. Once again, unsurprisingly, Rabbi Yehudah is, again, the most commonly appearing rabbi within this seder. However, a caveat is in order: מסכת עדיות is rather anomalous, so I'm going to list the top ten without Eduyot and then the top ten with Eduyot (and I'm omitting Avot from this counting).
Top ten (without Eduyot):

1 - רבי יהודה
2 - חכמים
3 - רבי מאיר
4 - רבי שמעון
5 - רבי עקיבא
6 - רבן שמעון בן גמליאל
7 - רבי יוסי
8 - רבי אליעזר
9 - רבי ישמעאל
10 - רבן גמליאל

Now the top ten with Eduyot:

1 - חכמים
2 - רבי יהודה
3 - בית הלל
4 - בית שמאי
5 - רבי מאיר
6 - רבי עקיבא
7 - רבי שמעון
8 - רבי אליעזר
9 - רבן שמעון בן גמליאל
10 - רבי יוסי

Now the most appearances within each tractate:

בבא קמא - רבי יהודה
בבא מציעא - רבי יהודה
בבא בתרא - רבי יהודה
סנהדרין - רבי יהודה
מכות - רבי יהודה
שבועות - רבי מאיר
עדיות - בית הלל
עבודה זרה - חכמים
הוריות - רבי שמעון

How the "Cohen Brothers" Changed Retail in the South

Yesterday, while doing some cleaning, I came across some things I had read and wanted to throw up on the blog. So, here is one of them: coming from Stephen J. Whitfield's "The Missing Piece: Jewish Shopkeepers in the American South" in the Fall 2009 AJS Perspectives, wherein he discusses something rather fascinating - Jewish retailers "modernizing" the American South. Whitfield writes that "Jacob Cohen may have been the first merchant in the South to put price tags on merchandise" in Jacksonville, Florida, which "even if the claim was inflated or apocryphal, Cohen Brothers helped to scuttle the barter system that had been customary before the twentieth century."
Whitfield continues that both the

company and its imitators thus activated transactions of trust between the customers and the sales force, and helped to reduce the power of the unscrupulous, there’s-one-born-every-minute hucksters. Eventually, instead of haggling and bargaining, came the assurance and the probity of “satisfaction guaranteed,” based on fixed prices and the right of customers to return what they had purchased and to get their money back.

Eventually, other stores tried to keep up and compete, causing other stores to follow in their footsteps. Thus, change occurred on a larger level for retail stores in the South:

The department stores and the specialty stores encouraged a consumerist ethos that would eventually bury the agrarian tradition that had so decisively shaped the mind of the South. The balance sheets on which the merchant princes depended can be understood as the death warrants of the old order. Such tradesmen helped their neighbors cultivate a taste for the products of the modern world, and thus altered the atmosphere of towns.

An Optimistic, Intelligent, & Poetic Conversation: Elie Wiesel Speaks with OC Rabbis

Yesterday, I went to the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education at Chapman University and joined along with another dozen rabbis in Orange County in an informal conversation with Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel. It was a special opportunity afforded us through Dr. Marilyn Harran, the director of the center.
For those who are unaware of the Rodgers Center, it's the best Holocaust center on any campus in Orange County (just as Chapman has the nicest Interfaith Center around) and perhaps generally in Orange County.
This was made possible in Elie Wiesel's third visit to Chapman (the first was several years ago on the 60th anniversary of his liberation, the second was last spring (which I attended)), as part of a week-long visit of his. In the sit-down, Mr. Wiesel fielded questions and responded in a thoughtful, intelligent, and what I would describe as almost a poetic way.
Moreover, he was optimistic about Jewish life. One of the first questions he fielded regarded Jewish identity, to which he responded, Be who we are - seeing Jews who are authentically Jewish. That is, not saying what we want in order to be accepted, but who we are. Moreover, learning is a central and key component to Jewish identity. Instead of despairing over American Jewry these days and even more broadly, he said, "the passion for learning has never been so strong" numerically. Also, he said, "anti-semites have never shaped our identity." "Anti-semitism is not fashionable nowadays."
Another interesting piece was that of one rabbi who inquired about rising anti-Muslim sentiments, to which he said, "I'm against collective indictments." "If we say they're all bad, we lose before we start."
But the larger theme of his talk was really about the learning (maybe because he was in the company of rabbis...): "Whenever I have a problem, I go back to learning."
Also, even though he is in his eighties, he is still optimistic, as he said he is working on two books simultaneously: a book on the Baal HaTanya and a work on the Rebbe.
One interesting anecdote (amongst others) he shared with us was that he was slated to speak at the end of a meal at a UJC General Assembly in the 1970s (I don't remember specifically which year) and he heard the head of the organization yell that he would resign if something happened. Wiesel asked him what the matter was: he said some people wanted to do birkat hamazon (by the way, Wiesel noted that, out of the entire gathering - the biggest annual gathering of organized Jewish leadership in North America - there were only a couple kosher tables). To this, Wiesel said, it not only wasn't worth it to resign over something like that, but why was he upset? To this, the head replied that it wasn't on the schedule! So, the compromise was that, since Wiesel was up to speak, they announced that their speaker had requested to do it. Afterwards, Wiesel said, the head met with him in his hotel room and thanked him for that and asked what he could do - any requests. One of them, of course, was about more Jewish stuff (Wiesel noted also that there was no davening, etc. - it really wasn't much of a Jewish event(!), especially considering it was for the leadership of organized Jewish communities in North America; he said the following years (and years to come) the GA was actually Jewish(!)), but also making sure that Soviet Jewry became an issue. Sure enough, it became an issue that the UJC got behind.

Rabbinic Popularity in the Mishnah III: סדר נשים

Continuing on from the posts from the previous two days of looking through The Mishnah and seeing which rabbis are the most commonly referenced and also those who are most common in each tractate (סדר זרעים & סדר מועד), I now present סדר נשים:

1 - רבי יהודה
2 - רבי אליעזר
3 - חכמים
4 - בית הלל
5 - בית שמאי
6 - רבי מאיר
7 - רבי עקיבא
8 - רבי יוסי ורבי שמעון
10 - רבן שמעון בן גמליאל

Thus far (halfway through the Mishnah), the top ten looks like this:

1 - רבי יהודה
2 - רבי אליעזר
3 - חכמים
4 - רבי יוסי ובית שמאי
6 -בית הלל
7 - רבי מאיר
8 - רבי עקיבא
9 - רבי שמעון
10 - רבי יהושע

And the most commonly referenced in each tractate:

יבמות - בית הלל ובית שמאי

כתובות - חכמים
נדרים - חכמים
נזיר - בית הלל
גיטין - רבי יהודה
סוטה - רבי יהודה
קידושיו - רבי מאיר

Thus far (halfway through the Mishnah), the leaderboard for most references in most tractates looks like this:

1 - רבי יהודה
2 - חכמים, בית הלל, בית שמאי
5 - רבי אליעזר
6 - רבי יוסי, רבי עקיבא
7 - רבי שמעון, רבי מאיר, רבי יהושע, רבן גמליאל

Rabbinic Popularity in the Mishnah II: סדר מועד

Building off of yesterday's post, I went ahead and counted up rabbinic mentions in סדר מועד and these are, again, the most commonly referenced rabbis in the משניות of סדר מועד, along with who the most commonly referenced in each tractate is (and, once again, Rabbi Yehudah comes out way on top):

1 - רבי יהודה
2 - חכמים
3 -רבי אליעזר
4 - רבי יוסי
5 - בית שמאי
6 - בית הלל
6 - רבי מאיר
8 - רבי שמעון
9 - רבן גמליאל
10 - רבי יהושע

Now, for each tractate:

שבת - רבי יהודה
ערובין - רבי יהודה
פסחים - רבי אליעזר
שקלים - רבי יהודה ורבי עקיבא
יומא - רבי יהודה
סוכה - רבי יהודה
ביצה - בית שמאי
ראש השנה - רבן גמליאל
תענית - רבי יוסי ורבי יהושע
מגילה - רבי יהודה
מועד קטן - רבי יהודה
חגיגה - בית הלל ובית שמאי

Rabbinic Popularity in the Mishnah I: סדר זרעים

Yesterday, I seized the opportunity - partially while I was watching over my new daughter - to begin looking at the Mishnah to see who appears most frequently. It was a new curiosity of mine: I hope to look through the entirety of the Mishnah and see who appears most frequently. If I somehow find the time, I would also like to go through the Tosefta. (By the way, if somebody has already done this work, I would very much appreciate a reference to said work or listing.)
So yesterday, I went through סדר זרעים and found that Rabbi Yehudah was the most mentioned rabbi throughout the סדר. What follows is a listing of the Top Ten most commonly mentioned rabbis (or groups of rabbis) in סדר זרעים as well as a listing of each of the tractates with the most commonly referenced rabbi (or set of rabbis) within them:
Top Ten:

1 - רבי יהודה
2 - רבי אליעזר
3 - חכמים
4 - רבי יוסי
5 - רבי שמעון
6 - בית שמאי
7 - רבי מאיר
8 - בית הלל
9 - רבי עקיבא
10 -רבי יהושע

And here are the tractates:

ברכות - רבי יהודה
פאה - רבי יהודה ורבי עקיבא
דמאי - רבי יהודה
כלאים - רבי יוסי
שביעית - רבי שמעון
תרומות - רבי אליעזר
מעשרות - רבי יהודה
מעשר שני - בית הלל ובית שמאי
חלה - רבי אליעזר וחכמים
ערלה - חכמים
בכורים - רבי יהודה

I don't know yet what all this means....

Academic Talmud & Lomdus Contrasted

An interest of mine is academic Talmud, as mentioned previously (III, II, & I), which is why I found the following a neat, concise distinction between academic and lomdus approaches to learning Talmud. At the outset of Rabbi Dov Linzer's "Ownership or Partnership: A Source-Critical and Conceptual Analysis of the First Sugya in Kiddushin" (delivered at YCT's 2010 Yom Iyun on Talmud and Torah She Baal Peh on 24 January 2010), I found his contrast of the source-critical method with the lomdus perspective of learning Talmud to be of interest:

In general, what has dominated for the last 150 years in the world of the yeshivot is a process of learning called לומדות, which is loosely translated as an analytical, conceptual approach. And what has dominated in roughly the same last 100-150 years in the academy has been academic Talmud, which consists of many components, but the one that I think is most interesting and most fruitful in the type of learning that would normally go on in the high school or the yeshiva level is the source-critical approach.
Now these approaches have very different assumptions in their goals. The לומדות approach – the conceptual approach - looks at the text, as the text has pretty much always been looked at for the last 1500 years: ahistorically. It does not look for – is certainly aware that the Mishnah comes before the Gemara and so on – but it assumes that pretty much all of the ideas, all of the material, all of the statements are true; at the same time, it does not look to sort of mark out how ideas might have developed over the course of history, over the course of time. And it does not try to see signs for that in the text. What it is interested in is in hearing the different voices in the text or at looking at a topic, at a sugya and asking, "What is the conceptual way of understanding what is going on here?" Meaning, it’s not just the statement that’s being made, but how would we more precisely conceptually define the issue and, through a clear, conceptual definition of the idea that will help explain to us the different opinions, the different consequences, based on sort of our theory of this particular law. And then the לומדות approach developed in its higher terminology to be used for more precise definition of these conceptual differences. …
The source-critical approach is very different. The source-critical approach, as the name indicates, recognizes that not only is the Mishnah earlier than the Gemara, but the Mishnah could be made up of layers, the Gemara could be made up of layers, and it looks, with a critical eye, towards these sources or these layers of the text and tries to understand what was at the earliest layer, what came next, how did the text develop to where it got. Now, already in the academy, for some, it’s just tracking the historical changes; but already in the academy, you do have some, like Shamma Friedman and others that try to bring in from this world of the yeshivah and ask, "Well, as the text developed and different ideas came at different times in history, how did the concept of the law change? What was the intellectual history? How was the way this law was perceived change over time?"
But, if that could be used in the academy to create a type of intellectual history, and not just a marking of changes, it could also be used in the yeshivah as well. We could ask our לומדות questions, our conceptual questions, but not just from an ahistorical lens, but actually try to find out maybe ideas changed over time. And maybe we can bring both of these disciplines together.

Daughter #2 Named

Following on the heels of yesterday's birth of our second daughter, I went to shul this morning and named her. Her Hebrew name is שושנה רייזעל and her English name is Lillian Rose.
Lillian is my paternal grandmother's mother's name and Rose is my maternal grandmother's mother's name. Interestingly, after pointing that out, both sides of my family said that we have Lillians and Roses on both sides of our family :)
Amusingly, after announcing her name on Facebook, one of my wife's friends jokingly said, "I feel like Sophie and Lillian will have a great time playing Mahjong together! =)"

New Baby Daughter!

With appreciation to The Almighty, my wife and I were blessed with the birth of our second daughter this morning. It was really excellent to, after having gone in to the hospital early yesterday morning and waiting out the entire day and first part of the night, to have our new daughter emerge healthily. Not only that, but my wife is also, thank God, doing well :)
Although being a father is nothing new, since my wife gave birth nearly two years ago, it is still a very wonderful feeling to be a new father again :)

Oy - You couldn't list the URL?

When seeing advertisements in papers, magazines, and elsewhere, a seemingly common convention is to include a Twitter, Facebook, and perhaps another one or two logos. This is nice for the marketing folks to let us know that they have a social media presence, but how do we get there? Granted, if you have a laptop or desktop, it's not too hard to search around, but it's kind of annoying and a lot of tapping to search around to find the advertised on Twitter. Even if you don't have the space to include a QR code or Microsoft Tag to link to your social media pages, please at least include the name - such as including the Twitter handle next to the Twitter logo.
As far as I know, there may already be other postings on this very same topic, but I wanted to add to the voices pushing for more than just little icons indicating your social media existence....