Free Download of the Soncino Talmud in English Online at Halakhah.com: 25,000+ satisfied customers a month

The Soncino Babylonian Talmud English translation is online - at a site that is not anti-Semitic or polemical.

Download the Talmud in English free at http://www.halakhah.com/ - 25,000+ downloads each month! 300,000+ each year.

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH WITH NOTES, GLOSSARY AND INDICES UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF RABBI DR. I. EPSTEIN B.A., Ph.D., D. Lit. FOREWORD BY THE VERY REV. THE LATE CHIEF RABBI DR. J. H. HERTZ. INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR. THE SONCINO PRESS, LONDON.

Contains the Sedarim (orders, or major divisions) and tractates (books) of the Babylonian Talmud, as translated and organized for publication by the Soncino Press in 1935 - 1948.

The site has the entire Soncino Talmud edition in PDF format and  about 8050 pages on line in browser compatible HTML format, comprising 1460 files — of the Soncino Talmud.

Please add a link to the site http://www.halakhah.com on your web site or blog.

Highlights:

• A newly formatted 2-column PDF version of the Soncino Talmud at Halakhah.com.
• A Kindle edition of the Soncino Talmud available from Amazon.com: The Kindle Soncino Talmud in English

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Selichot are Not Outcries

My teacher, Rav Soloveitchik taught that the selichot prayers are an outcry to God, a form of prayer that is out loud and hence a blatant public event. Outcry prayers he says, are different from more ordinary request prayers, more dramatic and more emotional.

The obvious repetition in those liturgies makes sense to the Rav because outbursts expressing needs and drama and emotion are repeated.

I disagree. Outcries ordinarily are one-time events. Only in utter desperation are they repeated. We who recite this prayer are not in utter desperation.

The repetitions of Selichot are way too numerous to make sense to me as outcries. And the label of "outcry" or "outburst" is hardly a category bearing significant cognitive meaning, deep theological content or any distinctive personality.

So no,  it is not correct to read the selichot as outcries. What then are the selichot?

Selichot are quiet and personal and above all, meditations seeking compassion.

Repetition is a hallmark of meditation. And compassion is a central end goal of the High Holiday season, central in particular to the Yom Kippur liturgy.

In his wonderful book, "Before Hashem You Shall Be Purified : Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik on the Days of Awe," by Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Arnold Lustiger, Lustiger says, "On Rosh Hashanh, Hashem moves from the throne of justice to the throne of mercy (p. 35)." Call it mercy or or call it compassion, I agree that movement takes place in the prayers for these holidays.

Through this season our prayers call on us to alternate between a definite certainty of the Kingship of God and a great uncertainty of the worthiness of our actions. We vacillate, we move at times into the personality of the brave public celebrity who is sure that we are number one and our God is number one.

Then we move into the personality of the insecure meditator, who seeks through meditative introspection a confirmation of the worthiness of his meager life. In one part of our service we crown God our King. And in another we meditate and seek the king's compassion so that we may live another day.

We start out this dramatic up and down High Holiday season as meditators seeking the compassion of God in the repetitions of the selichot prayers. Next we will go on to proclaim the Kingship of God on Rosh Hashanah. Then on Yom Kippur we will return and focus on our complicated quest for compassion with many quiet and personal selichot meditations -- persistently seeking compassion.

Whence and Wherefore | God's Favorite Prayers

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Is Google NOW incredible or creepy? Is NOW kosher?

There sometimes is a fine line between incredible and creepy.The Times hints at this in a review of phone app technology that seems to know what you are thinking, especially Google NOW.

Case in point. Yesterday I had to go from Teaneck, NJ to Forest Hills Queens, NY to attend the funeral for my sister's father-in-law. Knowing the possible traffic situations I figured on leaving my house an hour earlier, at Noon. I actually left about 12:15.

The event time and location were in my Google Calendar. And so,  I was on the GWB I got an alert from Google NOW at about 12:30 - telling me I had better leave now to get to the funeral on time.

First I thought, this is incredible. Then I thought, this is creepy. Finally I thought, NOW is not a New Yorker and does not have a clue about the time you need for getting around the city, especially for potential parking time.

The Times observes:

Already, an app called Google Now is an important part of Google’s Internet-connected glasses. As a Glass wearer walks through the airport, her hands full of luggage, it could show her an alert that her flight is delayed.

Google Now is “kind of blowing my mind right now,” said Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land who has been studying search for two decades. “I mean, I’m pretty jaded, right? I’ve seen all types of things that were supposed to revolutionize search, but pretty much they haven’t. Google Now is doing that.”

The Times mentions some of the other amazing feats that NOW can offer - once you give up your privacy entirely to Google. I have it on my phone and I've been kept apprised by NOW of package deliveries, (Google's imagined) travel time to home and work and other meetings, stock prices, nearby restaurant recommendations and more.

Bottom line? Let me say I certify that NOW is kosher. You will have to judge for yourself whether it is incredible or creepy.

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Is Israel's National bird the Hoopoe - Duchifat - Hud Hud Kosher?

No, in fact Israel's National bird, the Hoopoe - Duchifat - Hud Hud, is not kosher. It is "an unclean animal that may not be eaten."

The Times had an editorial in June 2008 that talked about the newly designated Israeli National bird, the Hoopoe - Duchifat (Hebrew) - Hud Hud (Arabic). The writer proposed that this decision on the bird would help Israel achieve peace with its neighbors.

In June 2008 Stephen Colbert quipped caustically that the bird is not a valiant eagle, "May you (Israel) emulate the noble long-billed hoopoe by squirting fecal matter at intruders."

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Here is the Times op-ed from 2008.

Will Peace Take Flight?
By JONATHAN ROSEN

LATE last month, Israel announced that it had named the hoopoe as its national bird. The long-billed hoopoe, which has a punky orange crest tipped black, is barely mentioned in the Bible (as an unclean animal that may not be eaten) but it plays a role in rabbinic literature and in Islamic lore as well. It is celebrated, among other things, as the messenger that shuttles between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is in other words well suited to the symbolic burden the country has placed on it.

The idea that birds can be emissaries to a battered world — like the dove and raven sent out by Noah — motivated Israel’s decision to adopt a national bird as part of its commemoration of 60 years of statehood. In Hebrew the name of the bird is duchifat. In Arabic it is hud hud. And in English hoopoe is a word that sounds, as Emily Dickinson noted about all feathered creatures, strangely like hope.

The news was announced at the official residence of the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, who in the late 1940s changed his name from Persky to Peres because he saw a giant lammergeier, or bearded vulture (in Hebrew, a “peres”), circling overhead. Legend has it that the lammergeier, which no longer breeds in Israel, killed the Greek tragedian Aeschylus by dropping a tortoise on his head. Birds can be dangerous, which is precisely why the United States chose the bald eagle, though Benjamin Franklin complained, in a letter to his daughter, that the eagle was a cowardly bully while the turkey was nobler and feistier and therefore a more apt symbol for America.

In Franklin’s time, a young democracy wanted a warrior bird; in the 21st century other considerations carry the day. The cross-section of Israelis who did the voting to choose a national bird — including schoolchildren, soldiers, academics and Knesset members — rejected the possibility of a raptor (specifically, the much-loved, and endangered, griffon vulture) as sending the wrong signal for the country. They also rejected the night owl, which Arabs believe to be an evil omen.

I first saw a hoopoe in 2000, the year the Oslo Accords officially fell apart. I had known about the bird since childhood, when I learned that King Solomon — who, with his storied ability to understand the speech of animals is the Dr. Doolittle of Judaism — had sought out the hoopoe in order to build the Temple. It had not occurred to me, until I began bird-watching, that the bird was real.

But there I was, in a small bird observatory in Jerusalem, with a soldier whose job it was to net migrating birds, weigh them and then toss them back into the air. “Filthy birds,” he said, pointing out one that was heading for a hole in a wall and then adding that they reeked of excrement. So much for the bird who helped the king build a house for God. It was, however, a lesson worthy of Solomon, seeing this lofty bird that smells of mortality. It is the nature of birds to embody multiple elements, shuttling as they do between earth and sky, between ancient and modern, between wild and tame. They are emblems of our heavenly aspirations and yet they are the closest living relatives to the dinosaurs.

The search for a national bird was organized by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and led by an Israeli ornithologist, Yossi Leshem. Dr. Leshem has created the International Center for Bird Migration in Latrun, the site of some very bloody battles in Israel’s War of Independence and home to a vast war memorial. The center’s hopeful slogan, printed in Hebrew, Arabic and English, is “Migrating birds know no boundaries,” in contrast to the people on the ground, for whom boundaries are everything. This gives birdlife an added poignancy in Israel.

Israel is a surprisingly good place for bird-watching (half a billion birds fly through the country during migration, converging from Africa, Asia and Europe). Jeremiah noted that “the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times” and she still does — every year, 85 percent of the world’s white stork population migrates over Israel, despite the general upheaval of the world below.

A hoopoe is the hero of the Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar’s “Conference of the Birds,” a medieval allegory in which a group of birds sets out to find the king of the birds. The hoopoe is their leader, artfully persuading all the reluctant birds to come on the quest. In the end, they manage to find the king of the birds, who turns out to be God. The birds that have made it into the bird king’s presence are filled with radiant insight but they are consumed — they discover they are part of God and they are obliterated in the divine effulgence. This is a happy ending if you are a mystic but it is chilling if you are not.

Attar, a Sufi, believed that all religions are a path to God. It is part of the endless irony of history that the place where Attar once lived (and that in fact expelled him for heresy) today threatens with obliteration those nations, most especially the Jewish state, that it deems an abomination. Whether even the wisdom of King Solomon, and his magical avian emissary, can devise an answer to this threat is one of the great challenges of the coming days.

Jonathan Rosen, the editorial director of Nextbook, is the author, most recently, of “The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature.”

/reposts from 2008/

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JStandard: My Dear Rabbi Talmudic Advice Column for August

Published in the Jewish Standard, Dear Rabbi: Your Talmudic advice column

Dear Rabbi,

My son, his wife and children have decided to make aliyah to Israel. My husband and I understand their practical and idealistic motivations for this decision. We applaud what they are doing and feel pride in their Judaic and Zionist ardor. We plan to visit them in Israel periodically, but we have no plans to move there.

At times we both admit to ourselves that we worry about them and that we will sorely miss them. What advice can you give us to help us cope with this bittersweet situation that we face?

Stuck in Bergen County
New Milford

Dear Stuck,

First, know that you are not alone. In our area, a good number of Modern Orthodox families with young children make aliyah. An underlying motive for this uprooting is the financial burden of local day school tuition. That concern combines with years of sincere devotion to the Zionist dream. Modern Orthodox education encourages pride in the miracle of the State of Israel. And many Jews simply feel a mystical attachment to the Land of Israel.

When younger couples and single college age children decide to make aliyah, that move is logistically less complex. But it also leaves parents with long distance communications challenges and airplane trips to see their offspring.

Many of our area families boast three generations of dedicated Zionists. I recall the excitement in our family when I was a young child and my grandparents announced they were making aliyah. That event took place way before such moves became more common among American Jews, when living in Israel meant making sacrifices and accepting a lower standard of living, even hardships.

Based on what I know from experience and from friends and what I sense in your inquiry, I don’t entertain the notion that you try to dissuade your children from going. Yet there are several ways to reduce the anxiety and loneliness that you fear.

First, do the travel. It’s been said for decades about the situation of American Jews, “There is no galut if you commute.” You are not fully in the exile if you make enough periodic visits to Israel. And you will feel close to your children and grandchildren as you see them progress and grow at intervals.

Next, use the technology. When my grandparents went to live in Israel, plain old telephones were a rarity and long distance calls were expensive and low-quality. Nowadays, even with the time differential, you can vividly see and interact with your Israeli family via Internet video applications such as Skype and FaceTime. Voice phone calls cost little or nothing.

Third, try to form informal social support mechanisms. You can make efforts to connect to other nearby parents and grandparents whose children have made aliyah to share concerns and, of course, to keep abreast of the best airfares and apps to use for the suggestions above.

Last, you can heed your children, when they inevitably suggest to you that you join them in their adventures, and you can make aliyah yourselves.

Dear Rabbi,

After many years of regular worship I started to pay more attention to the Alenu prayer that we recite at the end of every service. I do not understand why we say this so frequently and at the end of each synagogue session. Also, I have become uncomfortable with what I feel is the confrontational tone of the prayer and its proclamation that we are the only true faith and all other gods are worthless and powerless.

Can you help me find renewed relevant meaning in this regular recitation?

Pluralistic, not Pugilistic
Teaneck

Dear Pluralistic,

Your question draws attention to one of the great complexities of our prayer book – the different moods and motivations that flow throughout our services. One of those distinct philosophies, succinctly expressed in the Alenu, is that we are in constant competition with other faiths, that there will be an end to the contest of history, and that there will be only one winner – us.

In religious terms we refer to the “last minutes of the game” as the messianic age, the time at which we will emerge from the battles of the ages and the all the world will recognize us as the worthy people who worship the one true God.

In the services in the synagogue this theme comes to the forefront at particular times. The Alenu is famously one of the crucial liturgies in the Musaf additional service of Rosh Hashanah in the section of the Amidah that we call Malchiyot – kingship. We enthrone God on the New Year as our sovereign and we initiate our declarations of that with the Alenu.

The prayer concludes, “And the Lord shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall the Lord be One, and his name One.”

Most of the rest of the year, and throughout our prayers, we allow other themes to dominate at the core of our services. I suspect with reasonable certainty that we are not yet at the end of time. But permit me to offer this metaphor to help explain why it makes sense to me that we conclude every service before we leave the synagogue with the not-really-inclusive, and actually somewhat combative, Alenu prayer.

I see our synagogue as our team’s locker room where we gather together at our half-time breaks. We share our diverse team talk there for a while. And when we are done, right before we go outside onto the field to resume the contest and competition in the arena of our communities, we engage in a spirited spiritual pep-talk.

We say team-like things: that we are number-one, that our God is number one, and that we will crush our opponents! In the theological language of our prayer that comes out: “We therefore hope in you, O Lord our God, that we may speedily behold the glory of your might, when you will remove the abominations from the earth, and the idols will be utterly cut off, when the world will be perfected under the kingdom of the Almighty, and all the children of flesh will call upon your name…”

Whether you see yourself as an active team player or as an avid spectator, you should be able to root heartily for your team, the Jewish People, and do so with the Alenu prayer.

Dear Rabbi,

What does it mean when you say you offer in your column “Talmudic Advice”?

Seeking answers
Fort Lee

Dear Seeking,

By saying I supply Talmudic advice I mean that I offer in my column advice only, and not halakhic rulings or decisions. And I also mean that in Talmudic fashion I try to see more than one dimension of an issue and encourage the questioner to find his or her own best solution.

The Dear Rabbi column offers timely advice based on timeless Talmudic wisdom. It aspires to be equally respectful and meaningful to all varieties and denominations of Judaism. You can find it here on the first Friday of the month. Send your questions to DearRabbi@jewishmediagroup.com

Groove with God's Favorite Prayers

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The Incredible Pebble Watch and the Free Caddie Golf App and the Pebble Bike App

I play golf, I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 android smartphone. I started to use the Free Caddie app for determining distance to the green.

The problem was that the phone is hard to see in the bright sunlight and it is awkward to keep pulling out your phone to see the distance to green.

Then I discovered that the new Pebble smart watch can connect via bluetooth to the golf app. So I bought one at Best Buy. And I opened it and played a round of golf with it. Yes - it is awesome. It works.

I love the watch and the app. The watch also receives your email and your texts and can control your music. It is shiny and red and cool.

And I discovered now that it's a bike computer too. The free Pebble Bike app works great - tracking your biking mileage and speed, average speed, altitude, ascent, ascent rate and slope (beta) - even when your phone is in the zipper bag under the seat! Nothing more to buy. Wow.

They are rare. Get one right away here at Amazon or Ebay. Or try to Get one from Best Buy.

Experience God's Favorite Prayers

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Is Ice Hockey Jewish?

I never thought of ice hockey as a Jewish sport, even when I played it as a kid in rented ice rinks at midnight or on those rare frozen winter days in central park. There simply were no Jewish professional hockey players that I knew of.

But now my friend Sharon has provided indisputable evidence that yes ice hockey is a Jewish sport (on an amateur level) with her brilliant photos from the Maccabiah in Israel.

Please purchase God's Favorite Prayers

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