Blog B'Omer: This is the Fourteenth Post

Submitted by: High School Girl

Last night I went to a school lag b’omer party thrown by a kid in my class.

I learned many important lessons from it:

1.      It is really cool to have a backyard with a man made pond, life size chess set, volleyball net, tetherball,, fire pit and segways.

2.      S'mores taste better when the melted chocolate is not chocolate flavored wax aka chocolate chips but rather a huge pan of high quality chocolate.

3.      School parties are way more fun without teachers there (obviously).

4.      Colored marshmallows look really creepy when they are roasted.

5.      People still need to learn not to dress like they are going out to a restaurant when they are going to a late night bonfire/barbecue outside on the grass!

Blog B'Omer: This is the Thirteenth Post

Submitted by: firstpob_moo

This is a poem. I AM I am dying  And no one cares:               I.  I sit at the lunch table  I cough up red Around me others run  To friends, to class  I find the teacher  Amid the blur  "I am coughing blood."  She glances at the others  At the remains of my lunch  My Apple-and-Eve juice box              Cranberry.  She looks solemn  And faintly aggrieved  She says it is your drink.  Her shift is over  But I know she will feel responsible  When she finds out later  That I died before recess.              II.  I jump onto the counter  For a mug from the cabinet  My mother has company  A Mrs. Hammer from our block I ram my head into the cabinet door  My scalp is bloody  Everybody knows  If you bleed from your head              You die.  My mother gives me a kiss  A pat, to go and play  Mrs Hammer hugs me  And says poor baby And "it must hurt."  She cares  Unlike my mother  Who I know will be sorry  When her company leaves  And I am dead.

Blog B'Omer: This is the Twelfth Post

I love my children. Really.

But if they keep telling me not to sing, I am not sure what I am going to do.

I know I don't sing well, I know my voice is (in the words of one of these dear children of mine) "Croakey."

But I love it. It brings me such joy, and there are times when I just need to belt something out because my soul can not be contained. So as much as I love my kids, they will just have to suffer through their mother singing.

Just like I did.

Blog B'omer: This is the Eleventh Post

Submitted by: firstpob_moo

As part of a move to be a hip technology company - like Google - our offices have moved to open plan.  We sit at long tables with TV’s above us playing CNN without sound.  We’re surrounded by bright colors and meeting areas with couches instead of chairs. The walls along the perimeter of the space are covered in whiteboard paint for easy jump-up-and-work-it-out-in-big activities.   Last week the CTO stood in the middle of the room and filmed a question and answer session about new technology methodologies.  Those walls that don’t have whiteboard paint on them have inspirational sayings in big letters:  “Fools ignore complexity.  Pragmatists suffer it. Geniuses remove it!”  

My personal favorite, attributed to Aldous Huxley, is “Information is the enemy of knowledge.”

If inspiration can be defined as the spark toward thought and wonder, this is perfect.  Every time I notice it, I think and think and think what is could possibly MEAN.  And I wonder who thought it was a good idea to put it on a wall.

I assume that what they’re trying to say is that if you have facts, it may stop you from experiencing on your own, which means you may not have a full breadth of knowledge - you can’t say you own that knowledge if you didn’t get it yourself.   It’s a cool idea, but as a company who is putting emphasis on lean and fast, we shouldn’t be encouraging our employees to start from scratch and create their own list of learned data that will inevitably match lists that already exist.  It’s a waste of money.   Plus, once you’ve gained the knowledge, then you have the information - which according to this, cancels out the knowledge.    Seems rather catch-22ish.

The quote is attributed to Aldous Huxley, which also confuses things.  Aldous Huxley is famous for his book Brave New World, an alternate-world fiction intended to clarify individualist values & natural emotions by describing the evils that a government-run utopia would cause.

So if Aldous Huxley said it, one has to first figure out if Aldous Huxley meant it as a true statement or one that the evil people say and that as a reader you’re supposed to understand is false.  

Aldous Huxley doesn’t seem to have said this at all though, satirically, ironically, conversationally, controversially, or otherwise.  I’ve investigated this.  I didn't investigate to have information that could be construed as knowledge, heaven forbid, but just to help me figure out how to interpret "information is the enemy of knowledge."   And not only can I not find this quote related to Mr. Huxley, I can't even find all these words listed in that order anywhere on the internet.

So Aldous Huxley doesn’t seem to have said anything like this - because really, who would? - and no one else seems to have said it either.  In the interest of spreading truth I did tape up 8x11 pages in landscape orientation that say “never” “said” “this” after the “ - Aldous Huxley” on the wall, but someone removed the papers.

One thing that’s clear is that somebody involved in the decoration of our Open Space values knowledge enough to make sure its enemy is called out permanently on a wall.  

I’d love to know where this statement comes from, who made the decision to put this on our wall, toward what aim, and what they thought it meant.  But I don’t want to be pegged as anti-company by gathering this information.

Blog B'Omer: This is the Tenth Post

Submitted by Rabbim



I know how careful we all are about keeping kosher. But has it ever occur to you just how much that depends on the interpretation of our Sages?

Let me first give you an example you would recoil from:
Let's say they were three (small) pieces of meat in front of you . One of them is "chazzer treif" , the other 2 are glatt kosher. No one knows which is which. I throw one of them away and offer for you to eat one or both of the others. You probably refuse.

Seems like a reasonable position, right? Actually, its pretty close to a denial of the Torah.
Here is a more insidious case: Someone offers you a plain old regular glass of milk, chalav Yisrael, to be sure.

You accept, right?

Note that milk is only kosher if it comes from a kosher cow. If a cow has any disease or injury that would rather it non kosher (treifa), any milk taken from it would also be not kosher.

Have you ever considered the fact that if you would slaughter a dairy cow, you would find that only about 15 percent of them would meet your standards of glatt? 

And in Israel, where the market for non kosher meat is very small and they are much more aggressive at identifying kosher cows, the percentage of slaughtered dairy cows found to be kosher rises to 40 percent.
Because they only kill dairy cows when they are at the very end of their useful life, The working assumption is that cows , when they are in the prime of there milking years, are probably more likely kosher than that 40%. So it rises above 50 percent, let's say 60 percent.

So how do we drink milk?

The sages say that if you have 3 cows in your barnyard and you observe one of them being injured in such a way as to certainly render it a treifa, but it gets mixed back into your herd, you have a problem, since live things do not become nullified under the rule of "Rov".
However, if you let them out of the yard to the shed to milk them one by one or to slaughter them, you may assume that the one you have is kosher as, "it has left from the majority (kol d'parish mruba porish)."
Thus, you can milk all 3 cows, mix the milk and drink it.

Put another way, when you chug back a cup of milk,  40-85 percent of the cows it comes from are not up to your kosher standards.  However, according to our sages, the milk is 100 percent kosher.

Now you can go back and have that meat I offered you earlier.




Same reliance on our Sages who say that the one piece of meat is nullified in the majority of the other two.

 Bon Apetit!