Interesting Posts and Articles #200

1. Esser Agaroth hosts this week's Haveil Havalim, the Jewish blog carnival.
   
   
2. On ZooTorah, Rabbi Slifkin posts a link to an article he wrote about halachic considerations about exotic shofars.
   
   
3. At Reuters, how a building block for life was found on a comet.
   
   
4. Rav Elyashiv says not to visit the Kotel on Shabbos due to the security cameras.
   
   
5. On the Main Line on Artscroll's patent on their method of intralinear translation.
   
   
6. Chaptzem posts the trailer for the DVD of the big event:
   
   
   
7. On the Main Line, and DovBear, among others, on how the Chaim Berlin Apikorus does teshuva. I think it is very funny, and might well reflect on a desire for conformity and a willingness to whitewash inconvenient truths. But it might also simply have been the designer acting on his own, either for ideological or artistic reasons.
   
   That it helps undermine faith in an essential tenet of Orthodox Judaism, that those giving over the masorah won't fictionalize history, it can also be harnessed to demonstrate a point in the "Kuzari Principle": that even if someone would take it upon themselves to lie and fictionalize history (and the massive revelation at Har Sinai), it would not be accepted by the populace, who would see it as a lie. And indeed, see here how this took the Jewish Blogosphere by storm.
   
   
8. Blog in Dm notes the second in the trilogy of songs, from the band who gave us "United Breaks Guitars.
   
   
   
   I wonder at the legality and liability involved here, since this seems to have been made and performed after the whole mess had been sorted out.
   
   
9. Daat Torah on circumstantial evidence and lashon hara. The machlokes he delineates helps illustrate a point I made about the "problem" with sefer Chofetz Chaim, namely that there is no consistent bar plugta.
   
   
10. Rabbi Slifkin, at Rationalist Judaism, continues his series critiquing Chayim BeEmunasam. In part three, his point is that the sefer claims to present Rambam's definition as heretics those who argue with the truth of any statement of Chazal, when the Rambam himself argues with certain statements; and would then be a heretic under his purported definition.
    
    This reminds me of my recent series (see here, here, and here), and how people cite the Ran that anyone who argues on any of Chazal's midrash aggada in order to present their own interpretation is a heretic, when if this is what Ran means, he is declaring himself a heretic. Indeed, on the same scanned page of Chaim BeEmunasam is this quote from the Ran.