Is it permitted to make a snowman? Or is it considered constructing a graven image?
Prompted by this: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/saudi-arabia-issues-fatwa---4967400
Answer
According to Volume 3 Issue 8 of "Halachicly Speaking" (page 3) it is permissible for two reasons:
Is one required to have Lechem Mishneh by the Third Shabbos Meal?
Answer
One should have Lehem Mishneh by Seudas Shlishis and it is preferable to have Lehem Mishneh by any meal one has on Shabbos, even if he decides to have a fourth or fifth meal as well!
Shulhan Aruch, Orach Haim, Siman 291, S'if 4
I have always been led to understand that the mass of an element on the periodic table is the weighted average atomic mass over all naturally occurring isotopes. This seems to make sense with all the elements I have looked at except for uranium. Wikipedia's featured article on the element assures me that uranium's relative atomic mass is 238.03. The commonest isotope is U-238, mixed with 0.72% of U-235 and 0.005% of U-234, plus traces of a couple of isotopes with smaller mass numbers.
How then can uranium's relative atomic mass exceed 238? Either I have completely misunderstood something, or there is something else at work - relativistic maybe?
Answer
Approximately 99.3% of uranium on Earth is the $\mathrm{^{238}U}$ isotope, and this specific isotope has an atomic mass of $\mathrm{238.05\ u}$, where $\mathrm{u}$ is the atomic mass unit, equivalent to 1/12 the mass of a $\mathrm{^{12}C}$ atom. Including the other isotopes to obtain the average atomic mass drags the value down a little, but it still ends up being slightly larger than $\mathrm{238\ u}$.
It is interesting to point out why the atomic mass is slightly different from the mass number. The masses of a free proton or neutron are both slightly larger than $\mathrm{1\ u}$ ($\mathrm{1.0073\ u}$ and $\mathrm{1.0087\ u}$, respectively). Some of this mass is converted to energy and lost when neutrons and protons (collectively called nucleons) bind to form nuclei, which means bound nuclei will always be lighter than the sum of the masses of their component nucleons. Different nuclei release different amounts of energy per nucleon depending on how many protons and neutrons are inside the nucleus, and on their relative proportions. Very interestingly, the curve for nuclear binding energy per nucleon versus mass number starts off at zero for $\mathrm{^{1}H}$ (there can be no attractive nuclear forces between nucleons if there's only one nucleon!), then rises until it shows a maximum around nickel (specifically for the isotope $\mathrm{^{62}Ni}$) and from there on slowly decreases.
Since the atomic mass unit is standardized with respect to the $\mathrm{^{12}C}$ isotope of carbon, then in approximate terms, the nuclei with a lower binding energy per nucleon than $\mathrm{^{12}C}$ will have less of the initial free proton/neutron mass lost to energy (and thus an isotope will have an atomic mass slightly higher than its mass number), while for nuclei with a higher binding energy per nucleon than $\mathrm{^{12}C}$, more mass will be lost to energy and the resulting isotope will have an atomic mass slightly lower than its mass number.
Taking a horizontal line through the $\mathrm{^{12}C}$ isotope in this graph and looking at its intersections with the nuclear binding energy curve will show the regions where this flip happens; isotopes for atoms below carbon will tend to have higher atomic mass than mass number, isotopes for atoms between carbon and thorium tend to have a lower atomic mass than mass number, and then isotopes for atoms above thorium (such as $\mathrm{^{238}U}$) will again tend to have higher atomic masses than mass numbers. This is only an approximate analysis, as protons and neutrons don't have the same mass, so isotopes very close to the transition region don't behave perfectly smoothly.
Edit: The flipping effect I mention can be seen very nicely in the list of isotopes shown in this site. Look at the (atomic) masses for the isotopes, and see how the fractional part of the mass starts out as circa $.01$ (above the isotope's mass number), then decreases to $.001$, reaches exactly zero (by definition) for $\mathrm{^{12}C}$, then soon after flips under to $.999$ and keeps going lower all the way to $.90$ around zirconium and tin isotopes before slowly rising up to $.98$ for bismuth $\mathrm{^{209}Bi}$ and then flipping back over to $.04$ for thorium and $.05$ for uranium.
Now here's a question: I said the maximum of nuclear binding energy per nucleon happened at $\mathrm{^{62}Ni}$, so why does the fractional part of the masses in the table keep decreasing all the way to tin $\mathrm{^{116}Sn}$? It's because these masses are not normalized with respect to how many protons and neutrons there are in the nucleus. If you were to take all the isotopic masses and divide them by their respective mass numbers, you would see the minimum around $\mathrm{^{62}Ni}$, as expected (actually, the minimum ratio of isotope mass to mass number happens at $\mathrm{^{56}Fe}$ because it has a slightly higher proportion of protons to neutrons. As I said, the small difference between proton and neutron masses creates slight irregularities which I did not take into account for simplicity).
There was this mathematician Kurt Goedel who died of starvation because he ate nothing but food prepared by his wife who was hospitalised for a long period. This is a fact. There are people who die for such reasons.
So now we have this jew who was supposed to be an atheist and happy about it, who moved to a building where an utterly alone sickly old blind man lived next door. The good hearted jew engaged happily in helping out the old man and they eventually buddied up. Every saturday afternoon the jew would come to the old man's flat, bring some food, put the kettle on, put the telly on and they would watch the afternoon film together. At last after years the old blind man had someone to tell him what's going on on the telly. These saturday afternoons became the old man's delight! One day the jew even agreed to accompany the old man every sunday morning to the temple of idolworshipping and sit by the side of the old man watching the priests and the congregation drooling over their idols. At last after years the old blind man had someone to take him by the hand through the streets. These sunday mornings became the old man's delight! Then suddenly one day the was-supposed-to-be-a-happy-atheist-forever jew felt a click in his head and he found his whole life out of place and decided to put things back in order. There will be no more visits to the temple of idolworshipping. Sorry, old man. And as for saturday afternoons... could we make it sunday afternoon instead? This is what the jew told the old man one day, though he knew the old man would take it very badly. The next day the old man jumped out from his window and expired on the pavement. Now, the old man was doing as fine as he could before the jew came along. It was the good hearted atheist jew who offered support and company.
The question is did the jew commit oblique murder? Should have the jew kept violating a whole range of commandments in order to save the old man from the inevitable suicide? Is this a case of pikuach nefesh?
In short: there was a time when this jew wasn't observant and actively created around him a ring of dependence, people who depend on him. This ring he can't keep if he's to become fully observant neither he can destroy it without destroying a life, really, physical death involved.
This is not hypothetical, it happens all the time, either with old people or with other circumstances.
By the way, old people really sometimes jump out of windows for such petty things as their cats gone missing. And there's no free will involved or need for psychiatrists. This is just how 90 year old brains sometimes work.
Why was Esav going toward Yaakov (Gen. 33:1, 32:7) if he had (27:41) planned to wait to kill him until Yitzchak was dead?
(Please cite your source, if any.)
Answer
Interestingly, Daas Zekeinim and Kli Yakar (to Gen. 32:8) say that when Yaakov heard that Eisav was planning to attack, he was distressed thinking that this must mean that indeed Yitzchak was already dead and that Eisav therefore feels free to kill him.
Rashbam (to 32:7) suggests that indeed Eisav meant well in coming out towards Yaakov with his 400 men - he meant them as an honor guard for him - but that Yaakov suspected that his intentions were in fact evil.
Ramban (to 32:8) writes that Eisav didn't specifically say that he intended to harm Yaakov, but that Yaakov's messengers figured this out by talking to his men. According to this latter approach, it could be that Eisav in fact wasn't planning to kill Yaakov outright, just to scare him (maybe enough so that he'd die of a heart attack or something, without having to actually lay hands on him? After all, Eisav did always try to hide his evil deeds with a veneer of innocence - see Rashi to Gen. 26:34).
How can we know God? Isn't God unknowable? We learn and study and follow God's commands and pray, but how do we know God (as opposed to what God wants)?
What is a true way to know GOD better? Which commands in Torah are related to my question?
Answer
Like anything in a relationship, it can only be partially captured or described in words. We still learn a lot from others before and around us in the way that they've known Him, so here are some thoughts.
The essence of your question seems to come from the fact that God is not part of creation, nor truly comparable to anything else in our experience of nature. We can't define His essence and we can't perceive with our minds or our senses the fulness of who He is. We know how to have a relationship with other humans, but how can we truly know someone who is not at all human; not even a part of the world around us, but in fact its Creator? He is not abstract or vague or senseless in who He actually is, but in our eyes He is beyond all our categories and imagination.
In the book Building a Sanctuary in the Heart (available online at bilvavi.net), there's a quote that struck me when I read it: "He is hidden from their intellects, yet revealed in their hearts." I asked a rabbi about this and he replied that even though our minds and senses can't perceive God's 'essence', we perceive His actions and can grow to understand them. And as the rabbi understood it, when we think about His actions our hearts get to know Him. A lot of the strongest, most tangible metaphors of God's actions in Judaism and in our everyday lives stand to this effect. Not in the sense of defining Him, but in the sense of His love for us. When people study His Torah, and step out into living it in real life, their hearts get to feel His holiness. When you accept His blessings in creation, from each breath, to everything you eat and drink, to the ability to trust and thank Him for His wisdom in every part of life (as in Psalm 139), you strengthen your knowledge of who you are as a creation and of who He is as Creator and giver.
Even though we can't understand the process of creation in general, we can see that it exists. In the same way, we can't understand how humans could have a relationship with God, but Tanach and the Jewish testimony about God narrate the creation of such a relationship in the world. If you can accept this testimony, you find that obedience to God is another way of knowing Him: using our ability to choose His ways allows us to draw closer to Him in both love and experience. The cause and effect of such a thing is beyond our speculation, but the reality is something we experience. Righteousness, justice, purity, kindness, and obedience that is either natural or costly to us; every connection with these things is an immediate connection with God.
So in both thankfulness for His actions and obedience to His ways in wisdom, Judaism spends a lot of energy and focus on the belief that God has made ways for humanity to know Him. He is hidden to our minds, but His actions aren't, and He is known by heart. Knowledge itself is a wide and varied thing: you can have intellectual knowledge, but also relational knowledge; you can know something distantly as a fact, or you can be deeply aware of it often. These kinds of knowing are connected in our experience. And kind of like in a human relationship, where we know some things about the other and there's a lot left to learn about them, we can still say it is them that we love and connect with. From God, this is a gift.
I'll note that I'm not Jewish and don't know a lot about Judaism, so I never post comments on this site... but these are some things that relate closely to the question and that I think are valuable.
Edit: I heard a six year old Jewish boy recently tell me that your neshama can see God. I thought it was a good way to put it (he learnt it at school, I think).
If Yonah understood that he was being commanded by God, then how could he have possibly thought that he could run away? Did he believe that God was tied to a particular land, the way pagan gods were thought to be tied to theirs, and that if he just got out of Israel he would be ok? But Nineveh is not in Israel either. At the time he ran, did Yonah perhaps not yet understand Who was commanding him?
Answer
Yonah was a navi who was living in the kingdom of Israel before its exile by Sancheriv. God told him to go to Ninveh, which was in Ashur.
In general, God is not concerned enough with the affairs of non jewish nations to send them messages through a navi to repent, which is why they don't have their own prophets to begin with. Yonah concluded that their repentance must be relevant to Israel in some way, particularly to exile them from their land. (Yonah knew that the Jews weren't on the highest spiritual level at that point.)
Therefore, Yonah refused to go, not wanting to play any part in Israel's destruction. He hoped that God would choose another navi in his place, as clearly, if God wanted this done, it must be necessary. But not him. To try and ensure this, Yonah tried to flee to outside of Eretz Yisrael, as he believed that nevua does not exist outside of the land (which is true, with few exceptions). Thus, he thought, God would be forced to send someone else.
See Abarbanel (Yonah 1).
