talmud study

I'm studying with my rabbi tomorrow, and I still haven't written much about last time. Oops; I meant to do that. Before we talked (briefly; we'll return to it) what God prays for, we talked about the passage on B'rachot 6b (6b3 in the Shottenstein edition) that reads as follows:

"R' Elazar said: The Holy One, blessed is He, said the entire world was created only for the sake of [the person who fears God and keeps his commandments]. R' Abba bar Kahana says [the person] is equal in importance to the entire world. R' Shimon ben Azzai, or some say R' Shimon ben Zoma, the entire world was created only to serve as an accompaniment for this person."

The footnotes expand on this: R' Elazar says the purpose of creation was to get one person who fears God and keeps his commandments, and once that state is reached everything else is superfluous. R' Abba says other people do serve a purpose, but their combined value is less than the value of the one God-fearing person. R' Shimon says the rest of creation provides for the social and material needs of that one person, so it has value, though it's still a lesser value. And the Maharal argues that the rest of humanity is there to serve this person; the one who fears God is special, rising above trivialities and focusing on what matters, and he's an example for others.

(Aside: the word used for "fear" is "yirah" or its cognates -- good ol' yud-reish-alef of which I wrote a few days ago.)

I have a problem with these statements. We are also told that we -- every single one of us -- is created b'tzeit Elo[k]im, in God's image. Somewhere in Pirke Avot, in a wonderful passage that I can't quote or cite from memory, it says that every person should remind himself that for his sake the world exists. Yet, here we have the rabbis of the talmud elevating certain people above the rest, not on the basis of something that can really be demonstrated, like scholarship, but based on an internal matter. It seems incongruous.

Now sure, I'm being colored by my post-Enlightenment modernistic ideas about human worth and so on. And also by the way that passages such as these have been interpreted by those who choose not to work (living off of society) so that they can study all their lives. (To them I say: remember the other half of "without Torah there is no bread; without bread there is no Torah".) But it still seems a challenging, risky argument to try to put forth.

Perhaps it's meant to teach humility -- "while I do my best, surely I am not the sort of person they're talking about, so I should do my best to support my betters and learn from them". And if everyone acts that way, I suppose it can work. But everyone doesn't act that way, and a lot of friction and little good can come of contests to show who's more God-fearing. After all, isn't that, fundamentally, what every single religious war is about?

So I'm still challenged to fit this statement into its proper context, and into a context in which it makes sense.

spam problems

This morning I received mail, forwarded by my email provider, from AOL. They were threatening to blacklist our entire domain because of a spam complaint (note use of the singular). I was getting this complaint because a single piece of spam was sent by some third party via a mailing list I own. So they were threatening to blacklist us, though we were only the vehicle. That's like going after the phone company because a telemarketer called you.

I've since fixed the mailing list to close that particular loophole, at some inconvenience to some list members. I also sent a message to the list saying, basically, be more careful in targetting your complaints. But it turns out it's only partially the fault of the list member who complained.

AOL makes it very easy for people to complain about spam, even if they didn't mean to. Apparently, the current UI is such that many people accidentally hit the "complain" button when they meant to hit the "delete" button. My sys admin told me of cases where AOL users "complained", presumably erroneously, about messages that they had sent. Talk about bad interface design! Quick, send them some experts in human-computer interaction! Heck, send them any intern from any HCI program.

AOL is huge, and they're certainly not going to investigate every spam complaint. Smaller providers can't afford to do so either. So they'll blacklist sites, usually temporarily, based on complaints, not on investigations. I think it's wrong to target hosts of mailing lists (absent reason to believe that they're being especially reckless), but I suppose this is how things work now. And it's going to get even worse now that the federal government has legalized spam and abolished state laws that limited it.

I'm not sure, but I might have liked it better when the uncertainty in email delivery came from the UUCP chain rather than from blacklists (and black holes). At least then everyone who was using email knew it wasn't necessarily reliable; now people just assume you're ignoring them. Sigh.

But all of this did finally prod me into learning enough about procmail tonight to set up some filtering on my own inbox. The spam has been getting a lot worse in recent months, up from 10-20 messages a day to more like 100. So I finally have candidate spam going to its own folder that I'll check in on from time to time. In the few hours it's been in place it's caught 23 pieces of spam, missed three pieces of spam, and caught no non-spam. So far, so good.