Take a feather and a candle: spring cleaning in 13th century Haggadah books | Hacker News Reader

Take a feather and a candle: spring cleaning in 13th century Haggadah books

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50 pointsdiodorus35 comments

All hamets (leaven) that is in my possession, that I have seen and not seen, that I have beheld and not beheld, that I have removed and not removed, let it be nullified and like the dust of the earth.

This could be fun as a basis for a meditative approach to debugging.

There is another interesting wrinkle to the described process. What if you miss a bit in the house? Something in the couch cushion perhaps. Uh oh!

Well, the super Orthodox Jews have a solution. Yes, you should make a good faith effort to eliminate all of the hamets in your house, but you can exploit a loophole! Hamets in your house, but not owned by you, are OK, so rabbis in these groups have a list of non-Jews willing to buy all remaining hamets in your house for $1.00 (or other small amount). They then own them and you are in the clear. There is a special term for these people, but I don't remember it.

But what if you later (after Passover) find a box of crackers you missed and you actually want them? No problem because the loophole has a loophole. The buyers don't actually pay you the $1.00, they just pay you a penny as a down payment. As part of their service, they then deliberately don't pay you any more, default on the contract, and, the day Passover, the box of crackers are actually yours again.

you're confusing 2 things. before passover, Jews make a declaration claiming that all crumbs and other hametz not found should be like dust.

if however someone had something valuable, like a bottle of whiskey, then they sell it.

Looked it up. You are right..."sell" it, as in the temporary sale I mentioned above. Reference:

http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/1689/...

And of course, selling the White House chametz:

https://i.redd.it/p57ueuzum8ny.jpg

http://brisbanehebrewcongregation.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

Spring cleaning is something funny to someone that comes from a country (Brazil) where people usually do a thorough cleaning on a weekly to daily basis (by themselves or hiring cleaning maids in the case of the upper classes).

Growing up (in the southern US) it was usually when we'd do stuff like go through closets, or reassess the placement of everything in the kitchen. It was more like reorganization than anything else. We cleaned all the time.

"Spring cleaning" where I am means "go through your things and throw away what you haven't used since the last spring cleaning."

Recently I was watching a TV show about some guys living in the woods in Alaska and they really mean spring cleaning. In their case, their farm animals' feces had spent the winter frozen to the coop and barn floor boards, so at the first thaw they scrambled to clean the place up quickly!

From what I've seen, it's common place to clean thoroughly every week lots of places.

The idea of "spring cleaning" is much more thorough than anyone would do week to week. For example taking everything out of every pantry and storage area, washing the backs of cupboards and storage, throwing expired things out, polishing metals, varnishing, etc.

It does probably have more currency in climates where the weather would keep you cooped in for months over winter, and thus happen on the first chance to give everthing a good airing and bry properly.

Am I missing something or is this just a clickbait title?

tl;dr: Jewish men help clean the house one day a year

To be fair, it's a very deep clean.

can you tell why it is so important?

Who said it is?

It's right there in the title.

This is a bad Hacker News comment that predictably triggered a stampede of other bad comments. Please don't dumb this place down any further.

The post is a beautiful historical article that deserves a place here. It isn't to everyone's taste, but nothing is.

The post tried to make the point that historically, Jewish men helped out around the house. It was an unreasonable reach. This comment was a succinct rebuttal of that point of view.

But of course you can't judge everyone's knee-jerk reaction, so I'll remove it if you still feel hurt.

It's only talking about religious people; extrapolating religious norms to the whole ethnicity is kind of unfair.

...Especially when about a fifth of said ethnicity is basically atheistic as well; quite a diverse bunch really, from ultra-orthodox 'Haredi' to a purely cultural identity.

quite a diverse bunch really

In comparison to who?

Compared to the GP's "Jewish men..." notion, as though that were a useful group descriptor when it comes to behaviors. So, I suppose... compared to the often monolithic notions of Judaism that I so often encounter on and offline.

as though that were a useful group descriptor when it comes to behaviors.

I found it to be useful. In combination with some other comments, it gave me a particular idea about what the article was about.

strict grammarians, for instance, who would only have considered using "whom" in your sentence.

Christianity, where the definition effectively prohibits someone from being both an atheist and a christian.

To be fair, I'm not sure that Islam is too enthusiastic about atheists proclaiming for it either... to put it mildly.

"There is no god but God" does seem to offer some wiggle room for atheists, but maybe that's an inadvertent loophole.

It might, but I think the current climate in much of the Islamic world, while not the crazed image many have, is actually pretty brutal to people within the religion who are seen as blasphemous. From what I know, and I have to admit that this isn't as much as I'd like, the process of proclaiming your faith pretty much involves accepting the existence of god, prophets, the "punishment of the grave," that kind of thing. My impression is that if you're seen to have lied about that, you're lucky just to be outcast.

tl;dr It really doesn't pay to be seen as an "apostate" in Islam, at least in most places at this time.

> From what I know, and I have to admit that this isn't as much as I'd like

In general when you're talking about a group of a billion people you should avoid generalisations, especially if you also need to say that you don't know what you're talking about.

What did he say that was wrong? He didn't say all parts of the Islamic world are brutal to apostates, he just said much of the Islamic world is. And that's absolutely the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Apostasy_in_...

Dan, I'm sorry that you've taken my attempts at diplomacy as a declaration of ignorance. However diverse a billion people may be, that diversity is limited when a requirement of the claimed identity is to recite the shahada with conviction. If you can explain how that can be done, "I declare that there is no deity worthy of worship except Allah; and I declare that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah...." without belief in god and a divine prophet of that god, you're going to have to walk me through it.

As to the view on apostasy: https://islamqa.info/en/20327

Sure. As a non-theist, I was just goofing around with the concept of "there is no got but God" being logically equivalent to the proposition:

(∀ god) (god == God)

which is trivially satisfied if there are no gods. Over-dry humor, I know.

That's a good one. In other words, if you state "I declare there is no deity worthy of worship but Allah", you leave it entirely possible that Allah itself doesn't exist. The follow up that "Mohammed is his messenger" is not a contradiction either.

Which definition is that, exactly?

So the claim then is that there is greater diversity in thought about whether or not a deity exists among an ethnic group than among a group for which membership is contingent on thinking a deity exists? I don't think that conveys very much information, except that there is not perfect uniformity among ethnic Jews on the issue.

Fortunately, since the article is about the 13th and 14th centuries, it's doing nothing of the sort.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14088376 and marked it off-topic.

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