Sunday is Not a Day Off!

The JPost reported, here, that support is growing to make Sunday part of the weekend. To compensate for the lost time work people will have to work longer hours during the week.

Personally, [I think] I am opposed to the idea. I don't know how long other people are working now but I already work until 7 PM. If Sunday becomes part of the weekend and the other workdays get longer that would make my day even longer. The other option is to make Friday, currently a day off for many people, into a part-time workday. Since the Sabbath starts at sundown, even people who work on Friday only work half a day. So we'd have Sunday off but work longer hours M-Th and half a day Friday. No thanks.

If the goal of this plan is to create a four day work week, I think I could support it. Lawyers probably work at least 50 hours a week now. If the plan is to cut that down, what's to be against. However, for certain fields like law, the new regime might have little to no effect. In a business like law, clients' demands directly impact the hours the lawyers work. So absent a change in clients' expectations, lawyers will have to work the same amount. Furthermore, if work must get done over the weekend, for Sabbath observant people, it will have to be done on Sunday. It is very demoralizing to be working alone in an empty office on the weekend.

For kids who are in school Sunday through Friday, if Sunday becomes part of the weekend and teachers are off then we will have one day less instruction for children but one more day for family bonding. But if the parents need to work on Sunday they will need to make child care arrangements in lieu of school. Maybe I wouldn't mind having Sunday off if the teachers didn't!

There are other implications to this plan.

Mandatory High School Education Law Expanded

Yesterday's post was about American Jews making aliyah for the cheap Jewish education they can get here in Israel. Today, I am continuing on the school theme.

The Israeli Knesset recently expanded the Mandatory Education Law so that now education is mandatory for all children through the 12th grade. Schools may not expel students unless they have a replacement education facility for them. The old law mandated education only through the 10th grade. Parents must ensure that their kids attend school and schools must provide education for all children through the 12th grade.

I must admit I don't fully understand the logic of mandating a high school education for every student. First of all, what if a student is disruptive? According to the law, the school may not expel him unless there is an alternative school for him to attend. Clearly, no other school will be willing to take him, so the first school must keep him and do what exactly? Secondly, I am generally opposed to any law, ordinance, or social pressure that expects everybody to do the exact same thing. I don't think that every child is necessarily cut out for school. Most schools involve sitting at a desk for many hours and passively receiving information. A mandatory education law assumes that every child is physically, psychologically, and emotionally prepared to do that. I, however, assume the opposite. I think that the schools as we have them today are a relatively new thing in human history and to expect every student to be capable of attending through the age 18 is asking a lot. Third, I'm not sure why the law needs to demand that parents send their kids to school. I would think that most parents don't need to be told that their kids must go to school- they want them to get an education. I think that Israel probably has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. (According to Wikipedia it's 97.1%) And what if a parent decides that his/her child is best served by leaving school and pursuing some kind of career? Shouldn't there be more room for parents to decide what is in the best interests of their children?

The answer to these questions is that presumably, the society has decided that we will all be better off if everyone has at least a high school education (assuming that all who attend high school get a high school education.) Israel has had a long history of compulsory education, see the Wikipedia entry on "Compulsory Education," here:

Although Plato's The Republic is credited with having popularized the concept of compulsory education in Western intellectual thought, every parent in Judea since Moses's Covenant with God nearly a thousand years prior was required to teach their children at least informally. Over the centuries, as cities, towns and villages developed, a class of teachers called Rabbis evolved. According to the Talmud (tractate Bava Bathra 21a) which praises a sage Joshua ben Gamla with the institution of formal Jewish education in the 1st century AD., Ben Gamla instituted schools in every town and made formal education compulsory from the age of 6 or 7.

But I still think there is a difference between the Torah's obligation to teach one's child and the mandatory high school education for every child. I think the Torah's obligation leaves more flexibility for each parent to decide what is best for his child. Which, I might add, is why I think it is very important for governments to fund different types of schools with different education methods to educate all children, who do not all learn the same way.

For a blog post on the obsolescence of public school education in America see here. For a paper entitled Mass Secondary Schooling And The State: The Role Of State Compulsion In The High School Movement, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, see here.

From US to Israel for Jewish education - Israel Jewish Scene, Ynetnews

I am officially famous.

I spoke with a reporter on the flight to Israel a few weeks ago when we made aliyah about our reasons for doing so and the article was just published in the English section of Ynet, here. The article was about people making aliyah to avoid the high cost of Jewish education in the U.S. While that wasn't our motivation, it definitely is a nice benefit.

It is interesting, however, to see the debate raging in the comments section with some people accusing the new olim of coming here to take advantage of the free tuition at the expense of the taxpayers. I think they overlook the fact that these new olim constitute a new segment of the tax base and will contribute just as much as the native citizens of Israel (who have been here, for the most part, for all of about 80 years.)

Haifa District Court Judge Refuses Testimony of Reincarnated Man

Arutz Sheva (Channel 7) reported today that in the Haifa District Court a judge ruled that the estate of the decedent, a man who attacked Israeli soldiers with an ax, could not submit the affidavit of a 7-year-old boy who the estate claimed was really the reincarnated soul of the decedent. The judge politely said that the rules of evidence in a court of law are not the same as in the religious sphere and therefore the testimony was inadmissible. The family wanted to use the boy's testimony to show that the decedent did not commit the attack in which he was subsequently killed. See story here.


Apparently, not all courts are so strict. In a law review article from the University of Nebraska (John W. Strong, Consensual Modifications of the Rules of Evidence: The Limits of Party Autonomy in an Adversary System, 80 Neb. L. Rev. 159, 162 (2001)) I found the following description of a case in Arizona (Plaintiff's Petition for Special Action, Church of Immortal Consciousness v. Superior Court, Arizona Court of Appeals, Division 2, No. 2 CA-SA 94-0118) where:

a group holding some rather unusual beliefs brought suit for defamation against the defendant for publicly saying that the members of the group were “devil worshipers.” Apparently, in an effort to prove that the tenets of the group did not include devil worshiping, the plaintiffs proposed to call the founder of the group as an expert witness on the group's beliefs. This course of action presented certain logistical problems since the proposed witness had been deceased since the 15th century, and would testify, if permitted, by speaking through one of the current leaders. Not surprisingly, the defendant did not raise any objection.

The trial judge's reaction, however, was in my opinion entirely correct. After an initial period of disbelief that the plaintiffs were offering the testimony of a spirit, the judge refused to allow such a proceeding. Unfortunately, this was not the end of the matter, as the plaintiff filed a special action in the appellate court and learned briefs were prepared on the question of whether spirits can qualify as competent witnesses, lay or expert, under the Arizona Rules of Evidence.

And, ultimately, the case cannot be said to represent a vindication of the principle of judicial rationality. Upon the return of the action to the trial court, and its trial before a different judge, the spirit was allowed to testify. Following the testimony, and the settlement of the case, one local attorney was quoted as observing, “this sends a very strange message to people.” (Whitehouse, Spirit Testimony Raises Legal Questions, Payson Arizona Roundup, July 28, 1995, at 1.)

This is reminiscent of a story in the JPost earlier in the week about the government's Anti-Witchcraft Unit in Saudi Arabia. In one case apparently, a judge accused of bribery claimed he had been bewitched and committed the acts while under a spell.

"In accordance with our Islamic tradition we believe that magic really exists," Abdullah Jaber, a political cartoonist at the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, told The Media Line. "The fact that an official body, subordinate to the Saudi Ministry of Interior, has a unit to combat sorcery proves that the government recognizes this, like Muslims worldwide."

Obviously the problem with these types of claims is that they are invariably hard to proof or disprove. A person can claim he was bewitched and who is to say differently.

This reminds me of something I read by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World Revisited:

An ethical system that is based upon a fairly realis­tic appraisal of the data of experience is likely to do more good than harm. But many ethical systems have been based upon an appraisal of experience, a view of the nature of things, that is hopelessly unrealistic. Such an ethic is likely to do more harm than good. Thus, until quite recent times, it was universally be­lieved that bad weather, diseases of cattle and sexual impotence could be, and in many cases actually were, caused by the malevolent operations of magicians. To catch and kill magicians was therefore a duty -- and this duty, moreover, had been divinely ordained in the second Book of Moses: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." The systems of ethics and law that were based upon this erroneous view of the nature of things were the cause (during the centuries, when they were taken most seriously by men in authority) of the most appall­ing evils. The orgy of spying, lynching and judicial murder, which these wrong views about magic made logical and mandatory, was not matched until our own days, when the Communist ethic, based upon erro­neous views about economics, and the Nazi ethic, based upon erroneous views about race, commanded and justified atrocities on an even greater scale. 

In Jewish law, I'm not sure this reincarnation testimony would fly. First of all, written testimony is generally not allowed in Jewish law. Second, the testimony of a male below the age of 13 is generally not accepted. Third, even religious authorities are not (generally) going to believe the testimony of a person who claims they are the re-incarnated soul of the plaintiff, at least not without some stiff cross-examination.

See after the jump for my translation of the Haifa Court's decision and the original Hebrew version.

Mandatory Vaccinations in Israel

Two days ago I wrote about the legality of mandating medical treatment against the patient's or guardian's will. That post led me to some material on mandatory vaccination laws.

The mandatory vaccination movement seems to have begun in England in 1853 when the government required every child to be vaccinated or the parents would have to pay a fine of £1. There was a strong public backlash (partly due to the fines) and a committee was formed to re-investigate the matter and the fine was repealed. In 2004, the British Medical Association announced that vaccination policies should be based purely on voluntary participation. For a book on this topic see Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 (Radical Perspectives) by Nadja Durbach.

Coming to- and Staying Illegally in- the Promised Land

In a column in the Jerusalem Post last week, Seth Frantzman wrote about Israel's new and lenient policy towards immigrants who give birth to children in Israel. The government policy required female foreign workers to leave the country with their babies within three months of giving birth. The workers would have been allowed to retain their work visas only if they returned to their home countries and then returned to Israel without their infants. The Supreme Court, in a decision written by outgoing Justice, Ayala Procaccia, decided recently that a female immigrant who gives birth here may not be deported because doing so would affect her "right to be a parent, to have a family and to support herself. The policy is incongruent with Israeli labor laws that safeguard the rights of the woman both during and after birth.” Frantzman argues that this policy is based on paternalistic or racist views because the government sees the East Asian or African foreign workers as incapable of making mature decisions. Thus when foreign workers come into this country with a visa and decide to remain illegally they are not treated as having made a conscious decision to break the law but as charity cases who need special protection. Frantzman writes that "By deporting foreign workers, their 'rights' to a family are not being harmed; they are merely being asked to be responsible adults, responsible toward the law and their children." The State has the right to set the rules for who can and cannot enter. When the State gives a woman a working visa, it a personal right, not a right that extends to the woman's whole family.

***UPDATE*** The decision from this case was on the Hebrew portion of the Dinei Yisrael exam yesterday, August 7, 2011.

Part of me has trouble with the whole notion of borders in the first place.

Judge Rules that Doctors May Amputate Girl's Hand to Save Her Life- Against Mother's Wishes

In a recent decision of the Tel Aviv Family Law Court, Judge Yehoram Shaked ruled that the Tel Aviv Medical Center could amputate the hand of a minor, A.M. against her mother's wishes in order to prevent the A.M.'s cancer from spreading to her lungs and giving her a 60-65% of survival. (Family Court Case T.A. 26442-04-11.) The Judge wrote that there were two questions before him: First, should A.M.'s hand be amputated? And second, and easier to decide, should we prefer life to death? When the second question is answered in the affirmative, it follows that A.M. must lose her hand to save her life. The mother of the girl said that she believed that prayer and fasting was the solution to A.M.'s medical crisis.

Guest Post: Introduction to Israel's National Insurance Program- Bituach Leumi

Recently, I was at an expo in Jerusalem for new olim where I met Ms.Yael Harari of Transhomation, a company that helps recent immigrants to Israel. They help navigate some of the bureaucratic hassles that can arise for anyone moving to a foreign country, including dealing with the Ministry of Interior, banks, finding a school for children, and buying a car.

Below is an article from Transhomation explaining Israel's National Insurance Program- Bituach Leumi with a few minor edits for clarity:

The National Insurance Institute, a.k.a. “Bituach Leumi” in Hebrew, is the governmental body responsible for collecting premiums and dispensing various insurance benefits to these entitled.

The mere mention of “Bituach Leumi” to an Israeli, often rewards one with a frustrated look or a heart stopping sigh on his/her part, as this is regarded one of the most complicated bureaucratic bodies in Israel.

In a series of short articles, we attempt to provide you with a basic understanding of the system, including some helpful tips.

Rationale

The rationale behind Bituach Leumi, is to provide means of subsistence to those who are unable to support themselves whether temporarily or permanently, while granting benefits and allowances to those who have accumulated rights (i.e. maternity leave payment, work injury compensation etc.).

The purpose is to attempt an equal distribution of the national income, so that those who are able to do so pay their insurance premiums in accordance to their financial ability, while at the same time Bituach Leumi transfers this income to those who are in financial need.

JPost: This Week in History: Jewish right to aliya becomes law

1950 Law of Return legally enshrined Jewish immigration as a legal right, recognizing that “Every Jew has the right to come to [Israel] as an oleh.”