[Avodah] Segulos (was Parashas Ha'mon - A Segulah for Paranassah!)

[Ben Waxman]

On 1/28/2018 6:25 PM, Prof. Levine wrote:
> We are talking about segulos and if they are a normative part of 
> Yahadus.   Here is what Rav Shimon Schwab had to say about segulos. 
> (From https://goo.gl/fZVeKm The Kishke segulah Part II)

It is very easy to accept changes made hundreds of years ago as Rav 
Doctor Haym Soloveitchik noted in his famous footnote in Rupture and 
Reconstruction.

I understand and respect people who hold on to their minhagim. However, 
if other chose to change, az mah?  This claim of "this isn't the Judaism 
that I grew up with" is true but irrelevant. No one decides for someone 
else what they should or should or shouldn't be doing.  The Yahadut that 
I teach my daughter isn't what you teach your kids and if you were to 
tell me "well that isn't what I grew up with" I'd answer "You're 
absolutely right".

On 1/28/2018 6:25 PM, Prof. Levine wrote:
 > I agree that everything does not have to remain the same.  For 
example,  there was a time when only one person at a time said Kaddish.  
Today in most shuls a number of people say Kaddish at the same time.  
This was instituted to prevent fights over who should say each Kaddish.  
I am fine with this provided that that the people saying Kaddish say it 
together.  However,  when the saying of Kaddish becomes a Bilbul with 
each person at a different place, then I do not believe that anyone has 
fulfilled his obligation to say Kaddish.

If Rabbi Schwab didn't like segulot, that is fine. However, other rabbis 
and communities did. We can talk about whether or not segulot are 
halachic, if they're effective, if their based on ideas in the Gemara, a 
whole slew of subjects. None of that means that one rav, as important as 
he may have been, gets to decide what is normative Judaism, especially 
when said rav was a leader in one community only. Central European Upper 
Middle Class Jews don't get that privilege.

Ben