Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
you can "speedrun inner work" by going straight to the final boss and forgiving your parents
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
Chazal’s legislative agenda was to maximize the normative reach of Halakhah over all areas of human life to the fullest extent possible, bounded only by the formal criteria that separate an organic development from an arbitrary innovation.
Thus, preventing a biblical transgression is commonly viewed as the motivation behind rabbinic legislation, but in truth, it serves merely as a condition of legitimacy - it establishes the formal criteria that separate an organic conceptual expansion from an arbitrary innovation, for connection to a biblical antecedent is not the law's teleological cause, but its boundary condition.
The same is true for all boundary conditions, such as not enacting a decree upon a decree, not enacting a decree that the public cannot endure, and in the exposition of the Torah too, the thirteen hermeneutical principles constitute a boundary condition of a formal structure that separates valid, organic legal derivation from mere arbitrary legislation, which then allows legislative expansion - the prime motive- with a formal boundary condition that defines legitimate development, for what distinguishes between Biblical law and Rabbinic law is nothing other than a formal legal matter.
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
On the day of the elections to the First Knesset, 77 years ago, at 5:35 in the morning, Rabbi Moshe Yekutiel Alpert got up and wrote the following words in his diary:
“Early in the morning, my wife, my brother, and I arose... After drinking coffee, we put on our Shabbat clothes in honor of this great and holy day, for ‘This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’
“After two thousand years of exile, or perhaps even longer—one could say from the six days of Creation until this very day—we had never been privileged to experience a day like this: a day when we could go to the polls to vote in a Jewish state. ‘Blessed is He who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this time.’
“My wife, my brother-in-law, and I walked to the polling station in District 10, at the Mizrachi Workers’ House on Abyssinians Street, carrying our identity cards issued by the State of Israel... With immense and overwhelming joy, we walked the short distance from our home.
“All along the way to the polling station, I walked as though I were celebrating Simchat Torah, dancing in the hakafot with a Torah scroll in my arms—for I was holding an Israeli identity card in my hand. There were no bounds to the happiness and joy I felt...
“At 6:02 a.m., voting began. With a trembling sense of holiness and sacred reverence, I handed my identity card to the chairman and entered the adjoining room, where the ballot slips of all the political parties were laid out.
“With a trembling hand and a profound feeling of holiness, I took one ballot slip and placed it inside the envelope I had received from the chairman.
“And then came the holiest moment of my life—a moment that neither my father nor my grandfather had been privileged to experience. Only I, in my own lifetime, had been blessed to witness such a moment of holiness and purity. How fortunate I am, and how blessed is my lot!
“I recited the blessing of *Shehecheyanu*—thanking God for keeping us alive and bringing us to this moment—and placed the envelope into the ballot box.
“At 6:28 a.m., we returned home, and I went to pray.
“What a great festival day!
“On this day, I opened a new chapter in our lives.”
(And thanks to my friend A.A., who read this letter to me seven years ago.)
How fortunate we are to have been granted the privilege of choosing our leaders in the only Jewish state that history has bestowed upon us.
And God, as always, will do what is good in His eyes.
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
One of the soldiers killed today while preventing a major terrorist attack was Ron Yonatan Roytman, the son of the prominent Russian psychologist Alexander Roytman from Ashkelon
This is what his father wrote on Facebook:
“Today at 7:15 my son Ron died in battle. While preventing a major terrorist attack. A star boy. A real person. The best of the best, like all my children. Like all our children. I miss you, my son. And I’m proud of you… Have an easy journey, my beloved! Farewell. You are always with me. My heart…”
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
The weird thing about walking is that you walk long enough, it becomes an unconscious urge to walk more and more, farther away. Yesterday, I probably logged 25k steps hiking and now I went outside to grab a coffee and I couldn't stop walking. My legs had movement and energy of their own so I ended up on the other side of town.
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
I've lived in the same apartment building in Tokyo for 11 years.
I know zero names.
That's normal here. We nod in the elevator. We do not speak.
Then Mike moved in on the third floor.
Ohio. Six-foot-four. Laughs like a truck starting up.
Day 1: He knocked on every door with a plate of cookies.
(In Japan, when you move in, you give your neighbors a small towel. Then you leave. Mike gave cookies. Then he stayed and talked.)
Week 1: He knew everyone's name. Including the dog's.
Then there was Mrs. Sato on the first floor.
She's 84. Her husband passed away ten years ago. She lives alone.
In 11 years, I had never heard her voice.
Every Tuesday, Mike carried her groceries up the steps. She didn't speak English. He didn't speak Japanese.
They talked anyway. Mostly about the photo of her husband by the door.
Then one morning, her curtains stayed closed.
Mike noticed.
Nobody else did. I didn't.
He knocked. No answer. He called the building manager.
She had fallen the night before. She'd been on the floor all night.
She's okay now.
But the building isn't the same.
People say good morning. The elevator has conversations.
Last month, we had our first rooftop potluck. Nobody knew what a potluck was. Mike explained it twice.
Mrs. Sato brought 40 rice balls.
And then she laughed at something Mike said.
That was the first time I ever heard her voice.
Mike moved back to Ohio this week.
On his last morning, the whole building came down to the lobby. Kids. Grandparents. The dog.
Mrs. Sato handed him a box.
Inside: one thousand paper cranes.
In Japan, you fold a thousand cranes for someone you want to protect. Her hands shake. She had been folding them since the day he found her.
Then she said the English sentence she had practiced every day for a week.
"Please... come back."
Mike was crying too hard to answer in English.
So he answered in the Japanese he had been secretly practicing.
"Kanarazu kaette kimasu."
In Japanese, that doesn't mean "I'll visit."
It's what you say when you're coming home.
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
If you’ve never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’ll change you
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
I have an older gentleman who comes into the shop about once a week. He’s very quiet, says hello, browses books for half an hour or so, finds something he likes, leaves. Today he told me that he has spent years trying to rebuild his library after his wife decided she was
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
Was recently at a bar where drinks were dynamically priced,
i.e. the more people bought a particular drink, the more expensive it became (price would then decayed over time towards a floor).
Fascinating to watch a few market mechanisms play out in a bar:
People ventured outside their usual orders in search of cheaper alternatives, often discovering new favorites in the process.
Others treated rising prices as signals of quality, happily paying premiums to try expensive drinks they’d never had before.
More experienced drinkers behaved like value investors, picking up underpriced drinks they already knew were good while everyone else chased the popular ones.
Price discovery, information leakage, herding, and utility trades all unfolded over rounds of drinks.
More bars should try this.
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
Once, as I was walking through the corner of the market square in the great city, amidst the din of commerce and trade,
I saw a man sitting among the poor, covered in rags, untying and retying his sores one by one.
Recognizing immediately that this was the King Messiah, I approached him, bowed, and said: “Peace be upon you, my master and my teacher!”
He replied to me: “Peace be upon you, son of Israel.”
I asked him: “When will the Master come? When will your Honor reveal himself and redeem Israel?”
The Messiah answered me and said:
“When X is transformed into a Beit Midrash, and scholars and students sit therein to delve into the depths of Halakha; When they gather to debate this very inquiry: According to the view that a kinyan of ma’amad sheloshtan does not require the consent of the bailee - if a creditor transfers a debt through ma’amad sheloshtan without the debtor’s consent, and the creditor subsequently waives the debt, is the debt waived or is it not waived?
On that day, and at that very hour - I shall come.”
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
Another takeaway after three years of building a company is that the returns to just "being a good person", and not acting transactionally, are higher than I expected.
There are so many transactional, boring, and at times immoral people in the tech industry that if you act with sustained warmth, authenticity, humor, and integrity, great gifts will be laid before you. White pill.
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
A cozy website concept for a small coffee shop.
Designed to give customers a warm, unique experience they’ll love and keep coming back to.
Made with Opus 5.5
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
Artists, mathematicians, intellectuals, but especially childless careerists who've poured their entire souls into their work and material achievements are about to experience a level of ego death previously reserved for religious mystics and psychedelic casualties.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Rafi Kurlansik retweeted
float i,e,R,s,k,z;vec3 q,p,d=.5-FC.rgb/r.y;for(q.z++;s=5.,q+=d*e*R/6.+1e-5,p=vec3(log(R=length(q))-t/s,acos(q.z/R)-2.,atan(q.x,q.y)-t/s),i++<1e2;z=i>70.?d/=-d,-e:exp(e)*.2,o+=(cos(vec4(1,2,3,0)-R)+k+1.)*z/1e2)for(e=p.y;s<4e2;s+=s)e+=(z=sin(dot(p/p,exp(cos(p*s)+.7))))/s,k+=z/1e2;