"Moshav leitzim" --- where a company of people literally doing nothing else than engaging in frivolty and lightheaded, empty speech ---- The Technology Circus - Part Two!

 

What is a Moshav Leitzim? (Avodah Zarah 18b): “One who goes to a  circus or to a house of laughter

A second asifa addressing the growing impact of artificial intelligence was held Thursday night in Lakewood, drawing senior dreaming rabbinic artificial unintelligent leadership and continuing a discussion that began earlier this week.

The gathering focused on concerns surrounding AI-driven calling, texting, and content generation, and followed an initial asifah that drew dozens of leading rabbanim and roshei yeshiva, where the gedolim called for a yom taanis u’tefillah over the threats posed by AI. A date has not been set for when that will take place.

Thursday night’s meeting featured remarks from Rav Elyah Ber Wachtfogel, Rav Malkiel Kotler and Rav Yisroel Newman, who addressed both the technological and hashkafic implications of artificial intelligence.

During his remarks, Rav Yisroel Newman warned that artificial intelligence poses dangers he described as more severe than those associated with the general internet. Rav Malkiel addressed the use of AI in Torah learning, stating that Torah learned through AI-generated means would not warrant a bracha, characterizing such a bracha as a berachah levatalah.

 

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Leitzim Versus Baalei (Hashem Yisborech's) Daas..... 

 

AI can now use sleep to predict your medical future

In A Nutshell

• Stanford researchers trained an AI model on sleep recordings from 65,000+ people and found it could predict risk for 130 diseases years before diagnosis
• The system achieved 84% accuracy for predicting mortality risk and similar high accuracy for dementia, heart attack, heart failure, stroke, and other conditions
• Sleep recordings capture hidden patterns across brain activity, heart rhythms, breathing, and muscle movements that signal future health problems
• The findings suggest polysomnography may eventually become a powerful early detection tool, though current sleep studies require specialized clinical equipment

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that can predict a person’s risk of developing conditions ranging from dementia to heart failure by analyzing a single night of sleep data. The findings suggest that sleep patterns contain far more information about future health than previously recognized.

Researchers at Stanford University and collaborators trained an AI model called SleepFM on polysomnography recordings from more than 65,000 people, representing over 585,000 hours of sleep data. Polysomnography is the gold standard sleep study that records brain activity, heart rhythms, breathing patterns, and muscle movements throughout the night.

After analyzing these overnight recordings, the model identified elevated future risk for 130 medical conditions, often years before clinical diagnosis. For all-cause mortality, the system achieved a concordance index of 0.84, meaning it correctly ranked patient risk 84% of the time. Similar accuracy emerged for dementia (0.85), heart attack (0.81), heart failure (0.80), chronic kidney disease (0.79), stroke (0.78), and atrial fibrillation (0.78).

“Sleep is a fundamental biological process with broad implications for physical and mental health, yet its complex relationship with disease remains poorly understood,” the researchers wrote in their paper published in Nature Medicine.

AI Analyzes Multiple Sleep Signals Simultaneously

The study examined sleep recordings from four major research cohorts spanning ages 1 to 100 years. Traditional sleep studies focus on specific disorders like sleep apnea or measure isolated metrics. SleepFM takes a different approach by processing all physiological signals simultaneously—brain wave patterns, eye movements, heart activity, muscle tone, and breathing measurements.

The system breaks down sleep recordings into five-second segments, analyzing patterns across different signal types to identify which combinations predict future disease. For disease prediction, researchers paired Stanford sleep recordings with electronic health records containing diagnostic codes and timestamps. They only counted cases where diagnosis occurred at least seven days after the sleep study to avoid detecting existing conditions.

 

Strong Predictions Across Major Disease Categories

SleepFM demonstrated particularly strong predictive power for neurological and mental health conditions, including mild cognitive impairment and Parkinson’s disease. Among cardiovascular conditions, the system effectively predicted hypertensive heart disease and intracranial hemorrhage. Cancer-related risk prediction showed promising associations for prostate cancer, breast cancer, and skin melanomas.

The model maintained accuracy when tested on sleep recordings from 2020 onwards, a period entirely excluded from training. This validation included strong performance for death (0.83), heart failure (0.80), and dementia (0.83).

 These findings reveal that a single night’s sleep contains a wealth of information about future health across numerous conditions. Sleep patterns may serve as an early warning signal for diseases that won’t manifest for years, offering potential opportunities for earlier intervention and prevention.

MORE: https://studyfinds.org/scientists-decode-sleep-patterns-to-forecast-future-health-risks/?

AI has lots of resources with which to understand the Torah, so working on a Torah commentary gives you a better chance for an accurate translation. What makes a text a good candidate for AI translation at this stage? Why did you end up pursuing Kli Yakar?

 

Kli Yakar on Genesis

https://www.sefaria.org/Kli_Yakar_on_Genesis%2C_Introduction.1?lang=bi

To learn more about Sefaria's usage of AI, visit sefaria.org/ai.

 

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Ohrbit 

Orthodox Union launches AI-powered Torah learning app

Orthodox Union Digital Media

 

 

 

 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ou.org.torahai&hl=en_US

 

READ THE FULL Q&A

The "Elefant" In The Room --- Taking Shameless BS to Unprecedented Heights!

WATCH:From this past week’s Agudah Yerushalayim Yarchei Kallah 5786, a Q & A Panel on Contemporary Hashkafah Issues with Rav Yosef Elefant and Rav Uri Deutsch, moderated by Rabbi Yitzchok Hisiger.

 

 

 WATCH AND BE AMAZED AT THE RESPONSES:

https://www.torahanytime.com/lectures/431333

The Dangers Of The Microphone --- Asifah Regarding the Danger of Technology for the Bucherim of Bobov-45 Mesivta

Then came the microphone. And we call this progress.

 

They do not pasken.  They magnify whatever is fed into them. Wisdom and foolishness receive equal bandwidth. The tragedy is not that we possess such tools, but that we rarely pause to ask whether our words deserve amplification.

Perhaps the true takanah is not to ban microphones or smash smartphones. Perhaps it is this: before broadcasting nonsense, speak first without amplification—to ten smart Jews in a room. If your words can survive their silence, their skepticism....

ALL PHOTOS OF THIS IMPORTANT EVENT: 

https://www.boropark24.com/news/photo-gallery-asifah-regarding-the-danger-of-technology-for-the-bucherim-of-bobov-45-mesivtah

Risks of contaminated microphones:

https://lilac.works/2023/06/08/risks-of-contaminated-microphones/

 

Letter to a Catholic Friend - Rage against the creeps and the weirdos, against the thrill-seekers and the power-hungry, against those who hijack your voice but do not share your humility, your compassion, and your depth of faith and feeling

 

A warning about what is being advanced in your name

"Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time," Saint Joseph's University.

Editor’s note: I sent this note last week to a Catholic friend, who asked me to publish it. Here goes.—Liel Leibovitz 

Dear Friend,

On my desk, right next to my siddur, or prayer book, I keep a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions, a work I return to often with humility and awe. And whenever asked to give a list of things that the world needs to set it right, among my answers is always a strong Catholic Church, standing between us and barbarity. I’m writing to you, then, because I want you to flourish, and because, right now, I see you getting terribly, cynically, and, if things go very wrong, irreversibly played.

The reason I can see what’s happening to you is because it happened to me. For two decades, loud-mouth lightweights with thin connection to Judaism or Jewish life have rushed into the spotlight, declaring themselves representatives of the Jews. 

Organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace, for example, which are neither Jewish nor interested in peace, routinely declare that only by embracing Hamas can one live a truly Jewish existence. Bend the Arc, New York Jewish Agenda—there’s no shortage of groups rising to speak “as Jews” while interested in anything but the actual welfare of actual practicing Jews or, for that matter, in preserving Judaism’s real, core tenets.

And now a similar thing is happening to you. Let me show you how.

“I’m a Catholic,” Carrie Prejean Boller, the now-former member of the White House Religious Liberty Commission thundered as she took the mic in a hearing last week, “and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know.”

Boller then proceeded to grill each member of the committee whether they considered criticism of Israel to be antisemitic, showing little interest in their considered and nuanced responses and repeatedly accusing Israel of genocide. She also used her time in the limelight to defend her friend and fellow Catholic convert, Candace Owens, arguing that the popular podcaster was “not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism.”

That would be the same Owens who called Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion”; argued that Jews believed in incest and child rape “as the sacramental rites”; urged her listeners to read a text by the German antisemite August Rohling accusing the Jews of drinking Christian blood; called Judaism “the synagogue of Satan”; and claimed that the Jews were behind every great evil, from the slave trade to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

What happens if good men and women don’t take up the fight and vociferously reject the loonies in their midst? What starts with the fringes soon takes over the supposed mainstream.

You may dismiss voices like Boller’s or Owens’s as shrill. You may argue that they’re marginal. But to ignore them is a mistake. Owens was recently invited to keynote the annual gala of a growingly influential group calling itself Catholics for Catholics.

Never heard of that outfit before? That’s the point. It’s part of an astroturfing effort meant to create a new impression of American Catholicism, led by a few high-profile standard-bearers who look and sound nothing like average Catholics.

Which is why, above all of this, the actions and words of America’s most prominent Catholic today have become so important, and so troubling. I admire Vice President JD Vance’s journey, and I want to believe that he respects my people and faith as much as I respect his. But watching him in public these days sends shivers down my spine. With one morally clear statement, he could disempower this entire emerging false idol. Instead, he’s doing the opposite.

Take, for example, his recent interaction with a student at a Turning Point USA event.

“I’m a Christian man,” the student inquired, “and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might have owed Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally, or that we have to support this multi $100 billion foreign aid package to Israel to cover this, to quote Charlie Kirk, ‘Ethnic cleansing in Gaza.’ I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution [sic] of ours.”

It was a question with a very simple answer. Vance could have—and should have—explained President Trump’s Middle East policies and how they served America’s national security interests. He could have—and should have—also informed the young man that whatever he may think about Judaism, it most definitely does not advocate the persecution of Christians.

Instead, Vance went on to assure the young man that the Israelis are “not controlling the President of the United States,” and then went on to wax theological. “It’s one of the realities is that Jews do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah,” he explained. “Obviously, Christians do believe that. There are some significant theological disagreements between Christians and Jews. My attitude is, let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them.”

Really? Imagine a prominent American politician standing up and suggesting that as Catholics don’t believe what Protestants do, we ought to have a public, political conversation about whether a Catholic president, say, will obey the Vatican and open America’s borders to comply with the Pope’s teachings. 

Such a statement would be scurrilous, and recall some of the darkest moments in America’s recent history. That the Vice President would choose to center his faith not in deep, meaningful, personal, and evocative ways but as a facile and misdirected talking point is concerning. When we say we want more faith in public life, I’m not sure even the most ardently observant among us has in mind a world in which our elected officials are guided by theological urges rather than by America’s cold, hard interests.

But honestly, even that pales next to the coldest truth about Vance, which is that the most prominent American Catholic today is also the person not just shielding but promoting America’s most prominent antisemite, Tucker Carlson. There’s no need to say more here. It’s poison, and no fancy words will make it otherwise.

As I watch Vance, I can’t help but think of how he could help men like Bill Donohue, the long-time head of the Catholic League, who is in the trenches fighting the hijacking of Catholicism by high-profile charlatans and publicity-seeking frauds. (There is no shortage of these frauds by the Jews. PM)

 Donohue took to the Internet after Boller’s horror show to remind anyone who needed a reminder that for any one person—especially a recent convert to the faith who neither runs an organization nor possesses any special credentials—to claim to speak on behalf of all Catholics everywhere was, at best, “presumptuous and arrogant.” Boller, Donohue pointed out, wasn’t really interested in having a good-faith theological discussion—she was there for petty political hand-to-hand combat, which is why she arrived wearing a Palestinian flag pin.

What happens if good men and women don’t take up the fight and vociferously reject the loonies in their midst? I’ll tell you, because, again, I’ve seen it happening in my own community. What starts with the fringes soon takes over the supposed mainstream. Before you know it, you have folks like Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, making common cause with the Reverend Al Sharpton, a man who still hasn’t apologized for inciting a pogrom that claimed Jewish lives in 1991. Before you know it, you have the UJA Federation of New York, arguably the largest and most influential Jewish organization in America, writing a million dollar check to Gaza. Before you know it, you have politicians like Chuck Schumer prancing around and talking about how they’re defending the community’s interests while doing everything they can to side with its most prominent adversaries and support policies that outrightly endanger its members. Before you know it, you have people like Phylisa Wisdom being propelled from their role in some marginal, radical left-wing group to become the Jewish liaison to the mayor of New York City, home to the largest population of Jews in the U.S. In other words, before you know it, the Overton Window has shifted so far and so fast that even groups that ought to know better now feel that they have no choice but to amplify or parrot the crazies.

So, friend, beware. We American Jews have been far too slow to reject our kooks. We allowed mendacious and malicious ideologues to sow too much discord, alienate too many potential allies, and cause too much damage. We spent too much time having inane and fruitless theoretical discussions about Zionism before we wised up to the fact that the un-Jews didn’t really care about us, or Zionism, or Judaism at all—they cared only about power, their own and that of their fellow travelers. And now the un-Catholics are treating you to the same playbook.

Do not go gently into this plight. Rage against the creeps and the weirdos, against the thrill-seekers and the power-hungry, against those who hijack your voice but do not share your humility, your compassion, and your depth of faith and feeling.

I realize it’s no easy task to keep your heart and your mind both wide open and your arms outstretched to embrace your fellow believers while at the same time fiercely rejecting those who approach your community and your faith with a bad conscience. But the tension is the key challenge of our time. Rejoice and love like you have no enemies, and fight like you have no friends, and maybe you—maybe we—will find, as we always do, that our faith forever triumphs over even the gravest of challenges.

 

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/letter-catholic-friend?

 

	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more   Watch now   When the police and the army have to flee the Haredim inside Israel, few red lines remain And predictions are that in 2050, the Haredi population will be close to 25% of Israel. Forget Iran. Forget the Palestinians. If you want to know what may take this country down, just look. Daniel Gordis Feb 17   READ IN APP   If you blinked during the first few seconds of the video above, which was posted by YNet on its Facebook Reels, you missed the important part. So watch it again … What you’ll see are two women wearing white shirts, being hurried away by police from a menacing crowd in Bnai Brak, a Haredi section of greater Tel Aviv. What’s with the white shirts? That’s what many women soldiers wear under their uniforms. Photo for illustration purposes only So what happened to their uniforms? They took them off, hoping that the gathering crowd might get confused and not realize that they were the soldiers that the enraged Jews were hunting for. Why were they in danger? Because a huge, seething, menacing crowd of Haredim—who incorrectly thought the women were there to hand out draft notices—were after them. The police came and extracted the soldiers. From Bnai Brak, right near Tel Aviv. Remember when we used to extract soldiers from some Arab village that they’d mistakenly entered over the green line? No more. Now, soldiers still aren’t safe in Arab villages, but they’re not safe in Bnai Brak either. And the police? Note that they’re fleeing too. Not turning around and facing down the crowd. The police had weapons. Had this been Arabs, what would they have done? Perhaps, some people are asking, it’s time to spread that net wider? Amazingly, the police (ultimately under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir) had an explanation for the violence—the army screwed up. Main Heading (Red): The Chaos in Bnei Brak Main Headline: Tel Aviv District Commander Accuses: “The female soldiers passed through the city without coordination” Sub-headline: The Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Attacked: “We will not tolerate harm to soldiers” | The reactions to the riots The blame, they said, lay with the army (and not with the marauding Haredim), because the army should have coordinated with the police before sending soldiers into Bnai Brak. But soldiers in Israel go everywhere … to get home, to the playground with their kids at the end of the day, to the mall. What, to protect Haredi sensibilities, the IDF should get permission to enter parts of Israel? And what about when they are there to serve draft notices. Then it will be OK for the Haredim to attack them? You can only say that if you’ve given up on the idea of Israel as a sovereign state.

We have raised a generation of Haredim on a steady diet of contempt!

 

R' Moe, R' Larry, R' Curly SHLITA

There are riots in the streets of, Bnei Brak, Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. Girls in olive uniforms are spat at, cursed, called names that no daughter of Israel should ever hear. Young women who chose to serve the Jewish people—whether you agree with their choice or not—are treated as if they are Amalek. And then we pretend to be shocked.

Do not be shocked.

When you spend years teaching that the Israel Defense Forces is a spiritual abomination, when you describe it as a factory of impurity, when you speak of its soldiers as if they are lost souls beyond redemption, what do you imagine will grow from that soil? Roses? Or rage?

We have raised a generation on a steady diet of contempt.

From podiums and pulpits, certain rabbinic voices have not merely argued for the primacy of Torah study. That would be legitimate. Torah is our oxygen. But they have gone further. They have painted the IDF not as a complex national institution filled with Jews—religious, secular, traditional, Ethiopian, Russian, Moroccan—but as an enemy encampment. An alien force. A spiritual Auschwitz in olive drab.

And then we act surprised when teenage boys absorb the message.

If the army is treif incarnate, if its commanders are destroyers of souls, if its culture is described as an assault on Heaven—then a female soldier walking through, Bnei Brak and Meah Shearim is not a sister. She is a symbol. A provocation. A target.

This is not modesty. It is not tzniut. It is not yiras Shamayim.

It is a failure of leadership.

Let us speak plainly: The problem is not that Haredim cherish Torah. The problem is that some leaders have defined their entire religious identity in opposition to the State and its army. Hatred has become a boundary marker. Contempt has become a badge of purity.

And when you sanctify contempt, you should not be shocked when it erupts as violence.

No one is demanding that Haredi girls enlist. No one is forcing rabbinic leaders to endorse mixed units. The halachic debates are real and serious. But there is a vast moral chasm between arguing that military service poses spiritual risks and screaming at a nineteen-year-old girl that she is a shiksa in uniform.

The Gemara teaches that the Second Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred. Sinat chinam did not begin with fists. It began with words. With narratives. With leaders who convinced their followers that other Jews were existential threats.

Have we learned nothing?

The IDF is not a monolith of wickedness. It includes religious combat units. It includes soldiers who put on tefillin between operations. It includes officers who whisper Tehillim before entering Gaza. It includes boys from Bnei Brak who quietly enlist despite the social cost. To reduce all of that to a cartoon of impurity is not piety. It is propaganda.

And propaganda has consequences.

If a rabbi repeatedly describes the army as a machine of spiritual destruction, he cannot wash his hands when his students treat its soldiers as enemies. Words create worlds. Halachic rhetoric shapes moral reflexes. When you delegitimize an institution that defends Jewish lives, you are playing with fire in a house filled with gasoline.

Yes, there are real tensions between Haredi society and the State. Yes, there are coercive policies that feel threatening. Yes, there is cultural arrogance on all sides. But riots against female soldiers are not a defense of Torah. They are a chilul Hashem of epic proportions.

What does it say to the broader Israeli public when black-hatted Jews scream at Jewish girls in uniform? What does it do to the fragile threads holding our people together after October 7? Do you think secular Israelis distinguish between “fringe extremists” and the rabbis who have spent decades depicting the army as a spiritual plague?

Leadership means responsibility not only for what you explicitly command, but for what your words unleash.

If you tell your community that the IDF is a spiritual Nazi, do not be surprised when someone decides to resist it like one.

If you tell your followers that female soldiers embody moral collapse, do not be shocked when those followers treat them as walking affronts to Heaven.

Torah without derech eretz becomes cruelty dressed in black. Piety without responsibility becomes mob rule with a hechsher.

The tragedy is that it did not have to be this way. A rabbinic leadership secure in its faith could say: “We do not send our daughters to serve. We believe Torah study protects the nation. But those who serve are Jews. They are our brothers and sisters. You will not touch them. You will not curse them. You will treat them with dignity.”

Imagine the power of that message.

Instead, too often, we have heard a different tone—one of suspicion, delegitimization, and apocalyptic language. And now the streets reflect the sermons. You cannot cultivate hatred for decades and then feign innocence when it blooms.

If we truly fear Heaven, then we must fear the consequences of our own rhetoric. The Jewish people cannot survive endless internal wars. Not theological wars turned physical. Not in Jerusalem. Not now.

If there are riots against female soldiers, the question is not only what the boys in the streets have done. The question is what the men at the lecterns have been saying. And whether they have the courage to take responsibility.

 

 

REPUBLISHED

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-have-raised-a-generation-of-haredim-on-a-steady-diet-of-contempt/

Remarks by PM Netanyahu at the conference of presidents of major American Jewish organizations

 

More than his support for Israel, more than his empathy for the Iranian people, Donald Trump needs to stand by his word

 

Trump and His Word   When it comes to Iran, today’s meeting between Netanyahu and Trump could prove fateful. Michael Oren Feb 11   READ IN APP   In my media interviews, I am always being asked what Trump is thinking and what he is going to do about Iran. The questions are more pressing today, as Prime Minister Netanyahu holds his seventh meeting with President Trump in the United States. And each time I am asked “what is Trump thinking,” I have to answer with the three hardest words every analyst can utter, “I don’t know.” But what I do know is this: Even as Trump’s representatives, Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, negotiate with the Iranians, the United States continues to build up massive military forces in the Middle East. On a single day last week, 117 large military transports landed in the area carrying hundreds of tons of weapons, ammunition, and anti-missile systems. Another aircraft carrier, the USS H.W. Bush, will soon join the USS Lincoln in the Persian Gulf. Together with other U.S. naval and air forces, they will threaten Iran with hundreds of jet fighters, strategic bombers, and sea-to-land missiles. Immense assets will be needed not only to destroy Iranian bases and command centers but to protect U.S. ships from the thousands of rockets, drones, and suicide speedboats that the Iranians will surely unleash in retaliation for any American attack. With many in his own MAGA movement already criticizing his involvement in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Gaza as a betrayal of his promises to put “America first,” Trump cannot risk an even bigger involvement in Iran that costs American lives. So why, then, would Trump take the risk of attacking Iran? Why not cut a deal that freezes, rather than dismantles, Iran’s nuclear program, and declare it better than the deal that Obama signed in 2015? The answer stems from the one thing I know most of all. More than his support for Israel, more than his empathy for the Iranian people, Donald Trump needs to stand by his word. He publicly vowed to rescue the Iranians from their evil government and to overthrow it. Failure to do so could result in the president being labeled as a leader who draws a red line but recoils from enforcing it. Today’s meeting between Netanyahu and Trump, consequently, could prove fateful. The prime minister needs to clarify Trump’s goals in the negotiations and to learn, to the greatest degree possible, if, when, and how the U.S. will attack. He must seek assurances regarding Israel’s participation in any military operation. And if the administration’s talks with the Iranians conclude without eliminating or limiting Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities—a potentially existential danger for Israel—Netanyahu must seek American backing for unilateral Israeli action to destroy it. This article was adapted from a Hebrew version originally published in Ynet on February 10, 2026.

Historic Asifah Of The Sons Of American Admorim Regarding The “Vaad Hakehillos” Approval Seal For Technological Devices

 

 Kesh Diszcont - CODE- GROISERFERD

 

The Rabbonim have discussed the guidelines and are requesting that all Kehillah members purchase phones and MP3 devices only if they bear the approved seal of Vaad Hakehilos 

 MORE:

 https://www.boropark24.com/news/photo-gallery-historic-asifah-of-the-sons-of-american-admorim-regarding-the-vaad-hakehillos-approval-seal-for-technological-devices