Rabbi Kornreich and Octopi-fish

A follow-up to previous posts

I. Rabbi Dovid Kornreich, whose article about Israel I critiqued the other day, claimed that my post contained errors and asked me to report three corrections that he regarded as particularly important. Since, in the past, I was extremely upset that both Rabbi Meiselman and Rabbi Kornreich issued various slanderous falsehoods about me and did not retract even when these were pointed out, I decided to post Rabbi Kornreich’s points here. I will leave it to readers to decide whether his points are correct and/or substantive.

First, Rabbi Kornreich said that contrary to what I read in his LinkedIn profile, he left Toras Moshe in 2021 and is now full-time at Mir.

Second, he said that whereas I implied that his article was representing the view of Rabbi Moshe Meiselman, this was not the case; Rabbi Meiselman saw his article after it was published and disapproved of it. (I don’t know on what grounds; recall that Rabbi Meiselman sat on the dais at the notorious Satmar-led protest in Manhattan, where the speakers described Israel as an "evil regime" and spoke about how “the very existence of the state is a rebellion against God” and about how “the [Israeli] army was founded on murder and blood spilling.”)

Third, Rabbi Kornreich protested my characterization of him as justifying Arab terrorism. He compared it to pointing out that the motives of the Islamic attackers of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are easily understood, and said that this would not mean that one was justifying them murdering the cartoonists. Rabbi Kornreich argued that likewise, although he asserted in his article that the founding of the State of Israel was achieved through morally unjustifiable and violent means resulting in hundreds of thousands of people being driven out, and that the motives for Arab terrorism are therefore understandable, this does not mean that he was justifying terrorism. (Whatever one thinks of his claim here - I suppose one can argue about whether the word “justifying” means “fully justifying” or “given a degree of reasonability by saying that the motives are understandable and result from severe unjustifiable actions by the other” - I’m glad to clarify that he does not support Arab terrorism.)

II. In the previous post, I noted that a 19th century New York court ruled that whales are classified as fish, using a different definition than that employed in zoology. My friend Dr. Simon Nemtzov from the Israel Parks & Nature Authority pointed out that I didn’t have to go so far as the court in the US to find whales defined as fish, since it's in Israeli law too! Under current Israeli fishing law, marine mammals, octopi, clams, sea turtles, and even sponges are all explicitly defined as fish!

Note that this definition is even broader than that of the Torah, which would classify some of these as “chayot hayam” or “sheretz ha-mayim” rather than as dag. Sponges, which do not move in their adult form (I am slightly simplifying here), may possibly not even be classified in the Torah as living animals at all, which raises interesting kashrus questions!