Why Fallacies are False will be on hiatus until April 27

Fact-Checking the Torah -- just in time

Just in time for Passover, Sefaria has almost completed its vowelled edition of Babylonian Talmud, with complete English translation. Its vowelling is based on the famous Steinsaltz edition.

https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud

Everything is done and posted except Menachot and Chullin, and those will probably be posted sometime between now and Shavuot, Z'man Matan Toratenu. Chazaq!

If you ever wanted to read Talmud, let me manage your expectations. You can't just run your eyes over the translation and profit from it, any more than you could run your eyes over Einstein's paper on special relativity and profit from it. You need to do a lot of advance preparation. With relativity, it's calculus and linear operators and the fundamentals of physics.

With Talmud, it's Mishnah. But even Mishnah you can't just run your eyes over, you have to study it carefully before you have half an idea of what the Gemara in Talmud is telling you.

And you won't understand Mishnah if you haven't studied Torah, or Gemara if you haven't studied the entire Tanakh. The whole Jewish Bible is background to understanding Talmud because Talmud refers to lots of places in Tanakh as examples of what the rabbis are thinking.

That's because everything in Prophets and Writings was preserved for their examples or evidence of what Torah meant. They were preserved because they agree with Torah. Don't let anybody cite that verse in Jeremiah to you; they will cite a translation and the translation is wrong.

And as I have said over and over on this thread and as I also said on my Fallacies thread, every translation is a strawman argument.

So you will not understand Tanakh if you don't know Biblical Hebrew, which I also have a thread on.

I had to go through Torah twenty times before I memorized all the catchphrases that Mishnah uses, showing that they are not just words, they are legal terminology. 

I had to go through Mishnah ten times before I could appreciate the Gemara -- and Mishnaic Hebrew is different from Biblical Hebrew. And then there are other things.

For one, Mishnah and Talmud are organized associatively. My guru R. Bechhoffer literally said this in his recordings of lectures on Jerusalem Talmud. I have a post about it on this thread. It's one reason that just running your eyes over the translation won't help you understand Talmud. There are many digressions that come up due to an association of ideas, and when they are over the discussion will return to some earlier subject. 

For another thing, Mishnah and Talmud -- and Tanakh itself -- are all about JUDAISM. They are records of its oral tradition from before 4000 BCE to about 600 CE when the last parts of Talmud were recorded in writing. Oral traditions by nature are associative, not linear by subject the way we write things nowadays. They also reflect their own culture; trying to understand them based on some other culture is disrespectful at best and won't get you anywhere because no two cultures have enough points of similarity to interpret one in terms of the other. The same is true for language, and you need to learn Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew and Biblical and Talmudic Neo-Babylonian (once called Aramaic) or you will never get the full effect of the material.

And for a third thing, Mishnah and Talmud are legalistic material. Yes, they contain narratives and even poetry, and they refer to narratives and poetry in Tanakh. But every reference is related to Jewish law and if you know nothing about how any legal system works, you won't understand what Tanakh, Mishnah and Gemara are getting at. Also, you can't interpret Jewish law in terms of another legal system any more than you can get the most out of these works without understanding the language in which they were recorded.

The Sefaria edition of Talmud has careful citations to Tanakh and you can call up all the best commentaries from Jewish history; the most useful is probably Rashi, still the premiere explanation about what Tanakh and Talmud are getting at. (And a fellow language geek of mine.)

Yes. It's a lot of work. We all have limited time in our lives. The time I spent on Jewish studies got me two things. One is, I know when people are lying to me about what Jewish literature says. 

The other is, I'm learning how close the Talmudic rabbis were to the lives of working people and to the ecology of their environment. They knew how to destroy an ant colony. They knew that peaches and almonds were closely related. They knew that a cow's spots resemble those of her parents, centuries before Gregor Mendel's genetic experiments. They knew that people came in at least four types of gender and covered all four in their discussions. 

And they originally kept all this knowledge in their heads. It was prohibited to write Talmud down except as reminders. A messenger from one school to another could carry a note with a written version of a discussion, to get the opinions of people who weren't there at the time and might have something to contribute. What went into the ark of the covenant could have been just the Ten Commandments, or it could have been all 613 commandments, but it stayed in the ark; the people judging legal disputes had to do it from memory. The tradition recorded in Tanakh was passed along orally until the Babylonian Captivity. When Jews stopped talking Biblical Hebrew, they realized they were losing comprehension of the material on which their legal system relied. So they wrote Torah down first, no doubt, and then Prophets, and the Writings last, with some portions in Biblical Neo-Babylonian, their current street language. 

And then they suffered persecution at the hands of Christians, forbidding them to use any scripture that wasn't in Greek or Latin. But the Hebrew version survived because Jews already lived outside the Roman Empire, or in places where the Romans would have to catch them first. And by the time the Theodosian Code came out, Theodosius had bigger problems than enforcing it, the Huns being just one example. A Papal bull intended to gut the Talmud was irrelevant almost as soon as it came out, thanks to his writ not running in Protestant countries -- and Jews already migrating to the Americas.

If you're a Jew, don't let ignoramuses lie you into ignoring your classic literature. Do the work. Feel the pride. 

Why Fallacies are False -- 22, where they fit together

Now I’m going to go back to some old information and give you a diagnostic.

When you talk about people you know, that’s gossip. The standard for gossip is that everybody in the chain changes the story a little bit. When you receive gossip, NEVER believe it unless you can get back to the first person who said it. You will be astonished at the difference between what they said and what you heard. 

1/ Gossip, like oral narratives, begins with reality and changes to suit the culture that transmits it.

2/ If it survives long enough, examples of Olrik’s Epic Laws begin to populate it.

3/ People will shape their behavior in accordance with gossip, sometimes with extreme results like the Beilis blood libel trial. Beilis was chosen as the scapegoat due to gossip, not evidence; the government manufactured all the evidence they used via forgeries, suborned perjury, and planting objects.

Urban legends have a different set of features.

1/ they spread person to person like gossip, although often the medium is email.

2/ they name a vague or false authority, if any. If the urban legend is detailed enough, you can check with the supposed authority and, 100% of the time, they debunk the legend. Either they never said anything on the subject, or they never said anything like what’s in the urban legend, or it distorts something they said, which would be our strawman argument again.

3/ an urban legend is always about some group to which the person spreading it does NOT belong. So an urban legend about people flashing their car lights, saying that they are gang members, does NOT spread among gang members but only among outsiders.

4/ all urban legends are false because their data is false or their logic is false.

The authority issue /2/ in urban legends, has an analog in oral traditions; Olrik states it specifically. He says an oral tradition is defined as a narrative or set of narratives for which you can’t turn to the originator for verification, due to the passage of time. This is not, however, a fallacious appeal to misleading authority, it is inability to validate with the originator.

So the broad characteristics of an oral tradition are these:

1/ They transmit person to person until they are put into writing. Some of them continue to transmit orally in the originating culture after being recorded.

2/ It is impossible to appeal to the originator for authentication.

3/ And this is a big difference between an urban legend and an oral tradition: an oral tradition transmits inside the culture that it expresses, and the behavior of which it shapes. When outsiders get hold of it, not being part of the transmitting culture, they always distort it.

4/ An oral tradition always contains truths, but they are disguised by changes that mold the original narrative to conform to the Epic Laws and Olrik’s other principles, or to keep the tradition relevant to the culture as it changes from within, or because details drop out over the passage of time.

The problem of translating and commenting on oral narratives from outside the culture, /3/, underlies why Jews and Muslims do not trust translations they don’t have control over, and why commentaries and interpretations of Judaism from outsiders are failures. Yes, I said it: failures.

And it’s also a problem with Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides didn’t get to teach Maaseh Breshit or Maaseh Merkavah to his student Joseph, so he wrote it down. That was problematic anyway, given what the rabbis say about teaching these subjects. What’s worse is that Maimonides told Joseph, “You’ll never get this because you won’t let me explain it face to face, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that you have to use Aristotelian teachings to understand it.”

What? Wait, what?

Aristotle didn’t know anything about Judaism. How could he explain two subjects so drenched in Jewish philosophy?

Well, the answer is that Maimonides was arguing against a group called the Mutakallim. They differed from Aristotle on fundamental points, including atomism and whether a vacuum can exist. But kalam is also inappropriate because it derives from Islamic philosophy.

My pet whipping boy, DH, has the same problem. Not only was it invented by non-Jews (don’t cite Spinoza to me, he stopped his Jewish education at age 18), it was invented by anti-Semites. It relies on translations. It incorporates fallacies. It deliberately divorces itself from Jewish culture.

You cannot “read while running” the record of any oral tradition, and hope to write anything useful about it. You have to study it in its cultural context. You can’t say anything worthwhile about it unless your claims fit back into that cultural context; this is the analog of fitting your limited clinical trial into the big picture of medical science and the world demographic. But academe has divorced oral traditions from their cultures for millennia now, as well as failing to realize they may be dealing with fallacies. I found one paper on Talmud that committed four different fallacies – and the writer now teaches at a university. I discuss it on my blog. It's an extreme example of why my view of academe is so jaundiced.

If you start by agreeing that Jewish scripture is a record of an oral tradition, you can say “Linda is X” instead of “Linda is X and Y”. When you say “oral tradition”, it means that Jewish scripture was shaped by Jewish culture to express its customs and history, as well as by the human brain being all but hard-wired to transmit material using the Epic Laws. It doesn’t matter if the original source was my proposed NE Anatolian mother culture, or the Semitic cultural subset that developed into Judaism, or the original source was Gd. The human brains, transmitting the material over the millennia, would have shaped it into what we have now. Every culture does that with its oral tradition.

Olrik’s principles mirror SWLT and expand on it. They coordinate with the 21^st century description of Biblical Hebrew in Dr. Cook’s dissertation, which blew my mind when I realized it. Dr. Cook, whose work was pipelined by academe, got his first information about Olrik from an email I sent.

Modern results in archaeology and its cross-fertilization with the Human Genome Project and Oxford Project radiocarbon studies, coordinate with what Jewish scripture says – Shem WAS Yefet’s older brother.

When disparate subjects that develop in different environments, among researchers who knew nothing of each other’s work, reinforce each other like this, you have a dose of reality.

At the end of Olrik’s book, there’s an appendix that applies his principles to the Bible. It has several problems. It’s based on a translation. It’s the work of a proponent of DH. He’s trying to preserve DH (“save the phaenomena”) and express Olrik in those terms. That fails the simplicity canon of the Test of Occam’s Razor.

As long as you use all the data that fits your dataset description, and you represent the material accurately, the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one.

And that explanation is Olrik’s principles, not DH. I’ve done the work. Part of it is on my blog. Contact me if you’re interested in the rest of the analysis.

Why Fallacies Are False -- 21, oral "grammar"

So I’m talking about Axel Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research because it describes the structure for information that transmits well in a non-literate culture. I said that it starts from an analog of the first rule in SWLT. His work is the basis for my Rule 4, the divide between orally transmitted material and what originates in writing. And I said that the “grammar” rule in SWLT has an analog in Olrik’s work. These are Olrik’s “Epic Laws”.

You probably never heard of the Epic Laws. They are a collection of 20 features common to oral narratives; they can appear in any narrative while it transmits orally within its culture.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2018/07/fact-checking-torah-olriks-epic-laws.html

While written material may have some of these features, it does not rely on them the way oral narratives do. But if you discover them, dig into the history of the written work; its roots may go back to a time when the culture transmitted its history by word of mouth. I think this is true for the Chinese Romance of Three Kingdoms, particularly the opening with several versions of Olrik’s Law of Three.

The Epic Laws show up in the African Mwindo Epic; in Sumerian and Greek myth; in the Mayan Popol Vuh; in the Mahabharata. And they are all over Torah. Every single narrative in Torah has examples of the Epic Laws, and some of the narratives are related to each other according to other principles identified by Olrik, a sort of syntax.

Olrik died in 1921, decades before we knew that humans originated in Africa. Olrik’s principles reflect something that developed with the rise of speech among humans in Africa, and spread with humanity as it migrated around the world. For as much as 500,000 years, writing did not exist. People had to teach their children about their culture orally. And the “grammar” they used in their teaching has not varied. What’s more, that grammar persisted after writing developed.

That sounds like a pretty rash statement, right? But in 2013, when I translated the transcript of the Mendel Beilis trial of 1913, I found that one of the titillating details discussed at trial used Olrik’s Law of Three. It was not an oral narrative in Olrik’s sense; it was gossip that developed in the two years between the murder and the trial. I know that, because it was not just your generic gossip about who was sleeping with whom, it precisely related to the murder case that was being tried, and it existed only among people in the part of Kiev where the murder occurred.

Do you remember back to when I said that the Beilis prosecutors had trouble with their witnesses because the witnesses could not testify to actual dates and times? Most of the witnesses called by the prosecution were either completely illiterate or preferred to get information by word of mouth. They had better things to do with their money than buy newspapers. This is a breeding ground for transmission of oral narratives, as gossip, and for information to morph in transmission, taking on the features of Olrik’s Epic Laws, which eventually showed up in trial testimony.

Showing that gossip, being orally transmitted, will have similar features to ancient oral traditions.

Showing that the Epic Laws are all but hard-wired into the human brain.

If your kids memorized some of the books you read to them, analyze them with the Epic Laws and let me know what you find. Then run a testing program. Have your kid tell the story to some other kid. The more examples of the Epic Laws you found in the book, the more accurately your child should relay the story. After multiple retellings to the second child, have that child repeat it to a third. Record all the retellings: you’ll find increasing divergence from the original text. If the Epic Laws really are hard-wired into the human brain, they should emerge more strongly as your test proceeds.

Go through the films you liked best. One of the reasons films are usually different from the book, is that film uses the Epic Laws. Unconsciously, of course, since nobody in Hollywood could read Olrik’s book until 1992. But scriptwriters have usually been voluminous readers, and would have copied the features of the books they liked best. I know that Burt Lancaster who, as I said, read thousands of books in his life, had a knack for picking scripts that had examples of Olrik’s principles, case in point being Lawman. I wrote up an appreciation of his work in which I talk about this.

Until about 1800 CE, the vast majority of the world’s population did not read, even if their culture had a system of writing. Every culture has a subset of population that doesn’t read or prefers to get their information by word of mouth. In those subsets, information morphs according to Olrik’s laws, especially the part about transmission BECAUSE of exciting or titillating content. That’s how you get eyeballs and eardrums. That’s why MSM is morphing into infotainment.

And Fox got there first. The fact that MAGA lives and breathes Fox, shows you that its style suits their preference for oral transmission. They prefer exciting oral communications to boring written facts. And as part of a cultural subset, they reject external narratives. You can’t change their minds without one-on-one discussions that get them out of their subculture – at least while you’re talking to them. This resistance to change is a fact of human nature, and results in cult deprogramming reversing itself – meaning that when a MAGA exits a discussion with you and goes back to their comfort zone, they’ll forget everything about which you convinced them to agree with you.

Now I will make an even more outrageous statement. Political change happens because even if the government tries to put across a true message, there is a mass among the body politic who do not get the message because it doesn’t have the features of the oral transmissions in their subset of the culture. The information content differs, or the format does not use the Epic Laws. String together enough of these subsets who prefer oral to written transmissions, and you lose elections or have a revolution. If there’s chaos going on in the world right now, it’s because people resist information that doesn’t match their preferences for content and format.

And so one Danish professor, about whose work hardly anybody knows, can diagnose and explain some of the biggest events in history.

Why Fallacies are False -- 20, the subculture divide

It's not enough to talk about MAGA in terms of people who can't tell when they're dealing with misleading authority. Now a bunch of things come together that I talked about before, including MAGA as a subculture. This post talks about traditions of a cultural subset, using a field of study you probably know nothing about. This is my fourth issue for SWLT which I mentioned a long time ago.

The fourth issue is the larger context of communication: whether it originated in oral transmission or in writing. At the start of the 20th century a Danish researcher teased out the structure of ancient oral traditions, and it turns out to apply worldwide, including the Jewish Bible, Mahabharata, Popol Vuh, Mwindo Epic, and folk tales. (I can’t speak for its applicability to Christian scripture because I haven’t studied it. One of y’all now has a project – that requires you to learn koine Greek so you’re not working with strawman arguments like translations.)

Axel Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research identifies:

a/ that the structure of orally transmitted material is so different from what originates in writing, you can tell it at a glance.

b/ People who invent material in writing, never use this structure. Before Olrik, nobody knew of the difference, because they didn’t study things like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Those were for the nursery and nobody who wanted to be taken seriously studied them.

c/ Oral narratives may be recorded in writing but on the contrary, written works do not survive intact as oral transmissions. You’re going to say what about kids’ books, but wait a couple of posts.

Olrik begins from an analog of the first rule of SWLT: oral narratives, like words, arise as an expression of a culture. They document its customs or history as narratives.

It’s like gossip arising in a group of people who are all acquainted, but it’s more: oral narratives do not transmit between groups, even if both primarily communicate orally. A narrative that is meaningful in one culture is meaningless in another. You have to be separated from your culture and immersed in another, to start caring about its narratives. That’s why “we’d all love to see the plan” for changing MAGA and why it means separating families – to get the kids out of the cultural subset that teaches them to be MAGA.

Oral narratives arose and spread in ancient cultures before writing existed (I’ll say more on this later). But ancient cultures did not swap stories. The Semitic and Indo-European cultures did not transmit material to each other. That’s not why some of their stories sound similar.

The fact that the Semites and Indo-Europeans originated in the same part of the world, and the similarity of some of their narratives, suggests that they are descendants of a common ancestral culture. This also appears in their languages; for example, Hebrew yada, "know", is cognate to Classical Greek oida, which you will find in the Iliad. The split happened after wine grapes were domesticated, around 4000 BCE; that’s why their words for “wine” are cognates. There are other cognates, most notably words for “three”. (Remember that number.)

The same is true for Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch. They’re both available free online, as I found in 2014. I already did the heavy lifting for you by studying both.

1/ SP, as I call it, has 100% of the same narratives as JT. That tells you they are descended from a common ancestor.

2/ They have 90% of the same wording, a diagnostic of the split.

3/ 80% of Dr. John Cook’s specialized Biblical Hebrew grammar, that is in JT, is also in SP. The differences reflect developments since at least 600 CE. (See my thread on 21st century Biblical Hebrew.)

I have a detailed book about SP which I have boiled down to about 40 pages if you’re interested.

The stories that Semites and Indo-Europeans both have versions of, did not arise in Lola’s hunter/gatherer culture, nor would Lola pick up those stories and transmit them in her own culture. She might tell one around the campfire, and people might say “uh-huh” and then curl up for the night, but it’s hardly likely they would ask Lola to tell it again. They had their own oral narratives expressing their own culture; they weren’t interested in stories people were telling ten thousand miles away dealing with wine, which was a complete mystery to them.

Lola would tell stories that her ancestors brought with them. And Olrik says they would have morphed over the thousands of years between that migration and Lola’s lifetime. All oral narratives morph, the same as gossip morphs. Oral narratives start out expressing some cultural or historical reality, they survive as long as the culture still values the history or observes the cultural traits, and when that changes, people stop telling those stories.

What’s the key that a narrative originated orally? The “grammar”, which I will talk about next week.

If you don’t care about the “grammar”, you can skip a week.

21st Century Classical Greek -- some days you eat the bear

It's amazing what you find on the internet, especially Internet Archive, and how a little digging can reinforce a hypothesis that may seem somewhat gaga.

I was rewriting a summary of my book The Real Difference, comparing Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch and slamming ben Hayyim's self-contradictory and often senseless "grammar" of Samaritan Hebrew. I had a sentence about how northeast Anatolian languages have gutturals -- Semitic, Indo-European, and Indo-Iranian -- except for Latin, which seems to have more of a relationship to Tocharian than to the other languages.

And I referred to the Chechen language. Later in the paper, I got into verb morphology and the similarities between the Anatolian language families. And I thought, what about Chechen, a language of the true Caucasus.

Internet Archive has this.

https://archive.org/details/370682499-chechen-grammar-original

When I got to the verb morphology, I found -- how exciting! -- that it tracked closely with my verb paradigms for Classical Greek that threw out the old tense structure entirely in favor of aspect. 

Also, Chechen is an ergative language, and I showed on this blog how the "aor.2" verbs show up in ergative structures in Classical Greek. What's more, Chechen has a morphology with the same function as the certainty epistemic in Biblical Hebrew, and another that has the same function as my Classical Greek oblique.

The Semites and Chechens share the J1 and J2 Neolithic Y-chromosome haplogroups but the Semites belong to an older clade, suggesting that the Chechens have a relationship to the Minoans while the Greeks have that Siberian influence found in the Mycenaeans. 

So it's time to shred the old grammars and dig back into the Anatolian languages. I don't support the Nostratic macrofamily concept, I'm sticking to Anatolia and the Caucasus. But I feel my Greek studies sit on firmer ground.

Summary:

1. Verbs

2. More on verbs

3. Verb definitions

4.  Gerundives

5.  Imperatives

6.  Negatives

7.  Conditionals

8.  Syntax particles

9.  The particle an

10. Nouns

11. Adverbial equative

12. Syntax 1

13. Syntax 2

14. Ergatives

15. Concepts that are dead or ought to be

DIY -- GREAT eggless recipes

WE NEED OUR COMFORT FOOD, even though eggs are almost worth their weight in gold (even at $3,000 per troy ounce).  I've been posting these one at a time but here's a whole set. Some are also gluten free or dairy free.

1. WWII eggless cakes were developed for rationing. Use these recipes for muffins. Change out the raisins for other smallfruit or chopped cherries, figs or dates.

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup water

1 cup raisins

2 tablespoons oil or 2 tablespoons margarine

1 teaspoon cinnamon, ground

1⁄2 teaspoon clove, ground

1 1⁄2 cups flour

1⁄2 teaspoon salt

1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder

1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda

1⁄2 cup walnuts, chopped

1.               Place the brown sugar, water, raisins, oil, cinnamon, and cloves in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil.

2.               Cook gently for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and let cool until the mixture is comfortably warm to your finger.

3.               While the mixture is cooling, preheat the oven to 350F.

4.               Grease and flour an 8x4-inch baking pan.

5.               Sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.

6.               Add them to the cooled sugar mixture, beating until no drifts of flour are visible and the batter is smooth.

7.               Stir in the walnuts.

8.               Spread evenly in the baking pan and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a broomstraw inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.

9.               Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn onto a rack to cool completely.

Notes: For a good glaze, even if it is a 90's addition, save back a bit of the hot spiced water.

Mix with confectioner's sugar, a drop of vanilla, and a pinch salt. Glaze the cake while hot.

 Chocolate World War II Cake

 1 1/2 cups (225g) flour

1 cup (240mL) water

3/4 cup (150g) sugar

1/3 cup (80mL) oil

1/4 cup (20g) cocoa powder

1 tbs (15mL) vinegar

1 tsp (6g) baking soda

1 tsp (5mL) vanilla (optional)

1/2 tsp (2.5g) salt

 

For the Glaze

1 cup (125g) powdered sugar

1 tbs (5g) cocoa powder

1 – 3 tbs (15-45mL) water

 

1.               Preheat oven to 350F (180C.)

2.               Grease and line the bottom of a 9" (23cm) round cake pan and set aside.

3.               Combine flour, sugar cocoa, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. Sit aside.

4.               In a large bowl, combine water, oil, vanilla and vinegar. Add flour mixture, stirring until there are no lumps, about 30 seconds. Pour immediately into cake pan.

5.               Bake 25 – 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Center should read between 200F (93C) and 210F (99C.)

6.               Cool completely in pan before icing.

7.               For the Glaze

8.               In a small bowl, combine powdered sugar and cocoa. Mix in water, one teaspoon at a time, until you get a thin glaze. Pour over the still warm cake slowly and allow it to seep into the crumb.

9.               Let icing harden 10 – 15 minutes before serving.

 NOTES

You can substitute self-rising flour.  If you do, use equal amounts flour and omit both the baking soda.  It will change the final texture slightly.

If you do not have vinegar, lemon juice can be used or it can be left out.  The rise will be less if left out, more like a thin brownie.

The water can be replaced with coffee to bring out the flavor of the chocolate.

Flour rationing cake

3/4 c. molasses

1/4 c. oil

1 1/4 c. flour

1 c. corn flour (process in blender until fine)

1 c. milk

4 tsp. baking powder

2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. cloves

1 c. raisins

Beat molasses and oil. Add flours and milk, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, and cloves, stirring just until smooth. Add raisins. Pour into loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 60 minutes.

Eggless date cake; uses milk.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/228297/eggless-date-cake/

A collection of cakes with the eggs taken out:

https://www.allrecipes.com/egg-free-cake-recipes-8681357

2. Pasta and noodles for soup. Somebody on Bluesky said they have been doing this for a while.

https://oldworldgardenfarms.com/2023/01/24/homemade-egg-free-noodles/

3. Kugel traditionally uses noodles. Here's a potato kugel that is also gluten and dairy free and you can add smallfruit or grated apples or pears or chopped nuts to it.

Eggless Potato Kugel: just leave the eggs out of this recipe. 

https://toriavey.com/wprm_print/passover-potato-kugel

4. Fried chicken usually uses a buttermilk batter. That's not kosher. For that and chicken nuggets, I used spiced egg to hold the matzo meal coating. Instead of that, use the batter for the fish in a fish and chips recipe, but use a fancy spice mix like chili powder, curry powder, garam masala, Montreal, Caribbean jerk, or "KFC" 11 spices. To make this gluten free, use rice or potato flour instead of wheat flour. You can also substitute potato STARCH for the flour.

https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-are-kfcs-11-herbs-and-spices/

5. I love cauliflower in a spiced crust. Use a pakora batter, which you make thick for cauliflower or zucchini, and thin for spinach. It's already gluten-free because it uses chickpea flour, and it's dairy-free.

6. Cookies. Swap out butter and use yogurt, which you can make chain batches of with a dehydrator to cure it overnight.

https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/eggless-cookie-recipes/

6. In other posts, I pointed out that you can't make challah without eggs. You can use one less egg per batch. 

7. Eggplant parmigiana. You can just layer the raw eggplant, cheese and sauce in your baking pan; you can also use zucchini this way. You can also drizzle the vegetable with oil and roast at 425 F for 15 minutes, then layer and bake. MUCH easier, much less fat because you don't fry the vegetables first, and still delicious. Gluten free.

8. Stuffed vegetables, aka farcis. I made stuffed green peppers the other day and the recipe wanted you to bind the filling with egg. I left out the egg and it tasted great, plus it was gluten free and dairy free. Here's a stuffed eggplant recipe that doesn't call for egg in the first place. If you can find a nice BIG zucchini, this works for that, too.

https://www.recipetineats.com/moroccan-baked-eggplant-with-beef/

9. Breakfast. Pancakes -- replace the egg(s) with 1/4 cup banana or apple, or with 1 tablespoon each of oil and water. Also replace any milk with yogurt. Otherwise -- fruit salad, oatmeal (get the old fashioned because you can't make cookies with the instant) and other hot cereals, scrapple as a side for your ham or corned beef, yogurt with granola and chopped nuts that you aren't allergic to.

We will get through this. In the meantime, we deserve good food.