How Great Stories Are Made

I had an interesting experience at the chiropractor's office this afternoon. My chiropractor is a frum Jew, and has mezuzot on all of the doorposts in his office.

I had just sat down to wait for the doctor when I heard the following dialogue between a father and son:

"Dad, look there's another one! What does it say on it? Sin? Shin? Daled? What is it?
"It's something that religious Jews put on their doorposts. It has verses from the Bible in it."
"Wow! I guess he really does keep the law!"

The conversation ended there, and I poked my head out a spotted a kippa-less father walking out with his inquisitive son. I figured that they were Jewish, because the kid recognized the Hebrew letters, so I'm going to keep that assumption.

I wonder how much of a Kiddush Hashem my chiropractor realized he had created. That kid is probably going to go home and walk around his house and ask "why don't we have anything on our doorposts?" Which will lead to the parents making very uncomfortable gestures at each other ("He picked this up from you!)

They might decide to stop using my chiropractor, and eventually the kid will forget about the whole experience.

I'm guessing the kid was about 8, so fat forward 12 years. This kid is a between semesters of his Junior year and he's signed up to go on a Birthright trip to Israel. He will walk the streets of Yerushalyim, (free, because the Arabs decided to pack their bags and go home to Arabia) and notice the various mezuzot that line the doorposts and entranceway's all over the city.

He will then be reminded of this experience at the chiropractor he used to go to. He will go back to America and start asking questions. The summer following his graduation, he'll head to Israel trying to find himself, somehow wind up at Aish and start learning.

He'll realize that, as a Jew, he belongs in Israel, and will send his parents an email telling them that he's not coming back.

They will of course be outraged, ("This isn't the kind of son we raised!") and will immediately hop on a plane to come to Israel to try to knock some sense into their son.

He will convince them to take the Discovery seminar, take them on some trips all over the country, and they will eventually come around to his way of thinking.

They'll then go back to America, where they will spend the next 3 years watching their son grow on the other side of the world.

On his wedding day they will also decide that they also want to stay in Israel and make Aliyah with Nefesh B' Nefesh the following summer.

They will then somehow run into Rabbi Spiro, who right a book about their story.

This all Mashiach pending of course.

Good luck kid.

Read This if You Are A G-d Fearing Jew!

This is today's Shmirat Halashon halacha of the day. Please forward this to as many people as possible, and thank you to the Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation for all of their phenomenal work!

Talking During the Torah Reading

Unfortunately, idle conversations often begin with stories that are filled from beginning to end with loshon hora. When held in the synagogue, such conversations usually begin prior to the Torah reading, but when the reading commences, the speaker continues his narrative so that he speaks loshon hora even as the words of our holy Torah are being read. Often, this person is among the distinguished members of the congregation whose seat is at the eastern wall, so that his sin is committed in full view of everyone. In this way, one is guilty of desecrating Hashem’s Name in public, meaning, in the presence of ten Jews, a most severe form of chilul Hashem.

Note how many prohibitions this man has transgressed:

(1) The prohibition against speaking loshon hora, aside from numerous other commandments both positive and negative [which one might transgress when speaking loshon hora].

(2) The sin of “You shall not desecrate My Holy Name” (Vayikra 22:32), which, as mentioned above, was transgressed in public.

(3) He has ignored the Torah reading; even if he has missed a single verse or even a single word, his sin is enormous. For our Sages consider it a serious sin even to leave the synagogue while the Torah reading is in progress; how much more so regarding one who is present in the beis haknesses (synagogue) and whose craving for idle conversation and loshon hora causes him to ignore the word of the Living God! Often, this occurs on Shabbos, when the sin is far greater than on a weekday, as is stated in many holy works.

To all of the above is added the sin of engaging in idle conversation in the beis haknesses or beis midrash, which is a great sin as stated in Shulchan Aruch — and certainly when such conversation is in the form of loshon hora!

How Google Saved my Neshama

I've been a lifetime AOL user. Call it the curse of AOL being the first major Email an internet provider and the fact that I've been using the same email address for 12 years.

Anyways. I want to thank Yishai Fleisher for, unknowingly, opening my eyes to an extremely harmful feature that AOL provides.

Let's forget the fact that Aol NEVER WORKS! And it takes approximately 3 minutes to sign onto your screen name (and this is using the AOL website, forget the AOL program!) where you then have to spend another 10 minutes going through your list of 60 emails to weed out the junk from the stuff that's actually important.

So after spending what could have been productive time, deleting emails for Viagra and Microsoft Windows (all at low, low prices) I can finally go to the top of the inbox to read my email only to find that I have five new junk emails to delete.

How I managed 12 years of this with all my hair I have no idea.

So, now that I FINALLY have finished cleaning out my inbox, I can actually read my mail.

But this is actually not the worst part of AOL.

The worst part is actually the ads.

We learned in our E-Commerce class that most people have become immune to banner ads, and I can say that I've become one of them. But I think the fact that you don't even realize consciously what's on the screen is rather disturbing, and it took me a while to realize that AOL's banners are full of half naked women.

They run an ad continuously for a weight loss program, with a bikini-clad woman, as well an ad for an online dating service that shows a girl in her underwear looking at a webcam.

I think the fact that I didn't even REALIZE that that's what I was being bombarded with every single day shows I have some work to do.

So I emailed AOL and complained and this is the response I recieved:

"We are sorry for the inconvenience that our banner ads cost you, but we have no control over what our advertisers put in their banner space."

Translation: "We're getting too much money to care about the spiritual well being of our customers."

Well, I had been thinking about switching to Google's Gmail for some time and had been unable to make the switch until now.

The real catch was that I could still receive all of my AOL mail in my Gmail inbox. I could even send an email with my AOL screen name, all without having to actually sign onto AOL.

But there have been some additional bonuses to switching to Gmail.

First of all, I love the fact that Gmail does not use any picture ads. They take of the successful model of Google that doesn't use picture-based ads, they only use keyword based ads.

This gives me the oppurtunity to see ads that pertain to me. Take for instance an ad for Rabbi Rappaport's mohel services in the Baltimore-Washington area. Or as I wrote about last week, an ad to buy Rav Kook's sefarim online.

I even saw an ad for a dvar Torah on Friday.

Well I must say that I highly recommend Gmail, also for their unnatural ability to filter out spam, even spam that it brings over from AOL.

All in all I have to say that I am extremely happy with my decision and I hope that Gmail continues to provide the excellent product that they have.

The Last Place You'd Expect. . .

I just had the most incredible thing happen to me. I switched to Gmail this week for my email. I had been using AOL, but the ads that they post there I didn't think was good for my neshama.
One of the things I like about Gmail is that there are no picture ads, only words.
So I'm looking at my email and in the scrolling bar at the top of the page it switches to this:
תקליטור כתבי הרב קוק - www.talsys.net/?d=p/36 - חדש - גירסה 3 - מותאם לXP

It's a website for Rav Kook's sefarim!

Davening is for Talking and the Rabbi's Drash is for Sleeping. . .right?

I spent this past Shabbos in a shul (outside of Baltimore) that had a continuous murmur floating in from the back of the room throughout the entire davening. A murmur I can assure you that was not contributing to the conduciveness of the Kedusha in the room.

Then it miraculiously stopped. . . right when the Rabbi started his drash.

Then the Rabbi finished his drash and we started Mussaf. Then about the time I got up to Tekanta Shabbos, the murmer stated again, only this time it was louder. I wonder if the Kiddush Club had anything to do with it. . .

Anyways, this post was going to be a rant about talking in shul. But I have to mention some of the other things that went on during this past weekend.

You see we had traveled out of town for a family wedding (I won't tell you where because of the possibility of Lashon Hara), and lets just say that the entire situation was an educational experience.

The first thing that turned me off was obviously the lack of any fear for G-d in the Shul. I suppose there is something to be said that these people actually go to Shul on Shabbos, but no one has ever taught them how they're supposed to act there. I'm sure that when any of these people are in a meeting at work, they are not turning around and chating with the guy sitting next to them.

Just a thought.

The next big thing that turned me off this time was the wedding.

I could handle the large amount of women not dressed modestly (here's where having to wear glasses comes in handy, all you have to do is take them off). I could handle the hour long Chuppah! (My sister said that she actually enjoyed the long Chuppah "It didn't feel rushed" she said. Well, when you do everything before you actually get married, I guess there's no real rush to get to the Yichud room. Right? Just a thought). I could even handle the weird "She circles him 3 times, then he circles her 3 times, then they circle each other together." Strange, I don't remember coming across that one anywhere in a legitimate halachic authority.
I understand why they do it, they want to show that women are equal to men. Which in my case is a big mistake. Not they they shouldn't be equal to men, but they're already on a higher level than men are. Why would you want to lower them to the level of men? True, they are equalizing the sexes, but they have the whole concept backwards.

I'm not going to even talk about the mixed dancing. All I know is that is assur to have mixed dancing at weddings. Don't ask me to tell you where it says (but if anyone knows please tell me). Anyways, as soon as it started I had to leave the Shul and I went outside to throw up. I was absolutly disgusted. I then left the wedding and went back to the hotel, where I spent an hour learning Gemara, and then I watched Enterprise. At least I wasn't ruining my Neshama.

Anyways I was talking to someone about my whole 'experience' in this foreign city, I was saying the nerve of these people to stand at a Chuppah, that was going to lead to a wedding with mixed dancing, and they had the nerve to mention the Beit Hamikdash! I'm sure that's a topic that makes some people very uncomfortable, because that's what was on everyone's mind!

So the person I was talking to pointed out that all of those people are considered as if they were children captured and raised by non-Jews. It's not their fault for what they do, they have been 'captured' by the society around them. I suppose if you look at it that way, it's pretty incredible that anyone comes to Shul at all. They even had shiurim there.

A shocking realization hit me the other week when I walked of the bathroom to find my 4 year old brother playing on the floor. I said 'Hi' and he looked up at me and stared, shocked.
"What's wrong" I asked.
"You didn't say Asher Yatzar."

I suppose we're all 'captured' in some sense, all we need is a good jolt to free ourselves from the prison that we put ourselves. And I can assure you that I will be saying Aher Yatzar every single time I leave the bathroom for the rest of my life!

What Situation in Eretz Yisrael?

There is a custom here in America to say Psalm 130 after Shacharis in the morning. Last week I approached a young yeshiva buchur, who was home for the summer from his resident yeshiva, and asked him why we say this Psalm after davening.
I remember very well when this Psalm started to be said, it was back in 2000 around Rosh Hashana time, during what CNN likes to call and Intifada, what I like to call a terror war, in Israel. This was how American Jews were going to support their brothers in Israel. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but, well you know. . .
Anyways this particular buchur responded to my question, "For the situation in Eretz Yisrael."
I asked him what situation.

He didn't have an answer for me.

The yeshivish world is great, they have been the main reason that Torah is so strong in the world. But they unfortunately don't educate their students about current events or about recent history.

My chavruta and I tonight were were studying the 3rd perek (chapter) in the Book of Judges. In this perek it talks about the generations after the generation that entered Eretz Yisrael with Joshua. How those generations turned away from G-d, stopped following Torah, assimilated, and worshiped other gods. They were punished by not receiving anything from Hashem, and only after they had been enslaved again in thier own land, and called out to Hashem, were they saved.

The pasuk hints to the reason why the Bnei Yisrael, turned away from Hashem just the generation after the one that had entered Eretz Yisrael. "A new generation arose that didn't know Hashem, or the great things that He had done for Yisrael (Judges 2:10).
They didn't learn their own history. "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it," (George Santayna). If we don't know what our past is, even our past as recent as 50 years ago, we are only going to repeat the mistakes of that generation and do it over and over again. This happens throughout the entire Book of Judges, how the Jews would go through 40 "quiet" periods before they would stop learning Torah and start worshiping idols, and this pattern repeats itself for the next 400 years! It's important to know your history, I can't stress that enough. It's obvious that these generations didn't learn history otherwise it would have been impossible for them to repeat their mistakes.

We need to learn from our mistakes, so we'll know what happens when we are faced with a similar situation in the future.

The importance of the so-called "West Bank"

I hate the word 'settler.' Whenever I hear that word I get really angry! Why? Because what they call a settler, I call a true a hero of the Jewish people. There was a group of people who returned to Homesh today, one of the communities destroyed in the 2006 disengagement, and they raised a flag there.
Just a flag
Such a powerful image, the Israeli flag. I see the flag and I think about 2000 years, a people without a homeland sticking together, sharing a dream, and finally creating one. There hasn't been a case in the history of the world like this one.
These people returning to Homesh, are that symbol, a symbol that has unfortunately been lost in the recent decades as Israeli politicians start to question the creation of the State of Israel, and in the process of trying to bring peace, are actively destroying it.
What people like to call 'settlers' and 'settlements,' I like to call the residents of Biblical Israel. Because most of biblical Israel is in this 'West Bank,' as people like to call it. Hebron, the Temple Mount, Beit El, these are all places that are in land the Arabs claim as theirs. So no wonder our secular politicians are willing to give it up. They're so obsessed with trying to wipe religious Judaism off the map, they are blind to what that means politically, and to their precious secularism. The Arabs know that this land is important, in fact they know the whole land is important, that's why they want all of it.
They want it for religious purposes as well, the Koran says that once a land has been under the rule is Islam (which means 'submission,' by the way) it will always be under Islamic rule. The fact that Israel exists in a place that used to be Islamic land drives the Arabs crazy!
What I want to say is that we, as Jews, have to start accepting out religion more (make aliyah:) but in the meantime we have to realize that the only way we're ever going to win this war is going to be through Torah and Mitzvot, not through armed conflict. One day the Muslims will wake up and change, but what is going to happen if they change and we don't?