March 31, 2013 There’s Only One Reason To Go To Work – To Help God’s Kids Luke Ford No sacred cows.

There’s Only One Reason To Go To Work – To Help God’s Kids

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Luke Ford

Awesome video: “I am the seat and the source of my separation and conflict. My ego exists to justify itself. Chuck Chamberlain hit me with something. I was getting ready to quit the ninth job I had sober because of them. He said to me, ‘Kid, you have it all wrong. How much you’re appreciated or paid and how much more work you do than anyone else, all that stuff is none of your business. You’ve got to go to work for one reason only — to help God’s kids. If you go to work to be of service and to forget yourself and to ask God to help you to put you aside, then things will change.'”

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Rabbi Prof. Marc Shapiro on the need for Kashrut Organizations

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Luke Ford

Date: 11/11/2003 8:02:00 AM
Subject: Clarification

Message: I have noticed that many people don’t understand the basic shitah of this website. With your permission, let me clarify something.
Rav Henkin, who together with R. Moshe Feinstein was the leading halakhic authority in the U.S. in the 1950′s and 1960′s, is quoted as saying that the entire basis for the existence of the kashrut organizations is the view of the rashba. What did he mean by this?
There is a machloket rishonim and the rashba holds that if a non-Jew, in the normal process of making a food product, adds some non-kosher element, even a very small percentage, then it is not batel. Bittul only works when it falls in by accident. This view is known by those who study Yoreh Deah since it is quoted in the Beit Yosef.
If you look at any of the standard Yoreh Deah books you will find, however, that the halakhah is not in accordance with this rashba. Rather, any time the goy puts a small amount of treif into the food it is batel, even if it is intentional on his part. There is a famous Noda Biyehudah that discusses this at length. See Mahadura Tinyana, Yoreh Deah no. 56 where he permits a drink that was produced using treif meat in the production but the amount of meat was very small and could not be tasted. He states that it is permissible. There is a Rama who has a teshuvah and states similarly. (I am sure if you describe the Noda Biyehudah’s case to people, even learned ones, and say that there is a contemporary rabbi who permits this, they will mockingly refer to him as a Conservative or Reform rabbi since in their mind no “real” rabbi who knows halakhah could ever permit something that has non-kosher meat in it!)

So now we can understand R. Henkin’s comment. If you go to the kashrut organizations’ websites and speak to them they will tell you that you need the hashgachah because sometimes the runs are not properly cleaned between kosher and non-kosher or milk and meat and some slight amounts of the objectionable ingredient might remain (yet here even rashba will agree that it’s not a problem!), or they tell you about release agents or that small amounts of ingredients are not listed on the label, etc. etc. The rashba indeed holds that these last cases are problematic, but the halakhah is not in accordance with the rashba. The hashgachot have raised the bar and are now operating at a chumra level here as well as in other areas. But the average person has no idea about any of this and has never even heard about the concept of bittul. Even if you explain the concept of bittul to him, his response will be: “OK maybe this is the strict halakhah, but I’m not starving so why should I eat something that we had to rely on bittul for. A person who cares about kashrut won’t eat something that has even the smallest amount of treif.” Since people haven’t been educated about the halakhot, they assume that bittul is a kula to be used in emergency situations, and it is not their fault that they believe this, since this is the view that the kashrut organization hold and publicize.
There is a good article waiting to be written about how in the last thirty years we went from halakhah to chumra when it comes to food issues.

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Love And Loss

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Luke Ford

* I usually see a gulf between the stability of those women I date who come from solid homes and those who come from broken homes. Women with troubled relationships with their father in particular are usually a horror to date while women who love their dad are usually a delight. This one ex-GF of mine, her parents started out Orthodox, became swingers when she was about five and walked in on her mom in bed with a stranger, and then the parents divorced and split custody. So my ex-GF grew up in tiny apartments having to listen through thin walls to her father bang an endless variety of amazon blondes. She could never see me for who I was, but only for who I represented to her.

* When you bond with someone, you put yourself at risk of having your heart handed to you on a platter. (Stephan Poulter) Because that frightens me so much, I’ve long sought controllable intimacy (an oxymoron), hoping that if I could become a famous writer, I could have intimacy on my own terms with less risk of heartbreak. So I stay home on Saturday nights and FB instead of date.

* Every boy’s first love is his mother (and vice versa for girls) and the way that relationship played out is going to shape all of your future loves. For instance, if you found your mother untrustworthy, you’re likely to view all women as untrustworthy. If you found your mom manipulative or cold, you’re likely to view all women the same way. If your mom was attuned to you, you’re going to expect that from the woman you love.

* Most of us have just three or four emotions that dominate our inner landscape. If you’re habitually angry or depressed, you most likely have hidden hurts in your attachment to your mother (you felt ignored, put down, etc). Through psycho-therapy, what is hidden can become revealed and healed.

* Single women (under 40) I know have an insatiable appetite to be desired and to have attention paid to them, but 99% of the time, they have utter contempt for those men who want them. This comes to mind because a buddy today told a woman, “All these guys at shul are asking about you,” and then she pushed him for names. And he responded accurately, “You’re not interested in any of them.” But she kept pressing him for names because she wanted to build herself up, even though she would never go out with any of these guys and had turned them all down right quick.

* Which types of people are my favorite? Those with good values, clarity and courage (the rarest of the virtues).

* Shunning is a big part of Jewish life but it’s a trait that’s foreign to me. I’m on friendly terms with child molesters and pornographers and all types. I do make judgments about people and I am careful about who I allow to get close to me (I’m never wrong so far in those I’ve chosen to trust), but I can’t for the life of me think of anyone I shun. As a writer, I like observing all of life.

* Wherever you’re at in life, you can always increase your mastery and that will always make you feel better and live better. When I was bed-ridden by illness (from age 21-27) and unable to do anything but lie there most of the time, I worked on abstaining from complaints, developing my character, and finding meaning in suffering.

* I had several girlfriends who poured on the contempt for me because I liked mainstream pop such as Barry Manilow, ABBA, Air Supply etc and not so much alternative rock. They made CDs to try to convert me. I can get someone who appreciates classical music having contempt for someone stuck in pop but to have contempt for someone on the basis of taste in pop music (if you like Justin Timberlake, however, please explain yourself)?

* Everybody who believes in his religion finds other religions goofy much of the time. I would never treat someone badly on the basis of his religion/race/orientation etc, but I love sitting in shul and making fun of other religions (and other approaches in my own religion), orientations, race, etc. The Orthodox shul is one of the last bastions of being un-PC (along with strip clubs).

* About 10% of the time when I’ve broken up with a woman, she’s set about doing everything she can to hurt me (including a lot of nasty things inconceivable to guys because we’re used to competition and playing by the rules, things like faxing your work to try to get you fired, writing your parents/Dennis Prager to inflict maximum pain on them, etc). I wonder what warning signs I missed? I didn’t understand love addiction back then.

* My greatest fear is abandonment. All significant rejections (ejections, firings, break-ups) feel similar to me because they all bring up my unresolved issues from earliest childhood. I feel driven to cling and to suck the life out of those I love. I suck furiously at the breast that will run dry any minute. When I moved to LA in 1994, I had the delusion for the first few months of popularity that there would be plenty. I sucked the city dry for a year until people got to know me.

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Believe The RCC?

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Luke Ford

Y. emails: Luke,

If you don’t expect us to believe the RCC’s narrative, whose should we believe? Rabbi Kligfield’s of Temple Beth Am who was quoted in this morning’s LA Times as implying that this is all about “power plays” by rabbinic bodies? Kligfield is encouraging his congregants to keep buying at Doheny “Kosher”. But he never mentioned that one of the store’s key employees is the son-in-law of Beth Am’s Rabbi Emeritus.

You see, everyone has an agenda. Make money, standardize kashrut standards, protect friends and family, you name it.

Until I hear a more believable story, this is all about trust. I cannot trust a vendor who violates standards that he represents himself to be upholding. And although they can be heavy-handed, I trust the RCC.

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Do You Want Turbulence?

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Luke Ford

On his radio show Mar. 28, Dennis Prager said: “I comport with the conservative love of non-turbulence. I am not bored by my society enjoying itself, by my society continuing with obvious fixes where things are broken, but I don’t want turbulence. In private life, every one of you knows a drama queen, people who thrive on emotional turbulence. The left thrives on social turbulence. It comports with every poll done — people on the left are less happy than people on the right. When you are not happy, you think the world around you is awry and you thrive on turbulence. This feeds the left-wing love of change and drama and radical transformation because what exists now doesn’t make them happy.”

“This notion that government should get out of the marriage business is tough for me to understand. So then nobody is married or everybody is married? What does that mean in terms of divorce and child custody and alimony? How is that determined? Children will be able to say my parents are married about any group? So polygamy is marriage? What happens to atheists? They don’t get to marry. If society does not decide marriage, then there is no such thing as marriage because everyone makes up his own definition. Why is that libertarian as opposed to anarchic? For libertarians who believe in that, do you have any antecedents in terms of the founders?”

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Statement from the Rabbinical Council of California on Doheny Meats

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Luke Ford

I am curious who believes the RCC here?

Here is their statement:

On Sunday March 24th, the RCC received video footage alleging kashrus violations at Doheny Kosher Meats, a store under its supervision. Within hours of receiving the information including time stamped surveillance videos, leading members of the Vaad Hakashrus met and,
assessing the evidence of policy violations as compelling, ordered the immediate removal of our certification. Later that afternoon, a large group of community Rabbis and lay leaders met to review the known facts and to question the owner of Doheny. After initially denying any wrongdoing, he admitted to bringing unauthorized product to the store on two to three occasions.
After discussion, the meeting’s participants unanimously confirmed the decision to remove the RCC certification from Doheny Kosher Meats. In implementing that decision and determining to immediately publicize the RCC’s decision before Pesach, the Rabbinical authorities for the RCC consulted with Rav Yisroel Belsky, Rosh Yeshiva of Torah V’Daas and Posek for the OU Kashrut Division, and a nationally recognized kashrus authority. At 8pm Pacific time, Rabbi Belsky issued his ruling, based on the application of normative Halachic principles, permitting the use of products purchased from the store prior to the suspension of the certification. This ruling was immediately disseminated to the public.
In recent days, many allegations have surfaced which are factually incorrect. Over past years, the RCC received complaints from competitors of Doheny accusing Doheny of kashrus violations. The RCC investigated each and every one of these complaints at the time they were made but found no evidence of wrongdoing. To the contrary, each investigation showed Doheny in full compliance. In addition to asking these competitors to provide evidence of violations, the RCC took a number of steps to augment the security systems in place, in addition
to the Mashgiach Temidi (full-time kosher supervisor) at Doheny.
Among them:
 We implemented a system whereby all boxes of meat and poultry from Doheny were numbered and logged by the on-site Mashgiach.
 We also painstakingly reviewed invoices of product received and sold.
 Only the Mashgiach had keys to the establishment, which were Mul-T-Lock industrial keys that cannot be duplicated.
There are allegations that Doheny possessed fraudulent Agri labels which we are currently investigating. The serious lapse we did discover in the RCC supervisory system was the human error of an otherwise dedicated Mashgiach who absented himself for prayers, contrary to explicit protocols. The Mashgiach has been suspended and we are exploring ways to ensure this mistake does not repeat itself.
The RCC deeply regrets this circumvention of its kashrus standards. Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated systems can be breeched. The RCC’s dedicated Kashrus staff and full Rabbinic membership share the public’s outrage and sense of betrayal that a vendor schemed
to subvert our policies and abused the community’s trust. Legal action is now being considered.
The RCC, a non-profit community kashrus organization, will continue to work diligently to provide our community with quality kashrus.

Pico-Robertson’s three main Modern Orthodox rabbis email their membership:

Dear friends,
A few important updates concerning the situation that has unfolded over the last few days at Doheny Kosher meats:
(1) The owner of Doheny Kosher Meats, by his own admission, brought unauthorized boxes of product into his store on at least a few occasions during the month of March. The video evidence of this has been played repeatedly on KTLA.
(2) He did so while the mashgiach left his post to daven in the morning. This was a serious breach of his instructions, and the RCC is in the process of examining its procedures to make sure that lapses such as these do not occur again in any of their establishments.
(3) What was the basis for the “3:00 Sunday cutoff?” Standard halachik reasoning dictates that any product that was purchased prior to our knowing about the unauthorized boxes, is permissible for use. Since the majority of the product in the store was definitely kosher, any given item that we may have purchased can halachikly be assumed
to have been from the majority. But once we knew that the unauthorized product was there, all of the stock took on the halachik status of “safek”, i.e. being of doubtful kashrut, and therefore cannot be used.
(4) We agree with the RCC’s decision to remove its certification. Though the mashgiach should not have abandoned his post, the culprit here is the owner who violated all of our trust by doing what he did.
(5) We believe that he ought not be rewarded for this betrayal through another mashgiach stepping in.
(6) The allegations that have been made concerning Doheny Kosher Meats over the last couple of years derive almost entirely from Doheny’s competitors, and more to the point, were each investigated appropriately by the RCC at the time, and none were found to hold up.
Please see the attached statement released by the RCC which elaborates further upon these points.
This is a regrettable event in our community’s history. We hope that we will emerge from this situation as a more committed and stronger community.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky
Rabbi Elazar Muskin
Rabbi Kalman Topp

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What Took The RCC So Long To Crack Down On Doheny Kosher Meats?

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Luke Ford

The Rabbinical Council of California (RCC) has been warned for years about the unkosher shenanigans at Doheny GKosher Meats and the RCC has always deliberately chosen to do nothing about it, just as they chose for years to ignore the unkosher shenanigans of Rabbi Aron Tendler.

Turning a blind eye to inconvenient truths is an RCC specialty.

What did the RCC get out of ignoring all evidence about the unkosher dealings at Doheny Meat? As one Orthodox rabbi told me, “They make money. They need the income to pay their salaries.”

This trick of a kosher shop labeling the less expensive non-kosher meat as kosher has been going on for centuries because the monetary rewards of cheating are so immense.

In 1997, attorney Baruch Cohen maneuvered the RCC into a make-peace meeting with LA’s top Torah scholar, Rabbi Yehuda Bukspan, who operates a competing kosher certification program. The RCC has been knee-capping Rabbi Bukspan’s operation for two decades.

At this 1997, Baruch Cohen brought to the RCC evidence of non-kosher meats being brought into kosher-certified stores (including Doheny Meats) where labels stating “RCC certified” were lying around and slapped on non-kosher meat.

I contacted Baruch Cohen today and he declined to comment.

The JEWISH JOURNAL reported Mar. 27:

The Rabbinical Council of California (RCC) abruptly revoked its certification from Doheny Glatt Kosher Meats on March 24, but the RCC, Los Angeles’s leading kosher oversight agency, had first heard about the distributor’s suspicious practices years earlier.

Eric Agaki, an investigator who had been independently monitoring Doheny’s warehouse on Pico Boulevard and another location in the San Fernando Valley for the past six months, told KTLA on Sunday that he had discovered the company was selling meat as Glatt Kosher that had not been certified as such.

In an interview with The Jewish Journal on Wednesday, Agaki said that so far, he could only prove the 53-year-old company had been selling its customers meat that was kosher, but not “glatt kosher,” a higher standard.

But Agaki said that he doubted the meat allegedly repackaged and sold by Doheny was kosher by any standard.

“We think that they were packed with treyf, just regular meat,” Agaki said.

Agaki captured video and physical evidence that he said showed Doheny’s owner was reusing boxes from Agri Star Meat and Poultry, a glatt kosher meat processor, packing them with non-glatt kosher-certified meat, and then resealing them with fraudulent tape and labels that said “Aaron’s Best,” an Agri Star brand.

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Pacific Union College – A Paradise Lost

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Luke Ford

A favorite memory of mine is driving up Howell Mountain Road to Pacific Union College (PUC), listening to “Open Arms” by Journey, getting ready to fall into the open arms of my Adventist friends. I didn’t have my first non-Adventist friend until I was 15. Adventists were my people. I felt such ease with them. The world outside of the Church was a little scary, filled with meat and profanity and dancing.

So why did the drive up Howell Mountain fill me with such joy and why did the drive down fill me with such sorrow?

Pacific Union College was the first place I realized I could have a good life. That was where the most beautiful girl in the class, Cindy Anderson, left a note on my desk early in sixth grade asking, “Would you like to go with me?”

See the girls in California
I’m hoping it’s going to come true

My parents left me behind at PUC for the last six months of eighth grade so I could graduate with my class and that’s when I started to blossom. I got away from the pernicious influence of my mom and dad and learned to connect normally with people, following the examples of the Muth family (Andy was in my class and his mom was active with my school).

For a few months, I got to be a normal kid. I wasn’t saddled down by my father’s rage and my mother’s depression. I wasn’t isolated and cut off from the cool kids anymore. Somehow, away from mom and dad, I felt free to be myself. Around my parents, probably in a primitive unconscious fear of being farmed out again as I was in my first four years, I was passive, believing that all resistance was futile.

If my parents caught me chewing gum or eating between meals or drinking water or juice with my meals or eating too much peanut butter or any of a thousand different sins (any variation from my father’s practice was a sin in my home), there was hell to pay (even though my spankings stopped when we arrived in California in 1977).

If I was out for a walk with my father and I fell down, he would immediately announce to those around us, “He’s fine!” I might’ve sprained my ankle. My knee might be bleeding. I might be in agony. But my dad would be yanking me up and denying all opportunity for me to say anything. I just had to fall into line like a dutiful soldier of the lord. Away from my parents, however, I could live in reality. When I was injured, I could say I was injured. When I was in agony, I could say I was in agony. When I was hurt, I could say I was hurt. When I was lost, I could say I was lost. When I was scared, I could say I was scared. Away from my parents, life only got better.

If I was in a social situation with my dad, he had to be the center of attention. He had to be instructing people. He had to be stirring things up. He’d call it making people think. I only existed as an appendage of him. Other people only existed for dad to the extent he could instruct them and receive back from that a grandiose sense of self.

Away from my parents, I could be my own person. I could be judged on my own merits. I could compete on my own terms for attention and connection.

My final time driving up Howell Mountain Road in normal health was during Super Bowl XX on January 26, 1986. At the Muth home watching the game, I met an angel in a white track suit, Lori Winn. All the guys at her Monterey Bay Academy wanted to marry her. She was wife material. And I got the privilege of talking to her.

I was trying to get over a cold. I had just covered a Sacramento Kings basketball game the night before. My first semester at Sierra Community College had finished. I had a week off and I spent most of it on the couch at the Muth home listening to their soundtrack of Chariots of Fire. “Jerusalem” was my favorite.

I also visited my friend Andy at his dorm that week and I went to a movie in St. Helena with Lori (The Jewel of the Nile). When I drove away on Friday, when I drove down Howell Mountain listening to “Oh Sherry” by Steve Perry, I felt such keen sorrow.

The cold I battled all week at PUC turned into mono and the next three months were misery. Two years later, it felt like the mono returned but this time it never left and was eventually called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. My youth was over. Ahead of me was a conversion to Judaism and that forever changed my return experience to PUC. It was like I had married someone else.

These dreams go on when I close my eyes
Every second of the night I live another life
These dreams that sleep when it’s cold outside
Every moment I’m awake the further I’m away

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What Do I Do With My Regret?

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Luke Ford

On the one hand, I tell myself that given who I was, I couldn’t have acted differently in the past. There’s no reason to regret. In the present moment, I feel like I have free-will, but when I look over my life, it all seems fated.

Sometimes, a sense of loss overwhelms me and at those times I just give off an aura of sadness and despair. I wish there had been an intervention much earlier in my life and gotten me to psycho-therapy so I could learn new ways of relating to people, so I don’t just carry on the patterns of my parents.

Much of the time I spend thinking about the past is for the purpose of writing. So I use my regret and sadness and anger as fuel for creation.

I don’t endless replay scenes from my past unless I’m writing them up. I don’t spend much time thinking about what if. I don’t play out dream responses to situations I failed.

I write so much and so intensely as a compensation for my intimacy disorder. As a friend told me many years ago, “If you ever get healthy, you’ll write less.”

As I’ve gotten healthier over the past few years, I’ve blogged less.

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Dennis Prager’s Hair

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Luke Ford

“I am the only male I know of who’s transfixed by the different types of shampoos,” said Dennis Prager on his show Jan. 12, 2010.
On Mar. 22, 2013, a caller told Dennis, “Your hair is always so flawlessly beautiful.”
Dennis replied, “I’m blessed with my mother’s hair. It’s not a factor of shampoo. My mother had a beautiful full-head of white hair until she left us at 89 and I inherited that.”

* On his show Mar. 21, 2013, Dennis said: “I never ever think about whether God loves me and I am deeply God-centered. I have taught the Bible my whole [adult] life. All I ask is what does God want from me.”
On Mar. 22, 2013, Dennis said: “I want God judging. If God doesn’t judge, I want to be an atheist. The idea that God doesn’t judge not only doesn’t appeal to me, it is antithetical to everything I believe about God. I am more interested that God judges than that God loves. If God loves and doesn’t judge, that’s more frightening to me than God judging and not loving. I think He’s both.”
“This notion of hate the sin and love the sinner has never made that much sense to me. You wipe out whole villages and run a concentration camp and have orgies in Pyongyang while sentencing your people to eat bark, and I’m not supposed to hate you? I think you’re scum. How do you love good people if you don’t hate bad people? I’m not an air conditioner. An air conditioner blows out cool air whether it is Hitler in the room or Mother Theresa. When religion is reduced to an air conditioner, it is worse than useless.
“But we live in an age that hates only one thing — people who hate evil. People who judge are the only people who are really hated. Not people who exterminate human beings or run torture mills. Not the guy who raped an eight-year-old girl. We don’t hate him. We hate the person who hates the rapist. I hate it when religion is an accomplice to moral imbecility.”

* On Mar. 22, 2013, Dennis said: “I’m a big believer in and pracitioner of monogamy, but there a lot of sins in marriage that could be worse [than adultery]. I’d rather live with someone who had a brief affair than somebody who mistreated me every day and stayed faithful. Whenever I hear of somebody decent who had an affair, I also want to know what if anything precipitated it… Decent people who have an affair, it’s usually a symptom of something going on.”

* On March 20, 2013, Dennis said: “When I was a student, the last thing that we thought of was expressing ourselves. We believed that society, named the school, had certain principles that we conformed to or left the school or embraced those differences as adults.”

* On Mar. 20, 2013, Dennis described the ACLU “as the single most destructive organization in the United States.”
“The ACLU has more money than any school district. They just bully their way. People are just intimidated. The ACLU are left-wing bullies. Anything that represents traditional values must be destroyed.”
“Civil liberties in this country are so well protected that they have nothing left to do but to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization as we have known it. They loathe it.”

* Meeting wealthy Jews in shul on Shabbos is like meeting Catholics in Rome, but I never tire of meeting people who’ve accomplished something with their lives, whether it is wealth or knowledge or family or good deeds.

* When most people get into a relationship, they stop taking care of themselves, unconsciously expecting their new partner to take that over. This equals disaster.

* I walked around with such a swagger on Shabbos, it’s been a long time since I had a swagger.

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