I once met this nice girl who made me laugh and I made her laugh and I thought everything was great until she said, "I think you’re funny and nice, but you’re a bit much to handle." And she left my life.
I’ve had that scenario happen to me dozens of times.
There was a girl I shared Media class with in 10th grade. She was a grade or two ahead of me. I usually felt happy and confident in the class and I talked a lot.
About a dozen years later, she recalled to a friend of mine about me, "Nobody knew what to do with his brain."
The teacher I was closest to at Placer High School was my Journalism advisor. I was the Editor of the school newspaper in my senior year and was in the school’s journalism program for three years.
He wrote in my yearbook just before I graduated in June 1984, "I’ve never had a student challenge me as much you have."
Bob emails my friends: "Advisory Team Activate! Let us all assume the lotus position and focus our healing energy on Luke’s bruised ego. Ready? ohhmmmmmm …."
Khunrum emails: “Luke still courting Jewish girls? I expected him to be engaged to the Swami’s daughter by now. Sitting on her lap? Is that some kind of Hindu love move? An obnoxious, middle aged, overweight guy sits on you while you’re trying to enjoy a…? Ommmmmmmm!”
March 1, 2009 will mark the launching of Peulat Sachir: The Ethical Labor Initiative. (Peulat Sachir is Hebrew for “the worker’s wage”.) Founded by several L.A. Orthodox rabbis in conjunction with leaders in the business and legal communities, Peulat Sachir will be inviting business owners who serve the Jewish community to commit to an Ethical Labor Covenant, in which they publicly proclaim their compliance with Federal and State laws regarding wages, anti-discrimination and harassment polices, leave and break requirements, and worker’s compensation insurance. To qualify for the Ethical Labor Covenant, business owners will allow Peulat Sachir volunteers to spot check their payroll records, and interview employees regarding policies in the workplace.
On Saturday morning February 28, Rabbi Daniel Korobkin of Kehillat Yavne Congregation, Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City, and Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David – Judea Congregation will be announcing the launch. Due to a scheduling difficulty on Feb. 28, Rabbi Steven Weil of Beth Jacob Congregation will be announcing the launch to his congregation on Saturday March 7.
For more information, contact Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky at 310-276-9269, or [email protected]
Jewish schools – in every generation, but especially in an era of openness and choices – have a crucial responsibility concurrent with their job of teaching Jewish literacy and texts. They have to also teach them to value, love and desire to participate in Jewish life (in educational jargon we say that we need to get students to develop in both the cognitive realm and the affective realm).
In his article, Shawn Zelig Aster laments the lack of preparedness that he finds in students entering his class after 12 years of day school education. Of course, many of his students have had another year (or two) of study before they descend on the Yeshiva University campus. What did they do during their year in Israel, which was, in theory, dedicated in its entirety to the study of Jewish texts? My friend and colleague Yoel Finkelman set out to study this very question, and in a research study that he tantalizingly titled "Virtual Volozhin" examined what goes on in those programs. What he found was that many of these institutions put more effort into socializing their students into the value system of the Jewish community than they do actually teaching them to study on their own. (Don’t just take my word for it. You can see Finkelman’s study early version here – DOC and final version in the book Wisdom from All My Teachers). Perhaps I should mention that in my own study on one-year Israel programs (see here), most of the questions that I asked related to issues of belief and practice – which showed marked "improvement" over the year – rather than accomplishments in text study.
MENACHEM MENDEL COMMENTS: My impression from going over my son’s humash homework is that most of it is a waste of time. Instead of teaching the kids how to read Biblical Hebrew and appreciate the Torah, they are often asked questions about trivial matters in the Biblical text which are quite difficult for a sixth grader to be interested in. Sadly, he has already decided that Humash and Navi are boring and a waste of time and I have trouble convincing him otherwise.
TZVEE POSTS: After completing our daily study of all of mishnayos, my two young sons and I then spent considerable time and effort working our way through a 300 + page book on biblical Hebrew – not considered by them boring, not a waste of time. Go figure.
STEVE BRIZEL POSTS: I think that one should remember that Kabbalas HaTorah begins with an almost emotional experience of Gilui Shechinah with almost no intellectual component and integration of what Klal Yisrael heard at Sinai, proceeds downward to the incidents of the Golden Calf and then proceeds to the acceptance of the Luchos Shniyos and then the reaffirmation of Torah as understood by Chazal in their understanding of Megilas Esther in a far greater intellecual acceptance with no public fanfare whatsoever. Halevai, that all of Jewish education and educators understood that Kabbalas HaTorah and Limud HaTorah require both an emotional and intellectual committment, as opposed to merely talking the talk or merely being textually proficient.
When I was in JSS, our second year we learned Perek Klal Gadol with R Riskin. Most of us were not yeshiva or even day school graduates. We wracked our brains over the Gemara, Rashi, Tosfos, Rambam and SA.
I will never forget when R Riskin assigned a fairly large Tosfos in Shabbos (94a s.v. R Shimon) and told us that RYBS had assigned the same Tosfos and that he had spent much of his Yamim Noraim with both his Gemara and the Machzor as he wrestled with the pshat in that Tosfos. Wrestling with that Tosfos was fundamental in obtaining the beginning of an understanding in the basic concepts of Melacha Sheino Tricha LaGufa, etc. It also inspired in many of us the beginnings of a love of learning Torah.
IMO, American MO educators would do well to emulate R Moshe Besdin ZL and his abililty to develope both textually literate and passionately committed Jews, regardless of their hashkafic label.
LA POSTS: I work in a Jewish bookstore in Los Angeles and I see that most customers want to buy the down-to-earth Dummied down Judaism books. NOT the books that would teach them to think on their own or the more intellectual books.
ABIE POSTS: About 55 years ago I applied for admission to Brooklyn TA (YU HS). For placement I was handed a gemara I had never learned and told to come back the following day and explain the sugya.
When my son was starting 8th grade, I spoke to his principal, who was going to "enrich" my son and his best friend and told him of my experience. (The principal has long since moved on to being a leader in Jewish education.) He replied that no high school could give such an exam. He explained that schools now (30 years ago) teach "frumkeit".
BEN BAYIT POSTS: While I agree with the listing of reasons in Berger’s article, I think that the situation has progressed beyond the last line. There is now no longer a lack of need for Hebrew, nor even a fear of Hebrew – it has progressed to disdain. Hebrew has become an unnecessary component of Orthodox Jewry in America. Something to be avoided. Almost treif.
Not knowing Hebrew is still the ultimate excuse for not fulfilling mitzvat yishuv haaretz – can’t work, can’t educate the kids, can’t function in society. I mean why would a high-powered lawyer or doctor or investment banker (now probably un-or underemployed) move to Israel if they can’t get a job b/c they don’t know Hebrew. Nefesh B’Nefesh has made some inroads into this negative attitude against Hebrew by promoting an Aliya model that does not require one to even learn Hebrew. THIS IS BAD!!! It deals with symptoms and not causes. American Orthodoxy is going the way of Alexandrian and Northern Mediteranean Jewry of the first millenium. Becoming analphabetic and functionally illiterate in basic Jewish texts to such a degree that it is inevitable that it won’t be able to survice – septuagint – or artscroll/ktav translations nonwithstanding. Being functionally illiterate ain Hebrew and depending on Zelig Pliskin and Hanoch Teller for spiritual sustenance can only last a generation of two in the U.S. of A.
MIKE POSTS: You guys act as if this were a modern phenomenon. Why did Ramba"m write Mishneh Torah? To provide a straightforward text for halacha to a generation whose leaders lacked the textual skills to derive halacha from the gemara. In short it was supposed to be what "Los Angeles Yid" dismisses as "own-to-earth Dummied down Judaism books."
CONCERNED POSTS: This is a wide spread problem in all segments of the Torah world. All teens today have a very short attention span, maybe due to video games, texting, etc. If a young person doesn’t grasp something immediately he says it is too hard for him and gives up. They certainly would never look anything up in a dictionary. I wonder how many could even find the word in a Hebrew dictionary even if they wanted to.
My youngest daughter is a senior in a very large high school for girls in Brooklyn. Their history class uses a simple Hebrew text about the Spanish Inquisition and life prior to it and after it. She always asks me to translate it for her so she will know the material. Once she had five classmates over and they asked me as a group to read it to them. These were average frum girls. I asked if any one of them could read it and translate it and they all said that it would "take too long".
I told them that all authors use a select number of words over and over again. If they looked up words they didn’t know in chapter one and two and re-read it a few times they would have smooth sailing for the rest of the book. I told them that I do the same thing when I start reading a new book. I had recently started the re-print of "Hatnuat Hamussar" and the first few chapters took me a long time to get through but then it became much easier.
ANON POSTS: In my memory, half the guys in yeshiva were pretending to know texts, whereas they really were knowing the gist of many things; the shakla ve-tarya, a Tosfos; even a simple memra by an Amora. Yes, many of them got the general sense of what is being conveyed, but had no idea of what many words meant or how to pronounce them. It is true, in time many got better and better at it, and it is true that some people who were faking it the way I described in 11th grade eventually developed real skills over time. But the way you advocate, tackling texts, ends up being tackling the basic ideas in the texts and not the text itself, and many guys (and gals!) end up illiterate, or simply uninterested in trying to learn from texts (or learn period) once there is no longer a rebbe and a hanhalah forcing them to do so.
…for three days and nights of Jews doing Jewish right.
…But more than what you learn, LimmudLA is about with whom you learn: It offers a chance for Jews of various and often opposing backgrounds to study, eat or just sit together and in the process learn about one another and about things they might never have known could move them.
…If last year’s inaugural LimmudLA was characterized by a wild intensity, this year offered a more relaxed mania…
…In sessions we discussed deep — or just interesting — matters: blues music, King Solomon’s seven levels of laziness, Jewish meditation, but only rarely did follow-up conversations in the hallway produce much more.
…All due credit goes to sex therapist Doreen Seidler-Feller, who was able to facilitate several provocative and highly unusual discussions about sex that included everyone from sexually active teenagers to long-married Orthodox couples, who might believe open dialogue about sex — especially for the unmarried — is at odds with their core value of modesty.
The tension between the two poles of modesty and reality made sex a popular topic at LimmudLA. Sessions addressed boring sex, Shabbat sex, sexual repression and the influence of testosterone.
Seidler-Feller took great pains to create an atmosphere of comfort where people could thrash out their fantasies and ask intimate questions…
…Two observant Jews with the chutzpah to aim to satisfy both their ambition and their religious commitment shared their stories at LimmudLA.
…Projecting an image of femininity can be troublesome, too — how a woman looks sometimes overshadows how she performs. Working in the trenches, the newest generation is determined to change the paradigm and normalize femininity in the rabbinate.
And they are doing so with uncommon humility.
…Deep text studies and lots of grappling with God and faith were prevalent in the program.
How is such writing produced? By making your primary aim not to offend. This leads to lots of writing in the passive voice employing the jargon and outlook of the organizers. Contrast this with Danielle Berrin’s subversive cover story on Brett Ratner (having months rather than hours to work on a piece also helps).
LimmudLA was a terrific success and the organizers and their sponsors should be thanked again and again. LA brought out its best and brightest for this weekend retreat. The program was alive, the vibe good, and the entertainment first rate. Sunday’s concert featured a variety of Jewish performers for a PBS style showcase. It was a unique feat, created by Robbie Helperin. Kudos to Linda Fife & Shep Rosenman, conference co-chairs, & Ruthie Rotenberg, Executive Director of LimmudLA, and all the dozens of volunteers.
I’d love to see what Borat would at LimmudLA. “Nice! High Five! Sexy Time! Her, not so much.”
Since the Jan. 30 episode in which the Noe Valley resident was filmed verbally demeaning Gayla Long, the Missouri woman assigned to live with his family for two weeks, an anonymous viewer has started a vitriolic Web site, StephenFowlerSucks.com, and Fowler’s cell phone number and e-mail and home addresses have been published online. The online clip from the show built so much momentum that last week it hit a mainstream peak, appearing on the front page of Yahoo.com with the headline "Husbands Behaving Badly."
Meanwhile, critics of reality TV have questioned whether Fowler’s outlandish performance was for the cameras or if the cameras had captured a man at his worst. Many viewers are conscious that such shows are actually highly scripted, filmed in contrived scenarios and appear only after heavy editing.
"I don’t know if (producers) asked him to do that or not," said Faith Whitfield, editor of the Web site Reality Roll Call, which covers the genre. "But if in fact he was as intelligent as he said he is, he would’ve realized it was bad for his career."
In "Wife Swap," families exchange wives for two weeks, usually placing the wife in an extreme lifestyle contrast. The clean-freak mom moves into the house of a slovenly domestician.
In this case, Fowler was cast as the elitist, self-satisfied San Francisco liberal, and his visitor, Long, was the slow-minded Midwesterner. During the episode, Gayla mispronounces the word "agenda," a flub for which Fowler is quick to humiliate her.
He later calls her, "Undereducated, over-opinionated and overweight."
NEW YORK Vicki Iseman, the Washington, D.C., lobbyist who had sued The New York Times for $27 million over an article last year that she claimed wrongly depicted her as having an affair with Sen. John McCain, has reached a settlement with the newspaper.
The settlement, which does not include any payment, retraction or apology from the Gray Lady, includes an agreement for the Times to post an online Op-Ed from Iseman’s attorneys. Executive Editor Bill Keller will counter with his own Web essay.
Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet told staffers in a memo Thursday that the settlement essentially vindicates the Times’ reporting, noting to them that "We paid no money. We did not apologize. We did not retract one word of the story, which was a compelling chapter in the tale of Senator John McCain and his political rise."
He adds: "The story stands as a powerful examination of a presidential candidate who cast himself as an ethics reformer and scourge of special interests, yet seemed blind at times over the course of his career to appearances of conflicts of interest."
After the 2008 election, the National Enquirer published some convincing evidence for a Cindy McCain affair. Before the election, the Enquirer reported on a Sarah Palin affair. There was no lawsuits in response. I guess the Enquirer was right.
If you don’t want your affairs to be talked about, I’d recommend leading a private life. Every society has sexual mores and one of the primary ways of enforcing such cultural norms is through gossip.
Benyamin Eckstein posts to HirHurim: The big fear which prevents people from studying and applying Mussar is that they are deathly afraid of getting to know themselves. It is that which is too painful, not hearing about the dire consequences of sin.
The joy and inspiration are usually a kosher way to avoid and blur the pain of deep, methodical, honest self-awareness, appraisal, and improvement.
ChareidiLite posts: Haven’t there always been different styles of Mussar? Rav Yisrael Salanter was always trying new approaches.
The Narvadok strain was more the fire and brimstone style (how insignificant and failure prone is man), while the Slobodka style was more positive (look at what great potential man has).
In The Making of a Gadol, Rav Kaminetsky implies that the Alter of Slobodka moved away from the Narvadok mussar style after his son went off the derech and became a communist, realizing that a different approach was needed (at least for some).
But as the sessions piled up and I had to make more tough choices and miss more great classes, a funny thing happened: I started getting interrupted. As I went from class to class, I kept meeting more and more people.
Soon the conversations themselves began to pile up. An impromptu talk about the state of Jewish education in Los Angeles with a macher from The Federation. Encounters with an Ashkenazi professor who is a world-renowned expert on the Sephardi world; with an educator in my neighborhood who gives bar and bat mitzvah lessons to autistic children; and with a filmmaker from Jerusalem who is studying and documenting the halachic dilemma of donating organs within the Orthodox community.
I met a woman studying to be a Conservative rabbi who organizes Friday night services where the prayer melodies are always changing, a physician who prescribes natural substances to balance brain chemicals, a meditation teacher who thinks Jews do way too much thinking, especially at places like Limmud, and a successful television writer from Hollywood who once saw something on a license plate that encouraged him to become Torah observant.
As I kept meeting more people and having these impromptu moments, it struck me that our lives are filled with great conversations that never happen. These are not conversations that call for a lunch or an appointment or even a phone call. They’re conversations that happen when you bump into people; the kind of conversations, perhaps, that you would see among people who live, shop and hang out in a close-knit neighborhood.
I did not even consult the program before signing up for LimmudLA. I went for the conversations, not the classes. The classes help set up a framework for meeting people with whom you share values. People were far friendlier than normal at LimmudLA, something I also notice in a good shul or in a yoga center. People feel safe and they open up. I do notice more reverence in a yoga center than at LimmudLA with respect to cell phones. No cell phone goes off when Guru Singh teaches.
Israeli authorities captured two religious Jews in Jerusalem this week accusing them of being ring-leaders in a high-profile drug smuggling case going on now in Japan. Unfortunately, when the Jerusalem arrests were reported online, secular news portals and even some religious ones revealed the identities of the two accused individuals. Naturally, reader comment pages were replete with angry attacks against them, based on nothing more than a police accusation. Indeed, when one of the two was cleared entirely of any wrongdoing and released, the damage to his reputation was already done, his name smeared needlessly despite the cursory retractions that followed.
There were a few news portals, that reported Sunday’s incident without revealing the identities of the captured suspects during this phase in the investigation. Below is a list of those I came across.
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
