Rabbi Frand’s 2006 annual Teshuva Drasha

Ok, I recorded it, and it came out great! It took me longer to upload it than it did to edit out the extra stuff, but its finally finished.

He started off with the entire list of locations that were getting the shiur broadcasted live over the TCN network, and I lost count after 30 or so. Lots of places all over the country listening in! The meat of the shiur starts at around the seven-minute mark.

Anyway, here it is! Enjoy. If you do pass this on, please include a link to this post.

[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/2008070/view]

Shomrei Parking (yet again)

It seems like Shomrei has finally had enough.

From this week’s bulletin:

PARKING

In the past few weeks, the parking situation and the parking lot situation as a whole, have become highly dangerous.

Please note:

1. You may NOT park on the walkway to the modular building—this walkway is built for pedestrian traffic, not cars. The walkway has already begun to sink because people park their cars there—if this continues it will mean significant expense for the shul and we will hold those who park there accountable for the damage.

2. You may NOT park in spots designated for the shul’s professional staff during the hours between 7:00 am and 5:00 pm.

3. You may ONLY park in designated spaces. That means: NO parking on the grass in front of, or on the side of, any buildings. If you park in undesignated areas, your car will be towed at your expense.

4. You may not make a U-turn on Greenspring Avenue. This is a highly dangerous and illegal practice.

5. The speed limit in the parking lot is 5-10 mph. Especially with the current parking situation, it is imperative that everyone be extra-cautious and drive extra-slowly.

For the safety of everyone, please comply with these regulations. Our neighbors on Greenspring, and the construction crew who arrive early each day to work on the building, have complained—please show by your actions that we are a group that is considerate, careful, and mentschlich.

Frankly, its about time. I’ve seen many near misses as well as cars parked in ways where every other car gets blocked in. Hopefully the threat of towing cars will work (I doubt it).

Rabbi Frand’s 2003 annual Teshuva Drasha

I was going through some of my files and found Rabbi Frand’s 2003 annual Teshuva Drasha, which I had recorded on my Yepp (which, when I bought it, was cutting edge technology holding an amazing 128mb!). I tried uploading it to various audio hosting sites, but for some reason, every time it was finished uploading, the file would play in a high, squeaky voice, as if it were being played on high speed. I finally uploaded it to my personal homepage at my university via FTP (maybe that’s the solution, I don’t know), and it seems to be working.

You can listen to it here or right-click to download it. It’s about 8mb and 70 minutes long. The clarity isn’t the best, but you can definitely understand what is being said without difficulty. I’m going to try and make it to the shiur tonight and record it, and if successful, I will post it here.

Non-Jews greeting Jews

Why is it that non-Jewish people see someone Jewish and they want to strike up a conversation, they start with “Shalom?”  I highly doubt that when they see a Muslim they say “saalam aleikum,” or when they see someone French, they say “Bonjour.”

Why are we special?

Kudo’s to 7-Eleven

Remember the times when you’d get those email forwards telling you not to by gas from Exxon, Mobil, or a few others because their gas came from the Middle East? Instead, we were told to buy from Citgo or Crown because they got their gas from Venezuela.

Well after the recent remarks by Venezuela’s PM, Hugo Chavez, calling President Bush “the devil,” 7-Eleven announced that they’re no longer going to be doing business with Citgo:

Convenience store operator 7-Eleven Inc. is dropping Venezuela-backed Citgo as its gasoline supplier at more than 2,100 locations and switching to its own brand of fuel.

The retailer said Wednesday it will purchase fuel from several distributors, including Tower Energy Group of Torrance, Calif., Sinclair Oil of Salt Lake City, and Houston-based Frontier Oil Corp.

A spokeswoman for Dallas-based 7-Eleven said its 20-year contract with Citgo Petroleum Corp. ends next week. About 2,100 of 7-Eleven’s 5,300 U.S. stores sell gasoline.

Citgo is a Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, and the foreign parent became a public-relations issue for 7- Eleven because of comments by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Chavez has called President George W. Bush the devil and an alcoholic. The U.S. government has warned that Chavez is a destabilizing force in Latin America.

7-Eleven spokesman Margaret Chabris said that, “Regardless of politics, we sympathize with many Americans’ concern over derogatory comments about our country and its leadership recently made by Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez.”

You know Rosh Hashana is coming when…

• All the ladies at Shoppers that you never knew were Jewish start talking babbling to your baby in Yiddish and how they should have a ‘shana tova and a mazildike yar’
• You’re driving down Park Heights Ave. and you see scores of yeshiva bachurim walking with a towel over their shoulder and no bathing suit
• They’re sold out of white yarmulkes at Pern’s and Shabsi’s
• The line at the butcher is over an hour long
• Every other blog you read starts with “Well, its that time of year again…”

Feel free to add your own!

New Eruv List – a review (of sorts)

Yesterday’s Eruv List post made the people over at jrants come running, so I figured I should have a post that is actually about the Eruv List and not about me.

As Baltimore people know, the whole deal with the Eruv List has been topsy turvy.  First there was only the Eruv List, then the Eruv List alongside the Ner Israel Service League, then there was a tumult within the Eruv List and The Good Book came about, then the tumult was sorted out so we went back to only having the Eruv List, and finally, there was another tumult, resulting in the re-creation of The Good Book.  Through both tumults the Baltimore rabbi’s supported the Eruv List exclusively, writing letters saying that advertisers should support the Eruv List.

More recently, someone put out an ad in The Preview (competition to the Advertiser?) saying that the Eruv List’s finances weren’t up to par.  Of course, this caused an uproar, but the rabbi’s came through again with a very strongly worded letter saying that they personally reviewed the finances of the Eruv List, and things were OK, and that the ad was pure slander.

Don’t you love politics?

Anyway, I like Eruv List a lot.  I think it is well designed, and it has an awesome Eruv map.  The white pages have almost no ads, making it much easier to find the names I’m looking for.  Staiman Design really came through when this new format came out several years ago.  I don’t even know if there will be a Good Book this year (I think we got one last year, but threw it out), but they haven’t changed their design since the early 1990’s and frankly, looks horrible.

New Eruv List

Five points to the person who can find my picture in the newest Eruv list.

Insecurity

While I can never do justice to any speech I hear, I’m going to try to give a brief summary of what Rabbi Gottlieb said last night before selichos.

He said that as we approach Rosh Hashanah, we’re left with conflicting feelings.  On the one hand, we’re looking forward to a new year, a fresh start.  On the other hand, what has changed since last year?  We all have things that we said we’d work on last year, yet find ourselves in the same predicament; are we going to change this year?  While we are supposed to enter Rosh Hashanah with confidence that we will have a good outcome (which is why we shave, get haircuts, and wear nice clothing), it is this insecurity with our actions and their possible effect on our outcome that fuels our kavannah (concentration) in our davening.

Insecurity has had very signifanct results in history.  Rabbi Gottlieb mentioned that the reason we blow 100 shofar blasts on Rosh Hashanah is because we are counteracting the one hundred cries of the mother of Sisra.  It seems odd that we’d have shofar blasts in correspondence with such an evil person.  But the reason is because of the mother’s uncertainty and insecurity.  When Sisra went to battle and his mother didn’t hear back from him, she was uncertain if he had had the greatest victory of all time and was celebrating, or, and more depressing for her to think about, perhaps he had suffered a great defeat and even killed in battle.  With this insecurity in mind, she let our her 100 cries. (There’s more on that here.)

It was very apropos that  9/11 occurred approximately one week before Rosh Hashanah.  This happened about a year after the Intifada in Israel had started, and since it was Elul, many parents chose not to send their children to Israel for the year because they were afraid of all the bombings.  In other words, they were insecure with sending their children there.  Yet just a few weeks into Elul, the planes smashed into the Twin Towers showing everyone that no one is secure anywhere, and the only way to actually be secure is to place your trust in God.  With the towers collapsing, people realized just how insecure they were anywhere.

This insecurity is what drives us and we should take the insecurity to motivate us to daven properly and with full kavanah so that we can merit to be properly secure in our relationship with Hashem to do His will.

Weird Critter

I had to move some stuff on my porch because of the rain when I found this cute little critter. Anyone know what it is? I would say caterpillar, but I’ve never seen one so fuzzy. And the red lines that distinguished the parts that make it bend were cool.

Click the thumbnails to enlarge. If you click the last thumbnail, it’ll load up the original, unedited picture. I think that that picture is a piece of art. Just looking at all the droplets on the leaves is beautiful.

Remembering September 11, 2001

About a week after 9/11/2001, Rabbi Frand gave his usual annual Teshuva Drasha shiur. In it, he described how when major events happen, everyone seems to remember the exact location they were when they first heard the news. How true.

I was driving towards Baltimore’s Penn Station, giving a 9th grader from Ner Yisrael a ride to the train station so that he could go to his grandmother’s funeral, to take place in New York. As I was driving down the on-ramp to get onto 83-Southbound, the cellphone rang. My father, who was in Virginia at the time, called to tell me to turn on the radio ASAP, as a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Like many people, I thought that it was one of those small Cessna-type of airplanes, and that it wasn’t the end of the world. After all, a military bomber airplane had hit the Empire State Building in 1945, resulting in the death of only 14 people. How bad could it be? But after getting off the 83 at the exit for Penn Station, news of the second plane arrived, and right away, everyone in the car knew that these were acts of terror. Thankfully, the 9th grader didn’t take the train to New York, as they later shut down the entire line. Unfortunately, in the ensuing chaos in New York, the original funeral procession became separated from everyone else, and it took about two days for the family to track down the body and give it a proper burial.

Today, I spent a good part of the day watching the streaming video from CNN as things unfolded five years ago. It was and still is a very emotional filled day, and its hard not to tear up as you hear the reporters themselves become emotional in their reporting of that day.

May we know only good things in the future, and may the upcoming new year bring only good news.

Singing

Over Shabbos, I was eating lunch with a neighbor, and he brought up an interesting observation after we concluded a zemer (song).  Amongst non-Jews, you don’t hear people breaking out in song, and singing together as one.  Sure, people will sing songs to themselves, either quietly or out loud.  But have you ever heard more than one person getting together with another and singing it together in its entirety?  The only exception I can think of is religious functions like church and/or Christmas carols.

But Jews very frequently join together in song.  Whether at the Shabbos table, at a wedding, mesiba, oneg shabbos, or other type of simcha, Jews get together and sing together in unison.  It creates a spiritual bonding that uplifts the soul.  I think it is very special and should be treasured.

Wedding rings and Orthodox Jews

I was recently at a sheva brachos that was also attended by JewishCube. We got to talking about personal and spousal preferences to Orthodox Jewish males wearing wedding rings. I know that in the more yeshivish crowd, wedding rings are practically unheard of, whereas in the more modern orthodox crowd, it is pretty common. I don’t really consider myself to be in either of these categories, but I do not wear a wedding ring. Nor does anyone in my immediate family. I was curious as to the background of the wedding ring and how the practice came about. With women, it obviously goes back several thousand years. This is how Jews married from the beginning.

The Wikipedia article on wedding rings gives some interesting background. According to the article, the double-ring ceremony was started in the late 19th century by jewelers as a marketing tool. If everyone would do a double-ring ceremony, the jewelers would get more business. But it never became widespread until after the Great Depression. By 1940, double-ring ceremonies made up “80% of all weddings as opposed to 15% before the Depression.”

So this really is a recent phenomenon amongst non-Jews, and even more so, amongst Jews.

After doing a quick search on the subject, I came across this thread on a discussion board. It says there that according to R’ Moshe in Even Ha’Ezer 3:18 and Even Ha’Ezer 4:32, giving a ring under the chuppah or shortly thereafter should not be done. However, “even though perhaps it is repugnant for a God fearing person, one apparently should not forbid it in my humble opinion.”

What it boils down to, in my opinion, is personal preference.

Jewish man arrested for davening on plane

I find it interesting that when a Muslim man appears suspicious on an airplane, the passengers all want out, and even declare mutiny, for fear of dying. The flight attendants on the other hand want the flight to go ahead.

But when a Jew starts davening on an airplane, the only people who want him to stop are the flight attendants, and all the passengers know that no harm is being done by a Jewish guy praying. They know that the only people to ever try hijacking planes have been Muslims.

Some fellow passengers are questioning why an Orthodox Jewish man was removed from an Air Canada Jazz flight in Montreal last week for praying.The man was a passenger on a Sept. 1 flight from Montreal to New York City when the incident happened.

The airplane was heading towards the runway at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport when eyewitnesses said the Orthodox man began to pray.

“He was clearly a Hasidic Jew,” said Yves Faguy, a passenger seated nearby. “He had some sort of cover over his head. He was reading from a book.

“He wasn’t exactly praying out loud but he was lurching back and forth,” Faguy added.

The action didn’t seem to bother anyone, Faguy said, but a flight attendant approached the man and told him his praying was making other passengers nervous.

Read the rest, here.

How Birds See the World

Just move the target over to the right shoulder. Yuck.