November 2004 Archives

Now that the evil preceptor is out of the way, I hope to have a thesis draft done by the end of the week. Although there's much I'd like to write about now, expect blogging to be anywhere from "slow" to "non-existent" until the draft is completed.

I have to say I've missed reading my weekly e-mail updates from Dei'ah vdDibur. Today I found out that "content cell phones" are "wreaking spiritual havoc." Apparently, the dangers cell phone are so great, that even the public announcement doesn't say what they are. At any rate, the Hareidi community is implored to safeguard their children's purity and of course, "the deference to gedolei Yisroel shlita."

So basically, the "Torah True^TM" Hareidi educational system itself isn't enough to instill the appropriate values such that the bochrim themselves cannot be trusted with temptation and the only solution is to ban anything that might cause "agmas nefesh."

Who knew Hareidim were closet Democrats?

Also, it seems that there was a scandal in which a government report claimed that Hareidi schools received two or three times the amount of their secular counterparts. It also seems that this report was flawed in several ways. DvD Editor Mordechai Plaut recaps the hows and why of the mistakes, and even appeals to "the first rule that beginning students of statistics learn."

Plaut's argument implies that math might actually be important. However, we know from his newsletter that teaching math and all of its subversiveness will ultimately destroy the Hareidi community.

Does this mean it's now assur to read his column?

What if I get it on my cell phone?

My mother came back from x-rays on her knee and it seems as though the broken kneecap is fixed. This has several positive implications. Not only does she not have to wear the brace anymore, she can now bend her knee (though not completely yet) and even start putting pressure on it. This means she can also start doing weight-bearing exercises and start rehabbing the hip.

Yay Imma!

She also told me that Sunday night was Kushner's fundraising concert featuring Neil Sedaka. This would explain why so many teenagers were unsupervised and open to mischief.

Actually it does give me an idea. As a nice middah k'negged middah punishment, how about forcing the students to go to another Sedaka concert?

Or would that constitute cruel and unusual punishment?

First there was that whole messiness with McGreevey donations and witness tampering. Now, the school named after Charles Kushner's family has over 40 students busted for drugs and alcohol.

I have several friends who teach there, my father contributed to the curriculum when it first started, and I'm sure there are many positive things to say about the school. Still, I know this school has had such problems and it's been going on for years.

But now, not only does this happen, but I first hear of it from FARK of all places.

Hopefully this will be embarrassing enough to the school, the board, and the students to actually effect some change.

I can't say I'm terribly optimistic, but that's for another time.

וכל הפוסל - פסול, ואינו מדבר בשבחא לעולם; ואמר שמואל: במומו פוסל
"Whoever invalidates a person (in the context of marriage) is himself invalidated…Shmuel says, whoever invalidates does so though the faults with which he has himself.

- Kiddushin 70a

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

- Matt. 7:1-3

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"I know you are, but what am I?"

- Anonymous / Pee Wee Herman

Long before Freud gave it a spiffy name, many cultures and people have addressed or acknowledged the concept of Psychological Projection. The basic theory is that instead of dealing with your own faults, you "project" them on to other people by holding them accountable for your own shortcomings or by screwing around with their heads such that they're as messed up as you are. Though not always intentional, projection can still be harmful. Not only does it make insecure people feel even worse, it may also make satisfied people start to question themselves.

We've all had such experiences, and for me this has been an especially busy week.

Just found this CNN article:

A federal jury awarded as much as $434,000 to a Ukrainian woman who sued the Internet matchmaking service that set her up with the man who allegedly abused her after they wed.

Nataliya Fox accused Encounters International of fraud and negligence, saying it should have screened its male clients and told her about a law that helps foreign nationals escape abusive relationships without fear of automatic deportation.

Instead, Fox testified, agency owner Natasha Spivack told her to endure the alleged abuse or return to Ukraine.

I can't say if I'd hold the agency responsible for background checks, since its relatively easy to lie on these things. However, the response to "endure" the abuse - especially when they could have easily provided her wth a way out - is so intolerable that I can't disagree with the judgement.

A few months ago, I switched from Mozilla to Firefox as my primary browser. You might have seen some news coverage about its latest release, and could contemplate the switch. Aside from being secure and stable, there are several useful plugins to make browsing easier. Some of my favorites:

• Googlebar - Mimics Google's own equivalent
• Adblock - Removes image and flash advertisements from web pages - customizable based on URI
• Sage - A Firefox based RSS Reader
• Prefbar - Easy Access to preferences
• IE View - Handy tool to open up IE exclusive pages and links in an IE window.
• Spellbound - Works like IE Spell - checks spelling in web forms.

And there are loads more from which to chose. Now that I can do blog spell checking¹ from Firefox, I officially have no more use for Internet Explorer other than to handle MS's own websites.

Vive la revolucion revolution!

1. Yes, I do that occasionally.

Blogging may be a little slow for a while - certainly don't expect the longer postings to continue.

My mother came home from rehab on Sunday. Rehab will continue at home, but it's unclear how long it will take. Normally, rehab for hip surgery requires more support from the other hip/leg side. In my mother's case, the other side is still hampered by a broken kneecap. Therefore, she can't do the weight-bearing excersizes just yet so rehab may take longer than usual.

On the plus side, she is able to work at home - her boss installed a cable modem in the house. If you'd like to send wishes, you can e-mail Rabbiyuter at aol dot com. I'm sure she'd love to hear from random strangers.

I've gotten conned into regiving my shiurim at the Hillel here. The research is done, and I could use the hazara. Also, it gives me the opportunity to write out the shiurim instead of just putting up sources.

Finally, Izzy Kramer has been on fire in sending me loads of chords, and it's been hard to keep up posting them.¹ If I have any spare time, I'll be working on automating some things using PHP.² If there are any interested volunteers, please let me know.

1. Also transposing. Izzy uses a lot of barre chords - as well he should - but many players including myself have difficulty barre-ing acoustics.
2. At the risk of a flame war, I think PHP is cooler and faster than Perl - that and I forgot most of Perl and I've been wanting to learn PHP for a while. ASP.net isn't really an option since YUCS isn't running Mono - and there just isn't a need for it. From looking through the documentation and speaking to friends, PHP can best do what I need/want it to, even without MySQL

I had some of these in an update of the last post, but I'm seeing some really good articles on Arafat. Here are some of the better ones I've seen thus far (might add more).

• Honest Reporting
• Opinion Journal
• Arthur Hertzberg
• Barry Rubin
• Daniel Pipes
• Mitzpor

Thanks Zev

Finally, according to all shittot, Arafat is dead. Check out this Hallmark tribute picture on CNN:

Kind of makes you forget about the few thousand Jews he's responsible for murdering.

This will be the final post in the impossibly named series I called Rabbi Week. Today, I'd like to discuss what I consider to be the major misconception of the Rabbinate, and wrap things up with some thoughts as to what the future might hold.

I’ve recently written about different aspects of the Rabbinate, mostly in the abstract. Aside from describing the challenges of the profession, there hasn’t been much about the personal side to the Rabbinate. I’ve wanted to write about this for a while, especially considering my first year as a Rabbi, and spending the past few weeks at home reminded me of the many dimensions of a Rabbi’s life.

That, and I’m currently stuck in an airport.

I didn't expect this East Coast Swing to be a vacation, but I couldn't have predicted it to be as eventful as it was. I figured I would be driving my mother around, considering she had broken her knee a few days before I arrived. Still I planned to try to get something productive done, either in terms of reading, thesising, or job hunting.¹

It was a disaster on all counts.

First, the multiple trips to NY were more draining than usual. I was supposed to speak at the bridge shul for a seudah shelishit, but found out last minute that it was cancelled. Then, the broken kneecap became a broken hip, and of course that rightly required attention. This isn't a complaint, just pointing that the whole experience had been somewhat exhausting.

And for the coup de grace, I had to spend the night in Newark Airport.

It's not that I missed my flight as much as my flight missed me. I ordered my ticket from ATA a while ago and booked an 8:06 PM flight back to Chicago. Somewhere between then and now, ATA either removed the flight from its schedule or just moved it earlier. In either case, I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare only to find out that their last flight left at 6:12 PM. I hadn't received any notification about the switch,² and the representatives were less than helpful. The most that they could or would do was to put me on the 6:00 AM flight Friday morning. For that, it didn't pay to go back home, or even to stay in a hotel. I called their customer service from the airport and the person said that they should have offered a hotel stay, but they weren't the friendliest of people here. At any rate, the best she could do was to send me a $50 voucher for my next flight.

Actually, the food court is open all night long and isn't such a bad place to be. I might even get some reading done. They have wireless here, but it's about $7 for the night and not really worth it.

I'll post this tomorrow, and maybe something more if I feel like writing tonight.

1. I'm not including dating here, because although I'm not pessimistic, I've also learned not to expect anything to go in a particular way.
2. One representative muttered something about faxing it over, which is odd considering that I don't own a fax machine.

At risk of losing my blogger's license, today's discussion is on politics. I'm not going to discuss whether or not the results are "good" or "bad" on any level, but I did notice two ironic results. The first was picked up by The Daily Show in their election recap. The Bush camp claimed that John Kerry was soft on terrorism and would be too weak of a leader. Despite these accusations, Kerry easily carried New York, the state most directly affected by the 9/11 attacks.

Similarly, Kerry attacked Bush's economic policies which supposedly cost jobs while giving tax breaks to the wealthy. However, as Nicholas Kristoff mourns, Bush carried all the "middle America" hard working states.

It could be that the candidate's directed their messages to the wrong people - in the sense that they weren't able to change the people's minds. Or, you could say that they simply sold their positions to whomever wished to hear them.

Anyway, I'm also interested in the role religion played in people's decisions. Between the left-leaning liberal Jews and R. Eliyashiv's pesak to vote for Bush, I've gotten several IM's asking for my opinions. Maybe for when I get back to Chicago.

Just got word that my mother got out of surgery and everything went ok.

Thanks to everyone for your wishes, and I'll post when I have more details.

Dear Loyal Readers,

Some of you may know that my mother broke her kneecap a short time before I came to visit NY. Although she had been managing surprsingly well, last night she had an accident, fell down two stairs, and fractured her hip.

She is scheduled for surgery tomorrow - definitely on the hip, possibly on the knee as well, depending on the x-ray. We don't know what time of day it will be, nor how long it will take (which is understandable considering we're not sure what exactly will be operated).

If you have a tehillim group or a misheberach list of some sort, please add the name, "Leah Bat Chava."

Thank You.

UPDATE: Latest news is that the knee doesn't need operation, and the surgery is scheduled for around 6:00 PM tomorrow.