Author: Josh

Weekend Updates

Josh November 15, 2004 Odds & Ends

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

Analyzing Arafat

Josh November 11, 2004 Politics

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).

Thanks Zev

Ding Dong

Josh November 10, 2004 Politics

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.

Understanding The Rabbinate

Josh November 10, 2004 Jewish Culture, Rabbi Week

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.

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Life As A Rabbi

Josh November 5, 2004 Jewish Culture, Rabbi Week

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.

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One Night In Newark

Josh November 5, 2004 Personal

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.

YUTOPIA’s Election Recap 2004

Josh November 4, 2004 Politics

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.

Health Update

Josh November 2, 2004 Personal

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.

Say A Little Prayer

Josh November 1, 2004 Personal

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.

My Old Schools

Josh October 31, 2004 Personal

Introduction
With the previous ramblings about rabbinical schools and the rabbinate, I feel it’s only fair that I explain my own rationale for not only becoming a rabbi, but why I chose to the path I did.

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