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Speeches above a certain length are always full of redundancies and filler. After speaking for a while, the speaker always resorts to repetition and paraphrasing of the beginning of the speech. Sometimes it starts in the beginning. Pointless rhetoric also gets inserted occasionally. Toward the middle or end of a long speech, the person who is speaking nearly always runs out of ideas and recycles the ideas from the beginning. Sometimes this leads to contradictions. But it is not possible to have repeated information or contradicted it if you give a long speech. In fact, most speeches can be spoken in less than five minutes if no superfluous statements are said.
famous speakers can keep people interested for many long hours, based on many things from the interesting topics they speak to the way they speak even though they might repeat or remind their listeners of something they said earlier
how many famous speakers can you think of that you can listen to for many hours before getting to tired?
RY, you repeated yourself quite a few times in that post.. Could have narrowed it down to one sentence.
I recently attended a pidyon habein. A majority of the guests did not speak Yiddish yet a Satmar relative, who spoke English, chose to speak in Yiddish. People were respectful for ten minutes but as he went on for too long people started talking amongst themselves and he got angry
People who speak for too long at simchas are just being selfish.
Because long speeches are much easier to make when you directly copy paragraphs from Michelle Obama.
Sam,
Copying a paragraph word for word just shows sheer stupidity and lack of any foresight whatsoever.
An easy way to cut down the length of a speech is to omit any talking about yourself.
Common mistakes include:
Talking about how undeserving you are to speak at such a venue (which is either faux humility, AKA the worst arrogance, patently obvious, or both)
Talking about how little you prepared for the speech (even if due to lack of notice – the message is, “You in the audience don’t deserve the respect of a speech that sounds well prepared, or even the dignity to pretend that you do”)
Talking (in an “Out-Of-Town” setting) about how surprising it is to find B’nei Torah (or the like) “even here in _________ ” (You just slapped the entire community across the face)
Talking about how short the speech will be (you just ruined it)
Another common mistake is the belief that every speech must begin with a joke. This is totally false. It is not necessary to start with a joke. Nobody needs to hear the same corny lines again – and, yes, we heard that one already. DO NOT tell jokes unless they are truly funny. They lengthen both the actual and perceived duration of your speech, with no positive contribution.
In general, a speech should be planned. Determine the purpose of the speech (that is, what the audience wants to hear, not what you want to say) and how long it is expected to be, and develop a focused address that does not digress from its purpose or overstay its welcome.
Speeches should almost always be said in ENGLISH and if for some reason you cannot speak english you should get a proper translator who will translate into english after every few sentances
It is rude to give a speech in any other language without a translator unless the majority of the audience does not speak it.
(If you are in a differnt country, It is proper to speak the language of the country, In France it should be given in French
catch yourself: I was once at a speech in the South where a relatively well-respected Rabbi got up and said that he was so happy to speak to so many of the community members and see that they knew a lot of Torah, which was so surprising because it’s so far from a major Yeshivah. The city in question here has a well-attended community Kollel and several well-used Shul Beis Midrashes. One of the community members got up and said “Our Rabbis know more Torah than you” and walked out. Several people followed.
I’m honestly not sure if the Rabbis in that community were bigger Talmidei Chachamim than this visiting Rabbi, but the Rabbi definitely insulted the entire community.
“I’m honestly not sure if the Rabbis in that community were bigger Talmidei Chachamim than this visiting Rabbi”
The community rabbis obviously knew shimirat halashon better than the guest rabbi.
On the rare occasions when I ate a delicious pita in America or a falafel, I said that it was so good and it actually reminds me of a real pita or falafel.
Short speeches say.
sometimes long speeches are great. if you get into it even if you don’t particularly know the language. you may even pick up some of the other language. once i sat in a chassidish shul and the Rav spoke in Yiddish for a half hour and when he finished, I picked up a nice amount of words in Yiddish
I love listening to longer shiurs on TorahAnytime! The shorter ones are about a halacha, a brief look at the parsha, a moment of inspiration, and other good stuff.
The longer ones let me settle in and absorb the meaning. Plus there is more time to go into depth.
So yay for longer.
Granted short shiurs or speeches have their occasions too.
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