Midwest2

Hey guys, remember it’s the Three Weeks.

First, you have to know that I trained karate when I was young, so I’m biased.

I think that all yeshivot and bais Yaakovs should train the students in self defense/krav maga. It serves two purposes, besides the obvious one of being prepared.

1) It makes students feel more sure of themselves and less vulnerable, This will also spill over into their daily lives so that they are less aggressive or fearful. If an instructor feels that a student is a possible problem he should inform the mashgiach and if necessary get the person evaluated.

Plus, people who have trained are less likely in the first place to be bothered. There are subtle differences in the way one carries oneself that are picked up by potential aggressors and warn them off. A psychologist in New York once did a study in which he asked convicted muggers how they chose their victims, and showed them films, asking “Is this a person you would be likely to try to mug?” There was a specific set of behaviors that act as “tells” for a potential mugger. Training in self defense gets rid of most of them.

2) It’s excellent exercise, and will help young people to keep fit, and incidentally help the “AD” type kids focus during the rest of the school day.

And, yes, there are female krav maga instructors, even in the US, especially on the Est Coast, so tnzius shouldn’t be an issue in protecting our girls.

I just checked this in the old Linear Chumash with Rashi (the blue one) and with R’ Hirsch’s Commentary. The Linear Chumash translates ונשתטח as “prostrated himself” on their graves. R’ Isaak Levy’s translation is “went to pray on the graves of the forefathers for strength.” Neither makes any mention of davening TO the Avos, just that he went to the graves to pray.

crazykanoiy – a good lineup. The Republican leadership was missing in action in 2016. That’s how the country got Trump.

Avi K – excellent idea. For instance, check out Zelig Pliskin’s “Love Your Neighbor” which goes through the parshiot giving all the mitzvos bein adam l’chaveiro in each parsha with all the details, suggestions and illustrations. An “oldie but goodie.” I learn it almost every Shabbos.

Another good one is R’ Shaul Wagshal zaztal’s “Derech Eretz: A Torah guide to proper behavior in everyday life,” which has just been reissued by his sons in pocket format.

Also, R’ Ephraim Zaitchik’s “Sparks of Mussar,” also in pocket format, which gives principles and incidents from the lives of the Mussar greats starting with Reb Israel Salanter through the Chofetz Chaim.

I’m not acquainted with Chassidic sources, but perhaps someone else can list a few of those.

Anyone else with sources? It’s the Three Weeks, and time for taking stock of those particular mitzvos.

crazykanoiy – thank you for saying all things I would have had to weary my ancient fingers typing out. My beef is that

1) Trump is incompetent and inexperienced. He’s a television personality with no experience running a real business (licensing your name to somebody else’s hotel is not “experience.”). He has an ego, not a character. You can’t trust a word he says because tomorrow morning at 4 am he’ll tweet something different. So down the tubes go our trade policy, and the economic comeback we enjoyed until now. And good-bye to our position as “leader of the free world.”

2) He’s alienating everybody except Putin. Guess who used to be our worst enemy? The Soviet Union. And remember that Putin was KGB – an official Soviet Communist spy. And for the icing on the cake – the current idiom is to refer to the Republican states as “red” – the color of the Communist flag. Has the world been turned upside down?

3) He’s personally objectionable, in his private life and in his public communications. How does the rest of the world see us as making this questionable person our leader?

With someone like Rubio or Kasich as president, even though they’re Republicans too, the country would have continued its growth. Now?

I’m a statistic. I was riding in the passenger front seat when a car came out from behind a parked truck and hit us square on the side midway between the front and back doors. If I hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt I would have been thrown straight through the windshield.

The very few times that seatbelts contribute to a death are reported because they’re wild exceptions to the rule. Who would clock on a link saying, “Seatbelts saved 26 lives in the US last week?”

Pretty much agree. I’ve quit listening to current “Jewish music” because it seems much more like rock than Modzhitz. And the volume level at chasunehs rivals that at 60s rock concerts, the ones that left so many of my generation hearing-impaired.

I was a big fan of Ben Zion Shenker, and had some of his older tapes. When I saw that “Shabbos in Modzhitz” was coming out (on cassette, in those days) I bought it almost immediately. I took it home, put it in the player, turned it on – and almost cried. All those beautiful Modzhitz nigunim had a ROCK BEAT behind them. So much for “Jewish” music.

Yes, we have a problem with below-the-radar assimilation, and our musical tastes are one element of that danger.

The situation in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, etc. is very bad right now, economically and in terms of rule of law. In poor areas of the cities gangs rule, not the police, and people who don’t cooperate with them are at risk of their lives. The most effective way for us to stop people showing up at our border is to help those countries get their economies and governments back in order. Not only would it solve the problem at the source, it would be way cheaper than a 20 billion dollar border wall.

Immigrants overrun the US? Get real. There are at least 320 MILLION Americans. How are they going to “overrun” us? WE ARE NOT VULNERABLE. We are a strong, rich country with very effective law enforcement. and anybody who tells you differently is lying to you to get your vote or your money. Yes, there are parts of the country with economic problems, but we have never stopped being great and this idea that we have somehow been victimized and need to be be great “again” is just a scam. We’re basically in good shape, but – like all countries throughout history – we have a few problems that need to be fixed. Don’t fall for the doom-sayers.

Being a Litvak, I was taught that you don’t daven to flesh and blood, not your favorite Tzaddik and not Rachel Imeinu. You daven to HKB”H. Period. No one else. You can ask HKB”H that in the merit of so-and-so you will be answered, but that’s not davening TO the tzaddik.

I used to get into discussions with my Catholic friends about how they could pray to the statues of saints, who were after all human. I never got a logical answer. The idea was to pray to the saint to intercede for the person, but that’s still praying to a human being.

Davening TO a tzaddik seems to me to be to be not quite kosher. If you visit the kever to help you concentrate, fine, but not to daven to the tzaddik him/herself.

You can get “generic” printer cartridges just like you can get generic drugs. Office Depot, for one, sells recycled and refilled toner cartridges that cost half the price of the brand-name ones and work just fine. Check on line and save some money.

The CDC (a part of the US Public Health Service, which works to keep you and me alive) uses the best current methodology. That’s their job – that’s what we pay them for. If you’ve never learned any statistics, go to the library and ask the librarian to find you a book so you can understand the difference between causation and correlation, and why legitimate medical research very seldom uses the term “cause” – because the bar is so high.

Given your spirited defense of smoking, I find it hard to believe that you’ve never smoked. I did back in the day, and I know that the issue of choice is very difficult. Nicotine is more addictive than heroin, and kicking smoking is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. I finally succeeded because I developed bronchial pneumonia, and literally couldn’t breathe in smoke without having an asthma attack. If you’re hooked, get help. If you’re not hooked, quit talking about something of which you are ignorant.

At the risk of being considered a second incarnation of Yoshi, I’d like to second most of what Yoshi says, particularly about drivers. I live out of town (but with lots of refugees from the NY area) and I’m petrified at the way people drive. Whenever possible I jaywalk in the middle of the block to avoid the close calls with people zipping around the corner with a phone mashed to their ear. The miracle is that so few people get hurt. My Dad, a”h told me that whenever you see a ball bounce into the street, you hit the brakes, because there will be a child right behind it. We can’t expect a six-year-old to think first – that’s our job as adults.

As for kids, it depends entirely on the neighborhood, and in some part on the kid. Some places aresafe for kids to wander around in, some places aren’t even safe for an adult. Some kids are reliable, some aren’t. I don’t think that most of the little ones you see are entirely unsupervised. Usually there’s an adult or an older sibling around somewhere. To let a two-year-old outside alone is probably considered as neglect, though.

Remember they’re the kids, we’re the adults, and put down that phone and pay attention to where your car is headed.

Shopping – what do you mean when you say, “growing constantly?” I’ve begun seeing this word “grow” everywhere, and I’m not sure what people are using it for. At 72 I find that the only “growing” I seem to do is sideways 🙂

litvishechosid: every medicine you take is made up of two things: the drug itself (called the “active ingredient”) and some starch, for a solid pill, or liquid (inactive ingredients), to make up the bulk of the medicine, since the amount of the drug itself is too small to make a pill out of. A generic drug has the same active ingredient as the brand name, but the inactive (filler) ingredients will differ.

There’s an effect in medical issues called “placebo,” That means that just taking the medicine makes someone feel better even if the medicine has no “real” effect. Nobody has ever been able to figure out exactly how it works, but it’s real and it can really mess up your drug research. So there’s a technique in experimentation called a “double blind” trial.

You take your group of people for testing, and divide them randomly into two groups. One group you give the real medicine to, and the other you give a fake sugar pill that looks exactly like the real one (one of the “blinds” in “double-blind”). Then you have them evaluated by doctors who don’t know which patient is getting which (the second “blind” in the “double-blind.”) This way you’re sure that the doctors aren’t subconsciously changing their evaluation to go with their previous knowledge and the patients aren’t having a placebo effect and confusing both themselves and the doctors.

All drugs which go on the market have to pass this kind of test – brand-name or generic. For generic they test the drug ingredient against both the brand-name and a sugar pill, to make sure it acts the same. So there is no difference in the drug itself, just in the fillers the companies use to make up the pill.

The bottom line is that if you’re doing kiruv, and someone expresses real interest, you do a little asking, gently and diplomatically. If there’s any doubt, consult a rav who is experienced in kiruv with the group the person belongs to.

Something else to think about regarding geirim. Some non-Jews are interesting in Judaism but don’t know how to go about converting, so they are attracted to a Jewish man or woman. Sometimes this works out – the non-Jew’s interest in conversion sparks the Jew’s interest in teshuvah. Sometimes it’s a disaster, because the Jew is marrying out to get away from Jewishness.

In any kiruv process a situation may crop up where you need guidance. NJOP (National Jewish Outreach Professionals) or other groups can help. Don’t just try to wing it – people’s lives and happiness are on the line

“It seems to me that many people might get a brand name thinking its safer or more effective than generic.”

Yup. It’s called advertising. and we’re swamped with it. Back in the day prescription drug companies weren’t allowed to advertise to consumers, only to doctors. Boy, has that changed.

Bottom line: generics are cheaper and just as good, except for a few people who have problems, and their doctors can take care of that. As a general rule, buy generic. If you do have a problem, ask your doc and probably get the brand name. Why pay more for some fancy printed name on the label?

I don’t know whether Yiddish is to be considered “kadosh,” or not, but it sure beats English or Hebrew when it comes to describing people, their personalities, and situations where psychology comes into play. For instance, think of the worlds of meaning wrapped up just in the word, “fargin.” I didn’t learn Yiddish until I was older, but I was amazed at its resources for describing people and human situations.

litvishechosid – the process works like this:

1. A drug company does research and testing to develop a new drug, which costs $$$.

2. They patent it and sell it at a big profit to make back their investment and get lots of cash because:

3. After the patent – which usually isn’t decades long – runs out other companies can make the same drug, called a generic (general), but since they didn’t pay the costs of developing it they can charge a lot less. They compete with the “brand name” original drug, and for most people the benefits are the same at a much lower price.

4. Insurance companies want to pay out as little as possible, and other stakeholders in health care also want to keep costs down, so they require that the pharmacist will automatically use the cheaper generic unless the doctor says otherwise.

5. But as CTL says, the non-active ingredients in the generic may be different than in the brand name, which may cause some people problems, so the doctor can specify “brand name only.” So if you’re using a generic drug for whatever and you have symptoms, keep track of them and tell your doctor immediately.

6. The same works for over-the-counter drugs. Generic ibuprofen and Advil have the same active ingredient, but different stuff making up the pill itself.

7. Keep your doctor informed and follow his/her advice.

8. Some people think that the big drug companies are using the threat from generics to keep their prices artifically high, costing us lots of $$$ extra. If you want illustrations of this, google “Shkreli” and “Epipen,” about a drug company that got itself busted for increasing the price of a life-saving emergency drug through the roof.

I have had many friends who are from “over there.” In regard to what Igor said, the two most important characteristics are:

A: In Soviet Russia, nationality went by the father, and up until emigration became possible it was much more advantageous to be a Russian, so what was listed on the identity card wasn’t necessarily true by our standards.

B. Once emigration was allowed it became better to be a Jew, because if one member of a family was Jewish, the whole family could emigrate. I heard many funny anecdotes about this situation.

The bottom line is that the situation is often very confused. I knew one poor man who after extended arguments and persuasions got his son to agree to a bris and a bar mitzvah, and then found out that because his wife’s mother had been a Russian married to a Jew, that the boy wasn’t Jewish. He was heartbroken, because even though he wasn’t Shomer Shabbos, he took his Jewish heritage very seirously.

There’s a perception that all serial killers must be crazy, or at least “born that way,” and a few serial killers (Son of Sam, for example) actually were paranoid schizophrenics who heard voices telling them to kill. Most, however, are sane, or suffer from “personality disorders” – a very fuzzy diagnostic category which may or may not take away choice.

Some people are afraid of the mentally ill, and this is absolutely uncalled for. Only a very tiny percentage of mentally ill people are dangerous, and the odds of you’re meeting one are almost non-existent.

My point is that looking for causes and if there’s bechirah is not useful. The person has to be kept from harming others, and the fact that they’ve killed more than once makes them assumed to be dangerous – a shor mu’ad, so to speak.

The problem is that everybody is afraid of what other people will say if they “settle” for a working boy. It’s assumed that there must be something “wrong” with the girl, so people will talk, wonder “what’s wrong with the family,” etc. Also, they may worry that it will harm the younger girls’ shidduchim.

The real problem in all this is the parents and their need to keep up appearances. Supposedly the parents do the selecting because the young people themselves aren’t mature enough to choose wisely. Looking over the current scene, I think in many cases the parents are less mature than the kids.

Eisenhower. He had both the political skill and organizational smarts, plus having unchallenged integrity.

FDR as a second choice, although I would worry that the world has changed so much that he might not grasp the current situation.

The early Lyndon Johnson third. He had the political savvy, but lost his judgment when he succumbed to his Texas machismo and decided to escalate the Vietnam war on the grounds that the world shouldn’t consider the US a “poor, pitiful helpless giant,” thereby creating exactly that situation.

Actually, I don’t think any of them would be the best pick for our times – Mr. Trump, especially. I’m as old as he is, and it’s obvious that he’s living stuck in times past, kind of like a bug encased in amber. The world has changed incredibly, and you have to admit it before you can deal effectively with it.

Sorry guys, but the Torah view is that women are intended to be wives and mothers – and anything else they want. Men are intended to be husbands and fathers and Torah learners, as well as whatever else.

The major driver of the shidduch crisis is simply numbers – more girls than boys on the market at any one time. HOWEVER it doesn’t help that girls are not just admonished to be wives and mothers, they can only marry a guy who’s a lamdan and will sit in kollel until he’s gray. I once tried to red a shidduch for a working guy and the reaction was almost as if I had been advocating for a street sweeper. We have a set formula for what a girl should want, not just a set formula for what the girl should be. If she doesn’t want to spend years as a full-time working mother supporting the family, she doesn’t dare admit it. And if she “settles” for a working guy, she has to worry that her younger sisters may have problems.

I was once in the precincts of one of Brooklyn’s premier local colleges when I noticed a young man in yeshivish dress. He noticed me looking at him, and we got to talking. He felt he had to justify being in college (this was twenty years ago) and told me, “I’m here so that when I get married I can make enough money so that my wife can stay home with the children.” I told him “Yashir koach.”

Why? Because people are so worried about being seen wearing the “wrong brand” of hat that they’ll shell out the money no matter what. maybe they’re afraid it will hurt their kids’ shidduch chances? (BTW that’s not a joke.) Sellers will charge what the customers will pay. Quit paying too much for hats and watch the prices go down.