nfgo3: I noticed your first point, and I was wondering about that. If she’s overweight enough that she needs a lap band, then I can understand why she would be so crazy about her weight.

Does she have a nutritionist? A good nutritionist can make a diet plan that can make it seem as though she’s doing more more quickly, and this may be a psychological substitute for the lack of eating (hishtadlus).

Just a quick note- I know ultimateskier and she is NOT at all how you paint her to be. Everyone has bad days and horrible experiences- I think it’s a bit harsh to judge.

I don’t babysit (there’s nobody really in my neighborhood to babysit), but I’ve tutored, and one thing I always appreciated was when the parents stood up for me whatever I said. If I told a kid that she can’t go out and play til we finished (her mom had told me I could have that kind of policy), and she kvetched to mom, she would ALWAYS stand up for me and make the kid stay. If she was misbehaving, the mom would always confront the kid, never excuse her or give her a nosh, like previous posters said. Having a supportive parent in the background really makes life easier.

The thing is, yeshiva is considered a for-profit venture. These people are paying tuition, and the whole point of these kiruv yeshivos is that the parents won’t have to or can pay less. You’re getting tuition money- why should I help you?

So then the yeshivos make dinners, which are only useful if the parent body is already wealthy, while if it was it probably wouldn’t really need the dinner quite so much.

And thus, you end up with the yeshivos struggling to break even.

True, I guess… am I that bland? 🙁

Whatever. No biggie.

DY: Love it…

Honestly? I don’t know.

My dad says he’d go to KFC and McDonalds and all that, try everything once, and then head over to the beis din. But honestly, while I get fulfillment from being Jewish, if I’m not, I don’t NEED to be. There would be no need AT ALL for me to convert to be close to Hashem. I might, anyway, but it’s not the kind of thing I really know about right now.

“The Gordian Knot is superbly written with a brilliant plot and totally original”

“Honestly, the book’s climax wherein two Jewish boys miraculously track down an old Nazi is as ridiculous and contrived as plots come”

See, I love most of the plot idea, and I really like the first two parts (David & Buki and Chilik & Shalom). The writing was probably not at all bad in the Hebrew version (I get the feeling a lot of the issue was the translation, but of course I could be wrong). The first two parts were a brilliant idea.

Then comes the third part (Avi & Meitar) wherein are added the neo-Nazis, the evil Islamists, the secret code, the pseudoscience, the long-lost friend, and the kabbalistic rebbe who knows all the secrets. That part seriously justifies everything everyone says about why they don’t like Jewish books. If he’d just left that out, he’d have been in MUCH better shape- I think the original plot was SO much better and deserved MUCH better treatment.

I do recommend the book for the first two sections- you should probably also read the third section in order to know why you shouldn’t.

I can’t recommend enough the works of Haim Sabato. Really incredible. If you read Hebrew well then I’d recommend you start the Hebrew editions, but English translations are also fantastic. If you like thrillers, these ain’t them. They’re much more historical fiction/memoir. The best one IMO (Adjusting Sights) is about the author’s experiences in the Yom Kippur War, and is therefore very Zionist (the author is the rosh yeshiva of a yeshivat hesder)- if you don’t like that, skip it and go on to The Dawning of the Day. I don’t know if they’re sold in Jewish bookstores, though- I got mine on Amazon.

Also, this is PROBABLY not the right forum for this, but I liked The Chosen.

*runs away and hides*

🙂 🙂 🙂

gaw: You should really be getting double points for overtime here… 🙂

Thanks, Sam2!

I really should have remembered that. That was seriously my childhood.

GAW: You have somewhat of a point about Rebbetzin Jungreis, but Rebbetzin Tarshish is influential in her sphere. I didn’t go to her seminary, so I can say that what she says has nothing to do with me.

However, the whole “If a rabbi says it, it goes” mentality means that if a rav says something, it’s taken a lot more seriously.

Think about it- it’s all the mindset. Be honest with yourself- would you listen equally, as a gut reaction, to a rav and a rebbetzin?

Paradoxically, though, that’s why I don’t think that female Orthodox rabbis make sense- because most Orthodox people won’t buy into it, making the whole designation worthless. It’s just inflation.

In which case you’d be mechallel yom tov, so…

Of course, if you wanted to have the longest PURIM night, then that would lend a whole new meaning to party limo.

“Now I think the people who posts are in general high school kids.”

Hey, DON’T diss high school kids, please…

I don’t remember what CD it was, but there was an old one where they had a song for all of the parshios- it started, “In Bereishis we begin learning Torah- how precious we hold our mesorah. Bereishis Noach Lech-Lecha…” and continued all through the sefarim. “Shemos is sefer number two- out of Mitzrayim with Moshe Rabbeinu…” “Vayikra is sefer number three- come and learn about the korbanos with me…”

I’d love to know where that one came from. I still use it whenever I need to remember the order of parshiyos.

haifagirl: Once, during a piano lesson, I had a student learning an easy version of Brahms’s Lullaby. She recognized it immediately. “Oh,” she said, “it’s Hamapil!”

I love that one! My mom used to sing it to me when I was little!

revooh: It’s funny, I used to never listen to non-Jewish music but now I do. I just only pick songs I like, and I have to justify to myself why I like it. I happen to like instrumentals, so it’s not a big deal. I suggest maybe, as a transition, trying Piano Guys- they take tunes you may like, use only the music (as all of the Jewish singers do anyway), and it’s gorgeous (I’m obsessed with cello).

Remember, if you know this is what you really want to do, then doing it will be its own reward. Figure out EXACTLY why you want to do it, and it’ll make it easier. Everything’s easier when you have a clearly defined goal- for example, I’ve been gaining weight recently, and when I decided, you know, I’m gonna lose weight, nothing actually happened, because I had no motivation- as opposed to when my cousin got married, and I specifically tried to lose weight so I can look and feel my best about myself when I was there. Then it worked :).

pba: In seriousness, does that mean an exemption? 🙂

Apparently, about 30% of people have it, and more women have it than men. (So I’ve got a backup, I guess…)

mdd: “The previous wave Jews were mostly irrevocably lost.”

I think that’s unfair to those immigrants who did manage to keep their faith. And they existed- I’m a proud descendant of one.

The thing is, it may even be true, what you’re saying, except:

1) If those same Jews had come over earlier (which I think is the point of zahavasdad’s posts) then arguably the US Jewish community would have just been revitalized earlier, and

2) The conditions, weirdly enough, of the 30s and 40s were better for observant Jews than those of the previous decades. The five day work week first became standard in the late 20s, and the Fair Labor Standards Act wasn’t made law until 1938. In fact, according to Wikipedia (no, I usually don’t quote Wikipedia but I found this interesting, and feel free to take it with a grain of salt), “the first five-day work week in America was instituted by a New England cotton mill to afford Jewish workers the ability to adhere to their own religious Sabbath.” It was early on, but until Ford instituted it in 1926 it was an anomaly.

Those frummer Jews really just came at an opportune time for Yiddishkeit.

ultimateskier: You’ve passed this point long ago, probably, but you gave yourself away SO bad here…

Love ya, though!

Everyone: her stuff is good. 🙂

I love to write also (big surprise…), and while I don’t write for the Jewish Press or anything people outside my school will really read (except by accident at their second cousin’s house, as I discovered to my astonishment when my mom’s sheitelmacher complimented me on something I wrote for the school newspaper and I was like, what?), I still think it’s a great way to put my thoughts somewhere concrete. Otherwise they tend to kind of float away in the periphery, so when I write, I’m actually thinking for real- it’s kind of just an accident that other people happen to read it afterward.

I don’t really write inspirational type stuff, but if I did, even though I’m in high school, I wouldn’t really have an issue with that. Personally, I tend to find inspiration in the weirdest things, so I know that really, there’s the inspiration and there’s the kli- if you happen to be the kli for someone else’s inspiration, kol hakavod.

And if you want to use a pen name, use a pen name, but why would there be anything at all untznius about using your name in an article?

Vogue: The thing is, unless you specifically try to be mekarev the men, this idea won’t really solve the age gap (I think there is an age gap, but I highly doubt that it’s the sole or even major cause of the “crisis”). You’ll get more men, but also more women to further the imbalance.

ICOT- another not-random-AT-ALL thought:

Thanks! 🙂 Didn’t see that til now- it actually went reasonably well, considering that the questions were pretty much messed up.

I didn’t love it (though the Doctor fighting himself was cool, IMHO). I thought the concept was cool, and the Cybermen did occasionally scare me out of my wits, and Warwick Davis was great- I just thought it was a bit thin. Not that it wasn’t good- it just fell somewhat flat. I could see the Gaimanness, though.

“I mean, wouldn’t that really negate their purpose in wanting to do the thing in question, being that the premise of feminism is to assert feminine identity and capability?”

I think I mentioned something like this in the other thread, and it’s really something I never understood. I mean the whole point of feminism, IMHO, is girl power. Girls are SMART! Girls are AWESOME! Girls have the XX factor!

Personally, I have no desire to be a rabbi, and to be totally honest, I can’t really relate to that desire in others so well- but I can understand why women want to be rabbis, and I think it’s got a lot more to do with what OOM is saying than what people think it is. It’s like, you’re a kid, and your friend says there’s no way you can swing as high as he can. So you decide you want to swing, because you know you really can, but you’re only allowed on the swings for 30 seconds at a time to prove it. The point isn’t that women can’t be RABBIS- okay. But women also don’t have a lot of platforms- Rebbetzin Kanievsky is the exception, not the rule, and even she didn’t have a fraction of the public effect that a rav can have. Perhaps she didn’t want it- nobody can fault her for that, and that’s her business. But to then turn her into an example of how egalitarian Judaism is is ludicrous.

“It was clear from the rest of my post what I meant by force. Giving them an ultimatum is wrong -at least until they do the same thing with the Chilonim.”

Have you confirmed that every single thing Lipman wants to put in place isn’t already present in the chiloni system?