One Bare Head, Please...

I just hate it when I take a blob of Minoxidil Aeorsol and rub into my Yamalka.

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JewGlass: A (first) Jewish app for Google Glass:

Rusty Brick has announced the first of, perhaps, many Jewish apps that will harness the power of Google Glass. Check out this story at the Times of Israel, Jewish Google Glass Ceiling Broken. The clever programmer at RustyBrick (makers of their fine Smart Siddur, and many other apps) have seen the synergy between Google Glass and Judaism, and they are "on it".

God's Accountant:

I constructed this joke today. You will find the beginning quite familiar, but the end is original. I call the joke, “God's Accountant.”

An Orthodox Jew who is also a successful businessman has a money problem. He decide he needs to find a creative accountant. He calls an accountant and asks, “How much is two plus two?”

The accountant says, “Four.”

“Thanks,” the businessman says, and he calls another accountant. “How much is two plus two?”

“Well now,” the accountant says, “How much did you have in mind?”

“You're hired,” the businessman says. The accountant winds up deeply involved with the guy's business. He moves nearby to work more closely with him. He's also an Orthodox Jew, and they both attend the same little Stibbel.

One Sunday morning, few of the regular congregants are around. Shachrit should have started a good 15 minutes ago. Two guys are huddled in one corner of the room; three in another corner. And then there's the businessman and his accountant. The guys taps his accountant on the shoulder and points at the others. “Two plus three plus two. What do you think?”

The accountant responds, “I believe I can persuade Hashem that we have a minyan.”

Discrimination in Housing: My father, Joesph B. Robison, worked for the American Jewish Congress from 1947 to almost the end of his life in 1983. He was instrumental in the development of state law prohibiting discrimination in housing. His legal language was adopted first by New York State, and then by many other states as well. Today, discrimination in rental and sales of housing in the United States is generally illegal.

Haredi communities in the United States and Israel like to raise men who dedicate their efforts to Torah-true study, to the neglect of almost everything else. If you think it is admirable for more than a few, gifted members of the community to spend their lives this way, please consider that people who turn only toward our Talmud and Torah are mentally disabled when circumstances require them to address an important principle: to dedicate to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Here is a quote made by the Failed Messiah Blog. It bgins a thread at COLLive by a resident of the Crown Heights neighborhood:

We would hope that landlords, especially the Crown Heights landlords, would put a priority on our values, but sadly the need to make money is taking precedence for them. Some young agents and landlords will specifically rent to these goyim instead of a fellow Jewish family.

The commenter is quite oblivious that landlords in the area might simply have chosen not to break the laws about discrimination in housing. (In fact, in his statement at COLLive, he says flatly that he intends to discriminate as a landlord.) We religious Jews live in the United States. The laws of our governments give us certain incredibly valuable rights, and restrict us in various ways that, we hope, will be for the public good. How can we consider ourselves useful people, if we are going to blunder around here in the dark, unaware of the secular country that surrounds us and keeps us at peace?

Saving Anton’s Seat:

We have a small shul that comfortably seats 35 guys and 18 women. A few of the seats are three-person couches. Last Shabbat, I sat in the middle of a couch. Anton, siting next to me, was called up for Maftir.

While Anton was reading the Haftorah, Davy arrived, stood before Arthur’s seat and put on his Tallit. Quite obviously, he intended to sit in this apparently empty place.

What should I do? Should I inform Davy that the seat belonged to Anton? I reflected on my own experience. I have often lost my seat while being called up for an honor. Usually I don’t mind, and I just sit elsewhere. On the rare occasions when I wanted my seat back, all I had to do was ask. It seemed wrong, but I decided not to say anything.

Davy sat down in Anton’s seat, and I felt, oh, a little guilty.

When Anton finished the Haftorah, he commenced leading Musaf. He was not going to sit down for the rest of the service. I realized that my agony over what to do had been pointless.

Old Man Building his Sukkah:

Our Sukkah is about thirty-five years old. The frame consists of aluminum poles and metal joints. Two boards top the aluminum poles, a heavy, beautiful canvas makes the walls, and 100 bamboo poles make the schach. We decorate the Sukkah with forty charming glass ornaments; they won’t attract animals and insects.

Nothing in my life makes me feel my age more than that Sukkah. I used to need ninety minutes to assemble it. Now it takes two days, with several periods of work separated by rests for recovery. It’s hard work putting up that sukkah. I’m old.

A Hechsher for Water:

The O-U has just put their kashruthy seal of approval on distilled water. Not plain water, not water that has additives that actually require kosher supervision; water that is distilled. Well, the product does contain electrolytes (these should be inorganic minerals), so perhaps formal supervision is required:

MD Drinks, Inc.

Redondo Beach, CA

Brand: Function Water

Product(s): Vapor Distilled Water and Electrolytes, OU

We get older and smarter:

The cloth that encircles our 8x12 sukkah is gaily-painted canvas, heavy to lift. When Sukkot is over, I have to return it to its resting place in our attic, two flights up. Folding the cloth neatly is a time-consuming exercise, partly because its length is longer than our largest room.

Last year I got smart. I realized that I did not need to roll the cloth up very neatly, I only needed to roll it up so that I could carry it, and it would fit nicely in our storage attic. I’ve saved 90% of the roll-up time!

The "Hot Sukkah"

We live in central New Jersey, and this has been the year of the of the "Hot Sukkah" -- very hot temperatures and strong sun plaguing our visits to the Sukkah. I remember nothing like it. Walking back and forth between the kitchen and the Sukkah was exhausting, due to the much lower temperatures in our air-conditioned home. We sweated and sweated during our daytime meals, and in the evening, unfamiliar "noseeum" bugs bothered us and dropped onto our plates.

I'm afraid that the hot holiday of Sukkot will not remain a rarity. More likely, we are experiencing global warming. Every two to three years, when the holiday begins in summer, it will be hot again, unless we get some blessed rain.

I dreamed of a giant exhaust fan over the sukkah, but in practice, there's only one way I can deal with all that heat: I'll have to lose weight.

You're a Nerd if (I have never attempted this form before):

You're a Nerd if you try to put your tie on while wearing headphones. (Now how did I ever think of that?)

Dad lost his father’s tefillin:

My father’s father was a significant Reform Jew. He was the treasurer for the organization that proposed a Jewish State to the League of Nations. (We still have one of these formal proposals, written out in beautiful longhand.) Granddad had six children, the first four of them boys. None were religious, but all of his children were proud to be Jewish.

As I got deep into my Baal Teshuvah process, my father apparently remembered his own father’s tefillin. He could not find them, so he asked me if by chance, he had already given them to me. I would love to have had those tefillin! It was quite clear I had never heard of them. My dad was disappointed. He said he hoped he might still find them. I never heard about them again.

My parents died many years ago. A shattering question occurred to me today, and there’s no hope of answering it. There are so many wonderful questions to ask about the past, and their context slips away, covered in the sands of time, before you notice them. Here’s my question:

Why did my father inherit his father’s tefillin?

Dad was the youngest of the four boys. The oldest son was easily the most active in Jewish matters. In fact, a few years after granddad’s death, the oldest would be smuggling guns to aid Israel’s War of Independence. But my father got the tefillin. There must be a wonderful story there, and I’ll never know what it is.

The 'Other' Ketchup:

I’m serious about my ketchup. I use it on lots of foods, and I make serious use of it. I have observed that if you cook your own food, you can douse it with as much ketchup as you want, without fear of offending the cook. So of course we buy Passover ketchup.

You know the stuff I mean. Somehow, the great ketchup companies KNOW how to make ketchup, and the passover food companies make a pale imitation. For Passover, that’ll do. But then Passover is gone.

And I’m left with half a bottle of Passover ketchup. I ought to throw it out, but I do the “right” thing: Painfully and surely, I use it up. When it’s gone, can I say a Shehechiyanu?

RIA, the new Airline:

Have you heard about the new airline, RIA Air? They only make round trips.

Through the Generations: The 'Axe Detailer'

The 'Axe Detailer' is a cleansing tool for men. One reviewer called it, reasonably, a loofah for guys. (It's made out of artifical materials.) The ad copy that comes with it warns us that "when girls check out a guy, they notice every part. They don't miss a thing." This is silly advertizing of course. ('Dove for Men' sells an extremely similar product with no silly ad copy at all.) But when I use the Axe Detailer, I get a special pleasure due to the marketing.

I realized today that the pleasure I get is kindred with the feeling I get when I don tefillin. That act puts me in touch with untold generations of Jewish men who have done the same before me. Scrubbing with the 'Axe' puts me in touch with a delightfully younger generation of desperate men, all doing what I'm doing.

46 Wiggins (once Yavneh House) Demolished:

In 1961, a few Orthodox Jews at Princeton University established a group called Yavneh. Currently, the term "Yavneh" refers to the activities of the Orthodox group at the Princeton University Center for Jewish Life. But this group's first two homes were off-campus. The second, from about 1966 to 1971, was at 46 Wiggins, a short distance NW of campus. The house was probably built in the late 19th century. Its interior was a bit bizarre. There was a small room on the first floor that could be shut off by closing a pair of large doors. We usually said prayers there. The room looked as if it had been used for other strange rites in the past. There was a small living room, a large dining room, and a kitchen.

The group got a zoning variance to operate a kosher kitchen there, open to outsiders. There was resistance from some neighbors. Their battle cry was “Today the Jews, tomorrow the Black Muslims.” But the variance was obtained. The kitchen had a non-working mechanism to enable people in the rooms upstairs (2nd and 3rd floors) to send a signal. Numbered metal tiles would have moved when a button was pressed upstairs. There were fore stairs and back stairs, apparently so that servants could move about the building without passing residents.

Yavneh left this building in 1971 to move to Stevenson Hall, 83 Prospect, a University-sponsored kosher dining hall. Since then, 46 Wiggins has and several owners (I think) and many residents. It became a condo, and later (again, I believe) owners lived in it while renting out apartments in the building. These owners expanded the house, building a side porch and a rear porch, and extending the living room to the side as well. Recently, 46 Wiggins was bought by R. B. Homes, a home builder. The house at 46 Wiggins occupied barely half the property, and it appears that RBH has other plans for it. 46 Wiggins was demolished this February (2009), in less than two weeks. Almost all of the demolition was done by one piece of machinery, shown in the photos.

This machine has an immense metal head that consists of a pair of clamping jaws. I think that most of the destruction was accomplished by hitting the house with these jaws, usually positioning them above something and dropping, to utilize gravity. Then the jaws dragged material away from the house.

46 Wiggins was of course much larger than the machine that destroyed it. But those claws made the house look feeble and in need of a mercy killing, making the structure shudder again and again as it was attacked. If we believed that houses had feelings like animals, we would never allow such a thing.
















Here is the house from the rear, showing the added porches:



Here's the house from the front. In preparation for destruction, a chain link fence surrounds the property:


Here's the front door, with the last piece of delivery (a newpaper) tucked in:


And here's a bucolic side view:


Here, the front of the house has been battered:


The side, severely battered:

Here's the machine that did it:



Here's the machine that did it, working on the side:


Here goes the top (1):


Here goes the top (2):


Here goes the top (3):


Here goes the top (4):


Just a pile of rubbish ...


It's all over:


It's February 24, 2009. 46 Wiggins is no more. (29 Olden, 83 Prospect and CJL are still standing.) Stay tuned for a pic of whatever gets built here next.
- Tobias D. Robison

Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable Soup: no longer Kosher:

Look sharp, you may still find a few cans of Campbell's Vegveg soup that has a Kosher symbol. According to Arlene Mathes-Scharf, Campbell used to produce the VegVeg soup (and possibly a few other soups?) at a separate Kosher plant, but they are now making the soup in all their plants, due to the increased cost of shipping.

Update: I can't be sure about this, but it looks like my queries to the Kashruth Alert web page and the Webbe Rebbe led to more alerts about Campbell Soup. This is really sad, especially since shipping costs must be pretty low at this moment.

My wife and I broke up a party:

My wife and I broke up a party. I have an abhorrence of breaking up parties. When I was a small child, nine maybe, my beloved Germanic grandma told me about the difference between French Leave and English Leave. She was a goldmine of misinformation, so please don't try to learn anything from what she said: “French Leave” is a term of disdain, but it's the right thing to do. The Frenchman thanks his host or hostess discreetly and sneaks away, leaving the party in full swing. The Englishman goes around saying goodbye to everyone, shaking hands, and giving everyone else the excuse to go. He breaks up the party. I would never want to do that!

But there we were, at a dinner party that started at seven p.m. on December 25. Several delicious hours had passed, and the whole meal had been served with much animated conversation. Many of the guests were older than we, in their seventies. We had to get up early the next day for morning services, a Yahrzeit. So we suggested that we bentsch. Bentsching was fun.

But sure enough, after that, everyone said goodbye and left. I knew it was going to happen. I cringed all the way through bentsching. Maybe we should have crawled into some corner to say our prayers without a mezumin. But ... bentsching shouldn't break up a party.

It's Unscrupulous, but it's Kosher?

Like many orthodox Jews, I am against the idea of a “Hechsher Tzedek”, a kashruth seal of approval that certifies both the halachic kashruth and the ethical quality of the food production. But please bear with me. I seem to have a commonsense position that many proponents of Hechsher Tzedek might be able to accept. I shall use the Rubashkin Circus for my example. I know there are Rabbis who have said that there's only one thing that matters: Was the meat processed according to Halacha? To this question, I have an answer.

To a large extent, we trust the people who produce our kosher meat to police themselves, and to work accurately. If we know that the people controlling kosher meat production have no respect for secular law; if we know that some of their workers are mere teenagers who work twenty hours a day; how can we begin to assume that their kashruth is accurate?

In general, if a family does not observe the sabbath, their observance of kashruth is suspect. And if we know that people work very, very long hours, we know their work cannot be error-free. Similarly, if a meat processor seems to observe and respect nothing but halacha, and forces workers to work far past the limits of accurate work, we cannot trust him. For the Rubashkins at least, we need no new seal of approval, just a little common sense.

It's October 24, and I'm running scared.

There's not a lot of incentive to disassemble my Sukkah, but it's always an embarrassment if the thing's still standing on Thanksgiving. Do you know how few days there are till Thanksgiving? And the holidays just ended.

I repeated 'Layolom':

In Orthodox services, there's a tendency to frown upon, or entirely ban, word repetitions. And yet, I did something this morning I've never done before: Leading Musaf, in the Kedusha, chanting “Yimoch Hashem Layolom ...”, I repeated 'Layolom'. Nobody complained, but I want to describe the unusual circumstance that made this happen.

As I was chanting the line, I realized I had said that word unclearly, almost a mumble, more like “lolom”. Now I strongly believe that God knows what word I said, He always knows what we mean. And I know that everyone who was there understood me; we all know the text, they probably heard the word clearly despite my poor pronunciation. So why did I repeat the word?

The answer is: because I'm recording an audio book. As I record and edit, I've learned that it's very hard for people to understand mumbled words. And as they've never read the book before, they can't often guess what a mumbled word is. When I'm recording, if I notice a poor pronunciation, I stop and repeat.

Oh, the embarrassment. It won't happen again.

(If you're curious, you can find out about the book here.)

We just bought the exact same Sorbet maker:

Last year we bought the wonderful Cuisinart ice-30bc to make sorbets. We used it several times this year, and learned how to get really good results. We just bought another one for Pesach. The new one (the exact same model) is a lot cheaper. I assume this means that there are now better sorbet makers on the market. But I don't care. We paid our dues, learning to get good results with the 30bc. There's little time to experiment on Pesach. We'll know what we're doing.

What I think of you:

It was supposed to be a three -- or three and a half -- day field trip, working 300 miles from home. I drove down Monday morning. It was very painful to learn, on Thursday, that I would have to work Friday. (In fact, this is one of those typical cases where I did not get home for Shabbat.) I was out of clothes. I was too tired to wash anything. The prospect of going through my clothing to find the least sweaty things seemed more effort than I could manage.

Then I had a thought: on Friday, I would dress to make a point. The point? That I wasn't expecting to have to be there! I wore the exact same clothes I had worn on Thursday. Very passive-aggressive, hey?

Rabbenu Tam, Where are you when I need you?

We're keeping our house cold to lower our heating bills. I found the cold unbearable until I started wearing thin, black “duofold” underwear designed to keep me warm. I call this blessed stuff “middlewear”, since it goes between my shirt and undershirt.

Every morning, I have to decide whether to place my tallit katan under, or over, my middlewear. I think this is a matter of taste that has no practical consequence, so I don't always make the same decision. That may explain why, this morning, I put the tallit katan under my middlewear. And I put the other tallit katan over my middlewear. My intention, of course, is NEVER TO DO THAT AGAIN!

It takes longer to build my Sukkah:

Our sukkah's frame consists of pipes connected by joints held together by tiny bolts that one screws in with an Allen Wrench. In its time it was about as easy to assemble as any Sukkah could be, and I used to assemble it in an hour.

It takes me a lot longer now, and there are two reasons. One is that I'm older, slower and less strong. The other is less obvious. Like many oldsters, I'm more aware of my mortality and more averse to risk-taking. I know this makes no sense, my life was more worth preserving when there was more of it left to live, to say nothing of the lives of my children, but that's the way people are. So I take a lot more time than I used to, to make sure that the bolts that hold the sukkah together, that keep the schach from falling on our heads, are screwed in tight.

OCD? I don't think so. I know that those bolts used not to be screwed in so well.

My father's Toast:

My father made up a toast. It's not great. In fact I got rather tired of hearing it. But I'd rather memorialize it on the web, than have it vanish forever. Here it is:

L'Chaim! Ul'Shalom! [Sings like sinatra:] You can't have one without the other!

Kosher Innovations:

The company that makes the great Sabbath Lamp (and other neat inventions like the Sabbath alarm clock) has a new name: Kosher Innovations. Check them out! We own two "KosherLamps" and one "KosherClock", and now I'm thinking about the KosherLock (keycoded, no electricity).

A PDA is not a Siddur:

It's easy to download hebrew prayers onto a PDA, and very handy to have your own electronic prayer book when you're at, say, a wedding. I often use my PDA as a siddur in my usual shul also, because carrying any load for a while, even a thick prayer book is hard on my back. The PDA's much lighter and easier for me to hold.

At Mincha for the last Fast of Tevet, a brief moment forced me to realize how much a PDA differs from a real Siddur: We were of course not wearing tallits, and the Torah was being returned to the ark. as the Torah passed us in the front of the room, people reached out their prayer books to touch it. Would I ever reach out my PDA to touch the Torah? NOT ON YOUR LIFE!

The slow left turn: A Michshol!

In my youth I occasionally made slow, leisurely left turns at intersections. It seemed to me elegant to take all the time I had, right up to the moment of the light changing red. And I would be more safe I thought, because moving slowly and dependably allowed all the other drivers to see what I was doing, and to react if I was accidentally moving into their space.

I never take slow left turns anymore. I had one or two experiences that foreshadowed the traumatic one. I now think of the slow left turn as a terrible michshol, a stumbling block placed before the careless driver. Here’s what I learned:

My first clue to the evil of the leisurely left turn was a small one. Once or twice I turned left as the light changed yellow, and found to my amazement, that a driver behind me had made the turn as well. That driver must have hot-pinked the light. Or perhaps that driver was determined to make the turn, infuriated by the slow movement of my car, and just pushed through the intersection in my wake.

One evening, returning home, I turned left off of the last highspeed road I had to travel that day. The light changed yellow. A sports car was coming towards me from the other direction. It was driving fast, evidently intending to catch the light. I calculated that I would be out of its way in time, and took my leisurely turn, driving slowly, safely into the crossroad beyond the intersection. As I did this I heard a hideous sound of brakes screetching and tires skidding on the road. I looked in my rear view mirror, and this is what I saw:

1. There was a station wagon right behind me. The driver behind me had also turned left, following me through the intersection.


2. The sports car was just beyond the intersection on the LEFT side of the road, exactly where I had begun my turn. It had avoided hitting the station wagon by a remarkable deft maneuver, yet it would have crashed headon had there been another car following the station wagon that stopped at the intersection.

The woman in the station wagon was a terribly careless driver, and she must have just assumed the road was clear for left turns. I believe my car blocked her view of the sports car, but she should not have committed to a turn until her view was clear. But that’s why I call the slow left turn a Michshol: I set up a rare situation in which a normally careless driver could suffer, or cause, a headon collision.

And there were no airbags in those days.

I've got that part covered:

I was part of a large software development group working on a very difficult schedule to integrate many applications into an exciting new product. The schedule was, of course "challenging" (explanation for the uninitiated: "challenging" means "ridiculous"). We dozen people had weekly status meetings, working sessions that were critical to the potential success of the project. None of us missed any of these meetings. So one fall day as we grouped in, I explained how I would be missing seven work days in a month to the fall Jewish holidays. "That sounds like a good deal," said Brian (not of course his name), "how do I get in on this Jewish thing?"
"There is an initiation," hinted Mike.
"A small matter of the knife," growled Judy.
"Oh I've got that part covered," said Brian.
"Then you've got a problem, "I quipped.
Everyone began laughing hyseterically. Well, Brian did not laugh, and neither did I. But the others seemed really unable to stop. After several minutes the laughter quieted down to a steady ripple of chuckles.
"Let's get this meeting going," said our manager, and she collapsed in another round of laughing hysterics, setting all the others off again.
A few people tried to say something statusy, but only laughter emerged. After a several feeble attempts, our manager got up.
"Same, ah ha, same time next week," she laughed, and she walked out.

I call it the "Mordor" K:

As we all know, there are just TOO many kashruth symbols. I recently saw yet another one, a box containing a large letter K on the left, and the letters "orc" vertically arranged on the right. So this must be the Mordor K. I suppose that an orc would make a pretty good mashgiach. He might not fully understand all the nuances of the law, but all would be in great fear of making any kashruth mistake that he could detect. For example:

"A Kosher Alert: The So and So company has placed an unauthorized Mordor K on its Pork and Beans Sauce product. An army of four thousand orcs is now marching towards its factory."

Hitchhiker forced to eat at knifepoint!

I read a headline saying that a man was forced to eat pizza and drink wine at knifepoint. Can you blame me for assuming the story was about a Jew who (normally) kept kosher?