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lesschumras,
“on days like this past rosh chodesh, i like davening from the siddur on my phone. Why? Because it’s intuitive a nd eliminates searching and skipping”
And best of all, even on do-not-disturb mode, the app notifications keep appearing at the top of the page, so we don’t have to let our shemoneh esrei stop us from seeing the latest text or email that comes in.
litvishechossid,
“Everyone knows that there are tefillos that are designated for certain holidays. Besides it usually says what the Tefilla is for and you dont need to skip pages in order to skip that paragraph. Its different than having something printed that you dont say at all.”
My question was more directed at Gadolhadorah’s assertion that inclusion of different customs disturbed her kavannah. Perhaps she has experience with siddurim that are completely cluttered with multiple versions of each tefilla, at which point I can maybe understand her point. But I personally have not seen many siddurim like that. The typical Artscroll siddur, for example, has just a few places with variations. A siddur that tries to work for communities in both E”Y and Ch”L may have a few more, but the amount of space and skipping involved with these variations is far less than what is required to address the variations based on time of year within a single custom. What I am curious about is the sense that, based on her wording, the disruption to her kavannah is due to hashkafic reasons rather than visual.
“If you know other minhagim does that mean when you come across a nusach other than your own then you will suddenly say different tefillos since you “practiced” by seeing them in your siddur and skipping them until the time is right?”
No, not what I meant at all. Here’s some examples: On Friday nights, my custom is to say the 2nd chapter of mishnayos Shabbos right after saying “Mizmor shir l’yom haShabbos” and “Hashem malach geius laveish” and a mourners kaddish, but I have davened in other shuls where it is said at a different time. I say the psalm for the day of the week after mussaf on Shabbos and Yom Tov, but I have been to shuls where it is said after shacharis. Knowing that these are possibilities reduces that moment of, “what on earth??” when I encounter such a variation.
Gadolhadorah,
If you’re avoiding meat for health reasons, you might not be doing yourself favors with tofu. Tofu is made from processed soybeans, which aren’t very healthy. A lentil soup in the crock pot would supply an excellent amount of plant based protein.
Neville ChaimBerlin,
“Yes and no. If you had a family custom to use a certain Siddur and say exactly every word of its print, that would certainly be more desirable than one that includes verses you just have to know to skip.”
As I said before, even if you have a siddur that fits your customs like a glove, you’ll still have to skip things like shir hamaalos before shema when it’s not the aseres yemei tshuva, hakeil hakadosh vs hamelech hakadosh, yaalei v’yavo, al hanissim, long tachanun when it’s not Monday or Thursday, etc. One cannot escape skipping/flipping completely, so one has to work out coping mechanisms to maintain kavanna. Usually that’s accomplished through using the same siddur daily and becoming extremely familiar with it. So while having a siddur that matches your personal nusach exactly is better than one that does not to some degree, it seems like a small potato to me in the bigger picture, and I was curious as to why it tops Gadolhadorah’s list. That she used the phrase “hashkafa” rather than nusach or custom to describe the differences was also curious.
“It would make it easier to teach your kids your family Nusach also, rather than having to say “we don’t say this, we do say this, etc.””
I can counter-argue that it’s beneficial for a child to know that there are different customs, and to be told which one is his or hers. That way when s/he encounters variations, s/he is not confused. If a child can be expected to learn to skip over yaalei v’yavo when it’s not Rosh Chodesh or Chol Hamoed, certainly s/he can learn to skip or say the parentheticals in “b’rich shmei” before leining or aleinu at the end of davening.
Gadolhadorah,
“having too many choices offered by the siddur when davening is really hard on my kavanah”
I personally daven for the most part from the Artscroll “Yitzchak Yair” siddur, which I imagine is one of the types you are criticizing. In my experience, the variants in community nusach that are included as parentheticals/gray highlights are much less prevalent than the seasonal variants, e.g., yaalei v’yavo for Rosh Chodesh/Y”T, Al Hanissim for Chanuka/Purim, etc. I can’t imagine that you would want a siddur without these additions, and I’m sure with daily use your eyes can find and follow the flow of the tefilla even when these blocks are skipped. Why is it different or more difficult with the few other additions based on community?
Shopping613,
I completely agree with you that there is no way for anyone to know another person’s cheshbonos and challenges, regardless of background. I must point out, however, that there is no comparison between cousins, uncles and nephews, or even grandparents and grandchildren, to parents and children. Everyone will have to refuse or explain something awkward to his non-frum relative or neighbor at some point, but that is very different from a son, anguished but knowing it must be done, having to comfort his weeping mother who realizes that he cannot come to her home for Pesach sedarim anymore.
TGIShabbos,
“Many shidduch offerings were not ‘religious enough’ for them, but were somehow suitable for other FFB yeshivish guys who became engaged. Disposing ALL of their colored dress shirts (I didn’t need to go shopping those years). Not wanting to EVER return back to their non-religious home, although they said their parents were respectful and accommodating- “
It’s possible that these behaviors were expressions of religious fervor, but more likely they came from a place of immaturity. Turning down shidduchim could indicate a fear of commitment, for example, and the rejection of their parents despite accommodation could have simply been teenage rebelliousness. Building a healthy frum lifestyle requires a solid foundation: faith in Hashem and recognition of the Torah as truth, a clear plan for spiritual and religious growth, and a rabbi as a mentor and posek.
Avi K,
“1.”Yid” in English is a pejorative. Archie Bunker used it.”
So is “Jew”. And so what? This is not the real reason you have a problem with people using Yiddish; it’s just a deflection.
“2. Someone who wears peyot and tzitziot outside as an expression of pride rather than for halachic reasons has a problem.”
I disagree. Pride is not the best reason to wear peyos and tzitzis out, but if someone is going to feel proud of something, why not be proud of his Yiddishkeit?
“He has turned them into fashion symbols, like wearing a magen David.”
No, he is simply a person using dress as self-identification. Hashem requires us to wear tzitzis and to not destroy the corners of our beards. These are halachic parameters on our fashion, and there’s nothing wrong with using them to self-identify as a Jew, or even more specifically, a chassid, Yeshivish, etc. Don’t kid yourself, a kippa sruga is no less a fashion statement than long peyos, especially inside the Jewish world.
Joseph,
“What to one person’s shitta is beyond the minimum, to another person’s shitta isn’t even the bare minimum.”
Understood. Given that the OP asked whether or not to wear the peyos out front or long tzitzis in a work situation, and also refers to these hiddurim as expressions of pride (rather than, say, obligation), I don’t think this is the case here.
huju,
“Peyos and tzisis are not expressions of “Jewish pride.” They are fulfillments of mitzvos. Period. And “Jewish pride” is an egregious, misplaced emotion. Tznius is about humility, not “Jewish pride.””
The OP is not talking about just having peyos and tzitzis, but the very public display of them and going beyond the minimum (e.g., long tzitzis, long curly peyos) in a place where that is not common. Also, what do peyos and tzitzis have to do with tznius?
Avi K,
“As for working only with and for YEHUDIM (let the creole German rest in peace), make aliya.”
Because there certainly is no prejudice against people wearing Chareidi garb in the Israeli workforce…
Exhibit A: You can’t even tolerate a single word of Yiddish. Doesn’t bode well for cultural acceptance.
Avi K,
Have you ever received any help from your parents or others? If so, then get off your haughty perch. Nothing in zahavasdad’s story indicates that the husband and wife are not working. Financial independence is important, but nobody starts out financially independent, and you cannot simply flip a switch to get it. It takes hard work and time.
mik5,
It seems like you already have some opinions on this: https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/coffeeroom/topic/how-to-remain-a-ben-torah-after-leaving-kollel/#post-1329039
As far as how to dress when being reprimanded, I think one should dress just as he does every day at the office. Accept responsibility and apologize where appropriate, and be prepared with a plan of action to remedy the situation and prevent future occurrences.
RebYidd23,
That’s beginning to blur the boundaries between knish and kreplach, and I think that’s forbidden by the Torah.
They taste different to me. Round knishes are more like mashed potatoes with a crust. And they can get filled with things like beef, or broccoli. Square knishes are crispier, and usually not adulterated.
Meno,
Square or round ones?
“1. cant eat gebructs”
Has Celiac disease, got it.
“2. he has to take his plate into the kitchen to clean them after the friday night seudah.”
Ability to turn 1 plate into more than one, in other words clumsy, got it.
“3. he has to wear his hat and jacket”
Not a clothing thief, got it.
“4. he must know shas”
Know, or know of?
“5. his tatty must be rich”
His father is happy with what he has, got it.
“6. his name has to be either moishe or yanky.”
But he can’t have both of those names, got it.
DovidBT,
What if it had been raining?
In CTLAWYER’s town, rain only falls at night, when nobody is out driving. This was enacted by a town ordinance back in 1978.
DaasYochid,
Tell me, do you happen to post under any other screennames? How many times has the YWN admin needed to Ctrl Alt Del to restart his server because of your ubiquitous posts adding your 2scents everywhere? Be a mentch1, Uncle Ben, and give Health (or should I say Meno??) my regards.
Little Froggie, I mean, Avram in MD.
PS – the biggest risk from eating contests is choking
Eating contests are extremely dangerous and should not be done.
Gadolhadorah,
“one has to wonder whether it might not be more respectful and create considerably less confusion to use the Rav’s actual name.”
More respectful? Don’t know. Less confusing? Perhaps. But then it would be less fun!
Gezuntheit!
1. Coffee grounds added to compost make a good fertilizer
2. You can share it by bringing it into your office or Yeshiva coffee room (too bad you can’t bring it here)
3. Coffee cake
4. Drink 7 cups a day
5. Feed it to Joseph’s dogs (kidding – don’t do this)CTLAWYER,
“There is no history of damage/accidents in our High school parking lot.”
Oh yeah? Well in MY town, every Thursday children get free rides on flying unicorns in the park. And if a banged up car remains overnight in my town, by morning it looks miraculously like new. Sometimes it even transforms into a later year model.
Joseph,
“No, I’m proposing the law be consistent. Either allow insurance carriers to discriminate premiums based on gender and race or disallow either.”
Discriminating directly based on race would be a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that law and subsequent amendments do not address gender. However, auto insurance companies do indirectly discriminate based on race: they charge different rates by zip code, and predominantly minority zip codes tend to have much higher rates than predominantly white zip codes.
sissel613_,
“Seriously???”
No, not at all.
CTLAWYER,
“The average 17 year old at the public high school is driving a BMW 3 series or Audi A6.”
High school parking lots are where cars go to become transformed into golf balls. The body shop owners in your town must be millionaires.
Joseph,
“Isn’t it strange that state laws allow insurance companies to discriminate auto insurance premiums based upon gender but not based upon race?”
Health insurance used to charge women higher premiums than men, until Obamacare made it illegal to do so. Are you proposing new Federal regulations of the auto insurance industry… Obamacar?
square root of 2,
“why would we be instructed (by the torah, as catch yourself so brilliantly pointed out;” a halachic principle”, to quote the pearls of DY) to, in essence, ignore that very concept that the world is actually being created every moment, and act as if it’s autonomous?”
Doesn’t the very fact that the Torah has to instruct us to make this assumption a priori rather than leaving it as an unspoken empirical assumption speak to the fact that Hashem is constantly sustaining the world?
I think the idea that “scientists” group together in a vast conspiracy is pretty funny. Scientists in general are fiercely competitive, territorial, and love to knock competitors’ research whenever they can.
Forshayer,
“The look of unbridled love that one gets from a wife or child when he is their best friend.”
Do you really equate the love of a spouse or a child to that of a dog?? I’m 100% fine with dog ownership, as long as the dog owner recognizes that what he has is a dog, not a miniature fur-covered human being.
Ctrl Alt Del,
“I’m so done…….”
I think this is becoming your signature line on this thread 😉
Also, you do realize that Toi was responding sarcastically to the OP, right?
CTLAWYER,
I like minivans and vans, and so does my wife. And if I drove a Jaguar sports car or a super-luxury car around town, I think my face would be beet red. To each his own.
TheWizard,
“Is it hashkaficaly appropriate that when the husband and wife go out together with the car or minivan”
Car or minivan, husband should drive. Anything bigger (e.g., 12 passenger Ford Transit, Nissan NV, etc.) wife should drive. This is because of Toi’s point. The stinky driving, which is a liability in small vehicles, becomes an asset in larger vehicles, since people will move out of the way and you will get to your destination more quickly.
Mammele,
“yet water usage is part of a cycle as well, which still doesn’t prevent these wise environmentalists from warning us not to consume too much water even in places with ample water supply.”
Is there a big push in the NYC metro area to conserve water? If so, is the reason based on supply/environmental factors, or economic/infrastructure considerations?
Health,
“The purpose of EN is to provide a female presence in the case of childbirth. Most cases of childbirth are not life threatening, No matter how the posters demand that they are. So the creation of EN makes sense.”
I understand, and agree with you. Thank you for this explanation. To go a step further, if EN could field a team of certified nurse midwives to provide in-home prenatal care and attend planned homebirths, that would seem to be a fantastic potential resource for the frum community.
Joseph,
“What’s climate change, or even societal population growth as a general matter, have to do how much population growth a particular city experiences?”
Hashem created Earth as a place for humans to live, and gave us dominion over it – i.e., we can change it and shape it to suit our needs. Building cities and farms, utilizing its resources, etc. By cities, we can clearly recognize the need for planning and smart usage of resources (space) in order to provide benefit for as many people as possible. I’m contending that we should view the Earth as a whole in the same way. Thus, using that moshol, excessive carbon released into the atmosphere is equivalent to congested traffic.
The philosophical distinction as I see it is this: the secular environmentalists see Earth itself as more important than humanity, thus if carbon emissions are changing things, humans are a problem and must be stopped. In contrast to this, I believe that Hashem gave humans the privilege to use Earth for sustenance, enjoyment, and for increase. Therefore, carbon emissions are a bad thing only if they can cause a negative impact for humanity. Both philosophies are capable of addressing climate science, but the ideas and policies that could potential flow from them are very different.
Mammele,
“One of the problems we Frum Yidden have – or should have – with environmentalism is their logical conclusion against population growth. If one believes carbon dioxide is bad for the environment, there’s no way to escape this conflict. We can’t simultaneously believe that we need to reduce our carbon footprint yet actively increase our numbers.”
This is a good point about the current state of policy debate with respect to our response to climate – and an example of why I feel it’s important to make distinctions between the climate science itself, which is politically neutral, and the policies proposed by people with their own biases. I personally see your inescapable conflict as a false dilemma. City planners who try to develop the urban landscape to mitigate traffic congestion as the population grows are not lacking faith in Hashem, nor advocating for a cessation of city growth. I see this problem as city planning on a larger scale. We should be smart about how we use our resources, because we want to create a great quality of life for as many people as we can. And when we’ve optimized resource usage as much as possible and it’s still not enough for our children, it’s time to move to the suburbs or grow the city! Hashem created a vast universe beyond Earth that is full of resources. I personally don’t believe that a need for population control must be part of any plan to try to create an environment that is optimal for a thriving humanity.
ubiquitin,
“for example while in NY 2017 ma yhave been a colder than average year”
It was actually the 10th warmest year for New York statewide since 1895 (123 year period), despite the sharp cold snap to end the year.
Little Froggie,
“Again, you got me wrong. They have an agenda. And NOTHING will get in their way. It’s hot today? – that’s the global warming at play. It’s cold today? That’s the global warming at the cooling cycle. It’s really hot, you just don’t realize it. The weather changed? That’s the issue. Unbiased, honest, I say!!!”
Who is “they”? A climatologist would not make such silly claims. They are looking at decades, not days.
DaasYochid,
“Are you two talking to each other, or over each other’s heads?”
We’re parallel pontificating.
akuperma,
“it would seem that davening for a particular climate might be a bet dubious, though one supposes there is no harm is asking Ha-Shem to violate the natural order.”
We daven for weather-related things that we understand are beneficial to us. As we say between Sukkos and Pesach, v’sein tal umatar livracha – we daven for a good rainy season in eretz Yisroel. And outside of the rainy season when rain would be harmful to standing crops, v’sein bracha.
square root of 2,
“I do think there seems to be a hashkafic side to whether or not scientists can be believed, as is evident from the subsequent posts.”
I think the issue is not so much whether to believe scientists within context of their field, but how much weight to give to “their” opinions outside of their field. I think most of the rage on the right against climate science has nothing to do with climate science per se, but with political and economic policy. Much of the anger towards Hawking, likewise, was due to his athiestic pronouncements and stances on Israel where his knowledge and intelligence was no better than the next guy’s, not his research on black holes.
Little Froggie,
“You totally missed my point. When some bright scientist can claim that some oxyhyperflorurobihydronation in the hypershpheric region of the iosphere causes our weather to get hotter, and then tomorrow claim that the oxyhyperflorurobihydronation in the hypershpheric region of the iosphere causes out weather to get cooler and then claim that oxyhyperflorurobihydronation in the hypershpheric region of the iosphere causes out WEATHER TO CHANGE!!! is when we need to get a hard look at our UNBIASED, HONEST scientists!!!”
The problem with your point is that you are completely making it up. Not just the fake science words, but the notion that climatologists have flip-flopped. This notion came from some magazine in the 1970s that was likely responding to the fact that particulates – dirty stuff that gets put into the air – causes less sunlight to reach the ground. This is totally unrelated to carbon dioxide (CO2 – CO is carbon monoxide), water vapor, etc. acting as greenhouse gasses. Particulate pollution has dropped quite a bit over the U.S. and Europe during the past few decades (your mommy dealt with a lot more smog than you do), but CO2 continues to increase.
Presidential candidates aren’t the only ones who have to deal with inaccurate, sensationalized media. Ask your doctor how many times he’s rolled his eyes over some crazy medical claim made in a magazine based on research the author didn’t understand.
Health,
“Question – Did you vote for Trump?”
Give me two million dollars and I’ll tell you who I voted for!
“If not, why are you quoting his absurd comment?!?
He is an actor – not everything he said is 100% truthful.”Of course he was pandering to his base when he tweeted that. I included it as an example that opposition to vaccines is coming from different parts of the political spectrum.
akuperma,
” In America there are regional accidents, though mid-western (mid-Amerca) became standard as a result of the civil war (when someone from Illinois accepted the surrender from a Virginian)”
I don’t think this is quite accurate. Lincoln himself spoke with a distinctive Kentucky twang. I think the “American Standard” dialect developed conceptually more in the 20th century with suburbanization (middle class whites eschewing regional accents perceived to be associated with poor inner city areas, and favoring accents more similar to Anglo-Saxon residents of the interior Northeast and Midwest), and television and radio broadcasts that adopted the same. A possible Civil War connection may be the association of Southern accents with stereotypes of poverty and slowness, due to the extensive poverty in the South following the war. Regional accents in the Northeast were likely associated with poverty due to the high number of new immigrants in the early 20th Century.
Avi K,
“I have noticed that many posts are written half in Creole German. Is this normal English?”
It is for many Jews!