Lapid says he takes his lessons from Moshe Rabbeinu and says he will have to do what is unpopular but necessary...

The Daily Show has some funny clips from some recent shows...

the first is a Moment of Zen related to Passover:


and the next two are on Barak Obama's recent trip to Israel:

5 is: only prime number that ends with digit 5, books of Torah, amphibians have 5 fingers & toes on extremities, tonight's Omer #CountOmer

Davening by the grave of Rav Yonasan ben Uziel in Amuka has been considered a segula to find one's zivvug for a long time. The latest segula twist on that is that giving money to the Vaad HaRabbonim to daven for you on the night of the 7th day of Pesach, the night of the splitting of the Sea, at midnight, in Amuka will help a person find his or her own zivvug.




They say they have 90% success rate with the last of names from last year. Can you imagine that - 90% of the names on last years list for davening have gotten engaged! That is an astounding number! Why not mention the percentage from 2 years ago or from 10 years ago? Because it is a new segula that did not exist 2 years ago or 10 years ago. 90% success rate for a new segula is amazing!

here is a version of the Harlem Shake where you dont have to see people in their underwear... and I have discovered that the people behind it (and in it) are siblings of a friend of mine...

3 is: the fathers, the # of things on which world stands, sections of tanakh, the first odd prime number and tonight's count in Omer #CountOmer

this is a very interesting look at the Nahal Haredi brigade in the IDF, and on the ordeals the soldiers go through.. the journalist accompanied the Nahal haredi unit for 8 months to make this documentary


אני מצהיר from bhol on Vimeo.

I tried two new things this Pesach, so far:

1. I bought Yemenite soft matza to use for the korech sandwich at the seder
2. I bought the seasonal flavor of Ben and Jerry's Haroset ice cream

I could tell by just a few seconds in which way this "getting the story straight" look was going to go...

this is pretty cool...

1. not exactly kisei hakavod

2. a post-haredi election: can we achieve freedom

3. horaat shaa and the real world rabbinate

4. NYC Mayor Serves an Allegorical Purpose

5. cutting the line to sell chametz

6. anti-kosher

7. wig obsession

8. the live blog of the Obama visit to Israel.. funny!

9. Finding Passover Wisdom In The Work of Rainier Maria Rilke

10. Jews should never run

11. a coalition plan for charedim

12. Pesach diets

13. next year in rebuilt Jerusalem

14. the new Housing Minister's plans

15. Lakewood nostalgia

16. putting the pieces in the right places

17. a segulah I can (sort of) support

18. why I love Pesach

Each year in perhaps the past 7 or 8 years there has been a serious increase in the number of articles, and the promotion of them, discussing why kitniyot should be allowed nowadays even for Ashkenazi Jews  at least in Eretz Yisrael. This year I seemed to sense less of a discussion about kitniyot and fewer articles and arguments, though I also seemed to sense, without taking a survey or a poll, an increase in the number of Ashkenazi people I am in contact with that are eating kitniyot on Pesach.

I personally have found the logic in the arguments very compelling. Despite that I will not be eating kitniyot on Pesach. At least not this year, and I doubt I will change that tradition until there is a mass acceptance by a consensus of rabbonim on the matter.

Pesach is all about tradition. Some people do the craziest things on Pesach out of tradition. Pesach is all about doing crazy and unusual things, many of which have become tradition, just so that the "children will ask". We do things different on Pesach. We do not just do what is logical and what makes sense. We even have the main feature, or one of them at least, of the Pesach seder of children asking why we do things so differently on pesach, and the answers are not very specific. The answers talk about slavery and freedom, not explain why we dip or recline. There is something about doing things differently on pesach.

Does the ban on kitniyot make any sense nowadays? Perhaps not. An argument can easily be made that the time for such a ban is long gone, at least in Eretz Yisrael. But why must I break with a tradition that is hundreds of years old? Just to eat some hummus on pesach, or maybe some rice? Is there anyone out there that cannot survive a week without hummus or beans or rice? I know I can, and I have no interest in breaking a tradition that is hundreds of years old just so that I will be able to smear some hummus on my matza.

More or less, this is the same reason why I do not eat all the foods that have been around in the past 10 or 15 years that are made to replicate "real" foods, such as Pesach rolls and Pesach pasta and the like. I enjoy eating Pesach food for the week. The point of the holiday is to be different than the rest of the year, and I am fine with the food reflecting that. As I said about kitniyot - I can survive a week. It is just a week, not forever. And as someone said to me, our grandparents, and even more so their grandparents, did just fine for the week with far less than what we have available to us. A week without kitniyot or rolls is easily survivable. It is definitely, in my mind, not worth giving up hundreds of years of tradition for the payoff of a bowl of rice.

The "Malshinon", the snitch line, of the tax authority for people to anonymously call in and snitch on others who are not paying their taxes, has been so wildly popular that the city of Haifa decided to operate their own snitch line. For Chametz.

According to NRG, the laws against selling chametz in public during Pesach have never before been enforced in Haifa. stores openly sold chametz. This year, City Hall has decided to put an end to it. They have instructed city inspectors to be very strict about handing out fines to businesses selling chametz, and are encouraging residents of Haifa to call the municipal line, 106, to report any business discovered selling chametz.

City Councilman Shai Blumenthal says that Haifa is a complex city, as it is a city mixed with Jews and non-Jews, and in the non-Jewish neighborhoods selling chametz is permitted. The city inspectors have instructed the merchants as to where selling chametz is allowed and where it is not.

Depending on the success of the snitch line for chametz, we will have to run a contest to come up with other great ideas for usage of a snitch line.

Upon appeal, the courts allowed the practice/learning event of the korban Pesach to take place, as it has in years past. Here is some video from the event.





and this one is the skinning of the animal... with a little bit of "gore"...

A Guest Post by Sara Chana

Bein HaZmanim is always an appropriate time for a talk with your kids about safety... Rav Yakov Horowitz is always a great resource for that...

Kinderlach and Lipa in a release of Echad Mee Yodeia with Lipa



and here is the same song from Kinderlach released with a non-religious singer named Shir Levi:

in the fight with the IDF Spokesperson, and public opinion, over the issue of whether or not Bar Rafaeli is an appropriate representative for Israel considering her lack of army service, it looks like Rafaeli won...

what would Pesach be without a rendition of Vehi She'amda... thsi one by Yonatan Razel, the original composer, alone...




and here is a recent live performance of V'Hee She'Amda that is even better..

with all the pomp and circumstance, the Presidential limo still had to be towed and taken in for repairs... or maybe he had just illegally parked somewhere in downtown Jerusalem...

regarding the towing of the car.. Motti Matmon, the owner of the towing company that was called to tow the limo from the Shoresh Junction, said "It does not happen every day that the limousine of the President of the USA gets stuck and I have to tow it. I would say it was historic... I have not yet submitted the bill for the towing. It could be that I might need to tow it again to somewhere else, so only at the end of the story will I know how much to charge. There is a set price. There is no need to unnecessarily drive the price upward, but I also will not be giving any discounts to the President of the USA." (source: Ynet)

Finance Minister Yair Lapid has already touched a raw nerve, and he has only been in office a couple of days.

The State-owned chametz is always sold on erev pesach by the Chief Rabbis of Israel in the presence of the Minister of Finance. The MoF does not have to be there, technically, but traditionally he has always been present. When the schedule was set and the MoF was sent his invitation to the event, he politely turned it down and said his deputy minister would attend instead. (On Radio Kol Hai today somebody said that Avraham Hirschson had not been present at the sale of chametz when he was MoF, and he finished his term in prison. I doubt the two items are connected, and I dont know if he was there or not. An article I read said the MoF has always been present until now)

The Rabbanut bristkled at the rejection and got upset. They used his words from the coalition negotiations about not wanting to be photographed next to ministers form Shas and said that Lapid's refusal to participate in the event are a result of not wanting to be photographed with haredim. Lapid';s response was that he has no time as he is busy with preparing the budget. It also turns out the the deputy won't be participating either, and the Minister of Education Rav Shai Piron will be the one participating in the sale of chametz.

Lapid does not need to be there, either halachically or legally, but it would be good of the new MKs and ministers to make the extra effort to respect the traditions of the government. He probably finds time to continue going to the gym for a workout, despite the budget that needs to be prepared, and he probably finds time for plenty of other things as well. I am pretty sure if he wanted to he would be able to find time for the estimated hour it takes to sell the chametz and the budget preparation would not be affected. How much work is he doing on the budget on erev pesach anyway?

As I wrote about the ToTD, there have been a lot of great Facebook Status Updates that I noticed today. On any big news day that is to be expected. It makes it hard to choose a FSoTD, but it make FB a very interesting experience. Of the many great updates, I have selected the following one as FSoTD.

There have been a lot of great tweets that I noticed today. On any big news day that is to be expected. It makes it hard to choose a totd, but it make twitter a very interesting experience. Of the many great tweets, I have selected the following one as ToTD.

By @bneibraki

דרמה בנתב"ג; הלימוזינה הנשיאותית של ברק אובמה, שהובאה לנתב"ג התקלקלה ולא הניעה. הלימוזינה הושבתה, ובמקומה מובאת כעת מירדן לימוזינה חלופית.

It says, in English:
Drama At Ben Gurion Airport: The presidential limousine of Barak Obama, that was brought to BGU airport, has broken and will not start. The limousine is out of service and in its place a replacement limo is being brought in from Jordan...

All I could picture in my mind when reading this is some guy from the PMO or embassy staff bring the presidential limo in to one of our great mosachs, and the mosachnik telling him all the work that needs to be done on it with a cigarette dangling from his lips...

turns out, according to NRG, someone on the American staff of drivers for the limo got confused at the pump and filled 'er up with diesel instead of regular 95 unleaded..

An interesting development since the elections have passed is a possible deal in the works for the election of the Chief Rabbi of Israel.

According to Israel Hayom, a deal has been made, though it is not [yet] being confirmed by those involved, by which HaBayit HaYehudi would support Rav Shlomo Amar for a second term as Sephardic Chief Rabbi in exchange for the support of Shas, or at least no opposition from them, for the election of Rav Dovid Stav as Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi.

What is most interesting to me about this is that despite the bad blood that has recently been spilled between the two parties, they are finding ways to work together, to help each other, and get things they want/need taken care of. Tat's the way it should be, though so much bad blood is really not so necessary in the first place...

That being said, I personally don't care which rabbis are elected to be Chief Rabbis of Israel. To my life it will make no difference, and I do not see it making much of a difference to anybody's life. If the non-religious think that by supporting Rav Stav they are going to have an easier life form a religious perspective, they have got another think coming. Rav Stav is an Orthodox rabbi, and even though he is perhaps (and I dont know that he is) a bit more liberal than the average haredi rabbi, he is not going to do things that are against Orthodox policy and custom. The haredi don't use the chief rabbinate much anyway. The dati leumi also don't really benefit from a change in rabbis. They ate Rabbanut before, and will continue to do so, just as they used rabbanut services for lifecycle events and will continue to do so. So which rabbi is appointed to be chief rabbi really is not going to make a big difference to most people.

The biggest issue on the table might be how the Rabbanut will deal with issues of shmitta. With shmitta approaching in about 18 months from now, the next chief rabbis will experience 2 shmitta years during their coming term.

Really the selection of chief rabbi has become way too political. Instead of the best man being chosen, and I am sure all the candidates are tremendous rabbis and great potential chief rabbis, someone is chosen as a political deal. That almost ensures that the best man is not going to be chosen. The job of rabbi should be as minimally connected to politics as possible.

The best anybody can hope for from a chief rabbi is really that he find a way to lessen and minimize the bureaucracy involved in life cycle events. And that has nothing to do with what kippa he wears on his head.

I wonder what US President Barak Obama is doing on his plane, Air Force One right now. Is he sitting there knowing the protests and signs that are waiting for him about Pollard.. is he sitting there regretting his decision to come because of the protests and signs he will have to pass through? Os is he ambivalent to it all?

Jonathan Pollard - we are waiting for you... it is time to come home!

this video is an intro to the Formula 1 event that will be coming to Jerusalem in June...



Interestingly, the accompanying article says that Mayor Nir Barkat is himself a race car driver and has participated in race sin Israel and around the world... So, he runs marathons and brings a marathon to Jerusalem  He drives race cars and bring F1 to Jerusalem. What else does he do and what else will he be bringing to Jerusalem???

had to get this in before Pesach...

and here is a message for Obama from an Israeli soldier, via Latma:

The Maccabeats latest Pesach song... personally I am not a fan

Our education system is the highest quality even without the core curriculum. You cannot damage our praiseworthy education. Outgoing Education Minister, my dear friend, they who did not want you as Minister of Education will have you as Prime Minister and Minister of Education. And you, Rav Piron, the scion to a family of Vizhnitz hassidim, will with God's help be the Chief Rabbi of Israel...

  -- MK Menachem Eliezer Mozes, outgoing Deputy Minister of Education, at the ceremony of the changing of the ministers in the Ministry of Education

locust spotted on porch of Nahal Dolev in RBS

I don't know if a few individual locusts constitutes a "plague", but let's run with it..
yesterday a bank robbery in RBS, and today we are hit with the plague of locusts... something is happening and we must go through a period of introspection....

A Guest Post by Zev Kaplan

New Minister of Education Weighs: Prayer for Each Student Before Tests

  -- Nana News

this has not passed yet, is only under consideration, and will not be a prayer of religious significance, but of personal persuasion, and will be meant, if it passes, chiefly to calm the student before an exam...

The mere suggestion of implementing such an idea is interesting, in that a short time ago this would have generated an outcry of religious coercion. Such a concept would only have come from a religious or Haredi party, and the news media would have been screaming against it. Now a religious minister from a largely secular party suggests it, and it generates nothing more than a few news articles that mention it.

From another perspective, with a religious coalition (i.e. a coalition comprised largely of religious parties), such an idea would never have come to be - because of the fear of accusations of religious coercion and from the screams about it after the suggestion. Perhaps a side benefit that makes worthwhile the discriminatory banning of haredi parties is that legislation that will make Israel more "Jewish" in nature and culture will more easily pass now.  

South Africa's Chief Rabbi, Rav Warren Goldstein, has another message for this Pesach holiday...

The story goes that Shortly before John Dillinger, famous bank robber from the era of the Great Depression, died under a hail of FBI bullets emerging from the Biograph Cinema, Chicago, the USA’s public enemy No I gave his last radio interview. “Mr Dillinger”, asked the very brave radio journalist “Why do you rob banks?” “Because”, Dillinger replied “that is where the money is.”

That response, "because that's where the money is", later became famous and was largely attributed to Slick Willie Sutton. Willie Sutton was a bank robber spanning 40 years and spent over half of his adult life in prison. In an interview in 1951 and then again in 1952, Sutton was asked why he had chosen the career of robbing banks. he answered, "because that's where the money is".

photo credit: Yaakov Lederman

That has not changed, even though nowadays much of the money is digital Nobody is walking into Paypal headquarters and holding them up. But this morning a bank was held up in RBS, of all places, and robbed. Who would have thought such a violent crime would occur in this bedroom community of religious Jews???

Shortly after opening, a masked man walked into the RBS branch of Bank Leumi. He went over to a teller and handed her a paper that had written on it, in Hebrew, "this is an armed robbery". Give me the money". The teller gave him a bundle of money, later announced by someone to be a sum of 6,000 NIS, and he ran off.

The police came, with a bunch of police vans and even a helicopter, but the bank robber has yet to be caught.

We did not ban the haredim, but the haredim are the masters of banning others. They ban our rabbonim. Every little activist of theirs who gets elected to the Knesset immediately becomes a Rav, but when their media mentions our rabbonim, it calls them by their first names.

  -- Rav Chaim Druckman, speaking at the HaBayit HaYehudi convention to ratify the coalition agreement. it was ratified unanimously.

NOTE: I was not paid to review this book. It is an unbiased and objective review. If you have a book with Jewish or Israel related content and would like me to write a review, contact me for details of where to send me a review copy of the book.

Book Review: Letters to Talia, by Dov Indig

Letters to Talia is an interesting type of book. It first was published in Hebrew in 2005, but the content of the book was actually written in a two year span many years earlier from 1972 and 1972. It was translated and published in English in 2012 by Gefen Publishing.

Letters to Talia is a book of the correspondence between a young soldier, Dov Indig, and a  high school girl, Talia (an assumed name), in the 11th and 12th grades and was form a secular kibbutz. Talia's father had met Dov in the army and had been so impressed with him through their conversations on Judaism and Zionism that he suggested to his daughter to correspond with Dov. They corresponded for two years, while Dov was in the army and in yeshivat hesder, on a broad range of topics, and the letters have been turned into this book.

Back then, correspondence was by regular mail via the post office. Letters were hand-written and mailed. It was far more personal and more involved than our correspondence nowadays, via email or other means which is designed for, and used mostly, for brevity and quick correspondence. Reading such correspondence from a bygone era can be fascinating, even if simply because we rarely correspond like that any longer. When the content is intriguing and fascinating, it makes it even better.

Letters to Talia is not like other books of correspondence that I have read. It is not a debate between two people, and it was not written with the publishing of a book in mind as the outcome. It was really a correspondence between two people, with both asking questions of the other and sharing their own thoughts in their respective responses, though most of the correspondence is Talia asking Dov for his perspective on matters and his responses. What makes the correspondence especially evocative is the way they ask each other to be open and ask questions, state opinions, without concern or shame, and they do. They really hash it out, asking tough questions, giving strong answers.

Dov, it is clear from his letters, is a young man of high moral standards, an intellectual who loves to read and study on a wide variety of subject matter, and he retains a tremendous amount of what he read. And he integrated it into his life, as per what he believed in. It was not just intellectual fodder, but it became part of him. He is presented through his letters as such an intelligent and thoughtful person, with tremendous command of his beliefs and actions. Much of what he said, what he predicted would happen in Israel with the development of the kibbutzim, the approach of the next generation of secular youth, has come to be pretty accurate.

Talia is a confused secular young woman. She has been closed off from the world in her kibbutz for her entire life that she knows little of other perspectives even within her own country. She is curious, and develops a strong personal spiritual relationship with Dov through their correspondence. To her credit, she is open-minded even though she is writing to a religious man and is expecting answers based in religion and religious thought to her questions. She does not take anything Dov says as a given, and at times argues with him and questions him, especially on issues of morality within her community. Such as, Dov had spoken about true morals form the Torah lifestyle rather than man-made morals. Talia argued with him about how the people on her kibbutz have strong morals despite not being connected to the Torah. That is but one example showing how Talia was not just asking the questions, but through her arguments and defenses of her lifestyle we are given a glimpse of her perspective on life, Zionism, morals and Torah.

Besides for the opportunity to read so much Jewish philosophy written in such an easy-to-read manner, one also can broaden one's perspective by seeing how different communities approach Zionism, Jewish culture, Land of Israel, Torah study, army, love, Jewish thought and life in general. It is not just Talia asking questions, and Dov answering, but Talia offering her opinions or explaining why she disagrees or agrees or argues or does not accept a certain idea, and one gets a glimpse at the perspective of a secular kibbutznik.

Some of the side characters in the book are also interesting. Hagai Ben Artzi plays an important role in the correspondence. he was a close friend of Dov, and is quoted often, as well as having gone with Dov to Talia's school as guest speakers. Hagai Ben Artzi published the Hebrew edition of Letters to Talia, and is also the brother in law of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Another interesting character in the correspondence is a friend of Talia's named Maya. Maya went through an upheaval of her own and was on the path to becoming religious, causing even more inner turmoil to Talia.

The book concludes with Dov's death at the very beginning of the Yom Kippur War. The last letters were one that was written by Dov to Talia a week before Yom Kippur, and one written by Talia to Dov on the day before Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur war broke out. Dov rushed home to Jerusalem to gather his stuff and went right to the front lines, and was killed in an heroic battle on the second day of the war in the Golan Heights.

Unfortunately, the book does not go any further - we do not see Talia's reaction to the news of Dov's death, nor do we know what became of her. It is almost like leaving an open wound to fester. I really wanted to know. I wanted especially to know how she received the news of his death in battle, and what happened to her down the road.

I did some research and discovered that Talia has been very careful about her anonymity all along and has never since revealed her true identity. She did not want the book to become about her. Interestingly, she gave one interview, to a niece of Dov's, in which she talked about the book and what became of her. It turns out she went back to the kibbutz she had grown up on and has lived there her entire life. She did not become religious, unlike her friend Maya, but she considers herself a woman of faith and belief. Dov was a very powerful influence on her life, especially at the time of the correspondence, but she says she went through a very traumatic period at the time of Dov's death and a large block of time from that era is very blurry in her mind. She was not even told of Dov's death until half a year after it had happened. At the same time, she had  lost a number of good friends and classmates, and the first few years after the war were very traumatic and have been blocked out of her memory. Interestingly, she mentions her brother who had been one of the soldiers involved in the raid on Entebbe to release the hostages in Uganda.

If you are wondering, as I was, how the letters were put together, as each side only had half the correspondence, and perhaps it was not all saved at the time, she explains that as well. She says that a few years after the war Hagai called her and asked her to send him the letters in her possession.  She right away agreed and sent them, because she realized how important the correspondence would be to those close to Dov, as she had gone through something similar after her brother died and his friends shared the correspondence with the family. Much later Hagai called again and said they were considering printing the letters in a book. he asked her permission. At the time of the correspondence she had been very forthright in saying that Dov was not allowed to show the letters to any other person (though she agreed to allow him to verbally discuss the content), but now 40 years later, with a request for publishing the letters in a book, she immediately agreed to their publication as long as her real name would not be revealed - she says her name is very unique and she is well-known, and if her real name would become known, the entire word would begin to look at her as the young girl in the book rather than as the woman who she is..

You can get Letters to Talia from:

• Amazon: $13.83 (Kindle Edition for $3.99)
• Gefen Publishing: $15.10

Pat Condell is back with another great vlog on Islam

well done!