Blog Break

Note:

I expect to take a blog break over the next couple of weeks. Nothing traumatic is going on, and I'm not on vacation, I just want to break the habit of posting for a while. Otherwise, I fear falling into a state of posting just for the sake of posting.

I am still posting on the daily Torah Thought and Halachah blogs, and if something relevant for this blog does come up that I think is time-sensitive, I'll post it here, Gd-willing.

Thanks for reading,
Mordechai

On Blogging

The other day I came across an interesting Slate piece called "Bad Memoir Writing: Rules for doing it well". I enjoyed the piece, which you can find here.

While this blog is not entirely devoted to "memoir writing", the author (Katie Roiphe) advice did highlight two points I aim to attain in my posts: Self-Critique and Honesty.
 
Here are her words:



1. The writer should turn her fierce critical eye on herself. (One of the great masters of this is Mary McCarthy, who was terrifying and brilliant in her critiques, even of her own pretentions and snobbisms.) It is always satisfying to read a writer who sharply and deftly attacks the hypocrisies and delusions of the world around him, but we trust that writer more completely when he also attacks himself, when he does not hold himself to a different standard, or protect himself from scrutiny. Take David Foster Wallace’s famously dazzling essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.” He obsessively, comically, gorgeously dissects everything around him on the cruise ship, but does not exempt himself from his high level satire:

All week, I’ve found myself doing everything I can to distance myself in the crew’s eyes from the bovine herd I’m part of, to somehow unimplicate myself: I eschew cameras and sunglasses and pastel Caribbean wear. … But of course all of this ostensibly unimplicating behavior on my part is itself motivated by a self-conscious and somewhat condescending concern about how I appear to others that is (this concern) 100% upscale American. Part of the overall despair of this luxury cruise is that no matter what I do I can not escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. … I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance conscious, ashamed, despairing and greedy: the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.

2. Personal writing should seem honest. The reader likes personal writing to feel “honest.” (This does not mean that the memoir is “honest”—who knows how the writer really felt about something that happened 20 years ago, or yesterday. It just needs to feel honest.) The reader is as adept as Holden Caulfield in detecting phoniness, fakeness, posturing, and is as allergic to them. If the reader senses the writer is lying even to himself, or using the essay as a piece of propaganda, a forwarding of his own personal mythology in too clumsy or transparent a way, she will react against it. (This can cause readers to react against the personal writing of even very intelligent and stylish writers like Jonathan Franzen, who will include great scenes of penetrating self-deprecation but seems to be doing so in such a self-conscious writerly way that he may in fact be celebrating himself by way of self-deprecation.)

I think her motives are different from mine, though. She emphasizes that both of these are necessary in order to earn the reader's trust. That's true, but for me it's more because these are critical for teaching. I find it easier to convey an ideal by describing my own shortcoming, than by highlighting the way others fall short. And I would propose that honest teaching will go farther than dishonest teaching, of course...

Reclaiming my blog

I feel like this blog has gotten away from me a bit.

Looking back a bit, recent posts seem to me less personal, and less fully thought out, and less… interesting to me.

8 out of the past 10 are classes, articles or translations of sources. Torah, certainly. Addressing significant issues, generally. But not what I wanted to so dominate this piece of the blogscape.

I'm not sure when or why this happened.

I suspect it was around the time I noticed people mentioning my blog when introducing a shiur of mine.
Or maybe it was after the nth time I was told I was meant to be a role model for the Yeshiva University / Dati Leumi / Modern Orthodox / Centrist community.
Or maybe it was when I was asked how I can write so much without getting myself into trouble.
Or maybe it was just when I got so caught up in work that I couldn't spare ten creative minutes to put together an interesting post about anything other than whatever shiur I was working on at the moment.

I don't know why it happened, but I don't like it. I enjoyed this more when I could comfortably post on the offer of a Borsalino hat vs a Shas at my Bar Mitzvah, or offer a link to Denis Leary ragging on Mel Gibson for his Anti-Semitism, or present thoughts on Alan Alda's autobiography.

So in a tribute to more carefree days of the past and to demonstrate that I have not yet become a machine, here are five non-"Rosh" things I did in the past month:

* Bought a lot of plants with pink flowers for my Rebbetzin's birthday, and put all of them in the ground during a terrific rainstorm. [How many is "a lot"? If she were turning 21, there would have been 21 of them. If she were turning 25, it would be 25. The right answer is somewhere north of that.]

* Read approximately 300 articles about the NBA playoffs, mostly focussing on LeBron James and how this is his year or is not his year. The man's life is so 21st century American Shakespeare.

* Tried to show my kids the Venus transit with a pinhole camera [fashioned by the Rebbetzin, of course]. We did get an image of the sun on a piece of paper, but Venus was a no-show.

* As part of screening reading material for my kids, I speed-read the Hunger Games trilogy. Books 1 and 2 were entertaining enough that I wanted to turn the page and read on. Book 3 seemed like it was the book the author had wanted to write all along, but it also seemed like the book no one [myself included] would want to read.

Hm. That's only four, but it's all the "personal time" I can recall.

Maybe that's part of the problem?

Blogoversary

Four years ago I decided to start this blog, with the post that appears below. This followed a stretch of a little over a year in which I had blogged anonymously.

My anonymous blog was fun, and it allowed me an outlet I never could have had when publishing under my own name - but it felt wrong to publish without the responsibility that comes when you attach your name to something. Also, the longer I went with it, the more I felt that I wanted to take credit for that writing. So I went nonymous, and I began with the post below, which explains part of why I wanted to blog:

-
Why a blog?

A few reasons:

Reason 1. Part of being a rabbi is being an educator. In that role, I want to teach, to inform, to challenge, to inspire, to lead, to convey a new point of view, to wrestle with ideas and perhaps - but not necessarily - reach a new conclusion. I want to offer depth and nuance, and participate in dynamic interaction.
The standard methods - speeches/classes/articles - just don't provide that venue.

Speeches - There is little room for serious challenge in a forum that must entertain as well as inspire. The davening and kiddush that follow guarantee that the inspiration, for most listeners, will quickly fade. There is little room for nuance in a presentation that does not allow for note-taking and requires that the rabbi address too broad a semi-listening audience.

Classes - Classes allow for nuance, but because of the large groups involved, timid (and even not-so-timid) voices are drowned out, and ideas that should be explored to a greater extent are instead reduced to a few moments and a "let's move on."

Articles - Articles in shul bulletins as well as newspapers are a stronger candidate, but those lack the capacity for dynamic interaction, for feedback and discussion and debate.


Reason 2. Oh, and I want to be able to be funny, too, or at least spontaneous, and in speeches you have to worry about breaking the flow of the speech, in classes there's never enough time, and in articles there's never enough space. So, perhaps the blog will provide a venue for that.

Reason 3. And, while I'm at it, another reason - I don't see why an idea, once expressed in a derashah, should vanish into thin air.

Reason 4. And, all right, another reason - to avoid the temptation of recycling my own material.


So here I am, proud owner of a new blog, which I have named Rechovot: A Place to Expand. My goal is to post some of my derashot, class-themes or general musings here, to continue the conversation.

And with that... here goes.

-

And here it has gone, for four years now.

Nothing to see here

I should blog.

I have several items which should be blogworthy - My upcoming 2nd anniversary of stepping away from the pulpit... A medicine/religion panel I sat on for a program called IPEME last week... I. I. Rabi and agnosticism... Shuls and their frequent economic shortsightedness... Airport davening...

I'm looking at some fun ideas for classes for next year - Professional development for lawyers, an executive forum for business leaders, a program on Spirituality I call "Hitoriri", a responsa-based halachah series, and lots more.

I had a very stimulating meeting with a Hillel professional last week, in which we discussed his approach to campus work. It was an eye-opener, taking things I've seen and extending them farther, in ways I hadn't imagined.

It's now just about five years since I started my first, now defunct, blog. This blog passed 200,000 page views some time in the past two weeks.

And I'm planning a one-week trip to Calgary for after Tisha b'Av, first vacation since, well, last August.

So there are things I could/would/should blog about. But I just don't have it in me right now.

Bein haZmanim (kollel intersession) just started, so my time is more flexible, but I still have 20 things on my daily to-do list... I spent 5 hours between Friday, Motzaei Shabbos and Sunday on a failed Joomla upgrade for the kollel website (no, we don't have an IT guy)... and the Nine Days period always has a deadening effect on me.

I hope to write soon, but no promises.

Posthumous posting

[Interesting quote: "There is no need to be frummer than Bais Yaakov."]

I was going to write about this several weeks ago, but stalled as other things came up – and then Jack beat me to it with A few words about my death. But let it be known that I had the idea long before Jack [faux] did it.

The idea is simple: To post-date articles so that they show up on this blog only way down the line, quite possibly after I have moved on to a different world.

I'm not sure why I want to do this. It goes against my grain – usually, I want things I like to appear immediately. And if I don't like it, why publish it? And the Comments section would be pretty dull. And how would I defend my more controversial pieces?

And yet, I want to do it.

Part of me wants to do it because otherwise, the day I go will be the day this blog goes; it will ossify and become uninteresting [if it hasn't already...]. But if there is always the promise of a future post, then followers will still follow, and people will still visit.

Part of me wants to do it for the fun of being entirely out-of-sync when writing about cultural things. Imagine a future post which talks about sports or literature or just normal life, in a world which experiences those things entirely differently.

Part of me wants to do it because a major reason I blog is to tell my children about their ancestor, and they might read new posts even if they won't bother to dig into musty old archives.

Part of me wants to do it because I used to have an anonyblog which I kept anonymous to protect people who were described in it, until I got rid of it because I wanted to blog under my own name. Maybe I could take a bunch of those old posts, though, and put them on here in a century or so, when no one involved could be identified anymore.

Of course, there are risks involved; after all, Blogger may well be gone in 10 years, let alone 50 or 100; why write something, work on it, and withhold publishing it, only to have it disappear when Blogger does?

Nonetheless, I think I'll go for it. Stay tuned...

We Love rechovot.blogspot.com

I received the email below a few days ago:

from: Christie [omitted] christie@article-writing-services.org
to: torczyner@gmail.com
date: Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 9:46 PM
subject: We Love rechovot.blogspot.com

Hello,

My name is Christie from Article Writing Services. We have a client who would like to pay you for the opportunity to sponsor a blog post that you have recently written. We know that blogs can be expensive to run and our client would like the opportunity to support you in that endeavor.

In return our client is asking for one link that they specify placed into the body of the blog post (no porn or gambling). Feel free to contact me with any concerns or clarifications you may have.

If you would have any questions or would like to start the process, please email me at christie@article-writing-services.org so we can begin.

Sincerely,
Christie [omitted]
Outreach Manager - Article Writing Services
christie@article-writing-services.org

I'm not sure which expensive blogs Outreach Manager Christie knows, but mine isn't terribly expensive. Blogger is free. My writing is free. I don't even erode pencil points writing drafts. One day my laptop's battery will run out, but I can't think that blogging is what will do that.

And who is this mysterious client, who wants to support me through Christie Outreach Manager? Would he be interested in supporting my learning, perhaps sponsoring a seder or two? A little Yissachar-Zevulun instead of Twain-Zevulun?

Oh - and why no gambling links? Are you saving the gambling links for the really good blogs, Christie Outreach Manager? The ones you really love?

Actually, Christie Outreach Manager reminds me of some of the clumsier Outreach Managers/kiruv professionals out there – the ones looking for quick-fix soul-saving, who will say "We Love You", "Torah Codes predicted the Knicks would pick Iman Shumpert", or "Gd is a penguin with green flippers" if that's what it takes to get to first base.

What do you know about me, Outreach Manager, that you could say you Love me already? How long have you been reading? And why are you saying the same thing to all of the other girls (just google "article writing services" for a decent selection) out there?

I'm tempted to write Christie Outreach Manager back, like some other bloggers have done, but there's really no time these days.

Rabbis and Blogs - another look

We've discussed the issue of rabbis and blogs and professionalism before, such as in Hypothetical Question and in Rabbis friending children on Facebook.

Here's a look from "Should your doctor be on Facebook", a column by Dr. Danielle Ofri in today's New York Times. It's about doctors, but it could just as easily be about rabbis. Here's an excerpt:

I worry that it is impossible to maintain a perfect firewall, so I’ve decided to limit my online presence to the professional side of my life, keeping personal information off the Web. And before I post anything anywhere, I try to imagine what a patient of mine might think if she stumbled across it. Would it make her cringe? Would she feel awkward during her next office visit? Would this somehow compromise our relationship?

This means letting go of the fun and casual side of social media, but I think that’s simply part of the territory of being a doctor. It’s the same reason I don’t wear flip-flops and shorts to work, much as I’d surely love to. Giving up posting vacation pictures doesn’t seem like a particularly high price.

Doctors — like everyone else — are entitled to private lives, with all the attendant warts, embarrassments and unflattering moments. But now that any patient can Google a medical team, doctors — like teachers and lawyers — need to consider issues of professionalism before sharing their private lives.

Much to contemplate here. For example:

Will you see your Rabbi as a leader, if you read his blog post about entering the rabbinate and you know he is less than confident about leading, or he is not properly trained?

Will you accept your Rabbi's moral instruction, if you have seen his taste in music and you think he's coarse and unsophisticated?

Will you be able to concentrate on the Rabbi's speech on Shabbat Shuvah once you have seen him in vacation shorts and a Hawaiian shirt?

And so on.

Hypothetical question

[This week's Haveil Havalim is here]

So here's a hypothetical question:

Let's say you were a former shul rabbi who had a 3-year-old blog featuring derashos, shiurim [classes] and pontifications as well as drivel, and you were contemplating an eventual return to the pulpit. Your blog included everything from your music and food preferences to your thoughts about shul, community and international politics.

Would you:
a) Delete the whole thing?

b) Painstakingly review your 700+ posts to eliminate anything that could be used against you?

c) Let it all hang out there, since you really only want a shul that is comfortable with you as you are?

Of course, it's fashionable to say (c), because our utopian vision is one in which everyone gets to say what they want and be who they want and find acceptance. But is that what a shul should have in its rabbi?

Just a hypothetical question, of course; let's not start any rumors here.

Gifts to give your Rabbi

Like many bloggers, I occasionally skim through the keywords that bring people to this blog; they can be amusing.

Looking at Google Analytics, I find that in the past month, three people came to my blog by searching for "best ever rosh hashanah 2010 ecard", and another three by searching for "parshat shoftim 2010 elena kagan". One person was looking for "tefillin talmud shabbat fly" and another for "yosef albo bps director of marketing". Huh? And another for "Can a rabbi drive a honda". Weird, but the answer to that is yes, I think. Then there was "yoda in judaism" and "science update about radiation 2010" - hope you found what you were looking for, whatever that was.

Of course, at this time of year I tend to get quite a bit of rabbinic traffic, via searches like Rosh haShanah derashah, Yom Kippur derashah, sermon. Feel free to use my writing, folks. כל האומר דבר בשם אומרו מביא גאולה לעולם.

My favorite recent search was this: Gifts to give a rabbi.

I like that idea, so let me help you out. Please excuse me if this list is somewhat depressing and cynical, though; I’m in the middle of a campaign to remind myself of why I don’t want to leap back into the shul rabbinate. (As though Elul wasn’t enough.)

Here goes, with a month-by-month list of appropriate gifts for rabbis:

Tishrei – Anxiety pills. Or throat lozenges. Or throat lozenges laced with anxiety medication. Or a prescription for medical marijuana.

Cheshvan – Babysitting and a gift certificate for two to a restaurant, so the rebbetzin can get out one night and bring a friend. The rabbi won't be available due to the crush of post-Succos meetings and shiurim, but that's all right; she deserves it more, anyway, and so does the person kind enough to be her friend while she's tearing her covered hair out managing the family throughout Tishrei.

Kislev – A life-sized mannequin to use at minyan when he can’t find a 10th man because everyone is either away on vacation or snowbound at home. And antibiotics, because his lack of sleep and poor diet make him vulnerable to every bug and bacterium perched on the banisters of the hospital stairwells.

Teves – A set of Comedy CD's. Statistics show that January sees a spike in deaths, and the rabbi will need something to pick up his spirits after each funeral.

Shevat – A wall mural of the Kotel, or a sandy beach, or Paris, so he can feel as though he’s going on vacation like all of his congregants.

Adar – Book of 101 Purim Costume ideas, so he can use his mind for more important things, like censoring the Purim Shpiel of lines that will upset people.

Adar II – More anxiety medication, for the moment he realizes that even a Leap Year can’t postpone Pesach forever.

Nisan – Before Pesach: A new set of elbow-length rubber gloves to protect him when he kashers your sink.

Nisan - After Pesach: See Cheshvan.

Iyyar – A punching bag, for ridding himself of his frustrations in the guise of engaging in vigorous physical exercise. The one you got him last year is already toast.

Sivan – No-Doz – Because he doesn’t have the Shavuos-night option of going home at 1 AM, or of dozing during one of his shiurim. Even the one you’ve heard once before, which he’s heard many more times than you have.

Tammuz – A gift-certificate to a good seforim store, so he can get to work on preparing for Elul/Rosh haShanah/Shabbos Shuvah/Yom Kippur/Succos/Hoshana Rabbah/Shmini Atzeres/Simchas Torah. Not that he will actually get to work on it, but having a pile of sefarim that look like they could harbor good material will set his mind at ease during his family's annual four-day summer getaway.

Av –Ties (after Tisha b’Av, of course). It’s the only way his daf yomi will be spared staring at the same scenery, day after day, and it will spare him from missing a couple of hours of work to purchase something new for himself for Yom Tov.

Elul – A book of derashos, or a CD of shiurim from www.torontotorah.com, because by now it’s too late for him to start reading those sefarim he bought in Tammuz...

New from Google Labs: Google Honor

[Side note: Mazal Tov to me – At some point this past week we passed 100,000 page views on this blog. Of course, the number is somewhat undercounted, since many visits are not recorded by Sitemeter. Still, I appreciate the milestone, and thanks for reading!]

I am always amused when I check my “referrals” – the searches that bring people to my site. Some are conventional, like “Purim rabbi costume” “how to choose a rabbi” and “Judaism prohibits fun.” Others are more quirky, as in “husband punishment” and “Female Messianic Rebbetzin.” But among my favorites are the searches people do on their own names.

It’s no secret that people search for their own names on the Internet; who doesn’t want to know what people are saying about him, where she is being quoted, etc? And, yes, it’s a good idea to keep up on that sort of thing, just like we track ours credit ratings.

So I’ve been wondering. How about a new Google App: Google Honor.

Google Honor would fit with the company’s attempts to provide data of interest to the public: Develop software that finds people’s names on web pages, and assigns those names a score based on the positive or negative adjectives that appear in proximity to their names.

Higher scores would go to someone whose name appears in a sentence like, “Mordechai Torczyner is an amazing speaker,” lower scores to someone whose name appears in a sentence like, “Tim Horton is an awful speaker.”

Of course, this would require some optimizing, given popular phrases the meanings of which are vague to a non-human ear. As in, “I found Adam Smith's claims incredible,” and, “Donna Jones' work is amazingly bad,” and “Jason Menelaus's topic was frightening, but he handled it well.” The software would need significant sophistication.

But imagine if you could search your name and then get a score: 318, or 205, or -4350.

Imagine if you could search for your name and find out how nicely, or not nicely, people are talking about you, in just an instant.

Imagine if you could watch your popularity ebb and flow.

Imagine if you could know, with a simple number, exactly what people think about you.

Imagine – um.

Okay, maybe not.

Honest Scraps: The Weary Traveller

This is a personal complaint post; feel free to skip it. I would, if I were you.

But A Living Nadneyda was kind enough to tag me for the Honest Scraps Award, and now I'm supposed to write ten honest things about myself, and the only one I have time/energy to discuss at the moment is a complaint, so there it is. I apologize.


I have discovered, to my chagrin, that I am not much of a traveller.

I always thought I would be a good traveller-
• I like seeing new things;
• I am not particularly into creature comforts;
• I can go for extended periods on little sleep or food, thank Gd;
• I can work on a laptop or with a sefer, and keep in touch by cell phone as well.

And the mishnah/gemara make it sound like all of the tannaim were good travellers: Rabban Gamliel and his cohorts appear on boats headed to or from Rome, or take long walks past Har haBayis or along the water, etc. Caravans and ships fill the gemara, with all sorts of halachos from Shabbos issues to responsibility for property to davening to terumah/maaser.

On the other hand, Rabbi Akiva does place a premium (toward the end of Pesachim, in advice to his son) on studying in an undisturbed area. And the gemara does talk about not davening for days after coming off the road, because your concentration is so disruptive.

For me, though, it was pretty much moot until three years ago; I never travelled, until I started mentoring new rabbis in a Yeshiva University program. Suddenly I found myself spending full days in air transit, travelling cross-continent. And, surprise, I discovered that I don’t travel well:

• I get frustrated about missing chavrutot and shiurim.
• The airline industry is absurdly irresponsible.
• I can’t stand the repetitious commercials blasting away on airport television sets. I don't know what Evyawning is, but I heard way too many commercials for it during last night's flight delay in Toronto.
• I’m too cheap frugal to spring for airport candy bars. And the cooler souvenir foods they stock are never kosher.
• I don’t sleep well in foreign beds.
• My emails pile up, because my laptop doesn’t always cooperate.
• I can’t write up shiur source sheets, without my library available to get direct quotes (no CD ROM drive on the laptop, either).
• In international travel, I can’t use my cell phone.
• I don’t actually get time to see new things; I spend most of my time in airports, because I don’t have the luxury of taking long trips.

So, for example, the wonderful Rebbetzin and I flew to Toronto late Sunday night, to spend Monday seeing houses (seven of them) before flying back home late Monday night. The people there were wonderful, we got a great Priceline deal on a good airport hotel for Sunday night, and we may even have a house soon, but I just get so thrown off. I had to cancel a trip to the RCA Convention for today. (I am not a convention type of person anyway, but I was supposed to present something, and I had already paid for the day… but such is life.)

One good laugh out of the trip, though: Back at Newark airport last night, on the parking shuttle, we noticed two windows on the bus. One was labelled “Emergency Exit." The next one was labelled “Non-Emergency Exit.”

I know what they meant, but that was not what came across…

I owe you 9 other honest scraps. And seven bloggers to tag with this award. Some other time, I hope.

A Birkat haChamah photo, and Blogging the Passover Seder

First, a photo of my wonderful children, at Birkat haChamah.

Well, no, not actually at Birkat haChamah. You see, we had scheduled the communal Birkat haChamah for 9:30 AM, but when I checked the weather report before Shacharit they predicted increasing clouds. So we recited Birkat haChamah at shul after the siyum, and my kids did it with the esteemed Rebbetzin at home. Sans camera.

Then it got cloudy. Then it snowed. Then the sun came out - right at 9:30! - and then it got cloudy and snowed again.

So this photo is actually from bedikat chametz during a brief period of sun, and it’s only a little while after they did Birkat haChamah, and that will have to do.


Jack posted the other day about leading a Seder, and I commented that leading a Seder is a lot like blogging.

As Jack replied, you don’t get to moderate the comments at the Seder, which I’ll grant can be an issue at times… but I still enjoy the similarities.

The Haggadah itself is a blog, recording how Jews through the ages told and re-told the story of yetziat mitzrayim (the exodus).

Whether the Aramaic-speaker saying Ha Lachma Anya,
or the farmer saying Arami Oveid Avi,
or the tannaim R’ Eliezer, R’ Yehoshua, R’ Akiva and R’ Tarfon recounting the story in Bnei Brak,
or the Yerushalmi with its four children,
or Yehoshua telling the Jews at the end of his life B’eiver hanahar yashvu avoteichem mei’olam,
or sages counting miracles and devising acronyms for the makkot (plagues),
or Yechezkel’s b’damayich chayee,
or Yoel’s dam v’eish v’timrot ashan,
we leapfrog through Jewish history within the text of the blog itself, reading posts from so many authors, so many families of those Jewish generations.

And then you have the other blogs which link back to the original articles, with their comments. The early authorities with their glosses, followed by latter-day commentators, provide richness beyond the original.

All of these blogs are trying to do what many bloggers do - trying to inform the reader, and keep the reader interested enough to keep on reading, and to return.

And then, at our seder, everyone chimes in with what they know, remember or feel, on each note and story and lesson – we are the commenters.

And, one day, if we can get our act together, we write up our thoughts and create blogs of our own.

Yes, blogging is much like the seder. We lean back in our chairs, we eat, we drink four cups… okay, I don’t drink and blog. But you get the idea.

And, Jack, if your blog doesn’t come with comment moderation enabled, well, you can always come to mine next year, in Yerushalayim.

Is religion "private" if your family sees you?

[ I have some big news, but I'm not ready to blog it just yet.]

One of the fun side-effects of blogging is that it makes periodic self-examination fairly easy; like a diary/journal, it allows me to go back to where I was a year ago and look at what I was thinking.

Technically, I can always do that - I have computer files with my derashot and shiurim going back to 1997 - but the blog makes it even easier. To see where I was last Pesach, I just click the sidebar Label, Pesach, and I'm there.

This morning I took a minute to re-read a derashah I delivered last year, on Pesach, regarding private (צנוע) religion and public religion. It was a reaction to the Inquisition of then-presidential candidates Clinton and Obama at Messiah College (a topic I also blogged here).

I talked about our preference for private religion, in terms of not making our religious practice a display for others, while acknowledging that Judaism finds both approaches to religious practice appropriate at different times. When it comes to teaching our children, though, we are instructed to be public, particularly at the Seder. "והגדת לבנך - You shall tell your children," as the Torah admonishes us repeatedly.

In a comment on that derashah, Tzipporah contends that addressing one's family is actually private, rather than public.

Her point is important: Should our spouses, children, siblings, parents, be a natural part of the religious lives we consider to be most private and personal?

I'd suggest not.

As Rav Soloveitchik noted so articulately in his 1964 essay, Confrontation, there is a natural gap between individual human beings, no matter how close we are, because no one can truly know the thoughts, emotions, feelings of another. Shared experiences are not the same as shared lives and shared DNA.

The logos, the language we employ to bridge that gap, to communicate agreement and disagreement, comparison and contrast, is an inherently flawed medium. Language is a product of our context, our life history, our interactions, and so our words are loaded with meaning which we cannot convey to others, no matter how hard we try.

This gap generates a deep-seated loneliness in ever-social Man, a loneliness which can be filled only by a Gd who is יודע מחשבות, One who knows our very thoughts. Religion provides a context for that relationship with Gd, a way to communicate with the Deity who knows us.

In this vision of Religion, any human being other than myself is not a partner in that one-to-One relationship, is not privy to the information conveyed between me and my Creator. And so, any other human being is public.

So to me, any religious action performed before another human being - including one's spouse, one's siblings, one's parents, one's children - is inherently public.

And so the deepest parts of our religious experience (outside of training our children, outside of the Seder and similar educational opportunities) really should be more concealed than revealed, even in the case of our families.

What do you think?

Torah Web resources

[Note: I wrote this in a bad mood, so it's a little darker than I would like. Still, I believe the message is essentially correct, so I am leaving it as is.]

Two weeks ago I taught a class on "21st century Jewish publishing."

My main talk was really about modern changes in the way we think about creating content and marketing content, as well as the way that marketplace changes are affecting the quality and type of content being produced.

One of my main conclusions is that the fate of Torah on the web is to be largely, with relatively rare exception, amateurish in quality and poorly presented. There is no comparison between the parshah websites out there and what one will find in a beis medrash, or in a sefer printed before printing became cheap and easy. Sources are mis-quoted, pesukim are mis-quoted, simple ideas are passed off as deep, it's just sad.

This is because serious scholars are, with rare exception, not publishing on the web, and the people who are publishing on the web have no incentive, in terms of market or audience demand, for putting real work into what they produce.

I include myself very much in this. The divrei torah I post on this blog, other than the ones that are reproduced from my shul material, do not involve a lot of research. I don't put up erroneous things (I think!) , but I don't present the full depth of a topic, either. When I am blogging, I generally just write about whatever has been going through my head, and that in shorthand.

Bottom line: If no one will criticize, and no one will incentivize, the work will be less thorough. It's true in every field of labor. Pride in one's work does not win out over the demands on our time - and when it does win out, most people choose not to publish.

So, that part of the class was pretty much a rant, and I could go on and on about it. However, there are some really good exceptions to this rule. The Webshas and HaMakor sites I created while learning at YU are better than this.

Here are some of the exceptions, from various categories. The list was not meant to be exhaustive, by any stretch of the imagination; it was just a sampling of good sites. Please add any other sites you find useful, in the comments:

Jewish texts - Originals and translations
Hebrew language
Mechon-Mamre.org

Seforimonline.org

Esefer.net

Teachittome.com

www.halachabrura.org/alephlink.htm

www.hebrewbooks.org

English

www.hareidi.org/bible/

www.sacred-texts.com/jud/talmud.htm


Articles
Hebrew
www.daat.co.il

www.kipa.co.il

he.wikipedia.org (Hebrew wikipedia)

www.shemayisrael.com

www.betmidrash.com

www.eretzhemdah.org

English

www.teachittome.com

www.dafyomi.co.il

koltorah.org/ravj/ravj.htm

www.eretzhemdah.org

www.vbm-torah.org

www.yutorah.org

www.torahweb.org


On the Parshah

www.shemayisrael.co.il/parsha/index.htm

www.ou.org

www.aish.com

www.yutorah.org

www.vbm-torah.org

www.torahweb.org


“Ask the Rabbi” resources

www.eretzhemdah.org

www.aish.com

www.kipa.co.il



Email lists

www.aishdas.org/avodah/

www.mail-jewish.org

www.h-net.org/~judaic/


For children, and for parents/teachers of children

www.torahtots.com

www.pirchei.com

www.chinuch.org


Keeping Kosher

star-k.org

kosherquest.org

oukosher.org


Virtual Yeshiva

www.WebYeshiva.org

www.shemayisrael.com


Multimedia - Audio and Video

virtualcantor.com

Jewtube.com

Yutorah.org

Teachittome.com


Reference information

Minyan: godaven.com

Hebrew/English Dictionary: milon.co.il

Instructions for installing Hebrew on Windows XP: www.petri.co.il/install_hebrew_on_windows_xp.htm

Blog Ratings, and words we don't want to hear

I was visiting Frume Sarah’s World when I noticed, in her sidebar, a link to a Blog Rating site. They use the MPAA ratings code to label blogs for their content.

Naturally, I checked my own blog. I found I was rated G, with one appearance of “death” on the front page. That will change, though, with the following paragraphs…

I checked a few other blogs, to get a sense of where I fit on the spectrum:
Hirhurim is rated PG-13 for 3 pains, 2 deads and 1 use of kill;
Cross-Currents is rated R for 6 appearances of death, 4 of dead, 2 of gun and 1 of kill; DovBear, on the other hand, was rated G, “No bad words were found.”
Someone should probably let DB know; he’d enjoy that, I think.

Clearly, the folks who designed this ratings widget are sure that many people don’t want to be reminded of death/hurt/pain. A reasonable assumption. But there are many more things I don’t want to remember, so I think we need to expand the sensitivity list:

Mother in Israel has returned to the topic of nursing in public, a debate about whether women and children should be discomfited so that men can avoid being reminded of sexuality. (Boy, I’m really blowing my G Rating out of the water here…) So in honor of cringing males, let’s tack on nursing and chest to the Blog Rating list of keywords. (Interestingly, Mother in Israel did get an R, but not for those words - it’s 5 uses of sex, 2 of jap [presumably not in that context] and 1 of hurt.)

Everyone needs therapy is rated NC-17, for 7 uses of sex, 3 of suicide, 2 of rape, 1 of knife. Frankly, her post “Is Marriage for White People” reminds me of uncomfortable things, but that has nothing to do with the above-cited words. Maybe the raters could check for phrases like single-parent households and men disappear into the streets.

My brother’s blog, Kosher Beers, picks up a PG rating for 8 deaths, 3 deads and 1 gun. With all the legalese in his post from Wednesday July 23rd, I can’t understand why he only received a PG. I’d go for adding lawsuit, assert a right and albeit to the list of banned words. Those scare me a lot more than knife.

Concluding the round-up for now: Jack's Random Thoughts is only rated R, which is kind of disappointing after that NC-17 for the Therapydoc. His array of words is certainly more impressive, to me. Jack, I guess you’re just not trying hard enough. Same for you, Jameel; you can do better than that R you received. 5 kills, 3 murders and 1 hell… got to get those totals up. Sweeps season is coming.

[Postscript: This week's Haveil Havalim is here - and I have now received an R rating...]

My Jblogging Troll rates this post a 2

I had a spare ten years or so while in a doctor’s waiting room this afternoon. Having finished reviewing the parshah (not too hard for Behar, but I could have done Matos-Masei there and still finished…), I drafted this post about my Jblogging troll.

I’m not one for popularity contests (rabbis who worry about those are in deep, deep trouble), and I almost never looked at my JBlogCentral listings until I learned of my troll... but I was glad when my blog cracked the Top 20 on JBlogCentral. It meant more people would see my site, and I hoped that would translate to a bigger audience.

I also hoped that people would now refrain from rating my posts at all. My posts tend to be 400+ words, so I get an automatic 5 for each post, so my average would improve if people just left my posts alone.

Unfortunately, I soon discovered that once a day, or every couple of days, some troll would come through and rate all my posts a “2”. All my posts from the past couple of days would go from 5 to 7, in a matter of one or two minutes.

I wasn’t the only one to experience this - I soon noticed, for example, that someone was ranking all of Frumstepper’s posts with 2’s, also. My troll was two-timing, at least! Either it was someone trying to knock us down the rankings, or it was someone with an issue with orthoblogs...

The troll has a lot of time available, that’s for sure - the “2” ratings came in blocks at the same time for all of my posts, sometimes mornings, sometimes evenings. (Never Shabbos - a Shomer Shabbos troll!) Perhaps her (his?) own blog would do better if she (he?) spent more time on improving it, instead of bashing those of others.

I emailed the folks at JblogCentral, who were sympathetic but felt they couldn’t do much about it. They said they are volunteers, and don’t have the time to scan logs. (I’d simply require a login for voting, so that every vote would appear with an ID - but I suppose they are concerned about discouraging voter participation.)

So I deal with it by not taking it too seriously, and I've gone back to not really looking at my rankings much. In a sense, though, it's nice to be noticed. It’s like having someone who goes around complaining about the rabbi (not that I have anyone who does that) - if you don’t take the bashing too personally, it’s fun to have a “fan.”

One interesting last note: The troll probably ends up bringing me more traffic, and better ratings. When he (she?) rates a post, other people will see the title pop up and they'll come visit it as well. More traffic, which is what I wanted in the first place.

...and the doctor is still not ready to see me...

RenReb – Back from the dead, or only pretending?

I don’t have the time to write this, but I must: In a fine afikoman gift to the blogosphere, RenReb has posted her first new post in many, many months! (How did she know I’ve been good this year?) I feel like saying a ברוך מחיה המתים (Blessed is the One who resurrects the dead) blessing, only it hasn’t been twelve months since her last post… it just feels like it.

Yes, the Renegade Rebbetzin is back, or at least back for a day, for one post, a post which reminded me all over why I have loved to read her site. It was funny and personal and hit on something that has upset me greatly (the horrible death of Rabbi Jacob and Devorah Rubenstein) and then made me laugh with its notes about the Rebbetzin as appendage… and it was altogether too short.

One reason I like today’s RenReb post is that it reminds me of why I named this blog “The Rebbetzin’s Husband” in the first place. (Well, not in the first place. I only used this name when someone posted it several months ago in response to my “Help me name this blog” post. I really mean, why I used that name for this blog at all.)

My wife is altogether too often mis-identified as “The Rabbi’s Wife.” That is a farce; the Rebbetzin role is its own entity, with way too many unique responsibilities and way too many skill requirements to be categorized as Rabbi Redux. The Rebbetzin is mother to many, counselor to many, friend to many, teacher to many, host to many, even halachic resource to many - this aside from all of the ways she makes me a better rabbi – and to call her “Rabbi’s Wife” is as absurd as to call a rabbi “The Rebbetzin’s Husband.” (Or to have an orange on the seder plate, but that’s another topic.)

Two notes, for the record:
1) My wife is not the Renegade Rebbetzin. She certainly is one of the many, many rebbetzins who have been suspected of this. To be honest, I would love to see her blog one day. But no, she is not it.

2) My blog title is not, in any way, meant to indicate any association with her blog, which I readily acknowledge is far superior to mine. Hers is funny, mine is not. Hers is personal in the way an anonymous rabbinic blog can be; mine is not. Hers makes me want to keep on my reading; I don’t like reading my own writing.

The Renegade Rebbetzin blog is still the blog I would love to write, if only I possessed the sense of humor and the anonymity. The former I can’t have, because either you have it or you don’t. The latter I can’t have either, because my ego won’t allow it. So, I muddle on.

RenReb, thanks for re-surfacing. Hope to hear from you again.

PLEASE name this blog...

...because I just can't.

What’s in a name, you ask? Far too much, it seems, because after two months here I still can’t come up with a name I like for this blog.

Maybe it’s because I want the name to convey too much:
-That this blog is a place where I can talk about things that are going on in the Jewish and greater world, or in my own life;
-That this blog is a place where I can post derashah and class material;
-That this blog is a place where I can have a little fun… but not so much fun that I am no longer the rabbi. People from my shul have to be able to read this without being embarrassed.

A name, in Jewish thought, is a display of one’s ideals and actions, synonymous with one’s reputation. Think of Pirkei Avos and the “crown of a good name.” Think of Moshe asking Gd “When they ask me what His Name is, what shall I tell them,” and of that grandly eloquent Divine response. Your name is your first interface with the world.

This is particularly true on the blogosphere, where people see a link to your blog and decide, often on that basis alone, whether or not to click through and read what you have to say. That’s the problem with the “Rechovot” title – it says a lot to me, but it’s too vague or too serious for many readers. The current title, “Please extinguish all cell phones,” is all right, I guess, but it still seems to be missing something.

Among the titles I’ve rejected so far:
Rabbi 42: On life, the universe and everything (Too corny.)
The shul at the end of the universe (Too irrelevant.)
Shul Daze (Too cute.)
Torchblog (Too juvenile.)
A Rabbi’s Blog (Too dull.)
Rabbi in the House (Too Huh?!)
Tales out of shul (Too plagiaristic.)
Rabbinic Ruminations (Too I-take-myself-very-seriously.)
Rabbi on the loose (Too too.)

So you see the problem: a combination of failure of creativity and failure of language and, perhaps, failure of nerve. I’m tempted to just title this “Another Blogging Rabbi” and leave it at that…

Your ideas would be more than welcome. Please save me from myself.

What is this blog?

Why a blog?

A few reasons:

Reason 1. Part of being a rabbi is being an educator. In that role, I want to teach, to inform, to challenge, to inspire, to lead, to convey a new point of view, to wrestle with ideas and perhaps - but not necessarily - reach a new conclusion. I want to offer depth and nuance, and participate in dynamic interaction.
The standard methods - speeches/classes/articles - just don't provide that venue.

Speeches - There is little room for serious challenge in a forum that must entertain as well as inspire. The davening and kiddush that follow guarantee that the inspiration, for most listeners, will quickly fade. There is little room for nuance in a presentation that does not allow for note-taking and requires that the rabbi address too broad a semi-listening audience.

Classes - Classes allow for nuance, but because of the large groups involved, timid (and even not-so-timid) voices are drowned out, and ideas that should be explored to a greater extent are instead reduced to a few moments and a "let's move on."

Articles - Articles in shul bulletins as well as newspapers are a stronger candidate, but those lack the capacity for dynamic interaction, for feedback and discussion and debate.


Reason 2. Oh, and I want to be able to be funny, too, or at least spontaneous, and in speeches you have to worry about breaking the flow of the speech, in classes there's never enough time, and in articles there's never enough space. So, perhaps the blog will provide a venue for that.

Reason 3. And, while I'm at it, another reason - I don't see why an idea, once expressed in a derashah, should vanish into thin air.

Reason 4. And, all right, another reason - to avoid the temptation of recycling my own material.


So here I am, proud owner of a new blog, which I have named Rechovot: A Place to Expand. My goal is to post some of my derashot, class-themes or general musings here, to continue the conversation.

And with that... here goes.