Pikud HaOref Special Edition

The Home Front Command (Pikud HaOref) has been busily distributing CDs today in Ramat Beit Shemesh - a version of their emergency instructions specially made for the Charedi public. This includes haskamos of Rav Shlomo Amar, Rav Simcha haKohen Kook and Rav Yitzchak Dovid Grossman (regrettably no "Litvishe gedolim" there), instructions couched in religious terms of "mitzva" and "hishtadlus", recommendations to bring siddurim, tehillim and tallis and tefillin into the safe room, and - of course - not even a fleeting image of anything suggestive of something that might be construed as... um... female. Sssh. (I checked out the "regular edition" Hebrew videos on the web site, and they don't have any women there, either... so I guess any lonely males looking for a glimpse of the opposite sex will have to find another web site.)

In case you don't find the CDs buried in that 6-month-old pile of junk mail in your post box, as a public service, here are the two most important videos:

1) Choosing and preparing your secure room:


2) What to do in an emergency:


And here is the FAQ (in English) regarding the nationwide drill happening this Tuesday (June 2).

Bad news proves: The world is great!

On the way to visit my wife in hospital a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a hitchhiker. On hearing that we had just had a son, my passenger commented, "It's so nice to hear good news, when the world is so full of difficulties and tragedy." He then proceeded to enumerate several instances of people he knew in difficult financial, health and family situations... being a kind-hearted Jew, he was clearly very touched and disturbed by the suffering of his fellows.

I thought about this for a minute, and started speculating aloud with him:

As human beings, we are drawn to read bad news. Newspapers are filled mostly with a mixture of alarming, depressing and outraging articles; clearly that's what people want to read! Why are we so perversely fascinated by bad news? Why are we more drawn to a story of a horrific car accident ר"ל than a story about a new medication that will lengthen and improve the lives of millions of cancer sufferers?

In determining newsworthiness, my guess is that the most eye-catching stories are the ones that are the most out of the ordinary. Dog bites man = yawn; man bites dog = wow! So in fact, the fact that the media reports on so much negativity is the exception that proves the rule: The world is great!

As you read these words, thousands of babies are being born all around the world, bringing joy and excitement to their parents. Nobody reports on this tremendous miracle, because it is so common, we have come to take it for granted. Yes, many people are dying, too - but mostly people who have lived a good and long life. Most people in the world have enough to eat; most people enjoy their lives in general. The sun rises and sets like clockwork, providing exactly enough light and warmth to sustain life on the planet; our climate patterns are stable enough that we can predict with great confidence whether we should pack away our winter woollies for the next 6 months. Electricity supply has over 99% uptime (compare that to 100 years ago!), we can make inexpensive or free phone calls all over the world, with streaming video, we have a zillion and one different flavors of ice cream (dairy and pareve) to choose from, and we have baby-soft, fresh disposable toilet paper (check out Shulchan Aruch Orach Chayim 3:11 for the alternative).

Yes, folks, the world is working just great, thank you. And instead of focusing ourselves on the exceptions to the rule and getting all depressed by them, we should continually marvel at and be grateful for the infinite kindness of the Creator, Who has set things up so staggeringly perfectly that we barely notice how good things are, except by exception. It's just as well some bad things happen; otherwise we might never notice the good...

Enforcing bicycle safety laws?

I recently saw a police car stopped on a street in Ramat Beit Shemesh.
The officer was standing with a kid on a bicycle, and writing down something.
The child was not wearing a helmet...

I heard a while ago that they had passed a law that allows police to fine the parents of a child who is riding a bike without a helmet.
Can anyone confirm this?
Does my sighting mean that they are now enforcing this law?

If so - kol hakavod to them!

Azriel Chayim Behr

On Monday 18 May 2009, כ"ד אייר תשס"ט, our son entered into the Bris of Avraham Avinu, and was given the name Azriel Chayim - עזריאל חיים.

This is a first for us. For all our previous children we put a lot of thought into the meaning of their names, the etymology of each name, the balance between the first and second names, etc. etc. This time around it didn't really matter to us what the names Azriel or Chayim mean or how they complement each other, or even that "Azriel" sounds uncomfortably like our older son's name "Ezra", which could possibly giving the impression that we're obsessed with help (עזר being the root of both names)! There was almost no need for discussion; we simply knew, even from before he was conceived, that our next son would bear the name Azriel Chayim. Because that is the name of the person who, in my humblest opinion, was probably the greatest human being I have ever met.

That's him on the left: Rabbi Azriel Chaim Goldfein זצ"ל, the Rosh Yeshiva of the Yeshiva Gedola of Johannesburg, who passed away about a year and a half ago at the relatively young age of 73. I have written before about him, in a more oblique way; and many others have delivered spoken and written hespedim for him. I'd like to add my angle here.

Rabbi Goldfein was one of those rare individuals who was beloved by practically everyone he ever met. He loved and could relate to every human being, whether the greatest Torah scholar, an assimilated Jew or a non-Jewish nurse taking his blood pressure. He could converse freely and easily with anyone, with sincerity and interest, as one person said at his funeral, as if they were his best friend in the world. "Nay," said this speaker, "when he was talking to you, you were his best friend in the world."

He was a man of profound humility. He did not puff up in self-importance; he declined to grow a beard (other than during sefira and bein hameitzarim); while always dignified, he never felt the need to dress in an overtly "rabbinic" way. I heard that at one major public dinner, there was one table reserved for the Rabbis of the community. Rabbi Goldfein was among the first to arrive, and as he was making to sit down at this table, one of the waiters came and said, "Excuse me, sir, you can't sit here; this table is reserved for the Rabbis!" Rabbi Goldfein simply thanked the waiter for pointing this out, and politely moved away, mingled with other guests, and only later discreetly returned to the Rabbis' table along with his colleagues.

He drilled home the importance of derech eretz, how important it is to behave like a mensch, to dress like a mensch, to relate to others like a mensch. Derech eretz kadma laTorah, he always said: if you don't have the most basic level of menschkeit, how is it possible that the higher level of Torah is going to stick with you? Can you have a house without a foundation?

And speaking of Torah, he was a person who was, if you can have such a thing, the embodiment of pure, unadulterated Torah, with no add-ons of politics or other agendas. Once an Israeli professor met him, learned he was a Rosh Yeshiva, and asked him which camp he was from. "What do you mean, what camp am I from?" asked Rav Goldfein. "I'm a Rosh Yeshiva, not a Rosh Machaneh!" He had no interest in these political squabbles. All he wanted was to know the emes - how to understand the daf, what is the halacha; what does Hashem want us to do? And a love of Torah! He was generally a happy and optimistic person - but when he was giving shiur, he never stopped smiling - not for a minute! Even when he was in hospital, towards the end, in great pain and discomfort, and under strict instructions to relax and not strain himself, he could not resist engaging in Torah discussions with his colleagues and students who came to visit him. He would simply forget his pain, becoming more and more animated and excited as the discussions progressed, until the doctors would come and eject his guests and sternly warn him (again) that he needed to rest.

But to me, the one thing that he represented most strongly was balance. As I mentioned in my previous article, it's actually pretty easy to be stringent all the time. All you have to do is work on your gevura, your ability to restrain yourself, and you can say "no" to pretty much anything. But that's not the whole picture - because for every stringency there is an associated leniency. You want to make your restaurant "mehadrin"? If all restaurants do that, all the "regular" shochtim will lose their parnassa! You want a new, nicer mikveh, with more hiddurim? And cast aspersions on all the people who used the old mikveh for decades before? Every choice in life is something to be weighed up carefully, and casually choosing to err on the side of (apparent) stringency is not automatically the safest route!

Rabbi Goldfein to me represented the struggle for balance - and a thoroughly successful one at that. It is our beracha to our child, Azriel Chayim, that he should take after his namesake in all the aspects I have described above, and that his struggle for perfection throughout his life should be similarly blessed.

What's YOUR position on techeles?

After a very interesting Pesach trip with Machon Ptil Tekhelet, I'm going through a gradual phasing in of techeles into my tzitzis.

Being extra conscious now of techeles, I'm noticing what other people are wearing, and it surprises me that so few people are wearing techeles. To me it seems a pretty simple choice: the researchers seem to have very solid proof that that the stuff they're producing is the real techeles mentioned in the Torah. And even if you say there's some doubt as to whether it really is techeles, what have you got to lose? At worst you've got a dye on your tzitzis that doesn't make them invalid; at best you're fulfilling an extra mitzva d'oraysa, every minute of the daylight hours, for which the reward is eternal!

Is techeles too expensive? Most people are prepared to invest a fair bit of money in hiddurim/optional extras, such as buying a top-of-the-range esrog for Sukkos, or tefillin with completely black straps. So if you're prepared to pay 200 NIS or more for a nice lulav/esrog set, with which you're going to perform a mitzva d'oraysa exactly once if you're lucky (this year 1st day Sukkos falls on shabbos, so the entire mitzva of lulav will be d'rabbanan this year) - why would you not spend 160 NIS on something that is a mitzva d'oraysa (even if you have some doubt), that you can do every single day, every minute of the daylight hours?

I don't really buy the financial argument; I'm guessing that the reason why more people aren't wearing techeles is partly because people haven't really thought that hard about it, and partly because it's perceived as a political statement: I know one charedi Rabbi who wears techeles, but tucks in his tzitzis so that he doesn't get ostracized by the rest of his charedi chevra.

I'm especially interested to hear if you are opposed to wearing techeles - why?

What do you think? Please take the poll on the sidebar of my blog, or leave comments on this article.

Later Edit: I have taken down the poll, because some immature, insecure person has obviously written a bot to skew the results. I mean, I may be very popular and loved, but even I doubt my ability to attract some 45 people within an hour to visit my blog, let alone vote in a poll... and funnily enough, all of them were "ideologically opposed to techeles".

This reaction is very disturbing, because it says to me that someone feels so strongly against techeles that they are willing to violate "midavar sheker tirchak" (last week's parsha!) in order to push a certain agenda.

Why? What is so insidious, so subversive about techeles, that someone should feel the need to wage a holy war against a mitzva of the Torah?