Proper American Speech

Today I was in Target when I heard a young child screaming, "crockhead, crokhead!" His very young mother (I assume it was his mother, though she looked young enough to be his sister) was with him. She looked down at him and reprimanded him, saying, "Child, you've got to learn to say your words properly. It's CRACK-head. crackhead, not crockhead."

What's Love Got To Do With It?

ונפש יהונתן נקשרה בנפש דוד ויאהבהו יהונתן כנפשו
(שמואל א א׃יח)

OK, this post is not going to talk about the implications of this posuk for the Gay/Lesbian community. Maybe I will discuss this in another post. When discussing this posuk with my chavrusa, we got into a discussion about what the Torah means by "ahava", or "love".

I decided that an interesting project would be to look at how "ahava" is used in various places in tanach, and see if I could draw a conclusion. What I found is really interesting.

There is a concept when learning tanach that if one wants to know what a word means, they should look to the first place that the root is used, and use that context as a guide.

The first place that the root א.ה.ב is used is Bereishis 22:2 :
וַיֹּאמֶר קַח-נָא אֶת-בִּנְךָ אֶת-יְחִידְךָ אֲשֶׁר-אָהַבְתָּ, אֶת-יִצְחָק, וְלֶךְ-לְךָ, אֶל-אֶרֶץ הַמֹּרִיָּה; וְהַעֲלֵהוּ שָׁם, לְעֹלָה, עַל אַחַד הֶהָרִים, אֲשֶׁר אֹמַר אֵלֶיךָ
"And He (God) said, 'Please take your son, your special one, THAT YOU LOVE, Yitzhak, and go for you to the land of the Mountain Moriah, and bring him up their as an oleh offering on one of the mountains which I will tell to you."

In the begining of this posuk, God is instructing Avram to bring his son as a sacrifice. Avram is confused, because he has two sons, and doesn't know which son God wants him to take. So God tells Avram to take his "special" son. But Avram's a good father, both of his sons are special to him. Then, God says "the son which you love" and it is this phrase that seperates Yitzhak from Yishmael.

The Torah is making pointing out that there is a distinction between that thinking of someone as "special" and actually loving them. In today's world, when we talk about "our special someone" we are referring to the one person we love more than anyone else. But, apparently, our view of love is not the same as the Torah's. Love is something more than just viewing someone as really special.

Besides for familial love, there is one other context in which the Torah talks about love. That is in the mitzvah of ahavas HaShem. The mitzvah is found in sefer Devarim 10:12

וְעַתָּה, יִשְׂרָאֵל--מָה יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, שֹׁאֵל מֵעִמָּךְ: כִּי אִם-לְיִרְאָה אֶת-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ לָלֶכֶת בְּכָל-דְּרָכָיו, וּלְאַהֲבָה אֹתוֹ, וְלַעֲבֹד אֶת-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, בְּכָל-לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל-נַפְשֶׁךָ

Note that here, when the Torah tells us to love God, the phrase used is וּלְאַהֲבָה אֹתוֹ.
אַהֲבָה is a noun-love, as the thing love. But then what does וּלְאַהֲבָה mean? Technically, its, "And to love(noun) Him."

This is confusing. We see from sefer koheles that there is actually a verb-infinitive of ahava:

עֵת לֶאֱהֹב וְעֵת לִשְׂנֹא
(Koheles 3:8)

Why can't the Torah also use the word לֶאֱהֹב? Obviously, God wants to teach us about what real love is, and what it is not. Love is not simply having much affection for something. When we say "I love chocolate brownies" we are not actually using love in the right way. There's no doubt that Yaakov had ALOT of affection towards Yishmael. In todays terms, it would be called love. Yaakov loved Yishmael dearly. But, not according to the Torah.

So what can the Torah mean by "love"?

The answer, I believe, can be found in last weeks parsha, when the word ahava is used once again:


וַיַּעֲבֹד יַעֲקֹב בְּרָחֵל, שֶׁבַע שָׁנִים; וַיִּהְיוּ בְעֵינָיו כְּיָמִים אֲחָדִים, בְּאַהֲבָתוֹ אֹתָהּ
"And Yaakov worked for (or "with") Rachel seven years, and they were in his eyes like a few days, in his love(noun) for her"

Yaakov's whole focus, while in the house of Lavan, was Rachel. He worked seven whole years just to be able to marry her. Everyday when Yaakov went out to work, he knew the only reason he was doing it was for Rachel. He put up with Lavan for 14 years just to be able to marry Rachel. Yaakov's whole life's focus at the point was Rachel. Yaakov was "in love" with Rachel because everything he did, he did for her.

This is what I think the Torah is telling us love is. Love, true love, is when your whole life's focus is the object of your love. Thats why Ahavas Hashem is a noun. It's not a simple action. One can not just bring a korban and say, "OK, now I've fulfilled the mitzvah of ahavas Hashem" and then check it off his list. It doesn't work like that. To love God means your whole life is dedicated to God. Everything that one does, they do for God.

This is what distinguished Avram's relationship with Yishmael and Yitzhak. Sure, Avram adored Yishmael. He had alot of affection for him. It's only natural-Yishmael IS his SON, afterall. But the difference is posterity. Deep down, Avram knows that eventually, Yitzhak is going to be the one to continue the family legacy. Avram, as much as he may "love" Yishmael, knows that his life's work of spreading the idea of Torah Monotheism will be continued not by Yishmael, but by Yitzhak, the son that he loves.

Ignorance is creativity...a reflection

A good friend of mine (you know who you are ;) recently wrote a really thought provoking post entitled "ignorance is...creativity". In it, she describes how when she first started learning gemara on her own, at around the age of 16, she was coming up with such wild and crazy chidushim that could never actually make sense in the larger scheme of things, but the served the vital purpose of allowing her to expand her mind.

I just spent the past 6 hours studying for a math test with another dear friend, "Danny". Danny is somewhat of an atheist (he's a little confused as to what he believes at this point), but more importantly, he's a philosopher. He's only 19 years old, yet he is brilliant beyond his years. Danny and I have the craziest conversations, that only someone as insane as I would understand, much less enjoy. Whats unique about Danny is that when I say something outlandish, instead of nipping it in the bud and explaining why it can't be, Danny will proceed to expound on it, and develop the idea as if it was something that could and should happen.

For example, once I mentioned that someone I know was told as a child that God only gives people a certain amount of words, and once you use up those words, you won't be able to speak anymore. Other people that I've told this too responded in one of two ways: 1. They said that it's probably just illustrating how important it is for one to think about the necessity of their wordsds before they speak, or, 2. They try to convince me that this is impossible since God wants you to do certain mitzvot, like teffilla, that involve talking, every day of your life. Danny, on the other hand, just expounded on that and went on to discuss how much different our lives would be if we had to ration out our words, and asked if this would apply to the written word as well?

Danny thinks so much out of the box that I don't even think he realizes there is a box. He hasn't yet got to the level of comfort with the way of the world to become sedated in his musings. His thoughts are absolutely insane, but at the same time, insanely rational. I could sit and talk to him for hours about absolutely nothing, and at the same time, feel like a smarter, more intellectual woman.

What I wouldn't give to see his thoughts for a day...

Part II-"Friday Afternoon"

2:00. Eliana calls me, and tells me what happened.

"So did you call the health center, and poison control center?" I asked.

She said she did. The Poison control center told her the toxic level of contact solution is very low, so not to worry about that.

The health center told her to try various methods of getting the contact out, such as:

*eating something hot
*eating bread
*going to the bathroom
*throwing up

When none of these methods worked (Ok, she didn't try the last one) she called the health center again, and they told her to go to the ER. So, 2:30 Friday afternoon, 3 and a half hours before Shabbat, we head out to the Hospital.

Eliana has since come up with a theory about hospitals. "The whole point is to simply move you from waiting room to waiting room, so that you think they are getting something accomplished."

When it was 5:00 and we had only been seen by the triage nurse, it was pretty clear we weren't getting out of there before Shabbat. We called the campus rabbis, and one of them offered to walk the 5 miles to the hospital to come and meet us after dinner! We told him no way, we did NOT want him to walk ten miles in the cold rain for us.

The other one advised taking a taxi. It's better that a Jew not do the driving, and theres no way we could have walked. Theres more to this psak than simply that, but I don't have time to go into it now. Perhaps a later post.

We still weren't a hundred percent sure what we were going to do when we finally were ready, but as the sun set, Eliana and I sang lecha dodi to the passing police officers, men in handcuffs, and drug dogs.

Part I - "Friday Morning"

It's 9:30 am. "Eliana", a friend of mine at UMD, wakes up and goes into the bathroom to do her morning routine. She has a nutrition test coming up that she has been studying for, so vitamins are all on her mind.

"All right," she thinks to herself. "I'll be healthy and take a calcium pill today."

She reaches for the pills and then realizes that since she doesn't usually take pills in the morning, she doesn't have a cup in the bathroom. But, no worry, her roomate's cup in sitting convienently on the counter. And even more conveiniant, there's already water in the cup.

"Sweet!" Eliana thinks to herself as she gulps down her pill with the water.

But as she drinks the water, "sweet" is not the term coming to mind. More like "bitter" "burn" and "acid". Thinking that it must not have been water she swallowed, she asks her roomate what was in the cup in the bathroom. Roomate responds "My contacts and contact solution. Why?"

"Eh.." Eliana responds. "I think I just drank your contacts!"

Math and Rav Kook

Disclaimer: I'm writing this post kinda randomly. That is to say, I have a bunch of thoughts running through y head and i don't exactly know how they connect. Yet. I'm sure there will be a point by the end of this.

So, in math, we're learning about complements. The complement of a given set is anything that's not part of that set. This is the venn diagram which illustrates what the complement is:

In the diagram, the left circle represents everything in group A. Everything not in group A can be defined in three ways. First, you can simply call it "C and D", or you could call it "A complement." The way to write "A-complement" is Ac.

This gets more interesting when you start to assign actual values to the letters. For example, you could say that A represents all the people who ate at Hillel friday night , and C represents all the people who came to shul Friday Night. B would be the people who came to shul AND ate at Hillel, while D would be the people who neither came to shul nor came to eat at Hillel. Ac would be anyone who did not eat at Hillel, regardless of whether or not they went to shul on Friday night .

I find this interesting because when writing down math problems, my professor tends not to write the symbol Ac, opting instead to write a different variable which describes this group, perhaps S for "starved" (in this example, it doesn't quite work because obvously people who didn't eat at Hillel would have eaten somewhere else and would not have starved, but you get the point)

I thought about this today while learning a letter of Rav Kook. In it, he discussed the idea of a culture and a counter-culture. The hippies of the 60's were a counter-culture, a response to the general straight and narrow culture of the time. He talked about non-religous Judaism, and whether chiloni society is a culture or a counter-culture. In other words, do you define non-religous Jews simply as "NON RELIGOUS Jews" or are they something more than that? Are they "my neighbor down the block with the really pretty flower garden " and "That really funny guy in my Biology class", or are they simply "The group of people who are not religous.

Rav Kooks point is that its so easy for religous people to look at the rest of the world and think of them as "Religous-complement" but thats an entirely wrong way of looking at things. A guy I know, "Bobby" is possibly the most insightful person I've ever met. And I happen to know alot of really insightful people. I really value Bobby's opinions on almost everything. It doesn't matter to me that Bobby is not particularly religous-I can still count on him to explain my math work to me, or to shed light on a really complicated sugiyah I'm learning.

So often, we as religous Jews fall into the trap of staying in our own little Jewish circle, and never really branching out beyond that. A friend of mine grew up in an ultra-Orthodox family, went to Ultra-Orthodox schools her whole life, attended an Orthodox seminary in Israel, now is in Yeshivah University, and is getting married soon and moving some Chareidi nighborhood in New York. I'm not judging her particular choices, for her they probably were the best move. However, this girl does not have any real exposure to people who are not exactly like her. And that, in my opinion, is really dangerous. I mean, she could live her whole life never having to really think about why she is religous. And worse, she won't be able to convey that over to her children if she herself is unsure. And then people wonder about the "crisis" of kids going "off the derech." Amazing.

Shake your...checkbook

My good friend made a comment after shaking her 4 species* the other day. She said "What a silly mitzah. Not that doing it is silly, but you just feel so silly while you're doing it."

How true.

You kindof have to wonder what the rationale behind it is. Ok, we do it cuz God said so, but...why? It seems to me that succot comes in the fall. Ok, wait that didn't come out right. It's obvious that succot comes in the fall. It seems that the time of year is vitally signifigant to the underlying reason behind the mitzvah. Fall is the time of harvest. Many other cultures have harvest festials. In essense, succot is the time that we look at our produce and realize that it's all from God. We have to take a moment from our excitement and thank God for allowing our crops to grow.

Untill recently, almost every society was highly dependant on agriculture. Most people either grew their own crops, or grew cash crops to sell, enabling them to buy other types of food to feed their families with. If the crops didn't grow one year, you didn't eat.

Nowadays, we have a somewhat different culture. We're still dependant on agriculture, but not to the same extent. If florida has a bad year of Oranges, we can order from California instead. We may see tomatoes rise in price to over $3.00/pd., but we would never starve to death because of it. Thank God.

Today, we are much more dependant on business. I personally know day traders who committed suicide because the stock market went down that day. Our society is an economically minded one. We no longer care about the dividends of the field, rather, our interest is the dividends of the checkbook. With this in mind, maybe we can change the way we view sukkot.

Instead of thinking how silly it is that we are standing outside waving around a bunch of plants, we should imagine we are waving around our wallets, or laptop computers.

Succot is, in essence, a holiday of thanksgiving. Its the time where we look to God and say "Everything we have comes from you. Without Your graciousness, I wouldn't have my cozy warm bed, or even my house. I wouldn't have any food to eat, or money to buy food with. Thank You God, for providing me with sustenance."







*It bothers me when people refer to the 4 species as "lulav and etrog". What did the haddasim and aravot do that they don't deserve to be included as well?

If Mastercard celebrated Succot

Lulav and Etrog set.......$40.00

Construction paper to make paper chains and other decorations......$3.69

Holiday meals at the UMD Hillel......$45.00

Sleeping under the stars.....Priceless

The Succot Shake

Someone sent me this HILARIOUS video. Watching it makes me miss Israel so much...

One more crazy jewish thing

Last night, one of my roomates came back at 2 am a little tipsy.

We were all up, and ended up sitting around the table eating cracker, hummus, hot peppers and apples. Yeah, it was a strange combination, but hey, we're college kids now.

One of my roomates is not Jewish. She's really respectful of the three of us, and also really curious about our religous practices. Last night, we were discussing plans for Succot, and the drunk one said she was going back to Baltimore to help her family build the succah. The non-Jewish one asked "what do you build?" This lead to a conversation about the practices of succot, explained by the drunk one.

Here's what she said:

"We build these cabana style huts in our yards. For 8 days we eat only in the huts. We also take these branches and an upside down lemon and shake them around inside the hut. Then, at the end of the holiday, we have a thing where we hit the branches on the ground. Its alot of fun."

If that doesn't make you think Judaism is a cult, you should see us all daven Maariv behind the library each night.

Flowers, Brain, and Jesus

At the Hillel welcome back night, one of the activities was to paint flowerpots, and then plant flowers in them. On my pot I wrote something which Lissy Isaacson said in 8th grade when throwing ideas around as to what to write in the yearbook. We didn't end up using it, but for some reason, I have no idea why, the quote has stuck with me.

"Germinate Your Mind."

I was looking at my flowers recently and realized that theres more of a connection between flowers and the human mind than one would think of at first glance. Theres the obvious one that just like flowers need outside stimuli to grow properly, our brains need to be excercised regularly as well.

But theres another one that I just thought of.

I have noticed that I need to rotate my plant daily, because the flowers grow towards the sun, so they seem to lean over towards the window. Rotating them balances out the leaning, and makes them grow upright.

Just like flowers, our minds tend to lean towards one way (presumably the way we have been taught previously), and, just like flowers, we need to be turned regularly to be able to view things from an objective perspective.

A personal example: I went to school at relatively right wing Jewish high schools, and then I went to a pretty right wing seminary in Israel for a year. Then I returned to America, to the University of Maryland. I'm taking Jewish History, and it's taught from an extremely left wing perspective. The Proffessor is actually really good about presenting all opinions. Recently he was talking about Bayit Rishon and Bayit Sheni, and he said sometimes he gets the question "Is there a third temple?" The answer, he said, was "No, unless you are one who is of the opinion that the Messiah will return and come build it." He said it in a way that implied that was a preposterous thing to think , and the class laughed politely at this.

Well, some of us are of the opinion that the Messiah will come and redeem us all from our long exile. However, I didn't realize exactly how crazy this sounded untill this class. I mean, when discussing Christian theology in High School, no one could understand how Christians could actually believe that Jesus would come back to Save them. However they could readily accept that Meshiach will come [a second time, as the first time will have failed] to Save them.

As the Adderabbi once said, "I have often pondered what would happen if Mashiach comes, and his name is Jesus."

Amazing Shabbat #1

I must talk about my amazing shabbos!

I honestly felt like I was back in Israel, minus the Jerusalem stone buildings and of course the kedushas haaretz blah bla blah. BUT…Hillel is amazing. Maybe not in other schools, but the Maryland Hillel is amazing. Friday night, theres four different minyanim-Reforn, Conservative, Orthodox Traditional, and Orthodox Carlebach. By far, the largest minyan was the carlebach. We sang EVERYTHING! Some of the tumes sounded a little, well, slow, sort of reminding me of gospel music, but I guess that’s pretty characteristic of Carlebach. Then we moved on to dinner, which was pretty good. It was PACKED. There were tables all over the dining room, the hallway, the conference room, and the rec room (which is where the Carlebach minyan davened.) You could barely move. I think that someone told me there were 400 people there. Imagine a mid-size house with 400 people in it.

Yeah, it was that packed.

If I didn’t mention it already, the singing was incredible. You could feel the intense ruach in that room. And it was cool because it wasn’t just frum, orthodox kids who were singing. It was everyone. I was sitting next to a boy who was theologically conservative. That’s cool. I mean, I am not theologically conservative, but I respect ppl who are conservative when its for theological reasons. I don’t think he’s a heretic *. He simply thinks that halacha can change with the times. And to some extent, it can. We believe that too. For example, the Jews at matan torah ate chicken and milk together. That was their halacha. The Jews of today do not eat milk and chicken together. That is our halacha. But it is based on the same Torah. And we serve the same G-d. And whats the difference between following divergent opinions when it comes to…how long to wait btw meat and milk, and if one is allowed to drive to shul on Shabbat if the alternative is to stay at home all day. There are actually some opinions which say that electricity is not kindling a flame, and therefore allowed on Shabbat. The vast majority of jews are not of that opinion, but if one is, he is not a kofer in my eyes *

We had lunch, which was just as beautiful as dinner (maybe 200 ppl as opposed to 400) and later in the day there was a womens discussion shiur. All the girls were really smart and had very profound things to say. I felt out of place, and embarrassed when the only time I spoke was when the woman giving the shiur quoted a Friends episode and asked if she was getting all the details right. (she wasn’t). There was supposed to be a shiur on Rav Kook before that, but I got the times mixed up and was upstairs learning in the Beit Midrash while that was going on. I got 2 perekim of nach yomi done, and that’s really good cuz I finally just sat down and figured out where exactly I was up too. So I missed the shiur, but atleast I was still learning, and I put into motion my future learning. Mitzvah gorreret mitzvah.


*I met a girl there who's mom converted and decided to name her Kefirah. She didn't know it meant heretic when she gave her the name. I wonder what would happen if this girls decided to become a theologically conservative jew and drive to shul on shabbat?

So I decided to make a blog

I've had blogs in the past, but they've been kind of, well....uninteresting. My problem with blogging is that sometimes I feel compelled to post something, not because I feel that it's something the world desperately needs to hear, but rather, because my blog was looking kinda empty that day. Well, this is different. This is sort of an online diary. I'm not planning on telling my friends about this, but if they find me, I won't deny it (i promise ;). Anyways, the first post is something that I wrote my first shabbat at Maryland, a few weeks ago. I feel its a good way to open my blogary with.