Rock of Galilee

postgresql

2011-02-15T21:50:00.000-08:00

Life in the Galilee keeps moving at a nice, slow and steady pace. I haven't posted in a while, so I'm going to give you a quick update. The English speaking community in our village has really grown in the past year. NBN has helped 20 or so new English speaking families move in and it is beginning to change the demographic. At this year's Purim event the community has decided to include English as part of the entertainment so the new olim will feel comfortable participating.

Exciting news for me, I'm going to be speaking at the postgresql conference in NY this March. I wanted to talk about the relevance of open source database to the Israeli Arab conflict while living in a small village in the Galilee, but I couldn't come up with good stuff to talk about, so I settled for discussing using the database engine as an application server.

update: example of apparent "Turkish" email sting (עוקץ) in the wild

2011-01-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

Now that the the Turkel Committee has released its findings regarding the Mavi Marmarma incident, a new variation of the email scam is again finding its way to people who may be vulnerable. here's the new format - note that it keeps improving. For your information the UK phone number this time is in Cardiff.

I hope the Israeli Police Cyber Crime Unit is on this stuff...

------------------------------------

[from the evidently hijacked email address of the person you know]

Urgent

Apologies for having to reach out to you like this, but I made a quick trip to the UK and had my bag stolen from me with my passport and credit cards in it. The embassy has cooperated by issuing a temporary passport, I just have to pay for a ticket and settle Hotel bills.
To be honest,i don't have money with me,I've made contact with my bank but the best they could do was to send me a new card in the mail which will take 2-4 working days to arrive here.i was thinking of asking you to lend me some quick funds that i can give back as soon as i am out of here,i really need to make a last minute flight that leaves in a few hours.

I can furnish you with info on how you will get me the money. You can reach me via hotel's desk phone, the number is, +44 2920 644 171.

Thanks
[name and details of the person you know]

------------------------------------

People who receive emails like this should call the alleged sender using the landline or cell number they have, not the number in the received email if they are unsure about the provenance of the message.

The person whose email has been hijacked should try sending all the people on their hijacked email list an email from another email address forewarning them and giving them your new "secure" email address. The rest of us should probably make their usually belated monthly password change yet again.

Hoping this prepares someone for this - before it happens to them.

Shweky Concert

2010-07-29T02:44:00.001-07:00

Last night we headed down to Caesarea for a Shweky concert in the old
Roman amphitheater. We actually went because my nephew was in the choir
and we wanted to see him perform. The choir did an excellent job.
Shweky's choreography has not changed very much in the past 9 years (or
so) when we saw him perform in the US. It was thoroughly entertaining.
The crowd had a small percentage of "not outwardly religious people"
(meaning men not wearing kipot and women not dressing according to the
modesty standards), which surprised me, but it seems like "chasidic"
music is really making a comeback among the secular. For those who
haven't seen it yet, I recommend going to you tube and searching for
אנחנו מאמינים בני מאמינים and watching the Lee Fishman video.

If you get the Shweky in Caesarea DVD that is coming out in the near
future and see us in it, please let me know.

Caesarea was very nice. We got there early and went to the port, where
there is a mixture of ruins and tourist shops. We ate at a nice outdoor
cafe, pricey but very good. There was a sign up that said the beach was
closed for swimming, but there were still plenty of people in the water.
There was even a small water slide in one section.

example of apparent "Turkish" email sting (עוקץ) in the wild

2010-07-23T00:24:00.000-07:00

You may be aware that there are recommendations to change your email (and other) passwords following a reported heist and broadcast by Turkish hackers of tens of thousands of email addresses and passwords of Israelis which took place after the Mavi Marmara flotilla event. There is also indication that if your email address(es) and password(s) is not on the list (which may or may not be available any longer on the net) you should act as though it(they) are not secure.

This morning, I received what appears to be a cry for help from a friend.

Perhaps I should have immediately called this person to verify if this was real or not. Instead, I responded which is not recommended since in sender details IP is exposed. However, I am sharing their responses which may offer further detail and may be of use to readers of this posting.

In any case, I report it here as a heads-up to other people, and hopefully the relevant authorities in Israel who should be reading this.

In retrospect, there are several giveaways or tells that might have alerted me but this was good enough to get me motivated to want to help my friend. In fact, there is another spoiler or two but I will not reveal them openly here.

I did call my friend after the last response and he established that he was locked out of his yahoo account and was about to send "real" warnings to the email addresses he remembers that were on his contact list. He also reported the lock out to yahoo.

I now report this here, leaving out names.

Heads Up!!!

Email exchange:

first email received:

urgent help needed

Hey!

I'm writing this with tears in my eyes,I came down here to London,England for a short vacation and i was mugged at gun point last night at the park of the hotel where i lodged all cash,credit cards and cell were stolen off me.

I've been to the embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all,My flight leaves in less than 3hrs from now and am having problems settling the hotel bills.

The hotel manager won't let me leave until i settle the hotel bills now am freaked out.

I need your help.

Regards

------------------------------------

I answered:

Just saw your email. I trust if you don't reply, that you are on your way back.

If you can answer and you are still in UK, supply hotel name and manager's name

and telephone number and anything else that can help us help you.

------------------------------------

response:

[my name], i actually have limited time on the internet as the hotel manager has directed that the phone in my room be disconnected. all they want is for meto settle their bills. You can call him on this number +447045791223.i am so glad you replied back to my email. I have nothing left on me and I'm grateful to God that i still have my life and my passport.it would have been worst if they made away with my passport.$1,300 will cover all my expenses but i will appreciate whatsoever you can afford to wire right now, I promise to refund it to you as soon as I arrive home. You can wire it to my name from a western union outlet around. Here are the details you need to get it to me;

Name - [the person you know]
Location - 22 St. John Street London, EC1M 4AY United Kingdom

I still have my passport so I can use it as identification, e-mail me the transfer details and the confirmation number include the amount sent.
we shall talk when this is over.

------------------------------------

my answer:

Please tell me something that only you would know. So I can be sure it is you.

------------------------------------
response:

My wife's name is [her actual maiden name] she is a [profession] and am an [actual profession] .my abode is Canaan, Safed, Israel.[my name],it is me.....there's really no time to talk much...

------------------------------------
(end of email thread)

Dinner in Yaara

2010-07-05T21:35:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've last posted, though I'm sure you check the blog on a daily basis to see if the inspiration has hit me again. 13 years ago today (July 7), in an Italian section of Toronto next to highway 7 at a hall called "The Royalton" I got married. It was not only July 7th, apparently there was a Hebrew date too, and my BIL cares and knows what it is.

We can't go out this evening because of Book Club, and tomorrow night is English Shiur, Thursday night we're going camping... We actually had a dual celebration, the week before the kids got out of school, I took off a day and took my lovely wife on a 3 hour hike in the Yehudiya nature reserve. We had planned on going on the 7-8 hour hike, but we noticed 150 teenagers going on that hike when we arrived and decided, along with the advice of the guy who helps you choose a trail (I'm sure there is a title for him), to go on a shorter hike. We headed down the lower Zavyatan, a beautiful trail with a nice mountainside. Lots of interesting flora etc. There was nobody else on the trail, so we really got to enjoy the peace and quiet of nature's wonderland. After about an hour of walking we got to a very nice pool, very deep with lots of fish, and went swimming for a bit. We then went to a nice shady area for some lunch and climbed up the mountain. Very steep climb but thoroughly enjoyable.

Last night we finished our anniversary celebrations with Dinner in Ya'ara. Ya'ara (as everyone knows) is a small village about 5 minutes from Lebanon. Surprisingly, they have 2 kosher lemehadrin (super kosher) restaurants in the village. We had made a reservation at Beef Bahar and went there with another couple. You can find Ya'ara by taking the 70 up to Shlomi and keep on the road as it turns into the 899 until you see the sign directing you in. It's about a 20 minute drive from our village. The restaurant was very quaint and tzimmer-like. We ordered a first course of "fried things," which included Moroccan cigars, kubas and stuff like that, and a main course. They first brought out 12 different salads, bread and a large bowl of fries without asking us, which was very nice. The food was delicious and the portions were large.
The menu was pretty small, but it included a couple items for children

Highly recommended.

012 has lousy customer service

2010-06-09T04:58:00.001-07:00

Kavei Zahav 012 has horrible customer service.

I highly recommend not using them for Internet.

This is the second time that I had an issue with them and each time I
had to talk to a manager.

The first time they promised to call me back 4 times and never did. I
finally insisted on talking to a manager, which solved the problem.
However, the frustration getting to that point was not worth it.

The story is that I wanted to cancel my service and they said I had an
18 month contract. I asked them for proof of the contract and they said
they would have to get the recording and someone would respond within 24
hours. 48 hours later I called them back, they said that was impossible
because it takes 3 days to get a recording from the outsourcing company.
They promised that someone would reply to me within 72 hours. 4 days
after that I called them back and they said they hadn't sent the request
yet but it would take 2 weeks. 2 weeks later I called back and at that
point I insisted on talking to a manager. After discussing it with her,
she checked and said, the recording is here, this wasn't outsourced. In
the end, my wife had agreed to the contract and had forgotten about it.
I can accept that, and agreed to keep the contract. It was just so
frustrating.

2 days ago I was called by 012 to renew my contract. I asked the
representative when my contract was up and she said it was in 3 weeks. I
foolishly believed her. I signed up with a different company and then
called to cancel 012. They told me it did not matter what the rep on the
phone said, my contract was for another 2 months and I would have to pay
a penalty. I asked them if I could hear the recording of the
conversation with the sales person and they said there was no record of
the conversation. Obviously, if I would have agreed to extend the
contract there would have been a recording of the conversation.

I finally agreed to a cancellation fee because the 48 shekels it cost me
was worth getting rid of them.

prohibition on lying

2010-03-18T00:54:00.000-07:00

Uncle Moshe has made me mad enough to break the silence and return to
the keyboard. I was preparing for my Pirkei Avos shiur yesterday when I
stumbled on a falsehood that has been perpetuated by Uncle Moshe for
many, many years. We are up to the 9th misha of the first perek, Shimon
ben shetach explains to judges how they should interrogate the witnesses
to determine if they are lying or not.

There are very few commentaries on this mishna, so I brought sources
from Sanhedrin about the process and the story of the 80 witches that he
killed. I got into the Ten Commandments etc.

Then I decided to veer on the subject to the issue of lying in general
and, remembering the Uncle Moshe song, I turned to the verse that says
מדבר שקר תרחק. As the song goes, "מדבר שקר תרחק never tell a lie, Hashem
knows just what happened there's no reason to deny, honesty is אמת make
sure all your words are true so tatti, mommy and Hashem will be so proud
of you." This indicates that the torah source for lying comes from that
pasuk. However, that pasuk is not talking about lying at all. It is an
admonition to judges to be straight in their judgements. The pasuk
before states "don't bias your judgement towards poor people and the one
after says don't take bribery.

It seems that Uncle Moshe is trying to teach children not to lie with a
lie. We can judge him favorably and assume he is ignorant and actually
thinks that that is the source of the prohibition. Until last night I
was also ignorant and assumed that was the source of the prohibition,
but that is only because of his song. The actual prohibition comes from
a pasuk in Lev 19:11, which states "don't steal, deny or lie, a man
among his people."

The talmud brings down a number of cases where it is permitted to lie,
including a famous argument between beis hillel and beis shammai about
whether you should say that a bride is beautiful even if she is not. We
follow the opinion of Beis Hillel which says that after someone buys
something you should compliment it instead of telling him what you
really think. There is no purpose in telling someone after they buy it
that it was an unwise purchase, unless there is actual benefit to the
buyer (and informing him that he has bad taste is not really considered
beneficial.) Since there is a very strict return policy on wives, it is
appropriate to tell the groom that his bride is beautiful even if you
don't really think so.

Here in the Galilee we are getting ready for Pesach. the question of the
year is whether we eat canola oil or not. The rabbi said there is no
clear ruling and I can either eat it or not eat it, my choice. So I'm
taking a poll with all the people who will be eating with us, as to
whether they have a problem with it and if everyone is good with it, we
will start using it this year.

The big pesach tiyul has not been determined yet.

helping converts

2009-12-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

Wishing my readers a tzom kal (easy fast).

This week there was a notice in shul that they are looking for families to host not religious/pre-Jewish immigrant soldiers for a traditional shabbos. The Education corps has a learning course in which they teach the fundamentals of traditional (Orthodox) judaism to those who are interested.

A couple of years ago we had over some soldiers who were in the middle of the conversion process and they came to our house a number of times for shabbat. We had lively discussions and they promised to keep in touch after the conversion was complete. Well they didn't. One of them called us once afterward and after that she never even returned my calls and the other one never called and never returned my calls. I think one of them actually had the potential, but I don't know where she is or what she is up to now.

The question is should we do it again? On one hand there is a serious problem with the russian immigrants who are not halachically jewish, but came to Israel after being treated like Jews their entire lives. They get to Israel and are not allowed to get married and are outcasts in a number of ways. Technically the State of Israel should have stricter controls of who comes in and who doesn't, but they are here now and it is our problem.

One on side, we don't want to be converting people who are probably not going to be keeping mitzvos. On the other hand, if they are interested in being part of the Jewish nation and they are willing to learn what is required, I don't know if it is my issue if at the end of their conversion they decide to join the secular majority of the Jewish people. That is, as long as I do my part and do my best to show them what traditional Judaism has to offer and to convince them that it is their best interest to keep the mitzvos.

camping at the dead sea

2009-12-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

We just came back from a multi-day chanukah excursion. Monday night we camped at the Ein gedi beach by the dead sea. It was supposed to be bitter cold, but the weather turned out to be very nice. So we had a bbq and a small bonfire and everyone had a great time.

We went to ein bokek monday morning on the trail and there was a lot of water. The weather was perfect, but not really for a swim. As I watched my children I saw a lot of differences in thought patterns (or lack thereof). It was chilly out so none of the adults went into the water, aside from our feet as we walked through it. Some of the kids went into the pool and had a great time. When they came out they were freezing. We didn't bring a change of clothes because we didn't think it was possible that they would go into the water.

In any case, what I noticed is:
Child - Sees water wants to go in, goes in and has a great time. Comes out. It is cold. complains bitterly until something else catches his attention.

Adult - Sees water and doesn't even consider going in because it will be cold when he comes out.

The child obviously had more fun because he did not use any foresight. The question is does his discomfort after playing in the water offset the fun he had?

We will never know the answer.

erev yom kippur

2009-09-27T05:15:00.000-07:00

This has been a crazy busy week between rosh hashan and yom kippur, I did two selichos tours, one in Tsfat with the boys(actually 2, one with each class) and then to Jerusalem the next evening with the girls. We also built our sukkah, which we got from our friends who bought a new paper sukkah.

Hopefully I will get to writing those experiences, but now I will talk about today. Today started at 4:30AM. That's not as early as it sounds because we changed our clocks last night, so it only felt like 5:30AM. I've been getting up at 5:30 anyways for the past 2 weeks for selichos. Last night I had decided that I was going to go down to the nachal (stream) for an early dip in the mikvah (ritual bath). My plan was to daven (pray) at 6 and then go down afterwards, but I told my wife that if I happen to wake up at 4 then I would go then.
When I opened I eyes and saw that it was 4:30 I decided that it was a good time, and I was parked dopwn by the nachal by 4:45. It was very dark, but there was enough moon and starlight to see the path. The hue on top of the mountains was a deep purple and everything looked dark and menacing. I was thinking on the way down that I should have brought a knife with me in case any animals threatened me. After a couple seconds I realized that the only animal that might threaten me are wild pigs, and a knife won't help against them. Afterward, I realized that the jackals might also attack if they are in a bunch, but I didn't think about it then and I didn't have a knife anyways so it didn't matter.

I walked along the dark path for about half an hour until I got to the springs and the big pool. The only sounds I heard were my own sandals and animals crashing through the brush when i disturbed them. The only animals I actually saw were a jackal, an interesting looking animal that was bigger then a squirrel, maybe a weasel, ferret or really large rat, and some fish. There are some Persian fallow deer in the area, but I haven't see any.

I got to the springs at 5:10AM and it was getting much lighter. The water was perfectly clear and I saw some fish swimming about. I was in a bit of a rush because I had to get back to davening at 6, so I quickly jumped in and dunked 7 times and got out. It was so peaceful, with nobody else around. When I started walking back, I noticed that that the leaves on the trees had changed from dark black to light green and I could see the holy raspberries on the bushes.

About half way back I noticed a tent set up in a clearing with a small family cooking breakfast. It's surprising that I didn't see the tent on the way in, but it was dark.

I made it to shul before 6 and got home by 7.

After breakfast, I took the boys to buy our lulavim and esrogim, here you pay the same price as back home, the only difference being the currency.

I wish you all a g'mar chasima tova, an easy fast and a happy, healthy sweet new year.

sefer torah fundraiser problem

2009-09-24T10:44:00.000-07:00

UPDATE:
See bottom for update

Disclaimer: I have not consulted with any rabbinic people about my issue, so don't take this the wrong way.

I recently received a fund-raising request from my yeshiva high school alumni association. They are writing a sefer torah and dedicating it to the rabbeim. It is being marketed as a way to give back to the school and show appreciation for the hard work and dedication that they had put into your education and life. As it is a dormitory school, the rabbis are a very big part of your life and teenage-hood.

After I got the first mail from the alumni association, I got another email from a former classmate asking me to participate in buying a parsha with our class.

I really liked my high school and I liked the rabbis, not all of them obviously, but I got along well enough with most of them, which is not something most of my contemporaries from other high schools can say. I am still in contact with the high school and see one of the rabbis once a year, generally. I have donated in the past and I will continue to donate in the future, may God continue sending me parnasa.

I have a small problem with this particular fund-raiser though. I haven't ruled out participating in my class parsha, and I most probably will participate.

Here's my problem -
They are selling:
Entire Torah: Already Sold
Individual parshas: a bunch of them already sold
Special parshas within the individual parshas: A bunch already sold
Pasukim

If someone already bought the entire Torah, then he gets credit for writing a sefer Torah. The guy who donates a parsha is really not donating a parsha, because the guy who bought the entire torah already got that parsha. The guy who buys a special parsha or a pasuk is not really donating them either.

In other words, if someone buys a pasuk in a special parsha, that pasuk has already been sold to 3 other people, The Torah donor, the parsha donor, the special parsha donor and finally to the pasuk donor. I would think (and I could be wrong) that all of the donors aside from the original Torah donor are going to get credit for giving tzedaka, but not for writing a Torah.

I would like to hear from my readers what they think of this situation. As I mentioned above, I have not consulted with any rabbis about my issue with this yet and it is very possible that I am wrong and that everyone involved does get Torah writing points and not just regular tzedaka points (which are nothing to sneeze at).

UPDATE
I got a response from the yeshiva and I'm happy to tell you that my issue was unfounded. The head of the alumni association sent are sponsa to the exact same question from R' Zalman Nechemia Goldberg. The question asked went much farther then the question I asked and included the question, do you need to make a kinyan on the letter in the sefer somehow. The question indicated that most of the time when you purchase a letter in a sefer torah you do not make a kinyan on it. However, I have seen where the person sponsoring a letter has given the pen to the sofer and made him a shaliach in the writing. They also asked if someone who is not allowed to write a torah donates, does that pasul the entire torah.

If anyone wants to read the responsa themselves, please let me know and I'll forward it over (in Hebrew).
The answer is that when someone buys a parsha, they are not in actuality buying a parsha. The parsha is dedicated to them. However the way that it technically works is that you take all the money collected for the sefer torah project and combine it into one pot. If one person spends $1000 and another person spends $200 then the person with the $200 donation gets 1/5 of the amount of Torah writing credit then the $1000 donor. So if you want to know how much sefer torah writing credit you actually get, you add up the sum total of donations and divide the amount of your donation by it and that percentage is what you take with you as torah writing credit and the rest of the donation goes with you as tzedaka and harbatzas torah credit.

A groiseh yasher koach to the hanhala of the yeshiva, I recommend all of my readers donate to a sefer torah project.

shana tova

2009-09-18T04:09:00.000-07:00

I want to wish all my readers a שנה טובה ומתוקה, a sweet and good new year. May this year be a year of health, wealth and happiness for all of us.

I have been very busy this entire year, with very little time to blog, as I'm sure you've noticed. God willing this coming year will be just as busy, if not more so.

selichos

2009-09-14T03:17:00.001-07:00

It looks like I missed the JBloggers conference in jlem this year. I've
been pretty lax in my blogging recently and I hardly read anybody so I
didn't feel the pull to connect with my fellow bloggers. Maybe next year.

Normally I leave my house at 6 AM to beat traffic into Haifa, so I daven
when I get there. The shul on the Technion campus is mostly a sefardic
institution and they have been saying selichos for the entire month of
elul. Now that it is a week before rosh hashana, ashkenazim have started
saying selichos as well. After some inner debate I decided that it was
worthwhile leaving at 5:30 AM to get to selichos on time and I will hope
I don't get punished too horribly for saying sefardic selichos instead
of the regular ones.

I got to the shul 2 minutes late and someone was at the door saying
ashkenazim that way. They had a seperate minyan for ashkenazic selichos.
I had been worried about the singing and chanting, but this way there
were no worries. It was the familiar hum of reading the words as fast
you can possibly get them out, reading out loud together the key phrase
over and over with a single pizman other then the daily שמע קולנו. I
don't know if God forgave us because of the stuff we read, I'm not even
sure that anyone who was there knew what he was reading. But he
certainly forgave us because we showed we cared by getting up extra
early to ask.

school politics

2009-09-09T22:52:00.001-07:00

I'm on the school parent board again this year (like a PTA). I
considered leaving the board and making room for someone new. In fact, I
tried. I volunteered to be one of the class parents, we have 4 this
year. One of the class parents is supposed to be elected to represent
the class on the school board. I actually insisted on a correct process
this year where 3 people are voted as class parents and only one
represents the class on the school board. Last year, I was the only
volunteer and we had to convince 2 others to raise their hands. This
year 3 other people instantly put up their hands. Nobody had a problem
with 4 class parents. At the end of the meeting I asked the other 3 if
anyone wanted to represent the class and one woman said that her husband
really wanted to. I thought this would be a great way out of it. It is
so hard getting anything across and the culture is so different here
that I thought, "I tried for a couple years, and they'll be relieved
when I tell them that I'm not returning."

So I went down to the final meeting where we were talking about whether
to strike the system because a teacher wasn't given all the hours we
wanted and told them that 6th grade will be represented by another
parent. I was informed by the principal and a few other parents that
that is ridiculous and 6th grade can be represented by more then 1
parent. I explained to them that we had already agreed to 1 parent per
class and they rejected that with the explanation that at the beginning
of the year a bunch of parents join and then leave, so most probably the
other guy wouldn't stick it out.

At the meeting, most of the other parents actually agreed with me
(surprise) that we could not threaten to strike the system when the
school has more hours then it is supposed to and we only want 5 more,
which we can pick up from other classes here and there.

Last week I met with the principal and we worked out some of our
misunderstandings, so all is good.

Lost and Found

2009-08-26T23:12:00.001-07:00

On July 16 2005, I wrote a blog post about going to Morgenfeld's
restaurant on Moshav Liman. The restaurant has since moved to across
from Akhziv and the food is excellent, we were there 2 nights ago with
settler friends from the West Bank.

Laurie commented that she was looking for a friend, Amir Tlumak who used
to live in moshav Liman. I don't know either Laurie or Amir, but
yesterday, more then 2 years later, Amir commented on that blog post
that he is still in Israel and hasn't seen Laurie in 27 years.

Amir did not leave an email address or phone number, and Laurie did not
leave any contact information either.

If Laurie is still reading and Amir still wants to be found or if anyone
knows Laurie or Amir, please let me know if they find each other. I'm
very curious.

sefardi selichos rap

2009-08-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

I go to a sefardic shul for morning prayers every morning and now during the month of elul they have started saying selichos. Ashkenazim only have to say 1 week of selichos because as a general rule we have less to be forgiven for.
Sefardim don't just say selichos, though, they chant them. And sometimes they slaughter a goat in the middle.
The way it works is different people randomly start leading the chant at different places, so one guy might start chanting out loud and everyone will start answering and then in the middle a different guy will start his own chant.
Today someone started rapping instead of chanting. I think he was going for a new selichos feel. But he actually rapped shomer yisrael. It was very moving. Then he started to breakdance and that's when the rabbi asked him to leave. He felt that it was inappropriate to rap and breakdance the selichos as it is supposed to be a chanting with minor in-sync swaying.

tzfat klezmerfest

2009-08-10T02:41:00.001-07:00

While I'm already blogging...

The klezmer festival is back in tzfat (or safed if you write it like
that). The hebrew site can be found at http://www.klezmerf.com/ and
there is also a English site at
http://safed-home.com/KlezmerFestival.html The English schedule is at
http://safed-home.com/2009KlezmerFestivalSchedule.html one of the links
on the site doesn't work.

The festival starts today, Aug 10 and goes until Wednesday. We've gone
for the past couple years and have really enjoyed ourselves. I highly
recommend Simply Tzfat who is playing tonight at 11PM. We won't be there
as it is way too late for the kids, but it is definitely worth seeing.

If you just roam the streets you'll find a mad fiddler or too and that
totally make the evening.

Enjoy the music.

50 shek for a blogging convention???

2009-08-10T02:00:00.000-07:00

I just received my invitation to the 2nd annual Jewish bloggers
convention. It will be held somewhere in Jerusalem on Sep 13, 2009. The
exact location is not being released due to security concerns.

I enjoyed the 1st blogging convention. I didn't learn anything listening
to the panelists, but it was a lot of fun meeting the other bloggers,
some of whom I read and others who I had never heard of. When I first
suggested this blogging convention to Jameel 5 years ago, I told him
that people would happily pay to go to a blogging convention and he told
me I'm out of my mind.

I'm not so sure that I'm going to go this year. Maybe it's the 50 shekel
cover charge. Maybe it's because I'm not seen as often on the blogging
scene anymore. Maybe it's because I don't have any freaking time.

In defense of the cover charge, last year's dinner was easily worth 50
shek. If you have a couple of piled high deli sandwiches and some
drinks, you could easily surpass the cover charge. I would doubt this is
for profit, and even if it was I'm pro-free market.

But at the moment I'm not registering. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

sys admin in haifa

2009-07-23T03:47:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for a sys admin in Haifa with good Linux experience. If
you're interested shoot me a note.

apples from the US

2009-07-21T03:27:00.000-07:00

Today, at work, I noticed that the Granny Smith apples had a tag that
said Product of the USA, Washington Apples. I asked the woman who is in
charge of food why we are buying our apples from the US. We have plenty
of apples grown in the country. She replied that we buy from the
supermarket, whatever they have. But it is probably because of shmita,
then she and another woman (both of them secular) started arguing about
exactly when shmita ended and if that was a valid reason.

A couple weeks ago we visited the Breishit fruit packing plant in the
Golan. The apple picking is starting in another 2 weeks, so there are no
fresh apples from Israel yet, last years crop was indeed a shmitta crop,
so unless we are eating heter mechira (and it is odd that the
supermarket we buy from wouldn't) we have to eat apples from chool (out
of the country).

Speaking of the harvest, I saw a bunch of random people in one of
kibbutz yagur's fields picking tomatoes. A guy I was giving a ride to
told me that the machine already finished the harvest, and these people
are doing leket. Leket is one of the commandments of a field. After the
harvest, anyone can come to the field and pick up what is left. It is
one of the 3 commandments relating to poor people picking other people's
crops, giving them something to eat. The other 2 commandments are שכחה
and פאה. I have not seen a corner of any field marked off as being for
poor people to harvest, but I imagine that if a buncle is left in the
field, someone will come and take it.

According to <a
href="http://www.ynet.co.il/yaan/0,7340,L-15229-MTUyMjlfODA3MzA4NDZfMTQ4Njg3MjAw-FreeYaan,00.html">ynet's
encyclopedia</a> these mitzvos are only done when most of the Jewish
people live in Israel. Until then this is a Rabbinical commandment, and
I'm happy to see it is being fulfilled.

Finally on the topic of harvest, we went to the Golan last week to a
U-Pick in Moshav Sha'al and had a great time picking sour cherries,
raspberries, blackberries, mulberries, little plums and some other
assorted berries. It is 23 shekel entry fee for all you can eat and then
20 shek a kilo for what you take home. Highly recommended.

mad reviews

2009-06-22T22:31:00.001-07:00

These are unpaid ads.

First off I want to give mad reviews to the good doctors at EyeTravel, who travel around MI providing eyecare for the homebound. Eyetravel doctors go to people who can't get out, their primary enjoyment in life is watching tv or reading. Unfortunately as they get older and their health deteriorates, their eyesight is not as sharp as it once was. EyeTravel doctors give these people back their life as they come prepared with miniature medical equipment right into the house and restore their eyesight so they can continue to enjoy tv, reading and whatever else they need to see. As a number of their patients say to them when they are done, "God Bless You."

Back in Israel - Mad Reviews to the new burger place in Meona. Your choice of 160, 220 or 320 gram burgers (160 grams is ~1/4 lb). A 160 gram burger is 25 shek (about $6.50) and comes with an order of fries (cajun spicy, or regular). The burger and the fries were both excellent. It takes a bit of time to prepare the burger, but the taste is what counts.

Mad Reviews to me, I made chicken for the first time and it was edible. I actually didn't do much more then put my special wing sauce on already cut pieces of chicken and put in in the oven, but it worked. I also learned that if you have potatoes on the bottom of the chicken pot and you want them to be in oil so that they can fry while the stuff on top is cooking in the sauce, it doesn't work, because oil always floats even if you try to get it to stay on the bottom.

the economic thing

2009-05-11T01:51:00.000-07:00

This topic has been touched upon for several years. Everyone knows close ones who either work in the center of the country, or even in the regional center of the North, realizing that local jobs go less far in covering personal skill sets, or failing that, basic family monthly expenditures - if, that is, you can find one.

The graph image appeared in the "Israeli" July 25, 2006 on page 12 with no documentation.

In general. there has been a scarcity of useful documented local economic information and indicators or ideas relevant for initiatives in the so-called peripheries. But I am convinced this is an inhouse matter and among those of us who are concerned, there is sufficient talent and intelligence to suggest strategy over a barbeque, maybe.

I would like to share some sources that may flesh out thinking about these ideas. The first three touch on or relate to the North; the fourth relates to similar problems in the UK but which provide food for thought. Maybe you, the reader, do not need these. Anyway, they are not required reading, just represent my 2 cents worth. Check out the zip file and other links, if interested.

http://www.i-biz.co.il/innovation.asp
http://israel.planetfinancegroup.org/EN/download.php
http://www.tzafona.org.il/tzafona/open.aspx

http://www.ideopolis.info/publications.htm

The bottom line is that our specific catchment area and population - even total population - is only a very small part of even the North of the country meaning we can expect to receive only token attention from central government planning committees even after, nevermind . I personally find this lack of attention to inhibit my own sense of confidence, but that's a good reason I am me and you are you.

If you who happen to be reading this would like to invest in charcoal or other components or expenses or aims of this venture, please let us know.

pesach tiyul

2009-05-06T22:35:00.000-07:00

I know this is a bit late to be writing about our Pesach tiyulim, but I know everyone has been waiting for them. I just handed in a new support application that I've been working on for a couple months and I actually have a couple minutes to breathe.

Sunday morning, Chol Hamoed, we met my brother and his family near Yokneam to nachal Hashofet. My brother-in-law and family and littlest sister were with us for shabbos and they came with us too. I downloaded the directions from the Internet, and we found the park and a nice place to have a picnic lunch. We did deli sandwiches and they did some kind of cheesy somethings. Of course, there was also chocolate spread for the matzas.

After lunch we tried to figure out which way the nachal was, but the signs were all very confusing and the Internet directions did not help very much. There were a number of other cars trying to figure out where it was as well and so we guessed and continued upwards. We continued driving and the signs were not very clear and we finally got to a place where a number of cars were parked. We stopped there and asked someone if they knew where we were in relation to the map. They guessed that we were on the map and must be somewhere in the middle of the trail we were looking for.

We decided to start from that point and hope to find the red trail to get us to the water springs. We started walking through the cornfields, there were signs that said that we should not enter the cornfields, but the children didn't think that applied to them and they walked part of the time through the corn. It was similar to the movies, where you the corn is higher then the people walking, so we couldn't see them, but fortunately no one got lost.

At some point my BIL turned around and left because it was too much for his kids (they're much younger). And we continued onwards. After about an hour, we found the springs and had a great time playing in them. There were tons of people there, and it was good to have had a nice long hike before getting to the water. I've found that water after a strenuous hike is much better then water that you park next to, but that is debatable. My little sister fell into the water a number of times and she blamed me, in part, for her inability to stay on her feet.

After we finished playing in the water, we continued on the circular trail till we exited into the parking lot. The problem was that we didn't know where we were in relation to the trail to take us back to our car. It took us some time and the kids all got popsicles, but we found our way back to the trail and after a good hike back, we found our car.

We returned to our village for a nice BBQ. One of my little brothers came up with his family from Sunday eve through the last day. We did kabobs, not israeli hamburgers, meat and vegetables on a stick (They say that if there is both meat and vegetables on the stick, then your grill has not been disgraced as it would be if there was only vegetables), hot dogs and hamburgers. We decided that kabobs are bad to cook, because the meat and vegetables don't get ready at the same time and also the meat doesn't all get ready at the same time because there are different levels of heat on the grill. In any case, the food was all et and a good time was had by all.

$300 million dollar mistake

2009-04-30T07:10:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly enough, traintalk did not send me this article, which details how small things in e-commerce can make such a huge difference.
A huge retailer took away their forced customer registration on their website and they realized $300 million dollars more in sales.

The first thing I did after reading that was to send a message to my web developers that registration should happen automatically, and it should send a password by email so the user can check their account status.

atzmaut tiyul

2009-04-30T02:49:00.001-07:00

Yom Haatzmaut we planned a nice tiyul in the morning. Our family BBQ was at 3:00 PM, which gave us plenty of opportunity to enjoy the day. David Bellin, a friend and tour guide operator, recommended that we hike Nachal Katlav. The nachal is between Bet Shemesh and Jlem (through the back) and was perfect for our hike. We ate lunch at a precarious angle half way down the mountain. It was rocky, and rough and slightly strenuous. There was nana growing there and we found a couple almond trees as well. My eldest picked some wild beans and told me to eat them, slightly spicy and good.

The hike took us approximately 3 hours. We parked a car at the end, so we would not have to climb all the way back up. I heard the climb up is the fun part, but we passed on it this time. We got to the bbq on time and had a great time eating and playing around. There was very little traffic all the way home and we arrived before 10PM.

Special Prayer Session

2009-04-29T21:48:00.000-07:00

One of the most contested things about Israeli Independence day among various religious sects is whether to say hallel and if so, with a bracha or without. Before moving to Israel, I had never celebrated Israeli Independence Day (though as I'm writing this, I seem to recall a BBQ at my parents house once). After I got here I joined a religious zionist community and started celebrating the independence. I have been going to special prayers every year since I got here, though I still haven't said hallel with a bracha. It's a lot more then just hallel, they add in a whole bunch of stuff including blowing the shofar at night and reading a haftorah (without a bracha) during the day.

This year after the bris, we had thought we were going to hang out with my aunt and uncle who are here (for the first time) on a mission. We couldn't get ahold of them right away so we decided to go to the kotel for a little bit. They called as we were driving to their hotel and told us that the group was doing something that evening, so they wouldn't be able to get together with us until the next day for the family BBQ. We realized after we hung up that their hotel was across the street from the parking lot, so we stopped in the hotel anyways and visited for a bit. We continued on our way to the wall and the kids were all complaining that they were starving hungry (apparantly they forgot you are supposed to eat at a bris) so we stopped for pizza (70 shekel a pie in the old city, איזה מכה.

We then realized that we would be right on time for special prayers at the wall, so we hurried on down. They were just finishing up the speeches and we watched as they raised the flag to full mast and put out the big memorial flame that had been burning next to the Wall throughout Memorial Day. We then proceeded to do special prayers. Special Prayers (which includes the normal evening service) was very, very long. The first part was read repetitively half of a pasuk by the chazzan and the other half by the people, sometime. They were chanting sefardically as well (though nobody slaughtered a goat) and tried to throw in the tune of Hatikva as many times as they could during the reading/chanting. Hallel took way too long. Did you know that you could do the entire hatikva tune for each הודו לה' כי טוב. I hadn't know it was possible.

We decided to leave immediately afterwards and did not stay for the dancing.

We got to my brother's in Modiin (where we were staying) around 11:00 PM and then we started the grill up. My brother made a rub for the grilled chicken that was a bit strong, it was based on spicy paprika. It was a good way to end the evening.

the bris

2009-04-29T21:39:00.000-07:00

My brother's child had his bris on Memorial Day so we headed on down to jlem for the festivities. There is a dichotomy of emotions involved when memorial day meshes with a happy occasion, as you have to intertwine the seriousness of the day and the sensitivities of the people remembering their lost ones along with the happiness of the day.

The child was named Shoham Amitai. In my brother's speech he said that he didn't want to name after a dead person and especially not after someone who died so young, so he hinted at a friend of his who was killed in action during the Lebanon war, whose name was Amichai. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the name had to signify both Holocaust Day (the day of birth) as well as Memorial Day (the day of bris). Though my brother did not mention it (and probably doesn't know), the name Shoham hints at the holocaust as the Shoham Geriatric Center in Pardes Hanna is the home to the larget number of first generation Holocaust survivors in Israel.

May baby Hammy be zoche to Torah, Chuppah and good deeds.

memorial day

2009-04-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

Today is Memorial Day in Israel, whcih is noted in a different manner then Memorial Day in the US. This is a very solemn day, there are no big sales or BBQs, as most of the population in Israel has lost a loved one in Israel's wars. This is a day for visiting graves, of family or friends who you served with in the army.

I feel very much an outsider on this day, as I did not serve in the army and in my family only one brother served in the army and he made it out unharmed, thank God.

Last night, we went to the city's memorial service, which included the El Malei Rachamim, and a speech by one the city's rabbis as well as other people. The mayor did not get up to tell us how important he was, though the MC let us know. They have a slideshow where they mention all of the locals who were killed in Israel's wars. It is a very touching service, though a bit much for the little ones so we left in the middle.

word for single purpose item

2009-04-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

In Hebrew I have often heard the term yehudi when talking about something that has a single use. For example, if I want my own server for something that would say it is a sherut yehudi.

The word yehudi means Jewish, and I thought it was funny that they would use that term in Hebrew to talk about designating something for a specific purpose. I have used the term myself and people have understood me.

Today I learned that the word that is used in not yehudi, Jewish, it is yeudi, designated. The difference in spelling is יהודי vs. ייעודי. Hebes (native hebrew speakers) don't always pronounce the hay, so they can sound the same.

I realized this when reading some literature and it suddenly struck me that the word they were using was the word tht I thought was something else.

mazel tov

2009-04-20T21:44:00.000-07:00

My little brother had a baby boy today. It is Holocaust day and the bris will be on Memorial Day. I wonder if the planning people did this on purpose. Anybody born on Yom Hashoah should have their bris on Yom Hazikaron.

They are going to need a name that will incorporate all of these events, such as Massuah or something similar.

the pesach seder

2009-04-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

Seder was surprisingly fun. We ended up without any guests and the army never sent me the soldiers that I requested, so we were going to be alone. Seder is generally more fun with more people so we were a bit sad. We heard another family was without guests, so we invited them over. They turned us down and then invited us the next day. We agreed and invited them for lunch.

There are a number of different kinds of seder people. Some people read through the hagaddah quickly without commentary, other people discuss it, some people like to analyse every word and other families sing the whole thing. We like to discuss the hagaddah on the level of the children at the table, and the family we went to is more of a read it through kind. We didn't really discuss it, but we compromised as I interrupted the reading with questions and discussion points. I had prizes for the different age groups and the mixture of our 2 styles went very well.
I asked a couple difficult questions, one of which was partially answered by their teenage daughter who had been listening when I spoke to bnei akiva on shabbos. I hadn't given them the full answer, to the question I asked, but I was amazed that she was able to repeat what I had told them.

They brought a gift when they came for lunch and we hadn't brought a gift when we went to them, which is kind of awkward. Now we have to decide if we have to gift them back. The intricacies of human relations are always confusing.

One thing that is very different about where I grew up and where my children go to school is there is no focus on the hagaddah in my children's schools. I always came home with notebooks full of information on the hagaddah, as did my siblings. My children didn't know the first thing about it and I went through it a little bit before the seder with each of them so they would be prepared.

Blessing God for the sun

2009-04-08T04:58:00.000-07:00

Every 28 years, on the day before Pesach, the sun is in the exact spot that it was on the day that God created it (at least according to Abaye). To celebrate this we say a special blessing to God, who creates things. My wife wore a yellow scarf in honor of the day.

Today was that day. The last time this happened I was 5 years old and I don't remember it. Today someone in shul asked me to remember him the next time I say the prayer. He just turned 60 and assumes he won't be around for the next time around.

I went to 2 sun blessing ceremonies, the first was at our shul after davening. Everyone went outside and said the bracha together. The second one was the community event, where there were speeches (The head of the religious party, an official rabbi and the mayor) and musical accompanyment. I went with the wife and children to that one.

If you haven't thought about it recently, just look up at say out loud, "Thank God for the sun"

searching for chametz

2009-04-07T03:03:00.001-07:00

Tonight begins the search for chametz. We do this even though my wife
has already been through the house and is sure that the house is ready
for Pesach. The odd thing is that sometimes we find chametz. This is
not, chas vshalom, a criticism on the cleaning efforts, this is a fact
of life. Some things get missed.

We should learn a life lesson from this process.

As we continue through life striving for perfection it is worthwhile to
stop and do a check and see if the part of your life that you have
"cleaned up" is truly clean or if there is still a bit of chametz lying
around. It is only when we take the time to do the check, as opposed to
all the time spent cleaning that we are able to find the missing spots.

This year after you finish your search for chametz, take a minute and
think of a way that you could finish a process of making yourself
better/cleaner spiritually/physically and how you would be able to do a
search afterwards to make sure that the process did not leave any spots
behind.

Have a great Pesach.

(non) kosher for pesach

2009-04-06T02:54:00.001-07:00

I was talking to a co-worker about Pesach and what the company does on
Chol Hamoed. I believe they generally order from places that are not
kosher for pasech. My co-worker is not religious and does not keep
kosher, but he was concerned that there wouldn't be anything for him to
eat. He does not eat chametz on pesach. He doesn't necessarily keep
kosher during the holiday, in fact he told me one of his favorite pesach
foods growing up was matza, cream cheese and meat.

Very odd, but in my opinion it is better to keep Pesach wrong and at
least identify with your Jewishness then not to keep it at all.

another false alarm

2009-04-05T03:06:00.001-07:00

Today my wife called me that the air raid siren went off while she was
grocery shopping. She didn't hear the siren in the store but was told
about it by someone afterwards. They have already announced that it was
a false alarm and that they will be checking into the spate of false
alarms recently. According to one of our commenters, it is a natural
reaction by the radar watcher who were wrong on thinking that real ones
were false, which is understandable but still keeps us on edge.

My children are currently all out and about, the oldest one is who knows
where with a friend, and 2-4 were at the park with friends. They have an
older girl with them, but she's only 13. I hope they didn't completely
flip out, especially since they were at the park close to the siren.

bnei akiva peula

2009-04-04T22:39:00.000-07:00

Bnei Akiva asked me to do a "peula" for them on Friday night. Peula means activity, but it is actually supposed to be an interactive discussion on any topic that I want.

I actually volunteered to be on the list of people they call, after they posted a letter in our shul lamenting how hard it was to get anybody to help them out and it was our responsibility to provide them with quality peulot and they posted a sign up sheet for anybody willing to give one. So I posted my name and a month later they called me.

The age group is high shool (15-18) and I recognized most of the kids by face, if not by name, and most of them knew who I was. I had heard a great Radio Lab a while ago which gave a situation that is perfect for a teenage discussion.

You are standing on a bridge and you see a train coming towards the bridge. You look behind you and see that the tracks are broken and end in a big pit. If the train keeps going it will fall in the ditch and kill or injure hundreds of people. There is no way for you to warn the train. You have 30 seconds before it arrives. Suddenly you notice a fat man sitting on the bridge over the tracks. Not just a regular fat man, huge. You know that if you push the fat man, he will fall on the tracks and stop the train. He will die, but all the other people will be saved.

Would you go over and push the fat man?

On Radio Lab they asked this question and alomost everyone said no. They then changed the question slightly.

You are on the same bridge, and see the same train going towards the same problem. This time there are a parallel set of tracks and the fat man is sitting on the parallel tracks with his back towards the train. Next to you is a lever and if you pull the lever you will switch the tracks that the train is going on and it will kill the fat man and save all the people on the train.

Would you pull the lever?

This time, a signaificant number of people answered yes.

So I put the question to the teenagers. The topic of my discussion was not, would you kill a man to save 500. It was on making decisions and what goes into them. I gave them both cases, they didn't see any real difference between the two cases and if a teenager is going to theoretically kill someone he would prefer to push him.

There were about 70 kids in the room,50 girls and 20 boys, sitting separately (who would have thought that would happen in BA), so it was easy to see the differences between boy responses and girl responses.
In the initial response, only 7 people answered, 5 wanted to kill him and 2 didn't. I explained to everyone that all of the rest decided not to make a decision, which was a decision in of itself.

I changed the role of the fat man a number of times to gauge the responses:
* What if the fat man broke the tracks dug the pit?
Suddenly a lot of the kids wanted to kill him and there were a bunch who decided that we shouldn't kill him, even though they hadn't decided not to kill him before (from the undecideds).
* What if he was your friend?
* What if you know he had 5 kids at home?
* What if your brother was on the train?
* What if he wasn't Jewish, but he was completely innocent, someone from Mexico that had never seen a Jew before?
Here a couple kids said that didn't see any difference if he was Jewish or not, and an argument broke out about whether his descendents would become terrorists.

To finish off, I explained to them that the facts of the situation remained the same during all of the scenarios. What changed was the emotional factor. I told them that we are always aking decisions and emotion plays a big part in it and that it is very important to understand ourselves and understand what pressures we are open to, and what our buttons were that cause us to react when pushed. I told them that if they did not understand what made them tick, then they were open to manipulation as soon as someone else figured out what buttons to push.

Finally I tied it into Pesach, and expalined that when God hardened Pharoah's heart, he removed the emotional equation. From a logical perspective, Pharoah still wanted to keep the Jews enslaved. However, he had reached a breaking point emotionally. God therefore removed the emotional factor from him so that he could finish showing Egypt, and the world, the rest of the plagues, until form a logical perspective they recognized that God ran the world and all of nature and decided that if God decided that the Jews should leave, he could take them.

I got mad reviews, everyone loved it.

lieberman and annapolis

2009-04-02T06:18:00.000-07:00

Avigdor Lieberman, the new Foreign Minister of Israel, responded to
Tzipi Livni's speech, in which she berated him and everyone else in the
government, with a proverbial slap in the face.

Livni has been spent countless hours working on the Annapolis initiative
for peace, which was what the former government had based their peace
efforts on. However, this initiative was never ratified by any Israeli
government. The latest peace initiative that was ratified by the Israeli
government was the Road Map for Peace brought by the Quartet. Lieberman
started his first day in office by declaring Annapolis dead and buried
and declared that Israel would only be obligated to the ROad Map which
was approved by an Israeli government.

The Road Map for Peace has stages including obligations that the arabs
have to fulfill before Israel has to continue fulfilling. The reason why
Livni needed Annapolis was because Israel had already gone beyond its
obligations and the arabs hadn't done anything. In order to keep the
ball rolling towards ??peace?? Livni created a new initiative to
obligate Israel to more concessions without asking anything in return.

It's a good thing for the country that the only thing she can do now is
shriek from the opposition instead of continuing her policy of damage
towards Israel.

air raid siren

2009-04-02T03:35:00.001-07:00

My wife just called that they are down in the bomb shelter again. She
didn't hear any booms and it was only a single siren. They were probably
cleaning the siren for Pesach when it went off by accident.

lone soldiers

2009-04-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

We would like to invite 2 lone soldiers (חיילים\חיילות בודדים) for the first day of Pesach.
Does anyone know who to get in touch with?

new government

2009-03-31T22:34:00.001-07:00

Netanyahu presented his government yesterday and then he and Livni spoke. I prefer Netanyahu to Livni as prime minister, but I think he paid too large of a price. I also feel that the government is way too big. 1/4 of the Knesset members are ministers. Netanyahu's speech was very positive and he was constantly heckled by Kadima members. Livni's speech was bitter. There are no other words for it. She personally attacked everyone in the government, basically calling them a bunch of liars and thieves.

Livni is just a bitter old woman, crying that she received more mandates, so she deserves something.

Netanyahu did not mention the Kadima corruption in his speech, he thanked the former prime minister and did not wish him a comfortable prison cell. He did not talk aboout how crappy the last government was. One of the prices of victory is that it is very hard to attack the losers and make sure they stay losers for ever. Hopefully Netanyahu's government will actually do something positive in the next couple years.

Regarding the National Union - On one hand I'm sad that they were left out of the government, because I share a lot of the same ideas and plans as National Union voters. On the other hand, I'm happy they were left out because they are a bunch of backstabbing fools who don't know when to say enough. I feel that the NU and their voters are the epitome of "My power and the strength of my hand won for me this victory."

I'm also not happy that Labor is in the government. Barak is a crackhead and will probably be deposed of in the next Labor primary.

We'll see in the upcoming months if Lieberman is indicted for his crimes that have been investigated for the last 10 years. None of the facts have changed in 10 years, the issues just come out during election season. How odd is that.

Finally the Jewish Home, Daniel Hershkovitz's party settled for minister of Science. I really wanted education, but I guess science is part of education. Hopefully they can throw a bit of Judaism on the fire and have some spirituality and Zionism thrown back into the equation.

not like jack

2009-03-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

In our shul there is a small group of daf yomi learners, who learn by themselves (myself included). We often discuss the daf or include references to it in our conversation.
I generally do the daf during davening, not during the actual prayers, but during Torah reading, or when the shatz repeats shemona esrei. Sometimes, I'll see something in Rashi or something that doesn't make sense in the daf and I want to go and show it to someone. Then I remember. I am not Jack. And I hold myself back and wait until after davening till I discuss the daf.

There was this baalabus in a yeshiva (somewhere in America) that spent the entire time on shabbos davening learning. I never saw him with a siddur in his hand. We'll call him Jack. Probably a couple dozen times during the davening he would yell loudly to the mashgiach, "Look at this!!" As if the mashgiach had never seen whatever it was that he was looking at. First of all, we didn't like Jack, or his kids. Secondly we felt that it was the wrong time to be having a chavrussa.

Now that I'm more grown up, I realize that davening is an excellent time for learning. I understand that it is the wrong time, as I should be concentrating on the prayers, and when I have my boys with me I don't look in my gemara at all (Educational purposes). But it is a time when I have dedicated to religious time, so instead of reading the Torah pamphlets that everyone else is reading, I go through the daf.

But I am not Jack. I don't disturb other people's davening with my insights or questions on the page. I am not Jack, I spend time actually davening during the service. I won;t say that I am doing it correctly, but at least, I am not like Jack.

tremp to a kibbutz

2009-03-03T22:01:00.000-08:00

Last week I gave a girl a tremp from the Technion campus to the junction near the kibbutz she lives at. I asked her if she was a kibbutznik and she replied that her parents are. She is planning on leaving the kibbutz when she moves on. She said that the idealism is mostly gone and the beaurocracy is way too suffocating. When she grows up she does not want to have a committee decide on everything that she wants to do. She needs more freedom of movement. I suppose there was probably some sort of disagreement in the kibbutz about her going to to the Technion, but it could be a lot of other things as well.

I explained to her that there is a tight framework around everything in life and the kibbutz is probably just an exaggerated example. I gave her the example of my life, in which I have a wife and 5 children and work. I enjoy my life, but there is a very tight framework deciding what I do and when I do it. Even single people with few responsibilities cannot go and do whatever they want. They have to get up in the morning for work, they cannot just decide to take off whenever they want, etc..

I also explained that with the responsibility and framework comes all the benefits.

She was unconvinced and I wished her luck in her future.

judification of our village

2009-03-03T21:46:00.000-08:00

I attended an urgent meeting last night on the topic of Judification of our village. Apparently a lot of Arabs are moving in and people would like to stop the trend. There is a rumor that this is an intentional move and Saudi Arabia is funding Arabs moving into Jewish neighborhoods. In some cases the Arabs are offering more then the asking price to convince the seller to sell to them.

We discussed a multi-level plan.
1) Buy houses - There is a definite lack of quality rental properties in the area and a high demand. There is a current NBN initiative to move new immigrants to the Galilee and our village is one of the featured places. Buying property for rental is a solid investment.
There is an organization called Moreshet Galil that is involved in buying houses in the area and keeping it Jewish. One of their proposals is to form real estate investment groups, where people buy houses together. Their first proposal is a house for approximately $120,000 with someone prepared to rent the house for approximately $475/month. He is looking for 5 investors to split the house and already has 3 people at $24,000 a piece and is looking for 2 more. It will provide revenue of approximately $95.00 per month, which is a much better rate then you would get on almost any other investment at the moment.

Another thing we talked about was making the new communities that are being planned into closed neighborhoods where any buyer would have to be accepted by the acceptence committee.

Someone propsed making it less comfortable for them to live in our neighborhoods.

Lastly, we discussed the economic problems of the area and how we can improve it.

It was an interesting discussion, and I will probably have more to discuss on this in the upcoming months.

not hit

2009-02-21T21:56:00.000-08:00

On Saturday night my SIL calls right after shabbos to find out if we are still alive. Apparantly there had been a rocket attack in our neighborhood over shabbos and people were injured. We hadn't heard anything, except for a lot of thunder. We checked the news reports and it said a village near ours was hit, but the village was not mentioned. This might be under military censor still, so I'll only say it was a Christian arab village that was hit. This village has been around since the days of the crusaders and has a crusader castle on the other side of it. Also of interest to note, this village is right next to the village where Gilad Shalit is from.

That news ended a very interesting shabbos. We had 3 boys from Anywhere in Israel who were looking for an out-of-the-ordinary shabbos. We had a nice friday night with pouring rain. Unfortunately the basement flooded and all of their stuff got soaking wet. We had fixed the problem of rain coming into the basement, but 6 hours of straight rain overcame our defenses.

I told the boys that not only did they get flooded, they also survived a rocket attack. I suggested that the next time they seek adventure, maybe they should think again.

ceasefire????

2009-01-18T21:46:00.000-08:00

It seems like Israel really likes these one sided deals in Gaza. They walked out of the Gaza strip without an agreement, and that is what brought us this war. They are now walking out of gaza again without an agreement, and you can bet that they won't have a problem shooting rockets at us as soon as the last soldier leaves the strip, if they wait that long.

What I heard from the PM was laughable, given the history. "If they fire on us we will respond severely." I laugh at that statement even as I write it. You can almost hear Rabin saying, "if they shoot at us with the weapons we gave them then we will go in and take them back." Or how about Sharon, "if they dare to shoot one rocket at us after we leave Gaza, we will take it back." In other words, Olmert has decided that we've killed too many bad guys for now, so we will give them time to stock up on more weapons so that they are more prepared for the next round.

The northern border has been quiet for the past couple days and we're hoping it will remain that way.

Galilee sporadic attacks

2009-01-14T06:57:00.001-08:00

Well I guess that free punch was just the beginning. Rockets were shot at Kiryat Shmona and my wife said some hit Kabri as well, those that was not reported on the news. I think it means they are getting nervous that we are nearing our goal in Gaza. They are keeping us off-balance at the moment.
We had just offered to watch my brother's kids while they go to have another baby. They aren't sure if the north is the best place to send the kids to right now. They live in peaceful, quiet Samaria.

I think we are sending some artillery into southern Lebanon to show them that we aren't complete wussies, but we haven't attacked Beirut yet. UNIFIL is still scratching their heads as they try to figure out what the best way to condemn Israel for getting rockets shot at herself again. This is supposed to be a group that is charged with shooting the bad guys. This is their entire purpose of existence. Lets hope they can figure out which way the barrel should be pointing before Israel has to go in and do the job itself.

ctrl Alt up arrow

2009-01-13T04:39:00.000-08:00

In Windows XP sometimes the screen gets turned in the wrong direction. So you are looking at it sideways or upside down. The easiest way to deal with this problem is to physically turn the monitor on to its side or upside down and then it will be the correct orientation. Another way of doing it is by clicking ctrl+Alt+up arrow. The orientation was most probably changed that way to begin with (clicking ctrl+alt+other arrow).

Sometimes life is like that too. You do something small and find that suddenly your orientation is way off. The easiest way of dealing with it is to adapt to your new orientation, such as turning your monitor upside down. The more correct way of correcting it is to figure out how to get your orientation back the way you want it to be and hopefully on the way figure out how it got screwed up.

In the JPost today there was a story about a teenager (17 year old) who was convicted of killing his mother and wounding his father because they took away his video game. The judge said that he firmly believed that the boy did not realize that by killing his parents they would be gone forever, however he denied an insanity plea and said the boy was responsible for his actions. Talk about needing a reorientation.

UPDATE: I just realized that while this story was in the jpost, it did not happen in Israel.

Haifa was not hit

2009-01-11T21:47:00.000-08:00

Haifa was not hit. Don't worry we're all ok. This is the message we passed along to my wife's grandma after she got ver worried when she heard that Haifa was hit yesterday. I was here, nothing happened. At least nothing out of the ordinary - other then me buying shoes, which I don't normally do.

There is a push now to ban Balad, one of the Arab political parties, from participating in the upcoming Knesset elections. The party's platform includes armed struggle against the state and the destruction of its Jewish character. Kadima is trying to look more and more right wing because of the war is actually going to support the motion, while Labor is going to vote against.

The natives are getting restless and there will probably be more riots if the motion actually passes. the last time they did this the supreme court invalidated the vote and let them participate.

Balad's official response to the proceedings are that they stand by their platform.

The question is should a democracy allow a voice calling for the state's destruction? If the majority of people vote that they prefer a dictatorship to a democracy, do they take away their own inherent right to be self-deterministic? When the majority of German's voted for Hitler, did that make the actions that he did, which he promised before he was elected, moral? Or moral for the German people? Or is democracy not equal to morality?
If the majority of Gazans vote to annihilate Israel, does that make them all the enemy and remove from them any status of innocent civilian?

Deep thoughts by Sim

shoes

2009-01-11T05:45:00.001-08:00

I finally decided the time had come for new shoes. My New Balance of 1+ years were completely destroyed after having served me faithfully for about 2 years. I showed them to the guy in the shoe store and he said he had never seen New Balance look like that before.
I am very hard on shoes, I am a two pair of shoes kind of guy, 1 for shabbos, holidays and other assorted looking fancy occassions and the other for everything else. I also have sandals, but I don't consider them shoes. I went to the Grand Canyon today, the big mall in Haifa (Canyon is Hebrew for mall). I explained to the guy in the store that I am hard on shoes and I need the entire front to be solid leather, not netting or material as I would rip right through that. He had never heard of anyone doing that before but I chalk that up to his inexperience.

He had some Air Jordans, which he said were the best quality that he had, but I told him I had a problem buying those. He was a bit confused, so I told him I was from Detroit. He told me that it shouldn't be so personal, because Jordan would have played for whatever team gave him the most money. Israelis do not understand sports. In the end he didn't have any other quality shoes, so I bought these. I feel like my feet should throw up.

leftists suck

2009-01-09T00:06:00.000-08:00

It looks like the war chants were a bit early. One barrage, a war does not make. I think they were testing the water or throwing a free punch.

I want to wish a happy birthday to my little sister who turned 18 yesterday.

Anyways, for shabbos we are heading off to Bet-shemesh to spend it with the BIL. This was planned in advance and is not related to the rocket fire. Bet Shemesh is within firing range of Gaza, it is about 40 KM away, though they haven't been hit yet. Hamas probably wants to avoid the Tel Aviv area because they know that if the lefties have to go into their bomb shelter even one time it will kill the support they enjoy there. Udi Aloni suggested, in a ynetnews article, that Israelis should happily accept the rockets from Hamas as it is our fault that they are unhappy. The entire family is a bunch of nutcases. Someone should check into how much of his monthly income comes from Europeans.

TrainTalk pointed me towards a eureferndum blog post which discussed how Hamas is not only using women and children as human shields, but is actively trying to get them killed so as to maximize their pity power. I think it's important to see exactly who we are dealing with.

sonic booms???

2009-01-08T02:15:00.000-08:00

My wife heard a boom earlier and she called me to ask if there was anything on the news. I told her that she was the news and there wouldn't be anything on for at least 10 minutes. I listened to the news afterwards and there was a live report of someone from Lebanon who saw the rocket take off towards Israel. After that there was a report from Nahariya that rockets had landed. The reports were from someone who was "very experienced" according to the radio. The Home Front Command denied the reports and said with absolute certainty that there was no second barrage and the noise that was heard was from sonic booms.

I came home early today because my wife had an appointment with my older daughter and I have to get the baby from gan. It just turned out to be on Katyusha day, luckily for us.

activating the war blog

2009-01-07T21:59:00.001-08:00

I've been very lax at blogging recenty. This is mostly because I have completely run out of time. I fired my system admin at work recently, and now I have his work to do on top of mine. That and the rest of life has just left me with no time at all.

This morning my wife called and asked if she should take the kids home because rockets hit in our area. They haven't hit our village yet, but it's probably only a matter of time. Two minutes after I hung up with her, Jameel called to find out if we were still alive.

During warfare I feel a greater responsibility to blog then during peacetime (or non-active war, as is the general state in Israel). This is to keep people informed about what is really going on. The media outlets generally have such garbage and try to equate our suffering to their suffering. There is no comparison. Their suffering is self-inflicted and our suffering is inflicted by them. In other words they inflict suffering on everyone. It's about time we wiped them out.

We are still working out our family war plan, and I will keep you updated as the war progresses.

At the moment, the kids are all in school and we are waiting for instructions from the warroom as to whether we are taking them home or not. For the moment everything is just tense.

It's a good thing I only planned on working half a day today.

Local elections

2008-11-11T06:24:00.001-08:00

Big day in Israel as all municipalities hold their local elections. In our village, there are 13 seats on the city council up for grabs and the mayor's seat. We have a local religious party that is expecting to do very well this year. I am voting for them. I haven't decided who to vote for mayor yet. My choices are the incumbant, who has been the mayor for 30 years and is a dictator and a Likud guy who's running under Gaydamak's banner who has been trying to throw out the current mayor for years.

We threw a small get together for the current mayor at our house Saturday night. About 30 people showed up and we listened to the mayor tell us that he liked religious people and we really didn't need to vote for our party because his party would take care of us in any case. I agreed to have the get together because someone in our community asked me to do it so that the mayor feels he has support in our community. That way when we approach him after the elections, if he wins, he will feel that at least some of us are on his side.

The reaon we don't like the other guy is because he has been running an incredibly vicious, negative campaign. He hasn't said anything good that he will do, he just focuses on how corrupt the other guy is. Now for the past 5 years that I have been living in the city, it has been run very well. The city looks good and no matter what everyone is saying about education, the children are getting a decent one. There is growth and most of the problems that the other guy tries to throw on him probably aren't his fault. He did remove a 30,000 shekel debt that his daughter owed to the city and his son-in-law is making a nice salary on a job that he probably doesn't deserve, but I can't imagine that sort of thing would change with any new guy.

Also I like local dictators. I think they are a very efficient form of government. The religious politicos say that the current mayor has been giving them hell for the past 5 years and I should vote for the other guy. Other people in the community have been telling me that the mayor has helped us out in the past and because he's going to win anyways, we should support him so that he doesn't take it out on us later.

Yitzchak Rabin

2008-11-09T21:51:00.001-08:00

Today is the yahrzeit, the anniversary of death, for Yitzchak Rabin, the former prime minister of Israel. It is a sad day for the Jewish people in a number of respects. The government instigators, lead by Avishai Raviv, have never been brought to justice for their role in the assassination. The left have used this incident to massively incite against religious Jews. But the saddest part of the day is that when we felt we didn't have enough political power to stop the terrible things that Rabin was doing, we decided to try and change history by killing him. In the year before Rabin was killed, I heard a number of people, rabbis and laymen, talking about how he had to be stopped, but I took it as empty rhetoric. Sometimes our talk is very tough, but we do not expect anything to come of it.

There are two very important things to remember on the day of Yitzchak Rabin's murder. The most important thing to remember is that killing someone you disagree with is not the answer. Obviously there are people who are worthy of death. Killing a democratic prime minister who is doing something that a large percentage of his electorate want him to, will not change the direction.

The second important thing to remember on this day when Rabin is idolized by the masses is that he was wrong. His policies were wrong, his answers to any questions against what he was doing was wrong. The peace process was wrong. What he did brought harm to the State of Israel and the Jewish people. How many of us heard him say, "If they use the guns against us, we will take them away." When they used the guns against us, the answer was "it's too late." Had he ever heard of foresight? When Sharon gave away Gaza, years after Rabin's death, he said the same thing: "If they shoot on us from there, we will take it back." The people didn't laugh at how stupid he sounded. Now we are getting it from Gaza, and we are getting it from the guns we gave them.

Because of the path that Yitzchak Rabin followed, the Jewish People live in fear in their own land. But killing him was not the answer. The killer also did not have any foresight. The automatic prime minister after Rabin was killed was Shimon Peres, who is far worse in concessions to the arabs then Rabin ever was. If he killed him to, there is the political party that backed those ideals. In order to truly end the process, he would have had to kill a large percentage of the people in Israel, which would have been far worse then anything Yitzchak Rabin could have done.

blame obama

2008-11-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

There have been a bunch of weird things happening to the computers at work this week and I've decided to blame Barack Obama, the new President-elect of the US for this. For every unexplained incident, for example, an icon disappearing from the desktop. I have blamed cosmic factors and Obama being elected.

It's going to be a long 4 years.

local elections

2008-10-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

In our national elections, the NRP has decided to merge with the a number of right wing parties to build a united "right-wing" front. From a political perspective this is a great idea, if they can form some sort of agreement on policy. From a Jewish perspective, it is marketed completely wrong. The Torah says very specifically that we should go straight and not turn right or left. Therefore the party should market itself as a centrist party, in keeping with the Torah, instead of saying they are a religious party that believes that right-wing is better, against what the Torah says. They should market every party that is more left-wing then themselves as right-left (Likud), center-left (Labor) and left-left (Meretz, Kadima). If there are other parties that are more right wing then them, they can be marketed as right wing.

It's all in the marketing. Kadima marketted themselves as a centrist party and then apologized to the Palestinians for the refugee problem, something that not even President Peres would consider.

In our local elections, the supporters of the guy running against the current mayor called our house to convince us to support them. MY wife, who is mostly apolitical, answered the phone. They started telling her what the problems were with the current mayor and that their guy was going to fix it. Instead of hanging up on them or passing the phone to me, she asked them how they were going to fix those problems. They replied that there are a lot of problems. So again she asked HOW they are going to fix them. They had no response so the candidate himself got on the phone. He told her that the current mayor puts a lot of money into making the city look nice, so he would take all that money and put it into education, as an example. She finally hung up without making any commitment to vote for him.

She didn't ask him this question, but according to what he is saying, the ugliest cities should have the best education. Does he have any statistics to back that up? The facts are that the more beautiful cities generally have better education because the way a city looks says something about the population. I wouldn't want to live in a city that looks like a ghetto and I would bet the level of education would sink very rapidly if the city stopped investing in its looks.

more spam

2008-10-26T23:39:00.001-07:00

I just saw the most shocking video of Barack Obama talking about his ideas of redistributing wealth to poor people. That means that if you earn $100,000, he wants to take it away from you and give $50,000 to someone who did not earn it so that you are both even. Now after the poor person has the money and loses it, he would then take the money away from you again and give it to him to lose again. As he says "I don't want to punish you for success, I just want to give the people behind you a chance as well"

Watch it and weep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3pck

I keep getting this email at work from Chinese domain registration companies that someone is trying to take our company's domain name with a .tw or .hk or .cn at the end. They, being a morally upright company, want to give us the first chance at it because it is our trademark. I generally either ignore the messages as spam or I send them back a ridiculous message that makes no sense. It is fun because they generally respond.

Today, this is the email I sent them:
"I will file a lawsuit against you in the International Court of Justice that sits in the Hague. This is outright licentiousness and we feel that you are causing international strife. We insist that you cease and desist at this very moment. Chinese domain names, as you well know, are like the big dog that barks twice and then howls long and loud. I believe that you are Kevlin and you are not Will and you begin this process of squeezing us out of all of our hard-earned profits so that you can take over the world and get a Chinese American woman elected to President. We will not stand for this."

I got 2 responses back from them. The first one said that if I didn't register it soon the other group would because of the law: "who is first, who is the owner."

The second response I got back from them was surprising:
"Thank you for your reply, we have rejected their applications,but they will most likely register and snatch those domains in other approach.In that case we will not be with responsibility for any result about the matter."

I replied and invited him to tea to discuss world arbitization.

Acco in flames

2008-10-12T04:23:00.001-07:00

Acco has been a "model of Jewish/Arab relations" for the past number of years. They shop at each others stores, eat in each others restaurants and drink coffee together like brothers. At least that's how it was until Yom Kippur. In an obvious attempt to incite a riot, the Arabs sent a driver playing loud music into a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur evening. The Jewish residents asked him to stop and when he refused they roughed him up a little bit (He was not sent to a hospital and had no serious injuries).
At the same time, the loud speakers at all the mosques in town started blaring that the Jews were attacking Arabs for no reason and they should all get over there. 2000 arabs attacked the Jewish section of Acco, smashing car windows and shops, beating up people and burning things. Arabs were yelling "itbach al yahud" "slaughter the Jews."

God told the people of Acco, your prayers were ignored.

After Yom Kippur, the Jews had had enough. They went on a rampage and starting their retaliation. Apparantly, the police had forgotten that it was their job to stop the Arabs and they didn't much stop the Jews either. Houses were firebombed and people were beaten up. There is a call for an economic boycott of all Arab businesses in Acco.

I heard from an Acco resident that her eyes stung on her way home from shul after Yom Kippur because of the amount of tear gas that had been fired on the crowd. She said she doesn't even live in that neighborhood. Right now she is completely freaked out and is thinking of moving in with her grandma in Haifa just to get away from the madness. The Arab leaders have agreed to condemn the violence but they do it in such a wussy manner that it is telling the Arabs, you go slaughter some Jews, and we'll say "noo noo".

my shabbos shuva drasha

2008-10-05T00:07:00.000-07:00

In our shul we have a speech on Friday night in between kabalas shabbos and maariv. The rabbi only speaks on shabbos mevarchim and the other 3 weeks a month, they ask a member of the community to speak. We have a lot of rabbis in our congregation so most of the time we do get a rabbincal speech, but every once in a while they ask someone who is not a rabbi to speak. This week they asked me. This was not just a regular shabbos, this was shabbos shuva, the shabbos between rosh hashana and yom kippur. During the day the rabbi gives a long drasha that is supposed to fill your heart with thoughts of repentence. I turned him down at first, but he insisted and wouldn't accept any of the alternative speakers I suggested. Generally, I speak in shul one day I year, shabbos zachor. We sell Aliyahs on that shabbos and a couple of years ago they decided it would be funny if someone who didn't speak hebrew very well would sell them.
In any case, I agreed to speak and prepared my 5 minute shabbos shuva drasha. Everybody seemed to enjoy it. I could tell by the shock on people's faces when I started out yelling "Repent! Repent or you'll burn in the fires of hell" and the smiles that broke out when I said people must have considered Hosea a hypocrite for talking about repentence that it was a success.

The only negative comments I got were a couple of people who thought that maybe instead of saying "go forth and sin no more" I left out the "no more" and called on people to just sin. All of the other people just said they really enjoyed it. My Hebrew has drastically improved in the past 5 years and everyone actually understood me.

If anyone wants to see the English translation, let me know.
Here is my speech in Hebrew, for your enjoyment:

שובו! שובו פן תשרפו באש של גהינום!

כך אמר לי איש – יחף ומלוכלך - ברכבת של ניו יורק לפני 15 שנים. עכשיו אני עומד פה מול קהילה של רבנים, תלמידי חכמים ואנשי ציבור וחשבתי לעצמי מה אני יכול להגיד לכם על תשובה?

ההפטרה שלנו מתחיל עם הושע אומר לשבטי ישראל, "שובה ישראל."

מי זה היה הושע? הספר מתחיל אם סיפור שצווה אותו לקחת אשת זנונים ושיהיה לו ילדים. לפי כמה מפורשים הסיפור קרה בדיוק כמו שכתוב. בעיני העם חייב להיות בעיה דתית עם הושע. איזה צבעוני לדבר על תשובה בנאדם כמוהו שמםתובב עם נשים כמו גומר בת דבילים.

הייתי מדריך בתנועת נוער בארה"ב שעסק בקירוב רחוקים. היה להם אירוע לגייס כספים וכמה מהבוגרים דברו. נער אחת ממשפחה דתי עמד ודיבר על החווית החיים ונסיונות שלו וגם דיבר על ענייני מוסר ותשובה. הוא אמר שעכשיו הוא התאושש וחזר לדרך הטוב והישר אבל הוא זכר שבתון אחת במלון שהוא גילח עם סכין גילוח והזמין פיצה לא כשרה. היה שוק והלם שנער ממשפחה דתי יכול להגיד את זה, במיוחד שההורים שלו ישבו בקהל.

מה זה תשובה – זה תהליך שחייב לעסוק בו רק אחר שעושים חטא

ומה זה חטא – זה פעולה נגד רצון ה'

ומה זה ה' – הוא מלך מלכי המלכים, בורא שמים וארץ, שנותן לנו הכל, איש כפי צרכיו ולכולם יש תכלית אישי ומסלול החיים שהוא צריך ללכת.

איך אפשר לדמיין בן אדם שעובר על רצון השם? משוגע הוא? אחר הפרשיות הקודמות שתיאר מה יקרה להעם שלא הולך בדרכו. “בהמתו שחט לפניך ולא תאכל ממנו" "גלות" “עונש" “נשים אוכלים בנם"

אבל בסוף פרשה שלנו משה רבינו אוסף את כל המנהיגים של כלל ישראל ואמר להם:

“כי ידעתי אחרי מותי כי השחת תשחיתון וסרתם מן הדרך אשר צויתי אתכם וקראת אתכם הרעה באחרית הימים כי תעשו את הרע בעיני ה' להכעיסו במעשה ידיכם"

משה ידע שיש חטא, היה לו הרבה נסיון מאז שהוא התחיל להנהיג את בני ישראל. חטא דבר טבעי

וזה מה שהוא רצה למסור למנהיגים של העם. תנהיג בסבלנות. יהיה עונשים. וזה גם תהליך של חיים - של לומדים מהשגיעות שלנו.

לפעמים קשה לקבל דברים כאלה מרבנים שנראים בעינינו כמו לא מהעולם שלנו, רחוקים הם. כך היה לנו את הושע, היה לנו הנער ההוא, היה לנו את האיש היחף ברכבת ועכשיו יש לכם אותי. ואני אומר לכם תהיה לכם סבלנות. אתם תחטאו, בני זוג שלכם יחטאו, ובניכם ובנותיכם יחטאו. זה נורמל, וזה טבעי.

יהיה עונשים גם לכל אחד פרטי וגם לכל העם.

לדלג לפרשה הבאה:

“הצור תמים פעלו כי כל דרכיו משפט א-ל אמונה ואין עול צדיק וישר הוא"

שבת שלום

after shmitta planting

2008-10-03T04:08:00.000-07:00

Well the new year started and shmitta is over. Like Yom Kippur, where you start building your sukka immediately after, we tilled the land and planted carrots (That's the only vegetable in season right now). I will not be surprised if they do not grow, because we were supposed to but them 2 cm in the ground and 20 cm apart from each other and my children have a hard time following instructions. It's not simple to just go out and plant now that shmitta is over. If the plant was created in a forbidden way during shmitta then you can't plant it after shmitta either. This is the reason we got seeds. (Also because they didn't have any flats of what I wanted.) I don't have a tiller, so I did it with a shovel. It was pretty difficult. I think the reason the vegetables didn't work 2 years ago when we tried (aside from the fact that we were chased away from our home by Katyushas and our watering system stopped working) is because I didn't till the land. So this time, I made sure to till first.
It will take 1-2 weeks until the buds start coming out and then 2 months until we can eat them. These are organic carrot seeds, and I dodn't spray them with anything, so these will be real organic carrots. I was very excited to be able to plant right after shmitta. It's like saying that the only reason we didn't work the land the entire year was because God told us not too. As soon as the prohibition ended we went and planted.

Now I have to work on my sukkah.
BTW, does anybody know what days the chol hamoed concert in Bet Shemesh is this year?

shana tova

2008-09-28T21:56:00.003-07:00

Rock of Galilee wishes all of our readers a happy, healthy sweet new year.

shabbos in the hospital

2008-09-28T00:26:00.000-07:00

My daughter fell down the stairs in school and hurt her neck and was sent to the hospital. They put her in a neck brace attached to a pulley on top of her bed with a weight at the end. It seemed very old-style medicine, but I really don't have any way to judge that. She went in Thursday afternoon and they decided to keep her for shabbos. We weren't happy about it, but we didn't really want to decide on our own that the doctor didn't know what he was doing.
I stayed with her and my wife had shabbos with the other children at home. They got invited out for all 3 meals and we got tons of other offers. It is really nice living in a caring community.
The hospital doesn't provide meals for parents staying with their children so I brought all the food I needed myself. I bought

a bottle of Efrat Shiraz, not as good as Carmel, but better then Domaine.
A bunch of small challahs
a Rotisserie chicken, I reheated it before I left for the hospital at 3:30 double wrapped it in tinfoil and put it into a thermal bag and it was still warm when we ate it at 7:00.
A lot of water
Chummus
Potato Salad
A Turkey salami

The neighbors made me a couple of delicious kugels as well.

We drank wine, ate bread, had meat and sang shabbos songs. There is a shul in the hospital, so I took her for kabalat shabbat. It was a very difficult shabbos for my daughter, who was tied down to the bed for most of it. She stayed in a very upbeat mood until the evening when they told her that she had to stay for another night. We read books and talked and tried to play games, but it was very hard for her to play chess and checkers with her head attached to the bed. She was looking horizontzally at the pieces.

They let her out this morning and now she has to wear a brace until the end of the week.

To the Dead Sea

2008-09-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

The company is taking us on a vacation this weekend to the Dead Sea. Tomorrow afternoon work ends early, I'll probably just work from home, we'll take the kids out from school early (they'll be so disappointed) and we head southbound.

The dead sea is an interesting experience. Very few people actually like to go into the salty water. It can burn your eye out and tastes disgusting if you get any in your mouth. It hurts a lot if you have any scratches on your body. But it is supposed to be good for healing. So it might hurt a lot now but then it will feel better later, so it is worth it.

Friday, the scheduled activity is Masada and then a Bedouin lunch, they ordered Mehadrin for us (which means the Bedouin stole a rabbi along with the kosher sheep). We're not going to do Masada because the kids have already been there and no new ruins have been "found" since then. We'll probably do something like Ein Bokek, which is one of the Shabbos activities, because we are not participating in any of the shabbos activities.

We're driving ourselves, as are the other religious families. The buses were supposed to leave from there after shabbos ended, but then they changed their minds and said they would leave on shabbos. I argued against the buses leaving on shabbos because we're a Jewish company. I went through the list of people coming and pointed out a couple people who might prefer to leave after shabbos even if they are not publicly shabbos-observant. In the end we compromised and one of the buses is waiting until after shabbos to leave. I told the HR manager that I was watching out for the people who didn't know they were shomer shabbat.

Lousy Dinner

2008-09-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my wife, God Bless her, was not feeling very well, so I came home a bit early to help out with the kids. The kids were all very hungry when I walked in, so I decided to make them dinner. We had twice leftover chicken in the fridge, so I decided to make them a chicken dinner.
I cut the meat off of the bone and put it into a tin foil pan. I then covered it with bbq sauce and mustard. I added a touch of spicy chily sauce. We had olives and grapes in the fridge, so I put those in as well. Then I found some spices on the counter and put some in (I don't know exactly which spices, but one of them was kind of off white). I stuck it in the oven for about 20 minutes and then voila, I had a delicious meal.

My oldest daughter actually liked it. The other ones wouldn't even look at it. "Ichsa. That's disgusting" and "I'm going to throw up" and "That's not food" were but a few of the statements coming from the children. I told them they had to try it and then they could have a peanut butter sandwich. So they tried it and decided it was more disgusting then they could have possibly ever imagined.

I actually thought it was pretty good.

Olmert kneels to Arabs

2008-09-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

A recent Haaretz article quoted PM Olmert as expressing sorrow for the plight of the Palestinain refugees who lost their homes as a result of the forming of the state of Israel. He equated their plight to that of the Jews who were expelled from Arab lands at the same time. There is an expression that Olmert would have been wise to adhere to: "Better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are stupid then to open it and let people know it."

This type of comment incorporates so much historical revisionism it makes one want to throw up. There is no comparison between the Jews being thrown out of their birthplaces and the Arabs who left so that they would not be in the way when the Arab armies crushed the Jewish people and made them all very wealthy. Olmert is expressing sorrow that we won a war that was forced upon us. He is expressing sorrow that we were not swept into the sea, as was promised to the fleeing Arabs.

After apology, the next step is compensation. Now that we see where the PM was going with this, we should rejoice in our fortune that his corrupt dealings were found out and that he will spend a couple good years in jail. This kind of talk is most damaging to the State of Israel. It delegitimizes the right of defense and the right of the Jewish people to live in the God's country. He has effectively kneeled in front of Mohammad and kissed his shoes. Alas, The depths to which we have fallen.

Vigilante Justice

2008-09-13T23:05:00.001-07:00

This past shabbat a 9 year old boy was stabbed by an Arab Terrorist (is that redundant) in Yitzhar. The Arab also burnt down a house, but thankfully it was empty. Some of the residents of Yitzhar, in an act of vigilante justice attacked the village where the terrorist had escaped to.

A number of left wing nutbags have condemned the attacks by the Yitzhar residents. They completely ignored the terrorist crime commited by the Arab. This is for an obvious reason. Left wingers don't consider Arabs to be people. They expect Arabs to try and harm people and when they do it is not a surprising occurrence. It doesn't matter if it is a child or an adult or blowing up a sidewalk cafe. Left-wingers will not condemn it because "what do you expect from an Arab." They do however condemn Jews who try to protect themselves or seek justice, which the police sometimes fail to do. I thought about the reason for this and it is probably because they have such a high regard for Jewish people that they expect them to react in the way an adult would if a retarded child hit him.

Right wingers, on the other hand, consider Arabs to be people and expect them to be held accountable for their actions. When an Arab village protects a child killer and/or terrorist that village has to be held responsible. Anybody who protects a terrorist is a terrorist themselves. They show by their actions that they support killing and harming Jewish people and must be held accountable. In the biblical story, Shimon and Levi wiped out the village of Shechem when the prince kidnapped and raped their sister. They decided the entire village was guilty because they did not protest. Their father, Yaakov, was angry at what they had done. He was not angry that they wiped out the village, they deserved that. He was angry that the other nations in the area would turn against them and he would have to fight them all.

Maybe our situation is similar in that the nations of the world would turn against us if we wiped out a village because of their sins. That does not change the fact that justice would be served if the village were completely wiped out and all the people in it killed.

beautiful insult

2008-09-11T04:43:00.000-07:00

My daughter has been having some problems with some of the girls in her class. Since she came back from her trip abroad a number of girls have teased her that she speaks with an American accent. One girl was talking to her very nicely and my daughter had enough and she said to the girl in English, "You're beautiful." The girl, not understanding, was very insulted and went to complain to the English teacher that my daughter was cursing her out in English. The teacher called my daughter over and asked her what she said. My daughter answered and the teacher burst out laughing and walked away, leaving the girl who complained open-mouthed and speechless.

I'm proud of her that she finally has learned to use her language skills to her advantage.

Israeli school politics

2008-09-10T22:26:00.001-07:00

There are members of my village who read this blog so I tried very hard to not include anything that can be construed as lashon hara.

I'm on the board of the PTA again this year in the girls school (vaad horim in Hebrew). One of the functions of the board is to approve the amount of money that each parent must pay. There are obligatory payments and optional payments, and some gray areas, such as the class trip.

The principal presented the payment sheet to us a week before school started. We accepted it all, changing some minor details, such as having 5th and 6th grade go on a 2 day overnight trip together, which would make it slightly cheaper for both classes.

One of the payments that was presented as obligatory was 30 shekels for dental insurance. A number of parents complained that there is no dental service so why are we paying for the insurance. One of the members of the board checked the law and found out it was only obligatory in a city that provides the service. He sent an email to the board and the principal explaining the law and requesting that the principal issue an apology and credit all the parents. He also suggested that the board was at fault for not verifying this information before-hand. I replied that I agreed with what he wrote, but it is not the board's responsibility to know all the laws and procedures and it was 100% the principal's mistake for presenting it as an obligatory payment. I explained that I don't have time or desire to verify that what the principal presents to us is true, and I suspect the other parents do not either. I don't have any problem with accepting that a mistake occurred, just accept it refund the money and get on with life.

A person who is not on the board saw the emails (looked at a board member's email) and wrote a nasty reply. A very cynical email was sent that the board is anti the new principal and that we are jumping on her for making a small mistake and we're all hypocrites. The email seemed to indicate that we are driving our children to hate the principal by having loud public discussions and we are harming the children and the school by doing this. (He knows about this because he went to university and read the books).

A minute after I read this a board member called me and asked if I read it. He had already prepared a response and he wanted me to sign on it. I told him that I would have to read it first. He sent me the letter which was a nasty personal response.

I sat down and modified his response to be much more diplomatic. I wrote that I will ignore your cynicism and hurtfulness and just answer the issue at hand. I then explained the situation and why his concerns were not justified. I also explained to him that the emails he saw were sent only to the board members and the principal and were not meant for the entire parent body.

In the end he apologized for his tone and his content and said he had taken things out of proportion.

Honor the office

2008-09-10T00:06:00.000-07:00

PM Olmert will be indicted for accepting bribes, corruption and in general being a jerk. When we were at the NBN ceremony on Monday, they requested that we honor the office of the PM, no matter our feelings for the man himself.

I thought about it for a while, whether that is chanifa (hypocritical flattery or ingratiation) and this morning while I was driving with the dayan, I discussed what he thought about it. He actually brought up the topic, as he was telling me about a young woman who made aliyah on my brother's flight who came to the court to get a letter of exemption from the army for being religious. She told him about the ceremony and mentioned that someone was holding up the newspaper with his picture on it the entire speech. I said I thought that no matter personal opinion of him or level of corruption there still needed to be respect for his position. That is not to say that we shouldn't protest against his staying in power after it becomes apparant that he is corrupt, but we have to do it while still honoring the office.

The rabbi agreed with me and brought down the proof from the way that the prophets dealt with the corrupt kings. The specific example he gave was Eliahu and Akhav. No one will argue that Olmert is more corrupt then Akhav was, yet the seat of monarchy was respected by Eliahu. We have similar proofs from the way Moshe spoke to Pharaoh, no matter what he had done, he held the highest position in the country and that seat demands respect.

As long as we accept the rule of the State of Israel, of which the Knesset is representative and which is headed by the prime minister, we have to show respect for the institutions by showing respect to the people who are sitting there.

NBN ceremony - brother rock has arrived

2008-09-09T01:23:00.000-07:00

My little brother made aliyah yesterday with his wife and 2 kids on a Nefesh B'Nefesh flight filled with new olim. The flight arrived at 7:30 AM and they have a ceremony to greet the new olim. We stayed at my older brother's house Sunday night because he lives close to the airport and got to the airport at around 7. Security was tight because the prime minister was speaking. On every seat was a newspaper, either Jerusalem Post or Haaretz (in English). On the front page of both newspapers was a picture of the prime minister, probably so everyone would know who was speaking to them. The headline next to the picture (in the jpost) was "Police recommend indicting PM for bribery and a host of other charges." NBN requested from the guests to treat the PM with the respect due to the office of the PM because they work together and they have been very helpful to NBN. When he spoke he got applause when he spoke of Zionism and moving to Israel etc.. But whenever he tried to insert some politica, he got booed. He mentioned the word Kadima and at least half the room started booing.
The ceremony itself was great. They had lots of food and drink, were friendly and only asked my kids to stop making a lot of noise about 2 dozen times.

The new olim will be starting out in Ariel, a large West Bank settlement. We wish them the best of luck in their new home.

Settler girls

2008-09-07T03:59:00.000-07:00

The new school year has started (in preparation for the new Jewish Year) and with it the bnot sherut (National Service girls) have come in force to our village. Last year the majority of the girls were sefardim, a bunch of them coming from the lower north (Haifa Krayot etc..). This year we have a complete turn around. While we haven't met all of the firls yet, it seems that the girls are predominently ashkenazi. We had 2 of them over for friday night dinner, very friendly girls. The 2 we had over, and at least 3 others, are settlers from Karnei Shomron and the Kochav Yair area. I asked them if they noticed a significant difference between where they are from and the Galil. The surprising answer was -- There are a lot more Arabs in the Galil. I don't know if that is true, but the Galilean arabs are a lot more visible then those over the green line.

Before Oslo, the Arabs over the green line were visible as well. Life was similar to how it is now in the Galilee, Jews and Arabs were on friendly terms they shopped in each others stores and drank thick, bad-tasting coffee together. It was only after we started the peace process that the real hostilities began (Thank you Meretz et al). Now the Arabs and the Jews on that side of the country are openly hostile to one another. Jews entering Kalkilya, once a popular shopping spot for Jewish settlers, are in danger of getting physically attacked and ripped apart, as happened a couple years ago in Jenin. Lets hope we don't try and make peace the the Arabs in the Galilee, that will really open up a can of worms.

There is a big demographic problem in the Galilee. 52% of the population is Arab, including Muslim, Christian and Druze. They are not content to live in their villages and build illegally as they have been doing for years, now they are trying to take over Jewish villages by buying homes and apartments. The real problem is that not enough Jews are moving to the Galilee and that leaves the space wide open for Arabs to buy apartments in Jewish cities. There are a couple programs working on strengthing the Galil and increasing immigration. Lets hope it's not too little too late.

In any case, there is a bet in the community how long it will take the settler girls to bring in a couple caravans, put them on the wadi and call it our outpost.

Pray for the MIL

2008-09-06T22:18:00.001-07:00

My MIL had an operation last week and the initial results seemed positive. Last night my BIL called us at 1:00 AM to let us know that there were complications and she was back in the hospital. She is stable at the moment, but we are still very concerned.

Please say a prayer, tehillim or give some charity for the health and well-being of chana rachel bas tzivia

no biking in the galilee

2008-09-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

Today we took the children bike riding down by the lake. Since we live on a mountain, it is very hard to teach the kids to ride on our street or around the block because they have to start off in 21st gear. So we like to go down to the lake which has a very nice ride around it. I sometimes take my roller blades, because the kids aren't fast enough on their bikes yet to go faster then me, though the older two have overtaken me running.

Anyways, we got down to the lake and the road was blocked because of a bike race. Well that didn't bother us that much, we just parked our car and left it.As we started walking down the rest of the hill to get to the biking route, racing bikes were whizzing by us and people were yelling that we were in the way. When we finally got down there, we realized that most of the lakefront was blocked off for this bike race. We go down there a lot and there were no signs posted in town stating that the lake was closed. We let the kids ride around in the narrow space left for them for about 10 minutes until we just got frustrated and left.

right wing policeman

2008-09-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

This morning I picked up a soldier in the Border Guards who was hitchhiking. Technically he's a police officer, but I think they seem to be more military then law enforcement. He spoke with an Arabic accent, so I assumed he was a druze (I was wrong). We were listening to an interview with Haim Ramon about a government discussion whether to offer settlers compensation now for leaving their homes in Yoosh (Judea and Samaria) before the negotiations over final borders. It is a ridiculous proposal because it is based on the idea that Ramon has already decided pre-negotiation what we are giving up and to make it a fact on the ground so that there is no discussion. Obviously, if the Arabs are not going to have to negotiate for Jews being thrown out of their home, they will have more chips to negotiate with, so whether it is true or not it puts Israel in a much worse position.

In any case, I mentioned to the soldier that these discussions are useless because the gap is too large between the 2 sides. They should just have a vote and see if more people support the stupid idea or not. He pretty much exploded and said that there is no one to talk to and this whole process is ridiculous. He was born in Morocco and his father told him that the only way to deal with Arabs is by strength and force. If you say good morning nicely to an Arab he will assume that you are afraid of him. His suggestion was that for every Israeli killed we should kill 10 or 100. If they shoot 1 rocket at us, we should flatten all the land in the area so that they learn that we are not to be played with. He said that when we left Lebanon, we ran away leaving tanks and equipment (I don't know if he was talking about the first war or the more recent one). He said, can you imagine the most powerful army in the world running away from nothing. (Reminds me of the story of Sancherev when the Assyrians ran away from the loud noises that God sent towards them).
I agreed with him, but mentioned that we were discussing right vs.left and not Israeli vs. Arab. He started ranting again that Israelis are too dumb to know what to do with the enemy. How the left wing tries to be fair in the stupidest cases. He mentioned a story of a terrorist, a father of 8, who bombed the train station in Nahariya. That family is still today collecting National Insurance. He said that was a direct support of terror.

I let him off at Tzomet Yagur and wished him well.

New Format

2008-09-03T22:07:00.000-07:00

We've decided that two years after missiles have stopped falling on the our Galilean village that the war has taken a long-term break. Our format has changed back to pre-war issues and (as you can see) we have given the blog a face-lift.

There are a number of plans for the blog in the coming months, aside from the regular stories, and I welcome comments on the new layout and format.

Check out the selected daily news stories in the What's Happening section on the right side of the page.

bombing Iran

2008-09-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

I generally don't like to write about work, but this is too funny. We got an email with comments about one of our products. At the bottom of the email he wrote: "You guys better not bomb Iran. It will be your undoing. Wake up fellow people. This is the Universe speaking."

We discussed whether the reply should be:
a) We hadn't thought about that, we'll call back the missiles.
b) We'll forward you concerns to CEO Olmert.
c) It's top secret that our products will be used to bomb Iran. Watch out for the Mossad.
d) Too Late.

Rock's View on Politics....uh oh

2008-09-02T07:51:00.000-07:00

I spoke to an Israeli yesterday about the US elections and he told me the Americans are b'tzurot (in trouble). He said that until now there was no question that people would vote for McCain because nobody wanted a black man in office. Now that McCain picked a woman as his VP, there are no more options. He then said, "Do you have any idea what Golda Meir did to this country?"

Sever Plocker, an Israeli left-wing nutcase, writes about why choosing Sarah Palin as a running mate is showing up all of Obama's faults. In other words they can't say anything about her without showing up their own candidate. Well worth the read.

As I've said in the past, I would vote for a black person to be the president before a woman and would have no inherent preference between a black man and a white man (if everything else was even and that was the sole factor) and I would vote for a woman before an Asian. If I wasn't Jewish, there is no way in Hell I would ever vote for a Jew. The reason has little to do with race and a lot to do with practicality. Black people are 100% American, they have no inherent ties to any other country. Even if they are called African American, most of them (as is true with most white Americans) couldn't find Zimbabwe on the map. Women are fickle and emotional. Its how God created them and we love them for it. That's not to say that no woman would be better then any man as the President, but given the choice, again with all else being even, I would go with the male. Sarah Palin against Obama, for example, I would vote Palin because all else is not even close to being even.
Asians have a different mindset then Americans. They come from places where a 500 year plan to reach an objective is not uncommon. To have a 3rd or 4th generation Chinese-American sleeper agent would not surprise me. Maybe I'm a racist, maybe I've read too many books - I don't know. I have nothing against Asians as a whole. They may cheat in the Olympics by putting 13 year old girs in place of 16 year olds, but they do play a mean game of Ping Pong. Jewish people, whether they admit it or not, have a dual identity. Whether they are Jewish first or American first, if part of their Americanism had to cross part of their Jewishness they would have a serious dilemma. Plus they would not be able to handle Tante Zelda biting off their ear that not only did they have to go and marry a shiksa, but they had to bomb Israel. Oy if only Bubbe Hinde could see you now. She's probably rolling over in her grave...

In Israel the Kadima race is heating up. The choice is between the foreign minister, a woman, and a former general. For some reason gender is not mentioned much in Israeli politics. Maybe its because we have already had a woman vice president who shattered the glass ceiling. Maybe its because in Israel the more corrupt a politician is the better the chance he gets elected and corruption doesn't depend on gender.

bbq on the beach

2008-09-01T05:32:00.001-07:00

All 5 of my children are busy during the day now. The youngest one started playgroup today. As could be expected the problems in my oldest's class started on day 1, so we will be meeting with the teacher right away and try to deal with it immediately before it gets out of hand.

Today PM Olmert went to an Arab school to bless the first graders and he was met by protesters. They said that he was being investigated by the police for corruption and didn't want him teaching their children anything. I guess there are some things we can learn from the Arabs.

Tonght we are celebrating the start of school by having a BBQ with friends on the beach.

the tire

2008-08-31T11:54:00.000-07:00

After the starting school ceremony, the girls got together in their classrooms for a meet the teachers. My speech was cut down from what I wrote to a skeleton of it by my friend who told me that a lot of people would be insulted by what I had planned to say because I didn't understand the bad history in the school. Also I had forgotten that this was a welcome for first grade and didn't include anything about the darling new students. I also didn't throw in any sefardic phrases like yehi ratzon... and kapara alecha or chamsaa. So it was rewritten, but the new version didn't have a dvar torah, so he told me that the rav bet sefer was going to talk torah and I didn't need to. The subject of my dvar torah was taken out also so I couldn't use the same thing I had. Which left me with the opportunity to say what was on the top of my head which may have been appropriate for first graders "Look, I have put before you a blessing and a curse" but may not have been taken well, so I left out the Torah.

When we left it was already dark and as we were walking towards the car my wife, GBH, noticed someone changing a tire and suggested I go and help him. So I went over there and asked if he needed help and he said no, but it was a guy I knew and I assumed he really did need help so I sent the wife and kids home without me and stayed to help him change his tire. Something looked weird about the jack, so I asked him if he put it in the right place and he said yes, he knows how to change a tire. At one point the car slipped a little bit and I actually looked at the jack. What I found was that he really didn't know how to jack up a car and he had put the jack on upside down. The bottom of the jack is a flat panel that rests on the ground. The top of the jack is a little square piece with a ridge where the piece of metal sticking down from the car is supposed to fit into. Well he had the bottom braced on the bottom of the car against the door and it was balanced on the little square on top. When the car had shifted it was because he had dented the door of the car. It's a good thing that I went to help him or he might not be with us anymore. God works in wonderful ways.

As I was helping him change the tire, we were talking about his ethiopian project. He is an ethioipian himself (a kolel boy) and is now running a program that is trying to bring their teenagers off the street in Karmiel. They seem to be having a lotof what we would term "at-risk"kids. He needs money for the program and they are opening a non-profit org in the US so they can collect money. If any of my readers is interested in donating to a good cause that helps normalize ethiopian jews and teach them a bit of torah in the process, please let me know in the comment section and I will get you contact information.

I told him to send me the flyers he has in English and I will post them here as well.

new school year

2008-08-31T05:27:00.001-07:00

The new school year starts tomorrow and tonight is the welcoming ceremony for first grade. I'm speaking as a representative from the parent body - in hebrew. I've spoken publicly in Hebrew a number of times. One time at a sheva brachos I said that I didn't know either the kallah or the chosson, and everyone started laughing, I used the word for "biblical knowing." Another time I used the mishnaic word meaning opposite and got yelled at by someone who couldn't understand why I would be against the gan (we live across the street).
This time I sent my speech to a friend of mine to proofread and make sure that when I thank the mayor for his help I don't also call him an ape.

How far to go?

2008-08-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

We're technically already finished with parshas eikev as halfway through the week we switch our mindsets to the next parsha. That makes us solidly sitting in Re'eh territory right now. However, I wanted to share something that I spoke about at seudat shlishit last week in Chevron. You'll have to forgive me for being "so last week."

The activists who were talking to us were describing the obstacles they face while trying to redeem Jewish land. At one point someone told us that they had taken over a block of apartments for a couple weeks when 3000 yasmnikim came in to throw them out.
Yasamnikim are special police who are about as brutal as one can be. When they get taken out for a day of fun, they go to a settler beating instead of tubing on the Jordan river.

Anyways, he said that he and his son barricaded themselves in the apartment and gave them a really hard time before they were dragged out.

As I read through parshas eikev, I felt that the parsha was talking directly to us. It is easily understood in mostly modern hebrew as a musar shmooze from Moshe to us. He writes "Don't think that you are getting this land because you are so good and they are so bad. You are only getting the land because they are so bad. And you are a stiff necked people."
He also uses the famous line. "It was the strength of my army that won the battle." (כחי ועצם ידי עשה את החיל הזה) As it was in Egypt and in all the Jewish battles throughout history it is God who runs the battles and decides who wins and who loses.

Now I am pro fighting for our land. I think that we have to put in the proper effort to get it. I just don't know how far we have to go before it becomes a lack of faith in God to fight our battles. This seems to me to be the question that the Hagana, Irgun and Lehi faced (though they may not have known it).

I think that we have to fight the battle on many fronts, but at some point we have to take a step back and look at the forest. As it says in the parsha, we only deserve the land if we do Torah and mitzvos. If the people do not deserve the land, the actions of a handful of people will not change that fact.

I think that if some of the money that goes towards enhancing settlements went instead towards teaching non-religious people here about the importance of the Land of Israel and in keeping mitzvos then we wouldn't need to spend all that money on enhancing the settlements, it would come by itself.

no camping

2008-08-28T01:55:00.000-07:00

We were planning a final camp-out of the summer tonight, but it is not going to happen. The boys school has their big school initiation tonight, which we go to for some strange reason, and the girls initiation is on Sunday night.
Part of the meeting is an election for the parents board and I would like to remain on the board this year as we push for excellence. I don't have a problem pushing my ideas on the principal in any case, but it seems like I have more of a say when I'm on the board.

Instead, I'm looking at having a bbq on the beach on Monday evening to celebrate the start of school.

chasing out the hareidim

2008-08-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

There was an article in ynet about a hareidi family being chased out of a park in a secular neighborhood in Bet Hakerem in Jerusalem. Rafi G has also blogged about the story.

At first I felt badly for the poor family that just wanted to play in the park and got chased away by "self-hating jews", the classical term for Jews who don't like hareidim. But on second thought, this is what has been coming to the hareidi community for quite some time. We are talking about a community that ostracizes anyone who does not fit their mold. A yeshiva boy who stops wearing a hat or doesn't talk yeshivish, or wears a colored shirt is considered having gone to tarbus ra, bad culture. A non chareidi person, whether secular or dati leumi is considered to be impinging on the sensitivities of the community if they walk in a chareidi neighborhood.

The infamous tznius patrol, which has been arrested recently, has been going around destroying all non-hareidi things, even though the gedolei hador say that it is inappropriate to do that.

Hareidim can walk into any dati leumi shul and be comfortable davening there - that is unless they can't handle the tooma. On the other hand, a friend of mine walked into a toldos aaron in bet shemesh with a kippa sruga and they wouldn't daven until he left. One boy came over to him and said "we don't pray with Zionists."

Now I'm not going to comment on the hareidi family that this happened to, for all I know they are a very welcoming family and full of gemilas chesed. But the community has been asking for this for a long time.

I recently spoke to a friend who is thinking of leaving the yeshiva world and getting a job. I suggested that he check out dati leumi neighborhoods instead of chareidi ones. He was uncomfortable with the idea.

plexiglas experience

2008-08-26T22:52:00.000-07:00

My in-laws were just in from the great white north and my FIL loves helping out around the house. One of the projects that we had was to put a plexiglass wall going up the stairs. We had 2 wooden railings and nothing in between and my wife, God Bless Her, was afraid that the children would fall through. This fear was not without cause as the baby did fall through a hole so small we couldn't imagine that she could fit through it. She fell straight down from one floor to the next (about 15 feet) and apparantly landed on her diaper. It freaked her out ( and my wife as well) but, Thank God, no damage was done.

The first challenge was finding out what plexiglass is in Hebrew. They didn't know what we were talking about at the hardware store. After a number of inquiries, we found out that there is a glass store our industrial zone, so we went there. They make plexiglas, it is called perspex in Hebrew and it costs 300 shekel a square meter for 6 milli width.

We explained what we wanted including the measurements. We needed a parallelogram, the same height and width but at an angle. My FIL even drew a picture showing the angle. They explained to us that it was impossible and our drawing was wrong. It had to have a right angle and one side was shorter then the other and that would be the angled side.

We drank lousy thick coffee while they tried explaining this to us and then my FIL tried explaining why they were wrong and we really needed the parallelogram that he drew.
The manager was a Druze and the worker was Russian, I decided we needed some extra help, so I called a friend who is a native Hebrew speaker to try and explain it to them. After they discussed it for a bit, he asked them why they couldn't do it at an angle. They replied that they didn't have a protractor, so the only angle they could do was 90 degrees. I asked if I brought in a protractor and drew it on the glass would they be able to cut it. They said yes no problem, but it was late Friday, so I should come back Sunday. Sunday we went out for a tiyul and when we got back they said it was too late but that they would do it the next day before noon. I asked if we needed to draw the angle for them, and he said no need. He can do it, no problem.
The next day at noon, it was ready. My FIL picked it up and installed it on the stairs.

The only explanation I can think of is they went out on Sunday and bought themselves a protractor.

programming help

2008-08-26T10:47:00.001-07:00

I am in the middle of writing medical software and I really don't have the time to finish it. I am thinking of calling GlobeTask again to have a virtual programmer write it for me. I don't know if Globetask does programming, they are more of a virtual assistant company, where you call them to do time consuming tasks. The research they did for me on telemedicine devices was spot on and really saved me tons of hours.

The software piece that I need done is a GUI client that is to be written in wxPython. It is the part of the software that will allow the doctor to download the current patients to his laptop so he can work in a disconnected environment. I actually wanted to learn the library, whjich is why I'm writing it using wx, but I am so far behind schedule. Hopefully, GlobeTask or someone like them can pull it together quickly.

Livni, Mofaz, Barak or Netanyahu

2008-08-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

The Kadima elections are coming up and the people of Kadima are going to choose their next leader. One problem that they might find in trying to determine who is the best leader for the party is that the party officially has no ideals. Since there is no one who can convince anyone else that they will best represent the vision of the party, it all comes down to who has the most personal supporters and who can get the least dirt thrown at him.

Livni and Mofaz are both from the Likud, but they seem to have veered leftwards in their struggle to gain or remain in power. We will all remmeber that when Mofaz lost the Likud primaries he said that the Likud was his home and then went and switched parties.

Barak has been playing Kadima politics for the past couple months as he forced Kadima into primaries, is forcing Olmert not to run and is now suggesting the Livni is not qualified to be prime minister. It looks like Barak is really running the show for the no-ideal party.

Obviously this is all in self interest, as Barak wants Kadima to fall apart at its seams and he will become prime minister as Kadima and Labor merge,leaving those right-leaning kadimaists to move back into the Likud. This is the only real chance that Barak has of becoming prime minister, and he is certain that if Mofaz wins the election, the former Laborites will come swimming back to him.

Barak won't be any better of a prime minister then he was the last time. After he lost the premiership, he realized that he was swimming without an inner tube and quit politics for good. He only came back to the party when they realized that none of the other wannabes in the party were worth their weight in straw.

Ditto for Netanyahu. Now Netanyahu talks the talk, but gave 80% of Hebron to the Arabs. He gave them guns and bullets, from which they shoot at Jewish people. He has shown that as prime minister he will not take an ideal stand. That being said he belongs in Kadima, the party without ideals. At the blogger convention he talked tough about Jewish history, but he didn't give the authorization for the Jewish community in Hebron to move into the homes that are Jewishly owned.

All in all, there is a serious lack of quality leadership in the country. This seems to be a problem around the world, as we look at the US elections and see the choices are Obama or McCain. With the democratic runner-up being Hillary Clinton. Those 3 names just shout out, "No leaders. Please barf."

Meanwhile, I am not a member of any political party. Last general elections I voted Chareidi because I couldn't stand the thought of voting for anyone and I figured that each vote they received was like $2.00 to charity. I may not agree with their lifestyle/philosophy, but I do believe in giving charity and their organizations are worthy.

To whine or to act

2008-08-25T05:01:00.001-07:00

I mentioned last week, we just got a new principal for the girls school. I'm on the PTA board and we had a meeting with her last night for 3 hours. One of the problems we are facing is that the Education department does not want to approve 2 of the younger teachers for positions this school year, even though they had already been assigned classes to teach. We have a bunch of old teachers who are not able to teach anymore, because they're all burnt out and are bad for the students. For some reason, they can't fire them either. So the solution has been to give them minimal hours and bring in new teachers to teach the classes until the old goats either retire or die.

The principal requested that the PTA board write a letter to the education dept. explaining that we won't accept a school year without those new teachers. Our big threat is that we're going to strike the school year. None of the parents want to do it, but we don't feel we have much of a choice.

I recommended raising money for new playground equipment (again) and suggested that we have 2 options, either to continue to cry that the city won't give us what we deserve or to take pride in our school and raise the money ourselves. The opposing board member said that she isn't a fryer (Hebrew for sucker) and she is not contributing anything to buy equipment that the city is required to buy for us.

The most surprising thing was when I suggested we bring in Bat-El Gaterer, the religious olympian, to speak to the girls, none of the other board members or the principal had heard of her.

Is there no pride in our community?

Shabbos in Chevron (Hebron)

2008-08-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

There are a number of places that elicit emotion in Jewish people just by hearing their names. This past shabbos we had the pleasure and great opportunity to visit one of them.

Chevron, or Hebron, the land of our forefathers.

Chevron symbolizes the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. It is the place of our roots, from where Judaism sprouted. This is the place that Avraham Avinu, father Abraham, settled in. The location of the cave of the patriarchs, which Avraham bought for 400 pieces of silver. Chevron was the capital of the King David's kingdom until he moved it to Jerusalem, 7 years after he began his rule.

While we didn't know it when we decided to go, this week was the anniversary of the 1929 Chevron massacre, when centuries of Jewish presence in Chevron was ended. This was indeed a symbolic shabbos to go and experience the renewed Jewish presence that has been facing an enormous uphill battle since we recaptured the city in 1967. We got to see first-hand the struggles that the Jewish residents have to go through on a daily basis.

We left our Galilean village Friday morning at 9:00 AM to head down to jlem where we were meeting the group. Most of the group came from Kochav Yaakov, a settlement between Jlem and Ramallah. We had actually considered moving there when we made aliyah 5 years ago, but for a number of reasons chose our Galilean mountainside instead. We got lost in jlem and showed up 15 minutes late to the spot we were supposed to meet the bus. Fortunately for us (unfortunately for them), their was a problem on the highway and the bus was delayed for about an hour, so we waited for them for 45 minutes. The group was very friendly and we warmed to them immediately. I think all of the other families were at least partly Torontonian (coincidentally), so it gave my in-laws a lantsman connection right away.

Bethlehem
The first place we headed to was Kever Rachel, where mother Rachel was buried on the side of the road so that her children could stop by and pray while they were on the road. It used to be a quaint little building at the side of the road where you could pull off, pray and continue on your way. Since the peace process there has been no access for Jews to Bethlehem (because of the peace) and Kever Rachel has become a huge military compound completely surrounded by 30 foot walls. I said a couple chapters of Tehillim and went to deal with the children so my wife could have some quality prayer time. One of the ladies on the group brought a huge length of red string with her. There is a tradition that if you wrap a red string around the kever marker 7 times and then cut it up into little pieces and tie it around people's hands then good things will happen. A lot of people feel that the red strings that are handed out at other locations never actually got the kever rachel treatment and is therefore invalid. This is A1 kosher red string that got the full 7 times around and therefore can be worn by people who are into that sort of thing.

The bus was not ready when we left the building and the soldiers told us to wait in the building. We were a bit concerned at first that the bus got kidnapped, but eventually it returned.

Chevron
The next stop was at the guest house in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood in Chevron (Hebron). We got our rooms and the kids played barefoot outside. The park next to the guest house was under renovations, so they made do with running around senselessy like kids do. The park that was being renovated was the place where a baby, Shalhevet Pas, was killed by an arab sniper a couple years ago. The rooms were decent, we had 2 bunkbeds and a cot for the kids, the air-conditioning worked well and the bathroom was ok.
I watched the kids play outside while my wife got them ready for shabbos one at a time. It was nice to see that the kids all made friends with the other kids on the trip right away. They were all English/Hebrew speakers and the kids spoke a mixed language amongst themselves.

We went to the Maarat Hamachpela for maariv, the evening prayer. It was done in a Carlebach style, led by Simcha Hochbaum, a local activist.

The Maarat Hamachpela, known as the maara, is not much of a cave. It is a huge building designed like a fortress. I believe it was built in the 1400s by the Turks, but I don't have Internet access at the moment to verify that. There are 3 rooms inside, though it looks much bigger then that. The Abraham room is the smallest and it could hold approximately 30 people. The Yaakov (Jacob) room is where we davened and it could easily hold a couple hundred. The largest room is the Yitzchak room, but at the moment it is only accessible to Muslims who believe that it is the Ishmael room. I don't know if they really believe that or if they just say that to bother the Jews. The Yaakov room is actually outide in the courtyard with a tarp covering. There are tombs with names of the partiarchs

Outside the building, the courtyard was filled with women and children, everyone easily relied on the soldiers standing guard for protection. Our kids were a bit nervous because we had told them that they had to stay near us at all times because it was dangerous if they went to the wrong area. We saw the local kids walking throughout the neighborhood by themselves and that relaxed us a bit. Dinner was excellent, Morrocan food, and we had a chance to relax and meet the other families in the group.

In the morning, I overslept a bit and went to the 9AM tefilla at the maara. This was a mistake, t was the fastest davening I've ever been to. Normally this is not a problem, but they started from áøåê ùàîø and davened sefard (in other words they skipped the entire thing). Davening finished within an hour. When we asked one of the policemen at the gate, where the 9:00 was, he pointed and and said in hebrew, it's full gas. No kidding.

Lunch was good. They put eggs in the chulent, but that's what I would expect from Moroccans. Before dessert we had our first propoganda speech by David Wilder who told us about the community, what they were doing and what the challenges were in trying to convince the government to let them live in homes that belong to Jewish people. In 1929, after the massacre the surviving Jews were expelled from Chevron. But they still kept the deeds to their property. This property is mostly now controlled by the Arabs and even the properties that are controlled by the Jews, the government won't let them enter. It is a fight for every inch of land and for every new family to move in. The expulsion from Gush Katif showed them how successful they can be and they are bringing all their weight and money down against little Chevron.

After lunch we had rest and relaxation time until 4:30, when we went on our tour of the community with Simcha Hochbaum as our guide. We went to first see the graves of Yishai and Ruth. We couldn't see the former Slabodka yeshiva because that is in the 80% of Hebron that Netanyahu gave away to the arabs when he was the prime minister (And tafka pp doesn't like him...)
We saw some excavations of what might have been the gate of the city where Avraham bought the cave from Efron the Hittite. We saw the hospital where the women and children hid during the 1929 massacre and the arabs came and may they all be cursed for eternity for what they did there. A group of women and children took it over in 1979 and it is now a permanent residence. We saw and davened in the Avraham Avinu shul.

It was a great experience for the entire family, and I'm really happy we went. We arrived home at about 1:30 AM, exhausted.

Bronze Medal

2008-08-21T05:23:00.000-07:00

Israel captured its first Olympic medal yesterday as Shachar Zubari from Eilat took the bronze in Wind-Surfing.

In today's Taekwondo match, Batel Gaterer Israel's religious taekwondoist lost 4-3 to the Czech girl, Martina Zubcic.
Martina then went on to defeat the Brazilian kicker, Debora Nunes, 3-2.
She finally lost to Turkey in the semi-finals.
Turkey lost to the Korean who took the Gold Medal. I guess it would be a national disappointment if Korea didn't win the gold medal in their own national sport.

Losing in the first round of the olympics is still a huge accomplishment. We are proud of Bat-El for representing Israel and not compromising on her religious standards. I think she can serve as a role model to all religous Jews that it is possible to keep our religious values and still strive to be the best.

Linked In networking group

2008-08-21T04:10:00.000-07:00

A couple months ago I started a Linked In group called Israeli Anglo Network. The purpose of the group is to help English speaking olim build proteczia in a country where jobs more often go to the buddy of someone then the person most qualified.
http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/42658

This is not a mailing list or a discussion forum, it is just a group where other Linked In people who are in the group can find you. It is not the most convenient interface and they have screwed up a number of features as they are "improving" it.

At the moment, I have more then 220 members. Everyone in the group either lives in Israel or lied and said they did. I wanted to keep the group from being watered down, so I didn't let in anyone who wanted to be linked with everyone in the world (yes there are a lot of those people) or people who support Israel, or people who think that being in Linked In groups is the only way to be cool. If 10% of the group was not relevant to the group's purpose (which is to help ourselves) then it would lose a lot more then 10% of its value.

If you live and/or work in Israel, speak English and would like to be part of giving/getting proteczia even though you weren't in Unit 51 or a cherry, please join the group: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/42658

blogger conference

2008-08-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

I must be the last person at the conference to blog about it. I actually considered live blogging it, but I didn't want to even think about holding my laptop in one hand and a plate of deli in the other, while balancing a drink somewhere in the middle. So the laptop remained in the car.
It's about a 3 hour drive from the heartland to our Galilean village, so after visiting with my sister and brother-in-law for 10 minutes, I hit the road. It only took me 2 hours to get home and as I told my wife, "maybe I drove a little bit faster then a could've"

It was a great conference, but somehow I think the organizers missed the boat (or at least part of it). For me, and for a number of the bloggers who I spoke to, the main reason they came was to hear people like Zavi Apfelbaum, the Director of Brand Management at the Foreign Ministry. How can our blogs help the state of Israel. The problem is that she ran out of time in the middle of her presentation and skipped through a number of the relevant points. When they called her on time, there were protests from the entire crowd. Her Q & A session was disrupted by a wack job yelling about Israel's Jewishness. Now I am pro-Jewishness in Israel. It is a main part of the content that I write here, but there is a civilized way of discussing it and a non-civilized way. Screaming "What about the Jewishness" a dozen times until they end the session is not the way, especially when she never came out against Jewishness. She just came out for a multi-faceted approach to how we would like Joe Goy to think about Israel.

I pretty much skipped the last group of panelists and went and spoke to Zavi. I explained to her what bloggers would like to do to help her and a little bit of the power of getting the message out if she had 1000 bloggers including some topics that she sends out in their normal blogs. For example, if I get a message that says: There are dinosaurs from Argentina in the MadaTech science museum in Haifa. I would be happy to write about that, I might even include differing viewpoints on creationism vs evolution and how old the world really is.

Another high point of the convention was the surprise speaker, blogger Benyamin Netanyahu. It is not updated all that often, but he explained that as an aversion to ghost writers and the lack of time to actually write himself. These are sentiments that I fully understand. Netanyahu spoke very well and answered questions, most of them political in nature. What he failed to do, was address how bloggers could unite to get a message across. I wasn't called on to ask a question and when I finally decided to ask without being called on they were just ending the session.

The first group of panelists were interesting, discussing what the purpose of their blogs was and how they became big traffic players. All of them without intent. In other words, write passionately, engage the community and quite naturally traffic that is interested in your topic will come to your site.

I saw a number of bloggers who I recognized from the online world including: Rafi G, Jameel at the Muqata, Joe Settler, Batya from Shiloh Musings. I was sitting in the same row as Lurker, the guy who doesn't have a blog but comments, and RivkA from Coffee and Chemo. I had a great discussion with Ted from IsraPundit about politics and life in general.

To sum up, it was a great convention and I would go again next year.

going to Chevron

2008-08-20T04:36:00.001-07:00

Last night we dined out at Arnolds in Netiv Hashayara. nice food and atmosphere, but they told us we had to eat outside if we wanted to come because there was a party there. It was a bit humid, but not uncomfortable. The food was good but not as good as Morganfeld's in Moshav Liman. It's hard to compare because at Morganfeld's we generally get the sirloin steak and here the only glatt meat they had was the Entrecote. It probably changes depending on the week, you just have to ask each time.

In another hour or so, I will begin the trek down to jlem for the big JBloggers conference. A number of my anonymous blogging colleagues will be there, but I will not be reporting on the unmasking.

This coming shabbos it looks like we will be heading down to Chevron, the city of the avos. Very exciting. I haven't been down there in forever.

klezmer festival - done

2008-08-18T21:53:00.000-07:00

The KlezmerFest was a lot of fun. For those who didn't make it the first night, there are 2 more nights for you to get on over there. As planned, we saw Simply Tzfat, which is mostly Breslovers, and 1 chabadnik. (I think the chabadnik was playing drums so he wouldn't actually be seen on stage. The mad fiddler was excellent.

The free concert cost us about 150 shekels. 70 shek for parking. (They changed it so you don't pay for parking with a free shuttle, you get free parking and pay 10 shek a person for the shuttle.) They charged us for our 1 year old, which made me a bit angry but I paid without a fight because there was no point in fighting, they determined the price and if we want to use the service we have to pay it. I did mention that was unreasonable and he shrugged his shoulders. 54 shek for pizza. 20 shek for popcorn, 37 shek for drinks. Not bad for an evening out with all the kids.

We walked through the carnival atmosphere for a bit. It was a nice mix of religious/non religious people. We heard a couple of other groups performing, but don't know who they were. We got back home at 11. An enjoyable evening out.

Tel Dan burnt down

2008-08-18T06:02:00.001-07:00

This past Shabbos was very nice. My in-laws are in from anada and my bro-in-law came up with his wife and 2 kids. Everyone got along very nicely.

Sunday I took off for the day and we all went to Tel Dan, which is on the border of the upper galilee and the Golan Heights. It is a beautiful nature reserve and had a nice wooden path that is available for strollers, wheel chairs and people who have trouble walking. Unfortunately, there was a forest fire in Tel Dan a month ago and it destroyed, among other things the wooden path. They hastily formed a new trail that allows visitors to see most of the attractions in the nature reserve. It was nice, but not exactly what we expected. I explained to my children in my best Smokey the Bear voice that "Only you can prevent forest fires."

We hit Pizza Meter in Kiryat Shmona for a late lunch - delicious pizza. A half meter is about the size of a normal pizza, for 44 shek and it comes with a bottle of pop.

Tonight we are heading to the mystical city of Tzfat to hear the klezmerim play their music. You can see more information about the klezmerfest on their website.

Klezmer Festival

2008-08-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

Next week - Mon, Tues and Wed (Aug 18-20) is the big annual Tzfat klezmer festival. I highly recommend it. We have gone and had a great time the past 3 years. (Except for one of the girls who thinks she remembers it and thinks it was boring). 4 years ago (or was it 5) we were supposed to go with the neighbors, but after driving for about 10 minutes they got a call from their mom that the baby just wouldn't calm down, so we returned home.
The Rock of Galilee will be going on Monday evening. We are planning on starting off the evening at the Municipal Stage to listen to Simply Tzfat for an hour. We might stay in the same place to listen to Maksim Klezmer afterwards, but we have not made a final decision on that yet.

The official klemer fest website is http://www.klezmerf.com

On Wednesday evening is the big international JBlogger convention in jlem, and I am planning on attending.

an evening in the forest

2008-08-13T21:30:00.001-07:00

Only in Israel will the driver of an 18 wheeler decide that traffic is going to slow for him and pull onto the should top pass a couple cars and then cut back in. This is an example of what I put up with on the daily commute.

We had a fun company event yesterday. They set up in the Carmel forest with an open bar for the adults and bouncy things, a climbing wall and arts and craft activities for the children. There was also a pool table, air hockey, foosball and board games such as checker, chess, backgammon and cards.
I started out letting the kids jump around on the bouncy things, then I hit the bar. A long island for myself and a Tom Collins for my wife. The bartender replies that he doesn't have any ice tea and he doesn't know what a Tom Collins is. So I tell him how to make a Tom Collins and then how to make a long island. He asked if I wanted to take over.

Dinner was delicious, even though we had specially packaged "Super Kosher" food, so we didn't have to eat the regular kosher food that the non-shomer kashrus people were eating.
Towards the end of the evening, a co-worker (non-religious sefardi) told me that I should have gotten a minyan together for mincha so that he could say kaddish. I told him that I daven by myself at these types of events as there is no one else who is generally interested in davening. Also I didn't know he had to say kaddish.
I told him no problem, we'll gather 10 people, I'll say a mishna and then you can say kaddish. So he went back to his car and got his kippa and we gathered 10 men. I said a mishna from Avos, then some rav chananya ben akashya and he said kaddish. Excpet he didn't know kaddish very well so I had to help him. I told him he couldn't say kaddish dirabbonim because I didn't know that one by heart. It was still funny because I had to help him out with the extra sefardical words that he says. It's a good thing that I have experience davening with sefardim or I wouldn't have even known that they have extra words.

Next month - Dead Sea for shabbos.

we saw an owl

2008-08-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

This evening I took my girls out for a roller-blade. Well they roller bladed and I walked. They still aren't up to the level where it is worth it to put on my roller blades.
As we were walking we saw 2 very cool things.
The first was a helicopter that was standing in mid-air in the middle of the wadi. It was very dark and we could only see its lights. Suddenly it turned off its lights and we heard it moving, but we couldn't see it at all. I wonder if it saw something, or what it was looking for. A bit scary, I suppose. Generally when we see or hear things like that, we don't read about it in the morning, but I always wonder what is really going on.

Far cooler then that, we saw a bird with an incredible wingspan flying out from the wadi. I said it was a bird, but my daughter looked closer and yelled that it was an owl. I looked again and saw that she was right. It was an owl and it was just flying around in circles, higher and higher. I think that was the first time I've seen an owl flying free in its natural habitat.

hiring a principal

2008-08-11T02:32:00.000-07:00

Well Tisha B'Av is over and I'm eating a late lunch with another religious person at 12:45 so we can eat meat. Tomorrow is shwarma day, so we're not going to go there, probably just to the local cafeteria and get a chicken leg or something.

Our girls school principal decided to retire. He had a heart attack during the year last year (A couple days after I had a disagreement with him, though I don't blame myself for the heart attack). But he gave notice very late, so they don't have time to go through the normal hiring procedure, so they are doing a shortened, less open, procedure.

I am on the board of parents of the school and I tried to find out how we could be involved in the hiring process, so we don't end up with a monster. I was told that the best we could do is give a recommendation for a specific candidate. There are 3 candidates from our community who are vying for the position.

If anyone is qualified to be a religious girls elementary school principal and wants to move up north, now is the time.

The current candidates are:
* the former assistant principal who left the school last year to become principal somewhere else.
* The assistant principal at the boys school
* The teacher who was already appointed to be assistant principal this coming year.

They all seem to be qualified for the position, though we aren't doing any interviewing of the candidates, so I don't really know that. One of the members on the board wanted us to send a letter recommending the former assistant principal for the job. Apparantly, a number of people have called up the supervisor and said some nasty things about her.

The board member who wanted to send a letter is also the best friend of the former assistant principal. She was not interested in sending similar letters in support of the other candidates who are community members.

My first thought was that it would be ok to say that we do not agree with nasty rumors and that in our opinion she was a viable candidate, but no more support then that.

After thinking about it for a while, I changed my mind and said that if people are complaining about her, I am not giving any recommendation unless I know what people are saying and to check if there is a problem. As a representative of the parent body, I can't just ignore the fact that people are unhappy with her candidacy.

Most of the board agreed with my assessment and we decided that if the supervisor is not going to include us in the hiring process then we will not, as a body, do any recommending.

God help us.

tisha b'av

2008-08-10T03:50:00.000-07:00

I got off the floor about an hour ago, a little bit after chatzos. While the fire is still burning in the bais hamikdash, we only have a small, symbolic amount of mourning to do. The beard that I have been growing for 3 weeks, the not going to public events, no live music, the refraining from water activities, the vegetarianism etc.. all say that I am symbolically part of the mourning. It would be impossible to truly mourn, for if we knew what we were missing, we would never get off the ground. As it is written, "those who mourn Jerusalem and the temple will take place in its rebuilding.

My shul says 14 kinos on Tisha B'av morning, ending with the traditional Eli Zion. We started davening at 7:30 and finished at around 9:30 I thought that it was a good amount of time. In our shul, a different person reads each kinah out loud and then the congregation says out loud the congregational point, so during one kinah everyone is saying Oyah together. I read one kinah, stating that God is great and we should be embarrassed as it went through some of history saying nice things that God did for us and how we screwed it up. I thought that it was a decent amount of time for kinos. In Detroit, where they said all of them, someone generally brought a backgammon set and when we got bored of kinos we would play

I took my little girl for a walk today because she needed to get out. It was so refreshing breathing the fresh air and looking around at the Galilean hills. May we merit the bais hamikdash to be speedily rebuild, in our days.

friday hike

2008-08-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

Today were planning on going to Tel Dan with the family for a nice little non-intensive nature walk. 2 kids refused to go and then the family we were planning on going with decided not to go, so I ended up sitting on the couch working most of the afternoon. This was good because I have a lot of work to do to finish the application I'm writing. But OTOH I really wanted to go out. After working all week, I like to enjoy Friday and get ready for shabbos by seeing the rivers and streams in our nature reserves and say מה רבו מעשיך ה.

Have a good shabbos