The Maggid of Bergenfield

Shlach: The Tzitzit Shuffle

 Bamidbar: 15: 37-41

 

 It was a typical Tuesday morning davening at the eight o’clock shacharit minyan. The shaliach tzibur for psukei dezimra, the introductory songs of praise from tehillim, had led the service at a brisk pace, and they were chugging towards shemoneh esrei, the culmination of the morning service, at full steam. It was the usual daily crew at the minyan--around twenty men in the small beit midrash—and since no one had opened the window, it felt a bit humid in the room, one might even say a little pungent. The service had its usual vibe, what one of the congregants might characterize as haimish.

 They had just covered their eyes to recite the first verse of Shma and were proceeding through the three paragraphs of the prayer. All of the congregants were immersed in their own recitations. Well, somewhat immersed.

 M.K. looked over at his friend L.B. as he said the Shma. He wore a multicolored talit with many stripes and colors. What was it, purple, gold, and orange? Where did he get the minhag to wear such an outlandish talit? His family was German originally. Surely no one in the old country would don a prayer shawl like that. Didn’t he know it should have black stripes, as is traditional? O.K., so some wore blue stripes and some wore black. Still, there’s no reason to go all hippie-dippy . Who knows what motivates people to do what they do?

 L.B. looked over at R.S. who was davening in the row in front of him. His talit was the traditional white with black stripes, but one of his fringes was deep blue, dyed with techelet from a snail from Greece called the Murex trunculus in an attempt to revive the use of techelet as is specified in the paragraph on tzitzit in the Torah (hakanaf petil techelet, the corner is a deep blue string). L.B. shook his head in derision. Some people just have to do things their own way. He wouldn’t do that unless the rabbi certified the practice and everyone did it.

 R.S. looked up from his siddur for just a moment but caught sight of  P.L. clutching his tzitzit against his heart as he said the shma. He looked back down at his siddur but sighed under his breath for just a moment. So ostentatious. Prayer was a personal thing. No one had to see you express your emotions publically. Still, to each his own.

 P.L. did not look up from his siddur as he davened, but he couldn’t help hearing  J.M. strongly emphasize the pronunciation of the letter “z” in the word tizkeru as he read the paragraph on tzitzit. He knew it was a minhag based on being careful not to say tiskeru, which would mean to profit, and instead to say tizkeru, which would mean to remember. Still, he could say it more quietly. There’s no need to disrupt everyone else’s concentration.

 J.M. had let his mind drift during the recitation of the Shma, and before he looked back down at his prayer book he saw D.F. hold his tzitzit fringes out before his eyes while he said the words  ure-item otam, and you shall see them. He had never noticed him doing that before. What a funky, outside the box minhag. Still, he wouldn’t start doing it. It wasn’t in his family tradition.

 D.F. looked over at S.C. as he davened. When did he start putting his talit over his head when he said Shma? He certainly had changed a lot since they went to high school together. Back then he barely davened, now he was Mr. Pious. But still, it certainly was a good thing, as long as he wasn’t doing it for show.

 S.C. turned and looked at the back of the beit midrash and saw H.G. seated in the last row. Late again. Didn’t he understand that he needed to be present for the whole service? Just get up earlier. Didn’t he understand that zrizut makdimin lemitzvot, that you need to perform a mitzvah eagerly, and at the earliest possible time? He looked back at his siddur and continued to recite the Shma.

 H.G. sat in the last row of the shul and davened quietly to himself. He had arrived late, thanks to a crying baby and a delayed school bus, but he caught up to the group by the time they started the blessings leading to the Shma. He watched the room of daveners as they proceeded through their daily prayers, as this group did every morning. What a wonderful tapestry of minhagim. Different color talitot with different ataras (neck bands), some plain and some fancy. Some of the group shuckled fervently as they davened, others sat perfectly still. Some kissed their tzitzit like they were lovers while others didn’t gather them in their hands at all. H.G. had no family traditions, as his parents weren’t religious, but sitting in the back of the synagogue watching the members of the congregation each practice his own traditions was like being in a Jewish United Nations.

 He thought of the words of the third paragraph of the Shma which teaches the mitzvah of tzitzit. What was the key phrase? Lema-an tizkeru ve-asitem et kol mitzvotai, veheyitem kedoshim le-elokeichem. So that you will remember and you will do all my commandments, and you will be holy to your G-d. Clearly this group was fulfilling this commandment beautifully. And to him, reaching for holiness was what davening was all about.

 H.G. felt very inspired. As he looked around the sanctuary, he was confident that everyone else in the room was feeling the same vibe.

Naso: A Hair Raising Tale

 

 Bamidbar: 6:18

 

 Rabbi Zevulun Haimovitz did not have beautiful hair--not that his hair was particularly important to him. It had been rather curly when he was a little boy, and then it got frizzy and unmanageable when he was an adolescent. When it started to go gray in his forties, the gray hairs were straight while the others still curled over, and he took on the appearance of a porcupine if he didn’t keep it very short. Now that he was in his fifties, Rabbi Haimovitz was happy if it stayed attached to his scalp, but other than that he really didn’t pay his hair much heed at all.

 He had been going to the same barber for over thirty years. His real name was Rubin Rachevsky, but everyone called him Rusty. When Rabbi Haimovitz first walked through the door of Rusty’s Scissors: Fine Cuts for Men, in Fairlawn, Rusty had been a young man, fresh out of the American Barber Institute. Rusty had had a magnificent head of hair which he kept in a pompadour a la Elvis Presley, but nowadays Rusty didn’t have much cover remaining, and he kept a small ponytail pulled back with whatever he had left.

 The rabbi’s haircut experience had been going pretty much as usual that beautiful day in May. Rabbi Haimovitz walked in past the barber poll at the entrance and inhaled the Barbasol fumes with relish. Rusty shot the rabbi a greeting as he continued to trim someone’s sideburns. The rabbi responded cordially as he parked himself in a chair and picked up an old issue of Sports Illustrated, back from when it was still football season.  He waited his turn patiently as Rusty gabbed with his present customer and the local classic rock station blared in the background, some Rolling Stones song the rabbi vaguely recalled from his childhood about “satisfaction.”

 When it was the rabbi’s turn, he parked himself in the barber chair and leaned back comfortably.

 “The usual, Rabbi H.?”

 “Sure thing, Rusty.”

 They spoke about their kids. Rusty had three sons, one in the Israeli Army. Rabbi Haimoviz had three sons himself--one at Yeshivat Shaalvim in Israel and two at YeshivaUniversity in WashingtonHeights--and a daughter in high school. They discussed the Devils and the Nets (true, they had moved to Brooklyn, but they still considered them the hometown team). They debated the Yankees and the Mets. The usual stuff.

 When all the trimming was done, Rabbi Haimovitz paid for the haircut and started walking for the door. Just before he was to leave, the radio began to play “Brown Eyed Girl,” an old Van Morrison song he remembered fondly from his own high school days. He paused in the doorway to listen to the song in its entirety before heading back to his car. It was then that he noticed something strange.

 Normally, Rusty would sweep all the cut hair off the linoleum floor into a dustpan and into the garbage. Rabbi Haimovitz had seen him do it a thousand times. But as the rabbi stood watching him in the mirror, he saw Rusty sweep up his hair from the trim and placed it into a zip lock bag.

 “Rusty, what are you doing?”

 “Oh, Rabbi, I didn’t know you were still here.”

 “I am very much still here. Now what on earth are you doing with my hair?”

 “Well, it’s kind of a long story.”

 There were no other customers in the barber shop at that moment, as it was close to closing time. Rabbi Haimovitz sat himself back down into one of the chairs for waiting patrons.

 “I’m all ears.”

 Rusty’s forehead, which stretched all the way back to his ponytail in a long patch of follicly challenged scalp turned a bright shade of red.

 “It’s not what do you think.”

 “What do you think I think?”

 “I don’t know.”

 “Then how do you know it’s not what I think?”

 “I guess I don’t.”

 It was relatively quiet in the barber shop for a few moments, as the Beatles played “Love Me Do” on the radio.

 “Come on, Rusty, spill it.”

 “O.K., so it’s like this, Rabbi. You’re the most saintly person I know, or certainly the most saintly guy who ever comes into my shop.”

 “Rusty, don’t be ridicul—“

 “Now, Rabbi H., just spare me the modesty for a minute, O.K.? Everyone knows you’re a big tzaddik. Your being modest about it just proves my point.”

 “There’s a lot about you don’t know, my friend. One man’s tzaddik may be someone else’s rasha gamur.”

 “Rabbi, I have no idea what that means, but just go with me for a minute, O.K?”

 Rabbi Haimovitz shrugged and sat back in his chair.

 “My luck isn’t always so good, Rabbi. It never has been. If I buy a lottery ticket I don’t match one number. If I bet on a horse, it ends up going to the glue factory. If I buy a car it ends up being a major lemon. So I figured that I wanted to even the odds with G-d. I wanted to find a way to piggyback my way onto your righteousness.”

 “And how did you plan to do that?”

 “I was going to collect enough of your hair to make something with it.”

 “Oy gevalt. I know I’m going to regret asking this, but like what?”

 “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a pillow or a quilt. Who knows, maybe a nice toupee.”

 “Ribono Shel Olam!” the rabbi gasped. “And why in heaven did you think any righteousness could be derived from my hair?”

 “I saw it in last week’s parsha, Naso, in the story of the nazirite. When the nazir gets his hair cut off at the end of his vow, the kohen takes his hair and burns it on the altar with the shlamim sacrifice. Now that must be some pretty holy hair! Think how holy it must be to be burned on the mizbeach.”

 Rabbi Haimovitz smiled.

 “First of all, Rusty, I’m extremely impressed with your thoroughness in reading the parsha. I agree that is definitely an interesting detail about nazirut. But I would respectfully like to offer you a different conclusion. The kohen burns the hair as a sign of humility. It is to suggest that the hair is worthless. The nazir may have grown his hair long in an attempt to attain holiness, but once the hair is shorn off it has no value at all and is fully destroyed. It is like the dust of the earth.”

 “I see,” Rusty said, a bit discouraged.

 “However,” the rabbi said, “I would say that you are on the right track. I actually know somewhere where you can find holy hair.”

 “Seriously?”

 “Yes. Are you up for a road trip?”

 “Is it far?”

 “You won’t even need a car.”

 “Lead the way, Rabbi.”

 The two exited Rusty’s shop, and he locked the door behind them.

 Four stores down in the strip mall on Morlot Avenue was The Hair Lair.

 The rabbi opened the door to The Hair Lair to let Rusty in.

 “So you’re saying that the hair I cut isn’t holy, but the hair Marla cuts down the block is?”

 Rabbi Haimovitz patted Rusty on the pate of his bald head and smiled sympathetically.

 “Patience.”

 A young lady sat in the stylist’s chair wrapped in a smock with a braid of straight brown hair down to her waist. Marla Davidowitz held a pair of scissors and was about to cut off the braid.

 “Good. I’m just in time,” Rabbi Haimovitz said.

 Marla looked up at the two men who had just entered her store. “Hi Rabbi H. Hey Rusty.”

 The girl in the chair looked up as well. “Hi, Abba.”

 “Hi, Honey. I want to introduce you to someone. Rusty, this is my daughter Bracha.”

 “Of course you are. You look exactly like your dad.”

 “Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say,” Rabbi Haimovitz said with a sly smile. “Brachale, tell Rusty what you’re doing.”

 “I’ve been growing my hair out for over a year, and now I’m donating it to Locks of Love, an organization that makes wigs for people with cancer.”

 “That’s quite admirable,” Rusty said. “One might even say it was holy.”

 Bracha smiled shyly, looking even more like her father than she did before. “I don’t know if I would go that far.”

 “Works for me,” Rabbi Haimovitz said.

 “So what should I do with all your hair?” Rusty asked the rabbi.

 “Unless you’re planning to use it to clone a new, improved rabbi, I would definitely throw it away.”

 “I guess that’s the way to go,” Rusty agreed. “Still, I never considered the cloning thing before.”

 “Just toss it.”

 “Message received.”

 

 

 Special thanks to Dr. Daniel Cukor for his help in clarifying this particular point about nazirut.

Shavuot: A Holy Mountain of Cheesecake

 

 Was it a compulsion? An obsession? A brief trip far from reality? It made no difference. He was going to do it, no matter what.

 When Hank Lakish got to the synagogue kitchen a short while before the yom tov of Shavuot began, there were fourteen identical cheese cakes sitting in the refrigerator, pushing all the half-full soda bottles, vats of herring, and tins of potato kugel to the periphery. It was quite a sight. They had been purchased for the tikkun leil Shavuot, the night of continuous Torah learning that began at midnight and went until the early morning minyan at 4:45 in the morning. There would be classes given by the Rabbi and by congregants in the main sanctuary. There would be individual study going on all over the social hall. But just as important to many of the attendees—some might even argue more important—there would be nosh. Cookies, rugelach, and sponge cake. Soda, orange juice, and coffee, lots of coffee. But most of all there would be cheese cake.

 Rabbi Goldblatt had once told Hank that one of the miracles associated with shabbat at Congregation Sons of Israel was that no matter how much food you put out for the congregants, it would always disappear. Fourteen cheesecakes certainly seemed like an inordinately large amount for the modest group that usually assembled for the nocturnal Shavuot learning session, but every year it went, so why mess with success?

 Hank took the fourteen cheesecakes out of the refrigerator and laid them out on a rectangular table in the Sadie Markowitz Memorial All Purpose Room (truth be told, the kitchen was the Haimie Malinowitz Food Preparation Area). He grabbed one of the small round tables from the corner, covered it with aluminum foil, and went to work.

 What did Mount Sinai actually look like when the Israelites received the Torah? No one is certain where it is in the Sinai Peninsula, though Bedouin tradition designated Gabal Musa, literally Mount Sinai in Arabic.  At 7,497 feet high, it is not the highest mountain in the region. MountCatherine next door is 8,625 feet high, but then Sinai’s fame did not stem from its height. Its holiness towers over all other mountains in the area, perhaps in the world.

 The first three cheese cakes Hank placed on the table would serve as the base of the mountain. He took a cake server, fused the cakes together and smoothed the edges. He made a ridge, which would represent the boundary where the Israelites were not allowed to cross while God was on the mountain. He grabbed a few fancy cookies with colored sprinkles to serve as boulders. The cakes had almost no crust and had a nice thick consistency, so it would be easy to mold.

 Why was Shavuot associated with dairy? In school Hank had learned that it was because as the Israelites received the Torah on Mount Sinai they realized that they did not know how to slaughter meat correctly, so they opted for dairy because it did not require advanced preparation. That did not appeal to him intellectually.

 The next five cakes were used to give Mount Sinai some height. It may not have been the mountain in the desert with the greatest elevation, but Hank was confident it was still imposing, especially with thunder, lightning, smoke, and a strong, extended shofar blast echoing through the Israelite camp. Hank found some fresh parsley and relish in the fridge that was probably used to decorate fish platters and used it for vegetation on some of the mountain ledges he molded. He wanted authenticity in his Mount Sinai.

 Some compare the Torah to milk and honey, as in an interpretation of the pasuk from Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs, dvash vechalav tachat leshonech, Like honey and milk it lies under your tongue. In fact, the numerical value of the letters of the Hebrew word for milk, chalav, is 40, like the forty days Moshe was up on Mount Sinai. All these point to the link between milk and the Torah. Milk is sweet and pure and sustains the body like Torah sustains the soul. Still, this explanation was beautiful but didn’t satisfy Hank.

 As he neared the top of his cheesecake version of Mount Sinai, Hank tried hard to create majestic peaks and a few awe inspiring cliffs. But there is only so much you can do with cheesecake. Marble it is not. He tried some devil’s food frosting (from a cupcake) to give the impression of fire at the summit, but it didn’t really work. A chocolate donut hole or two served as boulders, but he could see there was not much more he could do with his creation. The project was nearing its completion. He took the last two cheese cakes that he did not sculpt and returned them to the refrigerator.

 Although the other name for Mount Sinai written in the Torah is Har Horeb, an alternative name in the rabbinic literature is Har Gavnunim, the mountain of majestic peaks. The Hebrew word for cheese is gevina. Hank decided that this link between dairy and the Mount Sinai worked best for him. His mountain was definitely sculpted with gavnunim and made of gevina as well. It was an intellectually satisfying interpretation for a man who had just built a six foot high model of a sacred sight out of cheesecake.

Hank stood back and regarded his work. Hopefully, he could take a few shelves out of the synagogue’s giant refrigerator and keep Mount Sinai cold until midnight. He couldn’t wait to unveil his work to the congregation. Some would be amused, others shocked. Hopefully a few would be inspired. He knew he was. But it didn’t really make a difference. For as he knew Rabbi Goldblatt would point out if he had been there just then, whether his creation was deranged or inspired, as soon as the congregants got out the paper plates and the plastic forks, it wouldn’t really matter.  It would all be gone by the morning.

Bechukotay: Go Ahead, Make My Day

 

Bamidbar: 26: 14-41

 

 The Rubinstein children were uncertain of the origins of the small glass orb that normally sat on the bookcase in the living room. Did their parents buy it on their honeymoon in Venice? Was it something that came over with the family when they fled Germany before World War Two? Was it a gift from a wealthy client of their father’s? Whatever its source, and whatever its actual cost, they knew their parents valued it highly.

 Before it had shattered into over one hundred pieces, it had been a clear glass sphere with a blue glass flower inside. It had been a true source of fascination for Debra when she was five, the way the blue from the flower projected its color through the globe and reflected light in many directions. It had had an other worldly appearance, a magical glow. Her parents let her look at it, but she knew she could not touch.

 Over the years it had migrated upwards, from one of the lower shelves on the bookcase to the highest one. It had been sandwiched between a tzedaka box in the shape of some medieval European synagogue and a large bronze fish of some sort. But even on its high perch it had stood out like a brilliant gem.

 They had been told many times not to play football in the living room-- too many times to count. But it had been a small Nerf football, and the odds of hitting the orb were astronomically slim. Ray was young and had never demonstrated any aptitude with a football before in his entire life. Who knew that he would pick today to master the perfect spiral pass?

 Now Debra, Ray, and Henry were gathered in the den to have their punishment meted out. They were pretty certain it was going to be bad.

 Bart Rubinstein was an affable fellow who rarely raised his voice, but he had been known to holler when prodded by his children. As paternal decibel levels went, the stink bomb in the sukkah had led to a particularly loud harangue from their dad, and the time Henry had flushed the tennis ball down the toilet and flooded the bathroom had elicited an impressive level of volume. But the mother of all tongue lashings had come with the rocket launch in the living room debacle. That had been a truly loud day in the Rubinstein house. Still, if polled, the three kids might have agreed unanimously that today had the potential to be the loudest rebuke of all.

 They knew it was going to be really bad when both their father and mother came in together to speak with them. That was almost unprecedented. Bart and Renee Rubinstein sat across from their kids in the den, and Bart began to speak. It was then that things got really scary.

 Bart Rubinstein did not raise his voice. In fact, he spoke rather quietly, in a hushed tone. He expressed his disappointment and meted out his children’s punishment in a voice slightly louder than a whisper. His tone suggested that he was so upset he dare not scream. It was like watching an old Clint Eastwood movie--more like the earlier The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly spaghetti western era than the later Dirty Harry vigilante cop phase of Eastwood’s career. Bart’s subdued tone was downright menacing, much like Clint’s was in his heyday.

 In the end the children were banned from television watching and computer games for a week and lost their allowance for a month. But that was the least of it. Bart’s sotto voce performance had chilled Debra, Ray, and Henry to the bone, and they had never been sorrier for misbehaving in their entire lives. If they could have reassembled the glass orb from its myriad of pieces they would do it, even if it took them weeks. They were truly remorseful.

 Bart and Renee left the house and went for a walk around the block to cool down. Renee looked at Bart and smiled.

 “What?” Bart asked.

 “That was quite a performance you put on.”

 “What do you mean?”

 “I mean, you were really scary back there with the kids.”

 “Thanks, I think. But you should know that I wasn’t acting. I was really that upset.”

 “I understand. But still, you seriously put the fear of G-d into them. I don’t think they’ll be throwing a ball in the living room again for quite some time, if ever again for the remainder of their lives.”

 “Then I guess it was a lesson well learned.”

 “Do you know what it made me think of?”

 “What?”

 “The tochacha.”

 “The what?”

 “You know, the rebuke Hashem gives the Jewish people in the desert when He tells them what will happen if they don’t observe His commandments.”

 “Come on! I wasn’t that mean.”

 "No, it wasn’t what you said. It was how you said it. We read the tochacha during the shabbat Torah reading in this very low tone, so that we have to listen carefully to hear it. I imagine that some say we read it in a low tone because we’re really not too thrilled about listening to it, because it tells us of so many bad things that will happen if we don’t observe the laws of the Torah. Others might suggest we don’t want our enemies to hear it, so we read it quietly. But I think that I learned an important lesson about the tochacha today.”

 “And what’s that, dare I ask?”

 “It’s that sometimes a low tone of speech can be really, really scary. If you’re truly powerful, you don’t need to raise your voice to convey your strength. Like with G-d and the Jewish people. And like you and your three children.”

 “Wow, that’s heavy.”

 “I know.”

 “I really didn’t mean to come on that strong, even though I was obviously, and justifiably, very upset.”

 “I think the kids understand that.”

 “I think I’ll go home and give them a hug, anyway.”

 “That’s always a good idea.”