03 May Speak Your Vues
SPEAK YOUR VUES WITH THE VUES MASTER
Please note that the author of Speak Your Vues is in no way affiliated with the publisher of this paper. The author of this column is an independent third party contributor. The views and opinions expressed by this author may not reflect the views and opinions of the publishers. If one has any issues with any of the views, please write a letter to the Vues Master.
GREAT LOSS
Dear Vues Master:
This past Monday, Klal Yisrael suffered a tremendous
loss. Rav Zecharia Wallerstein zt”l I is possibly the
greatest mekarev in America in our time. The only two
people that you can potentially say that are in his category,
R’ Shlomo Carlebach & Rabbi Dovid Trenk. He
helped more people than we know. Rabbi Wallerstein
was a tremendous mechanech & great orator. I heard
him speak many times & I enjoyed listening to him very
much. Yehi Zichro Baruch.
RE
Vues Master’s Note: A great loss and someone will need
to step up and do all these things he did.
THE LOSS OF RABBI WALLERSTEIN
Dear Vues Master:
Heartbroken. Our hearts are broken over the loss of
Rabbi Walerstein. Very few mortals achieve greatness in
their lifetime but Rabbi Wallerstein was that and much,
much more. He was a supreme educator. He broke the
mold. Rabbi Zechariah Wallerstein, zt’l was a tzaddik
gamor. A man who dedicated his life to saving an
entire generation of Jewish youth at risk, those young
people who were going off or had gone off the derech of
HaShem. He did this so selflessly and with a tremendous
amount of mesiras nefesh. He had an absolute love and
compassion for every single human being. He was vocal
about change and creating spaces where positive change
happened. May we all take upon ourselves some part
of the mission and continue Rabbi Wallerstein’s work.
Rabbi Wallerstein will be missed. No one can take his
place.
Vues Master’s Note: As time goes on, there will be more
& more stories coming out about Rabbi Wallerstein &
all the good that he’s done for Klal Yisrael.
ACAPELLA
Dear Vues Master:
The acapella music people listen to during sefira is so
good these days that one can’t tell the difference between
music with instruments and music without instruments.
I’m having a hard time understanding why
acapella music is ok to listen to during sefira. Can you
please explain?
WJ
Vues Master’s Note: I believe that Acapella is just like
listening to
regular music. I believe Rav Belsky held that way too.
LAAG BA’OMER
Dear Vues Master:
My son is learning this year in Eretz Yisrael in the Mir
& he wants to go with a few friends to Meiron for Lag
Baomer. Should I let him go? After what happened last
year, I’m very nervous.
RT
Vues Master’s Note: Do you think you can control your
son from here in America?
BABYSITTING
Dear Vues Master:
B”H the month after Lag Baomer my wife & I are invited
to five different simchas. B”H, we have five children.
Three of them are under the age of 8. My children were
not invited to any of the simchas. Is it ok for me to bring
them along? I really dont have anyone to watch them &
if I find a babysitter, it’s going to cost me more than $100
per simcha, just for babysitting. That’s not even including
the gift. The average simcha these days is about 5
hours between going & coming & the average babysitter
is $15-$20/hr. I’m really in a bind. I appreciate being
invited, but I really can’t afford it. What should I do?
LK
Vues Master’s Note: It is definitely better than paying a
babysitter
in order for one to go be Menachem Avel! Be thankful
for Smachos!
NOISY CHILDREN
Dear Vues Master:
I’m getting really frustrated about this young man that is
davening in my shul. He brings his 2 year old to davening
& the child is very disturbing. I understand people
wanting to bring their children to shul, but they really
shouldn’t until they are at least 6 or 7 years old. This
particular child makes a lot of noise & runs all over the
shul. The father sees nothing wrong with it & just follows
him all over the shul.
KJ
Vues Master’s Note: Why don’t you discuss with the Rav
and let him
decide. There may be rules in your Shul!
DR. KATZ
Dear Vues Master:
I was happy to see last week an ad in The Jewish Vues from Shulamith about the loss of Dr. Susan Katz a”h, founder of Shulamith High School in Flatbush and a woman who had a profound effect on thousands of students for over five decades in Chinuch. In 1980, she was approached by the directors of the Shulamith school, then in Boro Park, to launch a high school along with the existing elementary school in the heart of Flatbush. She did a fantastic job. She truly loved her students and treated them as her own children. She inspired her students to both excellence in academic pursuits as well as to value Torah and marry Bnei Torah. Dr. Katz retired in 2007. Over the years the high school has received numerous outstanding academic achievements. In a generation where so many young people are straying from the path, Dr. Susan Katz’s approach is an inspiring one that we should all emulate.
Yehe zichrah Baruch.
HG
Vues Master’s Note: We have been losing a lot of good ones lately!
HEAR
Dear Vues Master:
An elderly man who was almost deaf finally got hearing aids. When he happened to meet the doctor a few months later, the doctor asked if he and his family were pleased with the hearing aids. “I think they’re great, but my family doesn’t know I have them. I’ve changed my will three times already.”
MB
Vues Master’s Note: Where there is a will there are relatives!
PIZZA
Dear Vues Master:
On Motzai Yom Tov, I put in my order for 2 pizza pies in Lakewood NJ (Tomsriver-Manchester)at 10:30. I sat down to finally eat Chametz, believe it or not at 1:30am! After Chatzos. I think that’s the same time I finished the Seder. I didn’t want to be oiver on Baal Tosef! After 3 hrs you can bet that the pizza was well done & worth it from Upper Crust-Kutners. I could finish the daf yomi, maaver sedra, & finish Sefer Tehillim in all that waiting time. Ulavdo bchol levavchem bshnei yitzrechem. It was worth the WEIGHT!
RMS-RLL R’ Moshe Leib
Vues Master’s Note: I guess they needed to wait for the dough to rise. Or maybe to get a rise out of you!
CHANGE
Dear Vues Master:
A Talmid Chacham had a very happy marriage. His wife, Chaya, was a good, kind and devoted wife. Unfortunately, Chaya got sick and died young. The Talmid Chacham then married his wife’s sister,Bracha, who was the opposite of her deceased sister: mean and bitter. The Talmid Chacham once told her: “It’s ironic. Your sister’s name was Chaya, but she was a Bracha; your name is Bracha, but you’re a Chaya.”
BM
Vues Master’s Note: It’s not all in a name!
KIDS
Dear Vues Master:
It is wrong to not invite kids to a simcha. Kids are people too, part of the community that shares in your joy! Also, it is wrong to assume that the parents are willing to leave their kids for the event.
LH
Vues Master’s Note: So, What is right?!
CONNECTION
Dear Vues Master:
Reb Yechezkel Levenstein said that the avoda (purpose) of Pesach is emmuna (belief in G-d); however, his rebbi, Rav Yeruchom Levovitz, corrected him and said that it is avdus (subjugation). This makes sense as Pesach revolves around the son humbling himself by showing up at the seder table despite getting scolded. The rasha also gets honorable mention, in the haggadah, but not the fifth son. The maximum, “Maasa avos siman lebanim (acts of the fathers are a sign for the children).” means that whatever happened to our forefathers will befall their descendants. A different interpretation is that the good ways of your father should be a sign to learn from. For example, “If my father waited 24 hours between meat and milk then I should wait at least six hours.” If you find it challenging to follow their good ways at least don’t change their minhagim. For example, don’t put on tefillin during chol Hamoed or wear techlis if your dad doesn’t. Besides not keeping his mesora one is also contradicting and shaming him. It says in the Zohar that at the end of days people will be on the fiftieth level of tuma (impurity). How can that be if it was necessary to redeem us from Mitzrayim before this level? The answer is that now that we have the Torah it is possible to reach that level. That lowest level to be breached is the avdus of the son. This most elementary connection can’t be taken for granted anymore. I wonder what Rav Yeruchom would say about this?
DG
Vues Master’s Note: You need to learn how to connect the dots and then maybe your son will come back to you!
HUSBAND
Dear Vues Master:
A elderly Rav who was never at a loss for words, stood silent before his congregation. He motioned to a young boy to approach and told him that he had forgotten his teeth at home. “Please go to my house and bring me my teeth,” he said. After the boy returned with the teeth, the rav spoke and spoke with no end. He just couldn’t stop speaking. Finally, the gabbai approached him and said the hour was growing late. The Rav apologized. “He brought me my wife’s teeth.”
BM
Vues Master’s Note: You need to learn how to connect the dots and then maybe your son will come back to you!
RESPECT
Dear Vues Master:
It is interesting to note that Rabbi Akiva’s students died between Pesach and Shavous which is a time of growth. Rabbi Akiva’s dictum was Ve-ahavta le-re’acha ka-mocha (You shall love your neighbor as yourself). After loving yourself one has to make sure to love his closest neighbor, his parents. Love starts between parent and child and that relationship will help with other relationships. A peer relationship requires a family foundation. Maybe Rabbi Akiva had second thoughts about pairing his students together, who didn’t have a good foundation, as that could make them snug and feed off each other. So when he started up again he took an odd number of students. It’s apropos that we learn Pirkei Avos (The Chapter of Our Fathers) during this time and it started seder night with father and grandfather together with family.
DG
Vues Master’s Note: There is no time like the present to work on respecting one another!
BRACHA
Dear Vues Master:
Two friends were talking. One asked: “We say keshem shemevorchim al hatova kein mevorchin al Haraah. What in fact is the Bracha that we say on the Ra?” His friend answered: “Harei At Mekudeshes Li.”
NB
Vues Master’s Note: I guess that is where the phrase the biggest cause of divorce is wedding cake! He did not have yichus atzmo!
AM YISRAEL CHAI
Dear Vues Master
Early one morning shortly before Pesach, I went to Miami Airport to pick up my daughter and her family who had just traveled for 14 hours with two little children. We quickly loaded the children and suitcases in the car and got back on the road, trying to beat the morning traffic. We made good time to Boca, unloaded the car, and came into the house to huge greetings and lots of excitement. After a few minutes, when it was time to put the suitcases away, my daughter began to panic. The large suitcases were all accounted for, but a small carry-on was nowhere to be found. We went back to the car and it wasn’t there. We looked around the entrance of the house and it wasn’t there. The missing bag had more than just Bamba and Bisli. It had a sheitel, Tallis and Tefillin, a laptop, jewelry, and other expensive and irreplaceable items. My daughter called the airport but didn’t get through to anyone who could help so despite just having taken an arduous and exhausting journey, she got back in the car to head back to the airport to try to track down this lost bag. When she got there, it wasn’t on the curb where had last seen it. She parked and went inside, and it wasn’t in the lost and found. She was told to file a police report, which she did. She asked if they could review the security cameras to see what had happened and maybe who had taken it, but they said that wouldn’t be possible for a few days. Through actual tears, and a mix of dejection, exhaustion, and frustration, she made her way back to Boca, trying to reconcile herself to these lost and irreplaceable items being truly gone. After a few hours, they had all but given up hope of recovering their things when they remembered it wasn’t only the carry-on that was lost, there was a hat box sitting on top of it that was also left behind. As a last-ditch effort, a true longshot, they had an idea and asked two people they know from Miami to post in group chats asking if anyone saw the bag and box at the airport. One of them, an educator, happened to be on a plane herself and had already put her phone away for takeoff. But when she got a call and took her phone out to answer it, she saw the text asking her to post about the lost bag and hat box. A moment later, she received another call, from one of her students whom she hadn’t spoken to in a year. The young lady had just returned from seminary in Israel. They made small talk for a bit and she shared how she wasn’t supposed to come home for Pesach but at the last minute had arranged to return. The woman asked her, it is great to hear from you but why are you calling? The young lady said, the very last thing I learned about in seminary before our Pesach break was the laws of hashavas aveida, the responsibility to return a lost object. I just came back from Israel and I found something, I figured I should take it so I could try to return it but I am not sure what to do now. The woman’s ears perked up and she asked, what did you find? The young lady said, I found a small suitcase and I figured it belonged to a Jewish person because there was a hat box on top of it. The woman was stunned, she said, what did the suitcase look like and when the young lady described what she had found, it was a perfect match with the description in the text message. She knew exactly whom it belonged to and within a few hours, my children had everything back. The hashgacha pratis, the Divine Providence in getting everything back, was tremendous. A girl who hadn’t planned to come back from Israel was on the same flight and happened upon the bag. She just so happened to have learned something right before that inspired her to take it. She happened to call the very same person that my daughter had texted. As extraordinary as the guiding hand of Hashem was, there was another thought that overwhelmed me while thinking about the story’s happy conclusion. A Jewish girl saw a hat box and immediately concluded, I have no idea to whom these things belong but I am sure we overlap in some way, I am confident I can find them. If a Christian or Muslim saw someone leave a suitcase behind, if an Asian or African American saw someone leave a suitcase who looked like or practiced the same religion as them, would they grab it and say there is no question I will find a connection with the owner? This is what it means to be part of Am Yisrael. We are one people, one family, all interconnected and intertwined. Mi k’amcha Yisrael. We are Am Yisrael, the Jewish people. Rav Soloveitchik teaches that the word am, nation, comes from the word im, together. We are only an am, when we live with an attitude of im, togetherness and unity. In Russia in 1913, in what was known at the time as the “Trial of the Century,” Mendel Beilis was tried for murdering a Christian child to use his blood for Pesach. The lawyer representing him was concerned that the prosecutor might quote particular Torah teachings as evidence that Jews are supremacists who discriminate against other religions and therefore would commit murder against them. One such teaching comes from Rav Shimon bar Yochai who says that only Jews are called “adam,” other nations are not. The lawyer visited the Chortkover Rebbe to ask what to do if the prosecution quotes the teaching. The Chortkover told him, “If the prosecutor brings it up, ask the court to consider what would happen if an Italian man would be arrested and tried in court. Would all other Italians congregate and pray for his safety? What about if a Frenchman was on trial — would all of his countrymen interrupt their lives to pray for his safety, would they even follow his trial?” The Chortkover continued, “The Jewish people are unique in this regard: one Jew is arrested and put on trial, and Jews around the world stop their lives and pray for his safety.” Explained the Chortkover, “This is what Rav Shimon bar Yochai meant. We have many words for person in Hebrew. Ish and gever have plural forms but the word adam has no plural. Only the Jewish people are called adam because we are united, and we can be accurately be described as one person.” We are currently in the period of mourning for the 24,000 students of Rebbe Akiva who were struck down in a pandemic that occurred during this time of year. Our rabbis teach that the cause was she’lo nahagu kavod zeh ba’zeh, they didn’t treat each other with respect. Indeed, many explain that is why the Talmud tells us about 12,000 pairs of students rather than tell us 24,000 students. They were not acting like pairs, connected, or bound together as one, but rather they took the posture of adversaries, competitors, and rivals. Our mission and mandate, the key to transform this period of mourning into joy is to honor one another, to recognize our unique designation as adom, one united entity. Only when we are together, can we truly achieve am Yisroel Chai. Vues Master’s Note: Great story! RUSSIAN TV Dear Vues Master: I was watching a CNN report about Russian atrocities in Ukraine when the email arrived. It was from a producer for RT, the Russian government television network, asking to interview me about what she called “the American media’s collusion with the Third Reich.” Why is Russian Television suddenly interested in how U.S. journalists covered Hitler? Evidently it has to do with Vladimir Putin’s bizarre references to Nazis in his attempts to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to Putin, the Ukrainians—including their Jewish president—are actually Nazis and therefore the invasion constitutes “deNazification.” RT, Putin’s television network, promotes similar themes. On the day the RT producer’s email arrived, the RT website featured articles claiming that the Ukrainian army is filled with “neo-Nazis”; alleging that Russian citizens living in Ukraine are under attack from “neo-Nazi groups integrated into the government of Ukraine”; and asserting that the Biden administration is carrying out “genocide” against Native Americans in Nevada. RT.com also features wild accusations against the American news media, such as denouncing U.S. journalists for “vilifying” the January 6 rioters. Presumably such nonsense is a ham-handed attempt to undermine the credibility of media outlets that have been reporting about Russian atrocities in Ukraine. The RT producer’s claim that the U.S. media “colluded” with the Nazis in the 1930s is in line with the Putin regime’s contention that the Ukrainians and their American supporters are all Nazis or Nazi-sympathizers. It’s a classic propaganda device—take the kernel of truth within a known historical episode, tear it out of its original context, and then twist and magnify it to suit some contemporary political purpose. Yes, many major U.S. newspapers downplayed or ignored news about the Holocaust–but that was poor journalism (and, in some cases, a kind of antisemitism), not “collusion with Nazism.” Such anti-American propaganda is a staple of RT. Originally known by its full name, “Russia Today,” RT was created by the Putin regime in 2005. It is a propaganda agency, controlled and financed by the Russian government. Since 2017, its representatives in the United States have been required to register as foreign agents of the Russian government. I wouldn’t have known any of that from the producer’s email, however. She described RT as an “international TV channel,” with no clue as to its mission, financing, or governance. She never even used the word “Russia.” Obviously I have no interest in being used by Putin’s television network for his propaganda purposes; I replied that I would agree to an interview only on condition that my full comments be broadcast, including my thoughts on how the lessons of the 1930s are relevant today. I explained that I would point out, among other things, that: —Mainstream American newspapers in the 1930s were not pro-Nazi. Because of naïveté or ignorance, many major U.S. newspapers in the early 1930s failed to recognize that Adolf Hitler—like Vladimir Putin today—was an aggressive dictator who would threaten neighboring countries. —The Russian public today is at a great disadvantage as compared to the American public during the Nazi era. The American press is genuinely free and independent, and so the U.S. public had access to sources of information about the Nazi persecutions even when the Roosevelt administration would have preferred that the public not know. Thus while the New York Times downplayed Holocaust news, other publications, such as the weekly New Republic and the New York City daily newspaper PM, highlighted it. By contrast, the Russian people today are unable to freely access information about Russian atrocities in Ukraine because of the Putin government’s control of the Russian news media. — The fact that American journalists 80 years ago did a poor job of covering the Holocaust is no reason to doubt the accuracy of today’s American media coverage of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Russia’s war crimes have been amply documented by U.S. media outlets from across the political and ideological spectrum. The RT producer’s reply was not unexpected, but it was loaded with irony. “We are not interested in airing propaganda, nor including analysis which are propaganda themselves,” she said of my intended remarks. Pretty funny coming from a full-time propagandist for the Putin regime! I guess I won’t be hearing from RT again. RM Vues Master’s Note: In Russia you have two choices: Take it or leave it!