28 Dec 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.
SICK
Dear Vues Master:
I’m sick. I ate too many donuts this past Chanukah.
What should I do?
YB
Vues Master’s Note: Eat some more to keep your
equilibrium. Just kidding. Refuah Sheleima!
CONCERT
Dear Vues Master:
I’m so upset. I went to the Ishay Ribo/MBD concert
this past Sunday night in Manhattan and I spent
over two hours looking for a spot and couldn’t find
anything!! There were 3 parking garages in the
area and each of them were charging $55 and they
were all full an hour before the concert.
PN
Vues Master’s Note: Ever heard of mass transit?
Ah so you don’t want to get mugged? I don’t blame
you!
FAMILY TIME
Dear Vues Master:
I can’t believe Chanukah flew by so quickly. It’s
such a fun holiday. Every day I went to a different
party & it’s the only time all year that my entire
family gets together.
NK
Vues Master’s Note: Maybe get together every
Rosh Chodesh!
COOOLD
Dear Vues Master:
It was cold out there last Shabbos!! I don’t remember
it being so cold in December before. I’m
dreaming about Florida these days. Am I the only
one???
ML
Vues Master’s Note: Shhh! It is global warming!
RUSSIAN
Dear Vues Master:
A rabbi is sitting on a park bench in Moscow in
1951, studying from a book of Torah. A KGB
agent sees this, walks up to him, and says, “Komrad,
do you know that you can go to prison for
studying religion here in the Soviet Union, and
especially for studying religion in that strange
non-Russian language? Why are you doing this?”
The Rabbi replies, “So that when I go to Heaven,
I can speak to Hashem in his Holy Language!”
KGB agent then says, “Well, what if you end up
in the Other Place?” Rabbi says, “No problem. I
speak Russian too!”
MF
Vues Master’s Note: I heard they speak in sign language!
Sign your life away!
HUSBANDS
Dear Vues Master:
The local news station was interviewing an
80-year-old Jewish lady because she had just gotten
married for the fourth time: The interviewer
asked her questions about her life, about what it
felt like to be marrying again at 80, and then about
her new husband’s occupation. “He’s a funeral
director,” She answered. “Interesting.” The newsman
thought. He then asked her if she wouldn’t
mind telling him a little about her first three husbands
and what they did for a living. She paused
for a few moments, needing time to reflect on all
those years. After a short time, a smile came to her
face and she answered proudly, explaining that
she had first married a banker when she was in her
20’s, then a circus ringmaster when in her 40’s,
and a rabbi when in her 60’s, and now – in her 80’s
– a funeral director. The interviewer looked at her,
quite astonished, and asked why she had married
four men with such diverse careers. (Wait for it)
She smiled and explained. “I married one for the
money, two for the show, three to get ready, and
four to go!!
KF
Vues Master’s Note: When they asked her how
all her husbands die she said the first three were
drinking coffee the fourth one died because he did
not want to drink it.
DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO SELFLESSLY CARED FOR A LOVED ONE THROUGH A LONG ILLNESS
Dear Vues Master
I WAS THERE
I was there
when you wanted me
I was there
when you needed me
In your hour of despair
I was there
When you’re troubled
please remember
Through that cold
And dark December
When you needed
love and care
I was there
So when my race is run
And my trial’s almost done
And they ask me
Are there words
I wish to share
On that final
Judgment day
I know exactly
What I’ll say…
I wasn’t always good
But I was there
COUNTRY YOSSI TOIV
Vues Master’s Note: Amazing!
POLITICS
Dear Vues Master:
Notice the similarities between LGBTQIA+ and lehavdil, the seven names of Hashem. Also, Hashem’s name consists of seventy-two letters and lehavdil, there are 72 genders. What is the connection? It says in Berashis (3:5), “But Hashem knows that as soon as you (Chava) eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like Hashem, who knows good and bad.” The serpent is telling us that women will become like Hashem if she eats it. Is it a coincidence that the new marriage act, passed on December 13, 2022, happened the same year that they produced 72 genders? Furthermore, without getting into detail, shouldn’t the letter G come before L? The answer is women will exert their power at the end of days therefore the L comes first. The letter L also has the same phonics as kel (Lord) in Hebrew. Lord refers to the Hashem of justice and the English word Hashem, letter G, refers to the Hashem of Mercy. By emulating Hashem, in the wrong way, people are showing their true colors. When Hashem gave the sign to Noach that he will not destroy the world he used a rainbow positioned like an upside-down arrow to show peace and discontent. Therefore, the pride flag is using that which is unique to Hashem to antagonizing Him like the Dor Haflagah: (the generation of the division). There could have been a rectification for Chava’s sin during the chet hagel (sin of the golden calf). Even though the women were rewarded for not giving their jewelry they still could have done more. They could have prevented their husbands from giving. How do I know, it says that Chava cried and wore Adam down until he finally ate it. If she was able to get him to eat it, then she was able to stop him as well. The end of days will rest on the women to fear the Lord as it says in Sifra, Kedoshim, (1:4-10), “Scripture likens the fear of father and mother to fear of the Lord as it is written (Shemoth 20:17) And he who curses his father and mother shall be put to death” Only the mother can make sure that children honors and respects their father.
DG
Vues Master’s Note: I think you are giving these mushchasim too much credit! They are not that thought out!
PARENTS
Dear Vues Master:
You must be extremely careful to honor and revere your father and mother for the Torah compares their honor and reverence to the honor and reverence you must have for the Almighty. [In other words, after the Holocaust you must revere and honor Hashem, so you must revere and honor your parents even if you feel otherwise and with good reason. For example:] To what extent must you revere them? If you were dressed in costly clothing and presiding over the assembly and your father or mother came and tore your clothing, struck you on the head and spat in your face, you must not embarrass them, or show distress in their presence or anger towards them; but you must be silent and fear the King who is King of Kings, the Holy One, Blessed is He, Who so commanded. Even if your father is wicked and a sinner you must honor and fear him even a bastard is obligated to honor and fear his father. Whoever disgraces his father or mother even by words or gestures [or ignores them] is among those whom the Almighty has cursed. As it said, “Cursed is one who disgraces his father or mother.” If senility or insanity should affect the mind of your father or mother, you should try to deal with them in accordance with their mental status until Hashem will have mercy on them. But if it is impossible for you to endure because of their severe retardation, you may leave them, and delegate others to take proper care of them [and not abandon them and surely not ignore them]. One who truly wishes to honor his father and his mother should involve himself in Torah study and good deeds, for the greatest honor to parents is when people say, “Fortunate are the father and mother who have reared such a son.” [I’m not sure why he writes good deeds after Torah study as good deeds are a prerequisite for Torah study and good deeds reflect more on the parents then their Torah learning] If the son does not walk in the right path, his parents suffer humiliation because of him, and he embarrasses them with the utmost embarrassment. Kitzur Shulchan Arukh 143:21 (Metsudah Pub., 1996) On the other side, according to the Torah, the parents have all the rights, save causing their child to strike them. For example (Nedarim 48b): There was a certain man who had a son who had stolen sheaves of flax, and the father took a vow prohibiting his son from deriving any benefit from his possessions. They said to the father: And if your son would become a Torah scholar, and you would want him to be able to inherit your possessions, what would you do? He said to them: Let this son of mine acquire the possessions, and only if the son of my son becomes a Torah scholar, then let him, my grandson, acquire them from my son.
DG
Vues Master’s Note: Again! One track mind and one track letter! Do you think or write about anything else?
HEART ACHE
Dear Vues Master:
Mother Goose tells the Shochet, “ Eat your heart out, you can’t touch me for the next two months, unless you eat my heart.”
The רמ”א†writes, “ Some Shoch
tim have the Minhag not to shecht any geese i in the months of Teves & Shvat. There is a Kabbalah (tradition), that there is a certain hour in these two months, if a person shechts a goose, he will die, unless he eats from it. The Minhag is to eat its heart.”
MF
Vues Master’s Note: Fascinating! Good thing I am not a shochet and I
don’t eat Gestopte Genz!
GIFTS
Dear Vues Master:
Now that Chanukah is over, my wife and I want to vent. What is going on with this world? Why do kids need presents and parties all day? Chanukah is a special Yom Tov during which we celebrate miracles that happen. If I don’t buy my kids any presents, they will resent it. If I do, I’m giving in to the new-age mentality. Aren’t we supposed to stay away from presents? How can we stop this downward spiral?
AH
Vues Master’s Note: Don’t stay away, you want your kids to have fond memories! It is only once a year. Big deal!
AUSCHWITZ
Dear Vues Master:
In his hit Broadway play “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard chronicles a fictional family of self-described “Austrians of Jewish descent” as they are confronted by the rise of interwar antisemitism and, eventually, the Holocaust. The chief drama critic of the New York Times has described the play as “harrowing.” The real history of the Jews in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district and other Jewish communities in that region is equally harrowing. The Jewish experience in the Austro-Hungarian empire through the centuries veered from relative tolerance and assimilation to blood libels and deportations—as well as a surprising connection to the U.S. government’s refusal to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz. Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district was given its name by antisemitic residents in gratitude to Emperor Leopold I for his mass expulsion of the Jews from that neighborhood in 1670. St. Leopold’s Church was built on the ruins of the main synagogue. There is another city named after Leopold I, sixty-five miles to the east of Vienna. Same namesake, different backstory. In the 1660s, the emperor established a fortress there which later became the largest prison in that part of the country. The town built around it came to be known in Czech as Leopoldov, and then in German as Leopoldstadt during the Nazi occupation. The latter Leopoldstadt is part of the Trnava region, an area rich in Czech and Slovakian Jewish history and tragedy. In 1899, the year that Tom Stoppard’s play begins, there was a major blood libel case in the Austro-Hungarian town of Polna. A young Jew named Leopold Hilsner was accused of murdering two Christian women in connection with Passover rituals. Among Hilsner’s supporters was a little-known philosophy professor named Tomas Masaryk. He rose not merely to defend Hilsner, but, as he put it, “to defend the Christians against superstition.” Angry demonstrations by antisemitic students forced the cancelation of Masaryk’s lectures at Charles-Ferdinand University, but that did not stop him from speaking out in the later blood libel case of Menachem Mendel Beilis, in Russia. After his election as president of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Masaryk became a strong
supporter of Zionism and visited Palestine.
He received honorary citizenship
from the city of Tel Aviv in 1935, a forest
was planted in his honor, and Czech
Jewish immigrants established a kibbutz
named Kfar Masaryk near Haifa in 1938.
Both Leopoldstadts—the one in Vienna,
and the one in Czechoslovakia—have
a place in the history of the Holocaust,
although in very different ways. The
Jewish ghetto that was created in the Viennese
Leopoldstadt in the 1600s was
reestablished by the Nazis, in preparation
for deporting its 65,000 inhabitants
to Auschwitz. An estimated 97% of them
were murdered. The Czechoslovakian
Leopoldstadt drew attention in the spring
of 1944, because it was an important hub
along the railway routes used by the Germans
to deport hundreds of thousands
of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz.
That May, two Jewish rescue activists
based in Switzerland, Yitzhak and Recha
Sternbuch, presented officials at the
U.S. consulate in Bern with a detailed
list of the railways and bridges used for
the deportations and urged them to recommend
U.S. air strikes on those routes.
On June 24, Roswell McClelland, the
U.S. War Refugee Board’s representative
in Switzerland, sent a cable to the State
Department, presenting the Sternbuchs’
request in detail. He began by explaining
the brutal round-ups of Hungarian Jews
and how “people were deported 60 to 70
per sealed freight wagon for a trip of two
to three days without adequate water or
food, probably resulting in many deaths
en route.” Regarding the potential
targets, McClelland listed five specific
“stretches of railroad,” one of which was
“Galanta-Sered-Leopoldstadt-Novemator-
Trencin.” Significantly, McClelland’s
cable pointed out that one of the
routes was being used not only to deport
Jews, “but also many thousand [German]
troops to and from the Polish front were
transported daily over this line.” That was
important because it meant there was no
conflict between America’s war effort
and the idea of bombing the railways to
interrupt the mass murder of the Jews;
such an attack would serve both purposes.
The McClelland cable was one
of many appeals to the Roosevelt administration,
from Jewish organizations and
others, pleading for bombing of the railways
and bridges leading to Auschwitz or
the gas chambers and crematoria in the
camp. One of those advocates was Jan
Masaryk, foreign minister of the Czech
government-in-exile and son of the former
Czech president. “My government
[has] decided to approach all Allied governments
with the request to carry out
the measures which you suggested,” the
younger Masaryk wrote to World Jewish
Congress co-chair Nahum Goldmann
in July 1944, in response to Goldmann’s
request for help in promoting the idea
of bombing Auschwitz or the railways.
But in a later follow-up letter, Masaryk
reported that he ran into “considerable
difficulties” when he raised the issue with
Allied officials. The main “difficulty”
was that the Roosevelt administration had
decided, long before the first bombing request
was received, that it would not use
any military resources for non-military
objectives—even, apparently, when such
an attack would also disrupt German
troop movements. Sadly, President Roosevelt
and his advisers believed the fate
of Jews such as the residents of Leopoldstadt
was none of America’s concern.
RM
Vues Master’s Note: Wow! A long history
lesson!
SCALE
Dear Vues Master:
A woman noticed her husband standing
on the bathroom scale and sucking in
his stomach, obviously hoping it would
somehow lower his weight. “It’s not going
to help,” she said. “It’s the only way I
can see the numbers,” he replied.
MB
Vues Master’s Note: Not worth looking at
the numbers. It keeps on going up like the
prices of gas inflation!
NINE DAYS
Dear Vues Master:
The Turei Even (R.H.18b) & Minchas
Chinuch (#301: 6) both claim that in the
early days when they were mekadesh the
new moon al pi re’iya, in those places
where the shluchim couldn’t make it on
time to notify when Rosh Chodesh was,
they kept 9 days of Chanukah. (misafek)
The Pri Chadash gives 3 reasons why
today we don’t keep 9 days of Chanukah
in Chutz La’Aretz. 1) Chanukah
is a D’Rabbanan 2) 8 days of milah the
Yevanim tried to stop 3) We want to be
mefarsem nes Chanikah which was only 8
days & not 9 days.
Vues Master’s Note: And don’t forget it
would cost us more money in gifts and
Chanukah Gelt and one more day of parties!
CHANUKAH
Dear Vues Master:
Has Jewish identity become nothing
more than a joke? Celebrities, politicians,
and activists have been using their
Jewish identity to push their “unJewish”
agendas for far too long. The late Rabbi
Meir Kahane was successful in reviving
the tarnished Jewish pride among young
Jews whose parents abandoned Judaism
in every way but name. Relatively recently
this newfound Jewish pride has
been exploited for personal gain. Whenever
an important Jewish holiday comes
around there are always those one or two
politicians who like to distort what the
holiday is authentically about and inject
their toxic modern views into the meaning
of the holiday. Recent examples of
this are President Volodymir Zelensky’s
agenda pushing holiday wishes and Vice-
President Kamala Harris’s Chanukah remarks
two years ago with her Jewish husband.
President Zelensky, who’s country
has been invaded by Russia, sent his
distorted Chanukah greetings by comparing
the Maccabees triumph over the
Syrian-Greeks to his military’s success
over the Russians. “The few defeated the
many, light defeated the darkness – this
will be the case this time as well.” While
this may be a beautiful use of words and
imagery in reality the Maccabees were
fighting against the very thing Zelensky
is advocating for, liberal Westernism.
Things like same-sex marriage and acceptance
of all forms of religion as being
equal are exactly what the Maccabees
were fighting against. Kamala Harris just
two years ago spoke about the “light”
and “joy” of Chanukah. But what “joy”
does Harris think we are celebrating on
Chanukah? We commemorate the defeat
of the Syrian-Greeks and their assimilated
Jewish allies. Jews, like Kamala Harris’s
husband who does not feel the need
to separate themselves from the other nations
and reject Torah Judaism in favor of
the morals and culture of gentiles. Kamala
often appropriates the Jewish concept
“Tikkun Olam.” This term, and the very
words themselves, have been hijacked by
the left. The left wants people to think
Tikkun Olam means acceptance and
love, when it actually means restoring
world order, in other words, smashing
anti-Torah views, which Zelensky and
Kamala Harris both exhibit. People tend
to forget how bloody and dark the true
story of Chanukah is. My history teacher
in yeshiva always said that Chanukah
was more like a civil war. The start of
the revolution saw Matisyahu decapitating
a Jew and stopping the bringing of
an offering to an idol. The modern interpreters
of Tikkun Olam would be horrified
to find out that Chanukah represents
battling Jews who throw off the yoke of
heaven and serve false Hashems. If Kamala
Harris truly understood Judaism at
all, and wasn’t just trying to get rich Jewish
donors to support her, then she certainly
would not have made such foolish
comments and neither would Hashemless
Zelensky. May it be the will of our
Father in Heaven to restore his presence
to the world and return true meaning to
what it means to be a Jew.
JBM
Vues Master’s Note: Reminder! We are
still in galus!
CHILDREN
Dear Vues Master:
Two friends were talking about how their
children had grown up. One said to the
other “When my children were little, they
were so sweet I wanted to eat them. Now
that they’ve grown up, I’m sorry I didn’t.”
DL
Vues Master’s Note: It’s like an Arab
mother telling her friend look at this picture
of my child! Look how quickly they
blow up!
CHEESE
Dear Vues Master:
Donuts or Pizza? In Shulchan Aruch,
there is no mention of eating foods fried in
oil on Chanukah .(Latkes & donuts etc.)
In Shulchan Aruch (Rema) it says to eat
cheese on Chanukah. Probably the first &
only (source) for donuts on Chanukah is
from a copy of a (manuscript) that Rav
Y.M. Toledano z”l found. Somehow the
location of his find is unknown now. Rav
Toledano was a Rov in Tel Aviv & also
the minister of religion in Ben Gurion’s
Government. In his Sefer Sarid Upalit, he
quotes from a manuscript of R. Maimon
(Rambam’s father) where he mentions the
Minhag of donuts on Chanukah. I am not
sure if Rav Toledano himself was convinced
of this manuscript to be authentic.
Donuts or Pizza It seems that the mesorah
of our mothers (fried foods) has precedence
over Halacha in Shulchan Aruch
(cheese).
MF
Vues Master’s Note: Well that would
put bakeries out of business. I guess we
should all eat cheese donuts. That is a
cheesy response to