teshuva is possible

 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z2URkgKSr8M?feature=share

making it worse

 

Good place for Litvacks

 

Midwestern work ethic

 

9-5 and no more

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZusbjEIGoIY?feature=share

even a rapper does this

none of this NY financial industry 7 am until midnight garbage

do you want to live in a place that's booming?

i want to live in a place that's sane

guess where Akon (the black guy telling the story) is from. Metro NEW YORK!

At age seven, he and his family relocated to Union City, New Jersey,^[16][17] splitting his time between the United States and Senegal until settling in Newark.^[15] Growing up in New Jersey, Akon had difficulties getting along with other children.^{[citation needed]} When he and his younger brother, Bu Thiam, reached high school, his parents left them on their own in Jersey City and moved the rest of the family to Atlanta, Georgia.^[18] Akon attended William L. Dickinson High School in Jersey City.^[19]

Guess where Eminem is from? Michigan. Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born on October 17, 1972, in St. Joseph, Missouri.  By the age of twelve, Eminem and his mother shuttled between states, rarely staying in one house for more than a year or two and mostly living with family members, moved several times and lived in St. Joseph, Savannah, Missouri, Kansas City, Warren, Michigan and Roseville, Michigan[16] before settling in Detroit.

Go out of town. save yourself, You don't have to live in NY

aging and don't marry for looks

 

The Rebbe was against Zionism

The Rebbe was against Zionism

 אמנם צריכים להיות נגד הציונות, אך את האנשים המחזיקים בה באופן אישי יש לקרב, כלומר: מקרבים כל יהודי מאחר שהוא יהודי, אך לא מקרבים יחד איתו את הציונות שבו ח"ו

שיחות קודש תשכ"ז ח"ב ע' 407

It is true that we must be against Zionism, but one should still engage in outreach with the people who cling to it. That is to say, one should do kiruv with every Jew because he is a Jew. However, the Zionism should not be brought in along with him.

Lubavitcher Rebbe

Sichos Kodesh, 5727, p. 407

musar

שְׁמַ֣ע בְּ֭נִי מוּסַ֣ר אָבִ֑יךָ וְאַל־תִּ֝טֹּ֗שׁ תּוֹרַ֥ת אִמֶּֽךָ׃

My son, heed the discipline (musar) of your father,
And do not forsake the instruction (torah) of your mother; 

Rashi:

Hearken, my son, to the discipline of your father What the Holy One, blessed be He, gave Moses in writing and orally.

your mother Heb. אמך [like אמתך], your nation, the nation of Israel, as in (Ezek. 19:2): “What a lioness was your mother [meaning your nation]!” These are the words of the Scribes, which they innovated and added and made safeguards for the Torah.

Thus musar is the written Torah, toras imecha is the words of the rabbis.

How can musar here mean chewing somebody out? It's compared to Torah.

People confuse tochacha (rebuke) with musar. To give somebody musar should only mean instruction, englightenment. 

rebuke is something else.

don't fear the word musar. 

Why are you the only one?

 Years ago I attended a dysfunctional yeshiva. It's known even today to be a crazy place. Several formers students who are no longer frum have blogs on line where they complain about it. The head of the place, an insurance salesmen who used his uncle's money to start a yeshiva, was a mess of a person. He could not give a class in Gemara or halacha or anything. He had almost no experience in education, was anti-intellectual, viewed all questions as coming from the yetzer hara, and restricted his 'program' to two classes - Chumash and Gemara, even though it was a school for baalei teshuvah. There was no library. Guest speakers were not allowed. It was located on an isolated hilltop. When I asked for classes in Hebrew, halacha, mishnah, history, I was denied. When I complained about the place he said to me, "Why are you the only one?" Since 1/3 of the guys left in my year, I wondered how I could be the only one, but that's what he said to me. 

Decades later a young man was sent to me who also had gone to that yeshiva. This young man was no longer frum. He had bitter experiences with this yeshiva head who deemed himself the wise expert who could fix everyone. When he was ailing in the hospital in his final months, he paid for a taxi to send this young man to his hospital room so he could 'straighten out' the young man, who today is very bitter about the condescending and heavy handed treatment he received. He told me that the yeshiva head said to him, "Why are you the only one?" I said, "He said that to you too?" We laughed. Turns out he said it to all kinds of people. The young man told me of others who were told the same thing. Each one was the only one,

This might be a line used in yeshivas to shame a bochur, to make him feel that there's something wrong with him.  The yeshiva can't possibly be wrong or even wrong for him. And the proof is that he's the only one who doesn't like it there.

There's a school principal in my town that warns olim against moving children above the age of 7 to Israel,  He said, go out to such and such street on Shabbos at night and you'll see all the olim who are now off the derech. The street is full of them. And it's true, I was out late this Shabbos and I saw all kinds of rowdy off the derech American olim. They were too old to be brought to Israel and they got messed up. Are they each the only one? 

The phrase why are you the only one puts the failures of the institution on the child, it puts the failures of the society on the child. It's a horrible thing to say and it's never true. Life is complicated and there are all kinds of reasons why a child might not fit in a certain school, why he might be struggling in life. And there are all kinds of people that struggle in life. Nobody is the only one. 

When a social worker utters a phrase like that you really have a problem because a social worker is where we go to fix the damage done by school heads that say, "Why are you the only one?" When you find out that the social worker worked in a yeshiva, on the rabbinic staff, a light flashes: Oh that's where he learned that phrase. 

Social work is not rabbanus. It's an entirely different profession. It requires listening not preaching. It requires listening, not talking over people. A social worker helps the client to find his own voice. He doesn't critique the client's thoughts. He certainly doesn't shame him by telling him or his parents that he's the only one.

If a yeshiva guy is to become a therapist he has to transform himself. In yeshiva, he argued all day long. He has to drop the arguing. In yeshiva he was taught essentially that bochurim are not much more than a yetzer hara that needs to be fixed by the rabbi. He has to drop that or he is liable to really damage already damaged people. Few make that transition because they don't really respect the profession. They just see it as a decent parnassah. They really want to be rabbis or in full time learning and this will have to do. 

hang in there

"If you stay at the table long enough, the chips come to you."

Skip Brittenham

 A little while back, a neighbor of mine, a rabbi, gave me a lift in his car. He asked me what I have been doing lately. I said "mitzvos." He countered, "Torah and mitzvos." Evidently, it was not exciting to him that a Jew is doing mitzvos (even though Torah study is a mitzvah). You know and I know that if I had answered, "Torah," he would have said, "great, what mesechta?" He wouldn't have said, "What about mitzvos?"

I was at bar mitzvahs simcha, and the father kept talking about how his son is shteiging in Gemara. We heard nothing about the boy doing mitzvos. Even a bar mitzvah isn't about mitzvos anymore. I wanted to tell the father, it's not a bar Gemara, it's a bar mitzvah. Of course, the main subject of the Gemara is mitzvos, but people have found a way to get around that by turning all Gemara study into abstract lomdus. I don't blame the father really. He has been conditioned to ignore mitzvos. He gets propagandized constantly. 

It is quite amazing that a person should be made to feel like an apikoros only for asking that mitzvos be mentioned from time to time in the yeshiva world. As for mentioning Hashem, that's a dream. I have sat through multi-hour fundraising dinners for yeshivas where Hashem wasn't mentioned even 1 time! That includes Ohr Yehoshua dinners. 

The Chofetz Chaim, who was a yeshiva man, wrote an entire book for baalei batim about mitzvos. Evidently, he deemed the topic worthwhile. Times changed from the days of the Vilna Gaon, in whose time everyone did mitzvos, but maybe didn't study enough Torah. 

And long before that, Shlomo the king wrote, "The end of the matter, everything having been heard, fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the entire man." So I am going with Shlomo, the wisest of men, and with the Chofetz Chaim. We must value the mitzvos. And we talk about whatever we value. And if we don't talk about it, we don't value it. 

A Russian describes the BT experience

 "Hoped for better, turned out as always." Viktor Chernomyrdin

the difference

 This woman did a prank on her mother, asking people to honk and flip off her mother during a drive. Here are some of the hilarious and clever comments people left.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Rx6cfGtDyoA

She went from angry driver, to the Road Rage Warrior, to full on conspiracy theorist in one short drive.

She went from mildly annoyed, to truly angry, to genuinely concerned for the entire planet

“You know what? Fuck you! You goof!” Has got to be the best mom line in history

If I did this as a child I probably wouldn't be an adult right now.

You would not see funny and fun comments like this if the commenters were frum. You'd hear, what about civud av 'vaim? This is a chilul Hashem. It's not respectful. It's a sakanah.

All shame and being uptight. 

There's no humor, no fun, no happiness in the frum world. 

Doesn't have to be that way. But it is.  

In my view, narcissistic abuse means essentially that you are living in somebody else's world, prevented from being or developing yourself. Your own ability to think is crippled and your emotions twisted and repressed. This can happen when a megalomaniac has significant power over you. A parent certainly has significant power, but so can a religious leader or team of them with whom you have daily contact, particularly if you surrender your free will to those people as baalei teshuvah sometimes do. It’s that much worse if all this happens in a controlled and isolated environment. When religion is imposed on you forcefully, playing on your sense of guilt and fear, tremendous damage can occur to the psyche. You are trying to reconfigure your entire life to match a demanding religion to which you have opened the doors to your soul. However, when that religion is portrayed to you in a distorted way, a way that robs you of your individuality, autonomy and perhaps even your basic humanity, then you can become a kind of cripple. You are no longer you, and you can’t even make basic decisions about your own life. Your judgement has been undermined and your instincts shut out of the room of your life.

Kim Jong Un

 

chesed

 

childhood training

 

This is interesting and you'll know why. 

narcissists are killers

 

It's a death cult. They want to kill everything. 

affirmations

 

An affirmation for dating

 

I never force anyone to choose me. If you think you can find something better elsewhere then go ahead. I’m not holding you back. Life’s too short to hang on to someone who is not sure they want to stay. I believe in freedom, in the truth of feelings. If you must stay, let it be your heart tells you this is where you belong. Not because I asked you too. I want to be a choice. Not a default option. I deserve someone who sees my value, who understands what I bring to their life. I don’t want someone who stays with me out of fear of loneliness or out of habit. I want someone who stays for who I am, not who you want me to be. The door is always open. You are free to leave at any time.

Have You Lost Yourself?

Proof: if you are feeling that you are not yourself – then who are you and who is doing the estrangement? The narcissist’s introject.

Introjecting the entraining narcissist generates a schizoid state (emptiness) which mimics the narcissist’s.

Schizoid state as adaptation to narcissistic abuse. Split negative internal objects become identified with the Self and the victim defends against these negative thoughts by dissociating the Self altogether. 

Yet, if the narcissist’s introject is in charge, takes over – why the estrangement? Owing to encounters with repressed former self.

Approach-avoidance repetition compulsion with an objectified, mythologized, idealized self (relic of narcissist’s idealization and nostalgia).

Alienating self-consciousness and introspection.

 

set times

Granted, a “career in Torah” might not be for everybody; not everyone is on that level or can even aspire to reach it. Still, when you do study Torah, you can attain it, even if you do so once in the morning and once in the evening. Because when you do study, you can ensure nothing else exists in your world besides Torah. We see numerous examples of this in human nature: when someone decisively resolves that for a particular minute, fifteen minutes, or an hour, he’s completely dedicated to a specific thing – whatever it may be – he can indeed succeed. It’s entirely possible, and you need not be anyone special to achieve it.

But this raises the question: How can it be considered a “career in Torah” when you know, that just before you sat down to study and immediately afterwards you’ll be in a completely different state of mind? This is explained by the Alter Rebbe in Tanya that a union with G-d exists eternally above. When you engage in Torah and its commandments, although there was a time before you put on tefillin, for example, which is symbolic of all of Torah, and a time when you will remove them, and no longer wear them, nevertheless the “union” with God you created through them is eternal, an everlasting union.

There’s nothing miraculous to it; in fact, it’s quite self-evident. If time and space were both created for the purpose of fulfilling Torah and its precepts this is proof that Torah and its precepts exist on a higher plane than time and space. So, when you fulfill a commandment even though it was performed within a specific timeframe and not earlier or later – as stipulated by Torah – its effect is not subject to these limitations, given that the commandments are higher than time and space, which were only created for their sake, they are higher than the limitations of time and space.

The lesson from all of this is clear: everyone has their set times for Torah study, which they will surely make their best effort to increase. But practically speaking, your Torah study should reflect a “career in Torah.” 

Lubavitcher Rebbe

a respectful civilized conversation

 

Remember these? Been a while huh?

forty for understanding

 “At forty for understanding, at fifty to [give] counsel." Avos 5:21

So how does a 29 year old baal teshuvah, six years out of Trinity College have a right to start his own yeshiva, design it in a way that's unlike every other yeshiva for baalei teshuvah, be the main disseminator of hashkafa, stick it in on a barren field with no other shuls or yeshivas around, fail to have a library, fail to have any guest speakers, not take the bochurim to meet any other rabbis, and ban the few other rabbis on staff (the ones who are able to teach Gemara unlike him) from talking to students?

And the answer is, he doesn't. 

control of your life

The fastest way to take control of your life is to stop controlling everyone around you. You have no idea how time and energy and attention you are wasting trying to control other people. You have no idea how much energy you are burning through thinking about, worrying about, obsessing about what other people are doing, what they’re not doing, what they’re feeling, all which you have zero control over.[1]

 Mel Robbins, Youtube shorts, mIenms0ifuo and 57xRRIzY-3o. She calls this the “Let Them” theory.

---

[1] Youtube shorts, mIenms0ifuo.

Jessica Kirson on the Jewish personality sometimes

 Why I HATE performing for OLD JEWISH people in Florida — Jessica Kirson (full special part 2/7) (youtube.com)

encouragement

 here's tom brady making sure his receivers are not discouraged

these are muscle men who make millions of dollars

so what about a  jewish boy who goes to yeshiva and the entire day he is nothing but discouraged?

that's what happens in most bt yeshivas

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/B7d7OxERgSI?feature=share

NO SHORTCUTS

 “Lest the people reconsider when they see war and return to Egypt. And Hashem led the people around by way of the desert” (13:17-18)  Egypt was the source of heresy and immorality, and the exodus from Egypt involved abandoning the tumah of Egypt in preparation for matan Torah. In every generation anyone who repents undertakes his own private yetzias mitzrayim from the tumah of his previous deeds.  When someone wants to become a baal teshuva he may reconsider when he sees war, the battle which has to fight against the evil inclination, he may then change his mind about changing his lifestyle and revert to his private “Egyptian” way of life. That is why Hashem led the people around by way of the desert. One cannot take a shortcut all in one go. Teshuva has to be undertaken gradually. If one takes the roundabout route, one will not be frightened by seeing the distance that still has to be covered. On the other hand, although this is the general rule, each individual should assess his own level, and if he feels capable of accepting the yoke of Torah completely in one go, he should do so, based on the guidance of gedolei Torah.

Based on droshos by Rav Moshe Sternbuch shlita, raavad of Yerushalayim. To receive these weekly divrei Torah email benipray@netvision.net.il. 

פ' בשלח תשפ"א 

watch out for bt rabbis

 Rav Avigdor Miller said, “Now when a convert or a ba’al teshuva comes to the Jewish people, he has to know that he has to be a follower – he has to listen.  But sometimes a ba’al teshuva comes in and he takes over.  Right away he wants to teach all the old-time Jews how to be real Jews!  He knows better!  So what does he do?  He follows the models that he formed in the gentile world or in the non-religious world.  It happens.”[1]

---

[1] Rav Avigdor Miller, Tape # 30, August 1973. 

where will you be

 You are Joe from Chicago. You start keeping mitzvos and slowly incorporating Torah values into your thinking. You don't have to become a Mir Yeshiva man or a Belzer Chosid or a Religious Zionist, replacing your wardrobe and your speech patterns with theirs. You can if you want, but you are not required to. It might not even be advisable. You might be told to forget your career plans, drop your hobbies, lose your friends, and even to cut off relations with your family and to dedicate your life to Gemara study. You might even be tempted if you are enjoying the Gemara study and feel that you have entered a new world that is embracing you. But beware, all of that might fade to large extent and then where will you be?  

The trajectory of feminism

grandmother - If you are happy I am happy.

mother - If I am happy, you are happy.

wife - I am happy.

a fair chance

 

a fair chance

 "I think that the definition of a good society is where everybody has a fair chance at life's happiness. Now as you know  most people mess it up. They have the chance but for this or that reason they mess it up. And they ruin their lives even though they had a chance."

Norman Finkelstein, INTERVIEW: Norman Finkelstein | The sickness of capitalism, Israel's war in Gaza & German complicity, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__W0B_8ZoA, 1:05:32

If she balks, I walk.

To the sick mind healthy people are boring. They want excitement. They want to be cool. They don't want to live in places like Montana or West Virginia. Too many Churches. They want Hollywood, Manhattan, Miami. You know a person by what he wants. And shallow, pretentious people need excitement to feel alive. They don't know what to do with themselves in quiet places. They don't want to be a state assemblyman in North Dakota. They want to work for a Congressman on the Beltway in DC near all the psychopaths who vote for military aid to dictatorships.

With Orthodox Jews, the sick ones, it's New York or Israel. Every other place is just laughable. But the joke is on them, because New York grinds you down with greed. And Israel is all war, war of every kind, all day long war, but mostly a war against religion. 

Next time I go on a shidduch, I'll ask, how would you feel about living in St. Louis, Missouri. If she balks, I walk. 

a fair chance

 "I think that the definition of a good society is where everybody has a fair chance at life's happiness. Now as you know  most people mess it up. They have the chance but for this or that reason they mess it up. And they ruin their lives even though they had a chance."

Norman Finkelstein, INTERVIEW: Norman Finkelstein | The sickness of capitalism, Israel's war in Gaza & German complicity, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__W0B_8ZoA, 1:05:32

Sfas Emes - doing mitzvos takes primacy over studying them

 

Baba Matzia 85

Yehuda HaNasi was punished with intestinal problems for saying "Go for this you were created," to a terrified calf that was on the way to the slaughter house. He was cured only after he later instructed a maidservant to spare a weasel that she was chasing from the house, saying "His compassion is on all His works." 

Believe it or not this is part of Judaism. I suspect that the Litvish world picked up some of the cruelty of Eastern Europe and, in their way, attempted to convert it to religious philosophy. And so they have made a mantra of pain, that everything is supposed to be painful. When you go to these guys for aitzah, they tell you to take the most painful course of action. Of course, they don't do that to themselves. Hypocrisy they didn't get from Eastern Europe. That's just yetzer hara. 

The Baal Shem Tov came long to return us to the ways of old, a Judaism that is suffused with mercy and love. So of course, some Litvacks went to war against this as they learned from the Russians a tendency toward combativeness and arrogance. 

narcissisim

 word salad, not answering a question directly, not being able to explain the why of any behaviornot taking responsibility for misbehavior, lacking empathy -- showing only a drop of empathy that is dropped whenever the pressure is on

selfishness, grandiosity, attention seeking, manipulativeness,

vengefulness, obsessing about appearance and reputation

showing a nice face to the world that contradicts the one shown at home

shallow emotion, shallow intellect

blaming others for misbehavior

hot temper, easily triggered

disorganization in one's life

domination of others

Aliyah?