63: I Used To Wear Pink Shirts

[Music] hi this is deborah rolofsky and welcome to the roblox show thank you thank you thank you both of you and uh we have a response this week we have sponsored anonymously leloy nishmas my father not my father but the anonymous father uh marsha aaron ben rebu official someone who very much enjoyed listening to robert yalowski as we would drive back and forth for treatments during his very short brutal battle with cancer um i i have to tell you how how touched i am whenever i hear these things somebody actually put out a book about her battle with cancer and in the book she discusses how listening to my shirum helped her get through the process i've had this from other people um you know when i used to have cassette tape someone told me that they spoke to kupaku khalim here in israel to see if they would buy my tapes for people who are sick because it gives them and that's such a tremendous thing it continues i also appreciated the hours of shurim available for listening during my year of shiver thank you very alaska for inspiration and laughs along the way um i someone told me once that aikla's in brooklyn during the sphere normally when they put you on hold they put on music but during the sphere they used to put on my tapes so the guy told me he said i used to call up just to be put on hold so i could listen to the things you cheap jew could have just bought one but anyway but uh so thank you so much for that and tremendous inspiration well we're we're underway now we had our anniversary show in our second year i'm a little more comfortable now with the general forum that we're doing and so as i established all the way back in the very first podcast as you recall sitting in the corner of my bedroom uh looking like i was making a hostage video i discussed that i'm not only going to be doing the retoria of other things to discuss for example i wanted to do recipes um i wanted to share now that it's it's uh it's getting cold soup weather now personally i think you can eat soup anytime i don't know why there's this concept that soup is only reserved for cold weather there's a bagel store here in harnauf and they only make soup during the winter some you can't get soup i happen to enjoy soup all the time but um so i just want to share with you my onion soup recipe because it is the best uh let me get onto my soapbox a bit because i'm going to be ranting today full disclosure um and that is that i look up onion soup recipes and i can't tell you how many times i see onion soup mix in it now if i wanted to make an onion soup what's the point of putting onion soup mix in it making chicken soup and putting a chicken soup mix there's no point to making it just make the mix you can't take a chicken and vegetables and water and make a chicken soup you have to add in chicken soup mix this disturbs me if it was like when i was back in yeshiva and most of the soup was just soup mix and they would have like you have a tea bag with a little string and you would dip it into hot water so they would take a pokey and tie a little string to it and dip it into the soup you know so we could say now it was flaky again osum used to make uh these little uh instant soup mixes and one of them said bisari one of the police came at the time said there's there's not enough flashes and it's because of the busserie don't worry about it you know they they must have just like you know done the the the little teabag pokey trick you know and dipped it in you know and so i could say now officially it's it's bizarrey but um uh i i i'm i'm not happy with uh soup mix the fact matter is somebody wrote me i was really very surprised when i gave my breaded chicken recipe uh last week they said oh no wonder you had a heart attack and i was like why so a little mayonnaise because you could i could do a little mayonnaise you know uh they said well you put in onion soup mix says msg onion soup mix was a quarter of a cup and went in for three chickens and you think that's what's gonna do me in trust me if at the end of my life i look back and they say yeah it was the msg and the onion soup mix that he sprinkled on top of the chicken that did him in i will be surprised anyway but i don't like it because i i i don't think it makes a soup it's not a it's not cool a soup anyway so here's what i do um i cut up three large onions or four medium onions or seven very small i don't really don't know you'll have to work that out for yourself this is proportions and i cut them into slices now full disclosure sometimes i can't cut them all the way because they're too big so i cut the onion in half and then i cut them into half rings and a little bit of or a little bit of oil you could use olive oil if you're nervous and i fry them up until they get dark and then i sprinkle a little flour on top a little bit of flour doesn't have to be white flour it could be a whole wheat flour it could be spelt f-l-o-u-r spelt flour [Laughter] anyway sprinkle that on top just so it becomes a little more of a thick of a paste and then i pour in two liters of water i leave it stir it up wait for it to boil when it comes to a boil i then take three to four red onions depending on the size and i chop them up those aren't sliced i chop them up i add them in stir them in add another two liters when that boils up then i add um some dry red wine how much like this okay so i guess it depends on the size of the bottle the opening of the bottle and how round the circumference of your pot is but that's the amount it goes like this like this over here and stir that in and then i add uh salt pepper and curry that's it and i stir it up and i may add another two liters at this point depending on the size of the pot i let it boil up and uh you let it thicken at some point you have to taste it and see if it needs a little more salt a little more pepper a little more curry you know and when it's done give valdic if you want you can eat it just the way it is you want to eat it french style put some grated cheese and some croutons put the soup on top of it you don't need to do that that's less healthy but the soup itself is really it's very good it's very filling and it's good on a on a cold day there's some onion soup it's always a big hit here in the house when i make it but that's not what i want to talk about this week um i'll tell you what i want to talk about this week and this is what inspired me i've been teaching massive charm for years now at this point i teach masil shasharm to ladies in harnoff um 11 30 and sunday morning i teach massive sushiram to men and women in telestone uh eight o'clock um on tuesday nights and uh i give a daffy me every morning at 8 30. now i spoke about when i talked about getting fulfillment from learning torah i got a number of people who said well i've never really had a really fulfilling tomorrow's show i would like to participate and i say listen i don't record the gemara share because it is dynamic you have to be part of it i said you could call in if you want there is an actual fellow he's an emt and he works at night and he calls in to be part of the sheriff but most people said not so someone gave a suggestion which i happen to think is fascinating and he said okay so then let's do an online share belie nether in the beginning of january when we make our cma shots i will be making available details will follow uh achabura online um there'll be a nominal fee and i have to set up the computer so that everybody can be in a little window so i can see who you are i once did one of these things where people could just add comments it's not the same thing i'm sitting there looking at myself i already know what i look like not that i couldn't spend hours doing that but uh but uh that's that's doesn't have the dynamism is looking at the puzzled looks on people's faces as i discuss anita doing heset on and that absolute fulfillment that i as a market share gets from knowing that i'm talking about things that almost nobody understands or cares about and then it's my job of course to make that relevant and show how within that is really the secret of our nashoma i'm just kidding but um but whatever the topic happens to be obviously i'm we're starting in broncos that's a that's a much easier one it's a no-brainer it says made for me half of the gemaras are about going to the bathroom so you can imagine the opportunities that that presents for spirituality but uh so we're we're going to hopefully uh do it over there um but i do give it up for me and in fact there have been some requests that i do in masilis sharm khabura online because again i i happen to think that masel shasharm is one of those swarm that is so underappreciated um because it's imminently practical but people don't know how to make it practical and uh i have been teaching it for over 30 years and i uh i think it's a tremendous opportunity for people to really grow in their voters hashem it's so practical the messelstochon parikh aleph he mentions that you cannot save yourself from the itsahara alaba gadola now what is hashgaffer so hashgaffer isla the way you do uh la shkief the way you you do that outlook i'm not sure exactly how to is that you get up on top of a mountain and you see the whole view that's hashgrapher hashgraph is to see the whole thing that's hashgaffer and this and this reminded me of a whole bunch of stories that have happened to me that i want to talk about but i want to when i teach this idea about hashgaffer the way that the word is used today is like so often the exact opposite of what the word means yeah because of allu is libero moshe shapiro used to say this all the time when you say kosovo is a board and you have to carve into it and he says in modern hebrew we took the word luah to mean something that you immediately erase the exact antithesis of what the word is supposed to mean and sometimes words and the words of humpty dumpty and um alice to the looking glass words mean what i want them to mean the united states just took out the head of isis who by all descriptions was an evil man and the washington post in their headline describes him as a muslim religious leader scholar muslim religious scholar it's like uh who developed a tremendous empire so uh somebody wrote it and said that that's similar to saying adolf hitler you know a um a aspiring uh landscape artist um who established a very large empire where's what we wanted to mean yeah one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist and uh and and uh that's why it was napoleon bonaparte who said history is the events that are decided upon by the victor so um you know words that words are a tricky thing yeah hashgaffer today so i went to speak in a school once on behalf of a seminary and they said they said what is your school's hashgaffer i said what do you mean he says you know you are i said no no i understood with the word man i just i don't know what the question means you know your hashkafa so we believe in god we believe in torah we believe in your shamayim we believe in helping everybody grow it no no no you're a hashgaffer i said what do you mean do you say hello in your mouth's mood or not that's it that's your hush that's what it's been reduced to now i was discussing the question of saying hello matsumut and olugola which was training program i used to teach budding rabbis the question came up i said listen it's a halal issue like everything else there's some person will say yes and some post couldn't say no and i pointed out that salvation from yeshua university didn't say hello and there was a person in the room who was a muslim from yeshua university he had never been in the ramshire mary meiselman who was the rev's nephew he always says whenever everyone quotes the rough ask him how many years were you in the sheer yeah he never was in the room i don't have you ever met the ref because he was he was not well at that point he says to me that's a lie and you know it now do i get things wrong i get things wrong all the time yeah i'm old enough to remember when a president got something wrong that they had this great word they used to say the president misspoke now it's a lie anything donald trump says a lie he's a lie he said there's a lie you know it can't be he misspoke can't say he's a liar says that's a lie and you know it calling me a deliberate life i said my father-in-law got smirk from the rav and he said he didn't say halloween he said that's a lie i said robert granovsky who we had on the show when he was in university he says i was in a minion with the rub on your mother's morning and say hello my phone he says it's a lie and i was lucky because the new director of oligola happened to be sitting in the room and he said i was in a minion with the roof on your mat and didn't say hello i said is he a liar too i figure let's see if we get a little interest going he says all the closest tell me them of the rav said they didn't say alan everybody knows now i didn't know it at the time i have a i have a copy of hershel shakhtar's book my final look at it for me on the roof and uh i looked it up he doesn't say exactly what this young man said he didn't say that said a cursor and a blasphemer of the name of god that's different than saying you should say it i know that's it it's fine it's a fine distinction there if you can see the difference between saying you should say it or if you do say it you're a blasphemer like i say that's a subtlety that sometimes was but i didn't have that available to me at the time but at the end of class i said it's inappropriate for you to call me a liar in front of a shirt that i'm giving to rabbis i said i heard something years ago from people who are close to a biak of kaminsky rubiah kaminetsky held that the havorah te mani was the most correct one because since the yemeni jews had been isolated from most communities they weren't affected as much obviously european jews were affected by the languages they were exposed to farty jews were affected by the countries they were in and the tamil name weren't affected by anybody so for example svardim have a and then which are guttural letters that is in ashkenazi are not able to do but they only have uh they pronounce the comets as a pata they don't have that or that we have obviously if there's two different ones they should have two different sounds so there's uh there's uh differences between the two my name they have a pata they have a comets they have a yes they're both they have a gimmel and a jimmy uh they have a resh like the israelis and the sweden do and they have a race like ashkenazim do they have a tough and a thuff so they have like shabbos they have uh uh all kind of different sounds so he felt that this was the closest to the correct type of ball right because had the most sounds did it so he used to say krishna over again with the taiwanese pronunciation i have pointed out many times i am not pesach crone i don't check out my stories i've been telling this story for 40 years i don't know if it's true and i don't really care but i heard it i say it over right i said listen i heard this once if there was a talmud of yakov in the in the sheer i don't think he would call me a liar he might say no it's not really true i've heard that too uh you know rib yakov didn't really do that whatever but i can't imagine you call me a liar and he said to me whether you say halloween is more important than saying krishna twice a day i said rabbi surely you don't mean that i mean krishna is the pronouncement of everything we believe in in judaism it's what jews go to their death saying it's what we teach our children and when they're little yeah in in their rooms and they say she's my israel and he said again whether you say hello it's more important than saying krishna twice a day i said rabbi surely you're familiar with the fact that krishna is a diarisa and halal on yom smooth is at best that durable it's not he says whether you say hello and you almost it's what was that great right he says because it defines your entire judaism wow there was an ncsy tour to israel one was more modern orthodox one of the leaders and one of the leaders was more what i guess we would call yeshivish and uh he made arrangements to take the kids to meet different golem the boston arbor scheinberg like this he had learned in the gush so he went to his rebbe river luxemstein and he says he's only taking him to their golem he's not taking him to our godom i want them to come and see you so listen said who cares we agree on 99 of the issues and the one percent that we disagree wouldn't come up anyway he says let him go to the boston rebbe he speaks english his english is easier to understand than mine so um you know the the the hashgaffer so the reason i brought all this up well this is by way of introduction of what i want to talk about today as you may have noticed um i'm wearing a hat i don't usually do that um there was an exception of course uh on my benezemann podcast i had a baseball cap for benezema venezuela because we were on deal but for the most part i don't why did i put this on today this is what i was thinking about because when she took him come up they asked the question what's the boys hashgrapher i said well what do you want to know does he wear a black hat well that's not really a hashtag that's a head covering right um so you can argue it represents an entire philosophy and sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not very left like to tell the story where his son went to a crader and came home and said my rabbi said that anyone who wears a kippah sugar can't have any urushimayan because it seeps out of the holes he says i can't believe the arula hashem [Laughter] you know it's a it's a head covering give a perspective so so i of course so people always say to me no what they mean is it represents a whole series of sometimes yes but i know girls who just want to know that the boy wears a black hat and doesn't care about anything else there's somebody i don't know if he wants me to mention his name now because uh you know based on the world we're in today but for years this was a major person he used to wear a kippah sugar and a hat and i remember i asked him once i said why do you want to keep past we got you know just out of curiosity he's he says i learned in yeshiva and the rashiva said to me why you're going to keep pastor and i put on a black yamaka and he just laughed and he says you can wear anything you want now i don't know why this person looks so silly in a black yamaga but for whatever reason he did but he would keep us we got a black hat so what is he hashgraphically i uh i'm going to take this off now like i say all of that was just for my two-minute introduction anyway but uh lash keefe to get on top of a mountain and look over the entire field i learned the new shiva khabib i've mentioned this many times they try to keep it quiet but i was there i wasn't there long enough to get smirk because they said the amount of time it would take me they would have to give it to me posthumously and then they could just like you know chip it into my tombstone rabbi i decided to go to a more accelerated program like i mentioned last week i wanted to get a discount on my phone so uh but um they didn't dress in black and white and it's not just they didn't dress in black and white it was part of their hush coffee used to say look at the pictures and i challenge you go look at the pictures of the mirror in europe and and and slobodka and the yeshivas in europe they didn't dress in black and white the rest of yeshiva dressed in black and white everybody else were colored shirts colored hats when i went to have a time in the 1970s we were known as the yeshiva with the pink shirts now that's not really true it depended on the color of your suit i haven't have a gray suit so pink shirt went very nicely with it had a grey pink tie that went with it you know and with that of course i would wear my gray hat with the brown suit i'd wear my brown hat but we didn't wear black hats and in the summertime white straw hats the entire yeshiva was a sea of white straw hats that's what we wore so shiva felt that this influence of dressing in black and white was contrary to the messora that he had received he felt this was something that came from the khasidim that filtered in and it wasn't our mesora now he was really big on this on a lot of things our messora and he would always say my father had a message that he got from him and they would trace it back to the guru and they get up and this is how we do things this is our hashtag this is our messiah we're very big on that i mean hasidim not really i meet people who dress like hasidim and i say oh is your family they say no i said oh so which qasidas are you he says none i just like the wish do you want to be a cousin or just dress like one yes the barbers are in school casitas can teach you how to dress and look like a cousin and you never have to be a cousin it's so shitty it's so external it's so but this was so important anyway so years later i went to uh they were diving into the castle whatever the occasion was and me and another old guy we came in a white straw hat and everybody was wearing black hats i did a double take wait that was the only one i did another thing i said was haste what's going on over here they said the shiva eased up said why because the boys couldn't get she took him you show up at some house in flatbush and you want some guy to go you're going out with this girl you know nice business girl and you walk in you know with a great great great suit and a great hat and a pink shirt they don't care how much lumbers you've got you understand that you don't look it you don't lick it yeah and the most important thing is to look good and you look marvelous marvelous you gotta look good sheesh so uh i may have told this story already i don't remember i came to itself and i i wanted to learn in the kayla i came to a particular coyote and couldn't get a harvest i didn't know why and uh i was dressed yeshivish i had brown slacks tan jacket powder blue shirt nice uh blue tan tie brought it all together had my hush puppies and my white straw hat so i found out later they thought i was a tourist nobody nobody thought no i was dressed like a regular yoshima guy in oz but anyway what can i tell you i went to yeshiva where we lived in color not in black and white so uh so i came to its shell and i started to get the lay of the land so i uh so i switched to dark samba suits and white shirts i had this hound toothed jacket i eventually gave it away but it was one of the most beautiful things i ever had i love that give me just a moment anyway so fine i got myself a black hat i got black shoes you know i got a black trench coat you know and um and uh okay i started to to fit in you know i started saying this started pulling on my beard you know i used to rub my hands a lot that's very important it's an important move okay anyway go back to america a guy sees me and says it's all there but it doesn't look right i said why it says you smile too much [Laughter] you have to really look miserable i've never mastered that i'm sorry to say but um but anyway but somebody says to me you've become one of them i was like what do you mean you change the way you dress to fit in with them you becoming one of them invasion of the body snatches i said what does that bother you and the person said because you should be free to dress any way that you want i said you see i practice what you preach i am dressing however i want if i'm going to dress different than everybody else i need a good reason i need a reason to be different you know so okay you go to a classroom and everybody's wearing suits and ties you know and you're wearing a clown outfit okay so it's because you want to be missing et cetera but if you go to a regular dinner party clown outfit lucy you've got some explaining to do why would you do that you need you need to have a reason if you're out to freshman at seaboard means that if you're going to to be different you need a reason for it but but does the hat represent your philosophy i always thought it was an amazing thing one of the greatest social commentaries of all time was in a film that came out in 1939 it was uh it was popular at the time was called the wizard of oz and at the end scarecrow wants to get a brain and the lion wants to get courage and the tin man wants to get a heart and they come to the wizard and he says to the scarecrow and one of the greatest moments of social commentary scarecrow there are people who have no more brains than you have but they have something you don't have a college degree and so from the university wise and he goes a square times b is creating c squared i'm a genius listen as my father said once if you're an idiot you'll be an idiot with a college degree says uh line there are people have no more courage than you but they have something you don't have a medal that gives him a medal now he's got courage tin man people have no more heart than you have but they have some you don't have a testimonial you know so give you a reward it gives him a plaque and gets a little tear in his eye you know because now he's a wonderful person this is how it works and there are people who have no more you're shamayim than you do but there's only you don't have a black hat i taught in yeshiva once which catered to beginners and they had a rule if you came from a family where they were black hats and you had a black hat it was okay but during your first year you could not put on a black hat because it's too easy externalities i put on the black hat now i'm from there was a guy um in our summer he looked like the biggest tomahawk ever so he had a long great beard and had pace behind the isn't it he couldn't read olive face but he figured out how to dress the part do you want to be a tamil khakham or just dress like what here at the barbers on yeshiva we can teach you how to fake everybody out i used to teach when i used to teach balichuva you know i said look it's all in the appearance nobody cares it's only appearance you can't say um ramban and instead of saying rambam people say ramban the ramban you give yourself away in a second so we used to practice rambam rambam rambam ramban ramban and rambam rambam i said this tricks you know when you're learning gemara look at the massachusetts and then say i think this was a gemara and yuvamis and people oh you think so you think [Laughter] there was a guy he didn't know how to learn at all but everyone thought he was so smart because no matter what they were doing he'd go so what's the hamamina which has to be a great trick it's a great trick i you can do this in a conversation yeah um it doesn't matter what anybody says it doesn't matter you can try this doesn't know what anybody says you could say yeah but that doesn't explain why and people immediately go into an explanation even if it doesn't require an explanation we're eating at six okay but that doesn't explain why well um i figured that i want to give everybody time to get ready for bed and then i done this to my kids once so one time they did it on me but you never give out a weapon unless you have the antidote you know that so they said to me once okay that doesn't explain why and i go exactly all right i'm tired i wore myself out [Laughter] um this uh this concludes our show second show of the second year and the second hour of the second day um if you want to find out more about the show you can go to my website roberalofsky.com you could leave comments uh only positive ones i don't want to hear any negative information yeah i love inspiring stories i like to hear how you've changed my life and how wonderful you are and and particularly how um as you grow older you have really uh grown to um look so much more distinguished is what they say about old men anyway um and uh and somebody just wrote me they wanted to know if they could buy rabiolovsky mugs and if not would i mind if they made them themselves no by all means we are not selling paraphernalia yet so feel free if you want to take the logo and make your own ravioli show mug so you have that option anyway you can leave comments uh you could uh subscribe we're gonna be putting out some special things as i mentioned um starting with the first year in review i i i started going through the past podcast there were over 60 of them and uh it's so hard to pick out the highlights it's like where do you take the highlights it's like trying to find the best of the best of anyway um and you can find out about upcoming events i'm going to america november 18th through december 3rd if you want to have an event with one of the most inspiring and at the same time intellectually challenging relevant and humorous presenters and you have a lot of money [Laughter] you can contact me uh and when you find out who those people are who are discerning enough to take advantage of this opportunity it'll be posted in upcoming events and of course if you want to sponsor events you go to raviolovsky.com podcast and click on the sponsor and episode button that's it for this week i'm deborah ralofsky and this is the raviolowski show