Episode 9: Persimmon Nisa

[Music] hi this is Revere allow ski and welcome to our special Hanukkah edition of the rabbi Orlovsky show we have not lit the candles because I don't know which night of the week you're watching this but feel free there's the menorah it's all set at any night that you want just feel free to take your own personal candle and bring it to the screen and you can light or as many candles as you need but Hashem so before we get down to business I have to share first of all a tremendous hiker issetov to people who write me in to give physic your physic you know because I don't have any real numbers on this the last time we did numbers we were in the thousands but I don't know exactly how many it is now because people are watching and listening in so many different sites somebody told me big download for somebody else and then give it to them you know it said I don't have any you know access and and I just keep getting more and more but I got a call this week that was so powerful and poignant a fella called me up and he says you know I really called you up as soon as I get up from Shiva but you were in America I lost a child and what you spoke about on the podcast about us dealing with our own personal suffering is what got me the strength to be able to get through it and I listened to it over and over again so you know just keep doing this and I'm sitting here in my living room this is my own actual living room with my own farm behind me as you can see we got a bigger store and poster and you know just you know you have no idea what you do now this has been happening me for years there was a time when a guy told me he was in Lakewood yeshiva and they had bins filled of cassette tapes if you are among the younger people before there were downloads there were CDs before there was CDs there were actual cassette tapes these were little boxes that had tape in it that would go around and record anyway so he says your box of cassette tapes was always empty people were always taking them out and we're always listening to them and to me it's amazing that you know you can sit and you could today the you can sit and you can talk and you could say something and it reaches so many different people if somebody walks of life and you push it don't know where it goes the Emmis is this is the table arrived all right this fellow this so the story goes this fellow killed somebody he went to the roof and he says how do I do cut power he says fine go into the forest find the biggest rock you can find and carry it into into the town square and he worked so hard to carry it in and he brings it in and he says to rub what should I do now he says carry it back and that was this cut part so person says I'm about loshon Hara what can I do he says take a feather pillow and slid it open and let all the feathers out in the middle of the town and he does and he goes back to the roughest is what should I do now he says gather up all of the feathers he says I can't find them they've blown all around and he said that's the problem with Russian art you don't know where it goes you don't know where it goes so you know the truth the toy will arrive yeah we spoke last week about the Koyuk of toys and if the coil of D bore to do bad how much more so is the caddy bore to do good and the fact that I say anything that gives anybody any physican and meaning and you know and no maybe a smile you know I mean maybe a laugh out loud but is so somebody walking down the street right here in my own neighborhood carrying their phone laughing and said what's that you showed up I'm watching your father's podcast so who knows who knows where it goes and what it does and wash em or crush em okay so I want to talk a little bit about Hanukkah and this past week I spoke for the first time in Mali Adumim this has been a truly amazing month for the first time in my life I spoke in Staten Island and I spoke in Malaya domine I don't mean to compare the two obviously one is Erica Kadosh and the other one is in the stuff haha I'm just kidding of course it's trellis Kadosh it says essica douches hain the Mishnah in Calum execution saying the first one is Eric's job it shows Kadosh no place else is Kadosh so they had discourse to speak my lady I mean my old friend Ilana Adler who had this course of working with in in seminar seminar why you Tory leadership seminar many years ago a truly talented funny intelligent and he's probably watching extremely good-looking individual who I've had this course of working with what ask us to be able to go to my lady the minute I met so many people that I know who live in Malaya the moment we had a very large turnout and I started by saying as I orphaned through these kind of circumstances that it just confirms what I've always thought there's nothing to do in Malaya to me but somebody came up to me at the end and I you know we spoke last week about Shukla how easy it comes to some people and for me it's very good I forgot who told me this if you're out there you know and you want to send me an e-mail I'll be more than happy to I mention it but he mentioned the fruit that in America is known as the persimmon yeah here in Israel it's called an afar Simone now the Gemara refers to chemin afire Simone that's not this persimmon it's something else but this modern-day persimmon is known as a fire Simone interesting interesting you know a lot of the words in modern Hebrew was because we had words that we didn't know what to do with them and we had things we didn't have any names for us so we put them together yeah so that's that's the way some words got put together but you know yes welcome hey nothing's for nothing so the Jewish people tend to call this an affair Simone and he said afar Simone sounds strangely like Pierre su-mei yeah the farce the the far same like Chris to Manisa yeah publicizing the miracle which is one of the things we need to do on Konica and he said to me that if you were to cut the persimmon open and I will do that right now with my heat vision yep so then you take a look inside and you'll see I hope you can pick this up a eight eight lines drawn in the middle of the persimmon persimmon pursue may Nisa eight coincidence I have no idea but I thought that was really really interesting yeah and I wanted to share that with you on this special Hanukkah edition now you can all go out and buy your traditional Hanukkah persimmons to be able to add to you a holiday season yeah and for all I know it will help to absorb some of that oil that you're eating someone said to me you know it's a minute to eat oil on Connick I said yes there is I said how do you know the person asked me when you have eaten enough I said when you wake up in the morning and you're sweating oil then you know that you're more or less reached that point so here in our last night was our first night of Hanukkah now that I think about it probably everyplace else as well and we we made our first batch of latkes and they came out perfect crispy and golden and so nice someone told me the shame of Misha finding they said why is the Minich to make latkes to fry potatoes and oil and he said because that's all they had in Eastern Europe yeah they fried it on Hanukkah and Pesach they pretended it was carp as a green vegetable and the rest time they used it his furniture that was it oh they had what potatoes yeah in fact hello interesting historical fact one of the reasons for kidney is is because you can make it into a flower that's where we don't have corn make corn flour you could have a pea flour bean flour yet my daughter is on a very careful diet yeah and and she she's amazing all the different types of flours that I found out one could make out of stuff well of course all of Pesach today is potato flour and the magic of potato flour is unbelievable yeah I was at a gateways for Pesach and they had lasagna and noodles and cheese and pizza and all kinds of incredible things that you can make out of potato flour the magic of potato flour so of course there was a question what to do with this you can make it into flour so the higher Adam wanted to asar potatoes as kidneys and I don't remember who it was who said to him but said then change the name of your safer from kaya Adam to higher kartoffel now since there are people who are watching this who may not have the same mastery of Hebrew and Yiddish than I do Kim move on so exude me for you what I just said his book was called higher Adam right Adam as a person he says caught kaya kartoffel which is Yiddish for a potato because you're more concerned about potatoes and people and you find certain areas where all they eat Oh potatoes right which could not have been covered by the original tikona of kidneys because potatoes are native to North America they brought it over when they discovered when they discovered America that's where we got the that's where we got the potato from and the turkey yeah interesting because you know people eat turkey I'm not too mad anyone in particular any particular time of year but their people eat turkey now when it comes to a Bahama you could check to see if it's full of sinners choose it's cut according to the high Uggams as we just mentioned him you also have to have a Missouri amis aura that tradition that it's a kosher animal even if you find those things not everyone agrees with it but that was why they had the big Zabu controversy here in Israel a few years back that they everything they were crossbreeding cows with Zabu which is a different type of a cow even though it has split hoofs in Shores cut for fish it needs fins and scales yeah to be able to be identified as a coach to fish but a bird you need a masseur for it has to be a tradition any the Torah doesn't give any identifying features it lists 24 types of birds that are not kosher and in order to be a kosher bird you have to be not one of those 24 birds which because I'll say the majority of birds are kosher of course we can only eat those that we have a tradition for it like chicken and geese and duck and those are the universal ones there's also people of Messara for pheasant people of misura for pigeons some other birds but but that's about it nobody could have possibly had a Messara for Turkey because turkeys were native to North America and they certainly didn't fly to Asia or or Africa or Europe for the mostly about Europe for now for Asia Africa I come to be able to see them you weren't in the Middle East they came across when they came back from from Europe from America they came back from North America they brought they brought the turkeys with them so those people who eat turkey today are relying on the following logic motivator knew all of the time a birds and he didn't know turkeys so turkeys must be coached there are people to this day who not eat turkey yeah there are people to this day who do not eat avocado because they don't like it but that has nothing to do with hello huh I just thought I would throw that in because I don't like how God and there's certain places I go and they put avocado and everything California for example nothing personal I just don't like avocado okay I don't go into more detail anyway look at that look at the magic of a DD I have no idea why I'm talking about potatoes that's even talking about frying in oil oh my gosh I'm getting good at this yeah right so we're talking about Hanukkah and oil and again the idea is all this comes down to being the far same the NACE of the fact that the park Shemin burnt for eight days in the basin mikdash yeah and that's the idea of the pursue my niece are the eight days that we allow the we try to the fire say nice now traditionally you go look at the Gemara yeah traditionally what did that mean you lit at conocchia yeah it was Shh shirt distance from the ground wasn't too far from the ground you could put it all up a little higher from the ground but look at Philly you put it pretty low down towards the entrance of your Hudson and so you would see it when you when you would enter into your hotel and that was the extent of it I was extended come our discusses if you have 200 since the Hutt's era if you put a menorah at each one of them yeah but that was it at the entrance to your hotel you used to put it now this this doesn't happen much in America today because there are not many hot saris than ever Jews living there yeah people in instead tend to put it in a window yeah I guess you could put it by the edges to you yard if it's Walden or something like that but most people put it in their window there was a lot of times in Jewish history where they didn't do that they put it on the table and they would light it on the table when I was growing up we used to light the menorah on the table and how is it when you come to you shall I him I can't say over it so because I haven't really traveled around on Hanukkah but I know when you come to you chili I live in Hale Egan horn off you we used to walk down the street with the kids just seeing how many in menorahs we could count most of them could not count that on every window every Pesa every place some people actually made a hole in their wall and a glare you put a little glass box there in order to be able to put their manoa is some people put it on top of the walls and people put on a little chair next to the wall yeah and you just walk down the street and you see all of these menorah is burning you know ah but those menorahs are the persimmon ISA when your nose leritz yeah do you see less of them see some of them in the windows you see less of them yeah old-time American Jews used to put in electric menorahs in the window you spoke adoshem Haim far be it for me to cast aspersions on them but I know somebody who put in the window actual menorah with candles that were alight and they did not move the curtains properly and suffice it to say yeah it created an extremely warm atmosphere yeah one could even argue that perhaps they created a tremendous amount of pursue manisa the fact that they got out of there alive was the nice yet so maybe that's where they decided to use the electric ones you know I mean I don't know but but it was an interesting story my father my brother was looking for a neighborhood to move to he was not yet shomer Shabbos and my father said when I went around what I used to do is I would drive around neighborhoods during this time of year and I would look to find the neighborhood that didn't have too many see no lights if they didn't have too much xmas decorations up then you figured it must have been a Jewish neighborhood but this was around September October so so my brother said well I don't want to wait till you know December time he says well I guess you could drive around and look for suckers let me explain to you the flaw in this logic yeah when you're looking for a place that does not put up xmas lights that could be any type of jews i mean you know most jews certainly back then didn't put up holiday lights things are changing of course and the one thing entropy teaches us is that things go from bad to worse to worser you know so you know but for the most part Jews don't propose but only the most dedicated Jews will put up a Sukkah my father who was not shomer Shabbos until he was 67 years old used to build a sucker and he used to invite in you know these to bring the Hebrew school down to see if there's a major in North America I must tell you that weren't that many suckers so if we were using my father's methodology he would have concluded that it was not a Jewish neighborhood and in fact it wasn't but that totally irrelevant to my story yeah so he drives around interestingly enough until he what are the areas whose consider was Staten Island that he's driving around Willowbrook and he found a lot of a lot of suckers so he figures oh good this is a Jewish neighborhood where he did not know is that it was an orthodox neighborhood and since he went to work on Saturday not like big Dahlia Goomba so that was a little embarrassing as he drove down his street especially when the Hasidic sasebo opened up on his block but it did contribute to his eventual rededication to turin mitzvahs so God works in mysterious ways does he not yeah in any event it was funny I just spoke at Staten Island so I was in the shul yeah and as I was walking through the main part of my way down I I passed a fellow and he says to me oh you're a rapper Alaska says yeah I guess I used to live in Staten Island next door to your brother so we've come full-circle here in our introductory remarks because what I really want to speak about today is pursue may Nisa yeah publicizing the NACE and it's interesting because as I mentioned historically the way we would do this is by lighting our little candles and they would light it for a half an hour laughs I have now yeah somebody told the cover Times grandson yeah who used to fill up shot glasses with olive oil and let them burn well through the night night into the morning yeah he says I heard a dress on the cover time that he used candles yeah wax candles he let him burn from heaven now they blew him out and you're going on for hours and hours hey sis my grandfather also owned only one jacket I have a lot of jackets I don't have to be stingy when it comes to my mitzvahs if I'm not gonna be stingy with everything else if I want to live it on a small little one house thing with the dirt floor yeah he once said he says when we lived in Rawdon we all lived in one house there was room for everybody everybody lived there and we had our cam and everything was like that this isn't really fun finally moved to Lakewood you know so we moved into a two-bedroom apartment then there was no room for me I had to go sleep in your shoe when there was one room there's room for everybody you know so I lived in a one-room house and he had you know what jackets oh yeah you know but but throughout Jewish history people people had small menorahs and the word conocchia had not been coined yet and they and they would light them and by the by the Pesa of their huts here yeah nowhere in history did you find a tradition of putting up a 50-foot menorah and getting a crane to lift up a good politician to light it this has never happened in history and I want to I want to make a suggestion if I can share an observation we we live in Goa cedam now understand we went through Gois bevelle per ass ma died in 70 years gull is Yavin lasted a relatively short period of time girlis adam is pushing on to 2,000 years why because one of the purposes of Gullah s-- is to expose us to something to the point that we are disgusted by it I am NOT suggesting this on any level but there was a time when when a parent caught a kid smoking they would put him in a closet with a pack of cigarettes and say smoke the whole thing the idea being that you would be so exposed to it that you wouldn't want it anymore one of the ways to treat phobias if for example you have acrophobia fear of acrobats now I'm just kidding fear of heights so they would have you slowly a little bit more look at this look at that until you could reach the point we could just stare down and confront you know that sense of Terror that comes with the phobia to order to overcome it yeah so when we went into gullies the purpose of the Gullah sua's to expose us to the evils of these things in order to get rid what's goes befell so I was goes Adam Adam is power Adams power and it's something else it's externality teh Leonardo mother mother and people have an amazing ability to be external yeah I saw a guy with a long black beard and a frock and a humbug and he was an ama Eretz the eraser he knew he couldn't read Hebrew but when he decided to reattach himself to the Jewish community you know that's what he decided to do he saw that outfit decided to put on that outfit yeah if you judge a book by a cover I forgot which God w spell said it but he used to say you know which is the most harsh of place in all of you shall I am to dry cleaners you can walk in there and see all the frocks all lined up so externalities the the more people focus on an externality yeah and unfortunately we've become that how do things look to us how do we how do they appear to us as opposed to what they really are yeah so you know bigger is better it's true by everything whatever it is it's bigger it's bigger it's nicer it's it's it's it's fancier you know we put we put so much emphasis on the appearances of things as opposed to the essence of it presume a nisa at the end of the day right when we lie down manova in order to be I'd say as you can put it on your table for your family because at the end of the day the pursue may Nisa is in me yeah it was an interesting thing yeah few years ago somebody called me up and said smash I'm like a Russian my HUD whatever make such a big deal about Eckhart foot okay so God is one the oneness of God okay okay so he's one you know that what do we keep driving this point home and no matter how I explained it to him he kept saying I don't say my big deal one yet so the Bali Moussa used to say at HUD Alif there's one God Tess in the seven rukia's and this world dotted in the four direction of this world the vine was used to say a person can be Makabe Hashem a HUD everywhere in the world and all the Ricci is except inside of me that's the one place where it's still lacking yeah I used teaching seminary and I I would have girls with me meetings you know November and of course everybody knows you know the the fact that they say you know I'm going to have my year in Israel it starts sometime in September and it ends towards the beginning of June no you do your math that's not a month now take off a month over there for Pesach and take off midwinter vacation take off a month over there for Shawna's um kippered so cuz you know by the time you're done it's your six-month and in Israel you know so I'd have a girl in November you know maybe she's had six classes maybe less you know she said to me I came to area grow and I don't feel like I've grown yet so I said why I'm still wearing this I'm not wearing that I'm listening to this I'm not listening to that yeah I said the Inka growth is inside of you you know the Eco work I mean it's easy to change externalities but the insight of who you are via da da hai jaan vice versa of America know it today and place it on your heart intellectual knowledge is not what we call true understanding Venus a lave it has to go inside of you it has to become part of your Etsy Macias and that's become part and parcel of who you are as a person pursue may Nisa means that we Chanukah came at a particularly uninspiring point in Jewish history now don't get me wrong a small band of Jews had won many victories but you know they had to they had to do the avodah you know carefully because the Antonio fortress which was next door to the to the basin mikdash on the heart bias they were still held by Monsieur venom it was held by you know Greek leaning Jews and they used to shoot in at them as they were trying to do the avodah as the battle continued as the war went on four of the five Maccabee brothers died so you know it's nice to think of a victory in the sense of like you know everything ended happily ever after it wasn't the miracle of the nearest Chanukah took place at that time and sometimes the presuming Nisa is DAF koware looking at something and we don't see the big spectacle we have to know that a Kurdish burro who is there the miracle of Hanukkah is that we have to be m'f are same inside of us we have to create for us an understanding of Hakodesh Baraka a node Malvado a there's nothing in this world but a coach burro who and no matter what the odds no matter what the difficulty the out of the rod that used to say I never asked whether or not I could do something I asked whether something has to be done and I knew how could a Subaru who would give me the career to do it Carol needs good people to do important things and you or that person I was gonna say one of those people you are that person i Raveena was one person resource Atlanta was one person the Harshman area were a small group of people they were not the majority and they stood up to do that which is right well that's it for this week for our special Hanukkah edition of the rabbi Orlowski show if you want to find out more about the show you can go to Rebbe olaf skis.com slash podcast you can leave comments on this episode which is episode 9 at Rabi Alaska calm slash podcast / 9 if you want to find out about my upcoming events schedule reveal a ski that come / events and if you want to contact me directly look at how appropriate this is Rebbe Alaska comma / contact yeah and me it's a sham we should all have a little token Kanaka [Music]