Everyday Miracles (Meaningful Tefila #7 - Ep. 153)

hi this is doug narlowski and welcome to the wraparolowski show and whether you're watching with our friends over at tour anytime whoever you watch or listen to your podcasts and uh we keep finding new places that people are listening and watching their podcast so uh we're trying we're trying to track it down i keep meeting people all the time from uh diverse places in the world who are telling me how they listen to my podcast so you know i don't know how we track them all down but wherever you are yeah on land and to all the ships and see uh welcome to the ravalovsky show and uh we have a sponsor this week a return sponsor it is sponsored anonymously to spread the word about dailygiving.org now i spoke about dailygiving.org i must have been about uh eight episodes again and we showed the video featuring all of the most important people in clay israel and excluding me not that i'm mine don't get me wrong i'm very happy to instead have someone sponsor my show to talk about it rather than me just talking on some video with a bunch of other people why should i why should i be in with the rest of all of the famous speakers and leaders of claysville when i've got my own show in any event uh evidently the response from my listeners was uh profound and dramatic and a whole bunch of people signed up also to the point that they are sponsoring again and they didn't even write a text this time they said you just talk about it yeah and they urge you to go back to episode 144 and watch the video again i myself have watched it several times and i keep asking myself why am i not in that but but it's uh it's really very moving and very emotional and the concept is that you sign up and give a dollar a day and it's given out to uh needy causes and it's all transparent you can see where the money goes there's no and i i gotta tell you a story because this will come as a surprise to many of you but sometimes i get myself caught in controversies i know it seems so amazing because i'm such an easygoing person without any opinions whatsoever how could i possibly find myself in a controversial position now sometimes i find myself in situations that i didn't even know about i find out afterwards that somehow i stumbled on a land mine and people are upset at me for something but but very often i even have no idea about it but i was invited once to a city i won't mention where to speak on behalf of a stalker and that stucco advertises the fact that they don't keep any of the money that they raise for any administrative course in fact i was speaking at a level malca and the entire malevolemalka had been donated by outside people so that the people give their money know that it's going completely to stakka so it turns out there's another stock in this town which does have overhead costs and they do pay staff and so they they have a different slogan to try to get people to do it and they called me up and told me that i should not speak for that stalker because they were attacking them why because since they have administrative course the very fact that they're advertising that they don't have administrative course is really a backhanded slap for them and i said why you advertise that eurotstaka is special for this reason they don't do what you're saying so you're attacking them just as much as they're attacking you no it's different because ours is true but this is also true yes but theirs is being used to attack us anyway we went back and forth after a while i realized that we weren't getting any place with these emails and then so uh so uh but i did speak and there was a very large turnout and they seemed to be doing very well because people find the idea of giving stuck a very appealing i do not mean to cast any aspersions on anybody but it's pretty well known that mishullahim who are going around collecting for a particular staka or a particular mossad institution keeps a percentage of the money how much they keep is uh sometimes frightening if you ask about it and these organizations figure well it's found money we wouldn't have gotten this money anyway so even if we get a small percentage of the money that the people are giving it's gonna die for us but the people who are giving the money don't always realize how much of it the person is collecting is keeping so it's uh it's a it's a little frightening anyway um dailygiving.org doesn't keep any of the money everything that is taken in is given out and you can go and see where everything is from it is as the expression goes more bang for your buck so that uh you know that what you're giving a hundred percent of it is going out to stucco and because they deal with so many different stockers it really gives you a chance to be able to be supporting so many different causes um which is so important it says i'm picking up a sakolofirov mice what does that mean says the bartender if you have a choice of giving ten dollars to one person or one dollar to ten people give one dollar to ten people because you're doing the mice stuck at 10 times so here your one dollar is going to all kinds of different organizations and causes and important things in cloud yourself so you know that you're hitting a lot of them so i'll just read uh the last thing that he uh wrote over here sign up for a loved one as a daily us uh for an aliyah for a neshama or a foreign to help find the shidduch or to sign up for all of persons of a person's children to teach them to give soccer also very good idea um late rabbi aaron weiner who uh um lived in our community and uh he was a builder and uh he was building a shul which hashem even though he did not make it to be able to see it dedicated um it was going to be dedicated to shem soon he worked very hard but someone told me the story that uh when he lived in chicago so he told his children for their bar mitzvah money to pick stalkers to give it out to you get to pick where you want to give it to as opposed to just keeping it for yourself um i know the story is true because i met somebody from chicago who was very upset about it she says it puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us now that we can't keep our kids bar mitzvah money be that as it may um it's uh it's something where if you tell your children listen this is uh there's a big squish to be able to participate together with all of clay yourself so there are eight thousand people now he writes something that i'm i'm i'm not sure how to understand this line uh now thanks in no small part to robert arlovsky there are over 8 000 jews giving a dollar a day together now i don't know how much of those 8 000 people we got from our podcast um but if it's in no small part because of me well that would be at least uh two to three thousand people so i urge the rest of you now to go out and sign up it's a it's a wonderful thing and we should all participate okay we're in the middle of talking about tevilla and like i said i don't know how long i'm going to go on not because of anything other than the fact that uh one of the reasons people enjoy listening to me is because i have add and since so many people today obviously suffer from this they enjoy listening to my podcast because you know you're on a roller coaster you're on an adventure yeah so sometimes i'm dealing with a uh a series and i've dealt with different series and i get emails from people like can we talk about something else because like i'm getting bored talking about the same thing if i wanted to take a course on field i would have taken one so uh i'm gonna have to wind down at some point but you know uh i had a kid in one of my classes who also had atd and he told me a joke he says how many kids with add does it take to change a light bulb i said how many he says you want to ride my bike and we both went anyway so uh so i know i know that i i'm pressing the attention span so i figured this week might as well go for broken actually work with a text i'm sorry [Laughter] but um we're coming out of hanukkah and khannak is of course and as you know there is uh a structure to the shmona s ray uh i say schwann esri because that's the term that the gemara uses even though they were actually 19 brothers and uh we also say on shabbos we dive in shmoney sri even though there were only seven brothers but uh that's the uh that's the common usage so hey sue me anyway um not that you'll get anything out of it you know i understand it might provide you at least with some entertainment you know when the real estate market collapsed in 2008 and uh and it brought down a lot of people um people asked me were you hurt by it and i said no everything that i was invested in was untouched because all of my investments consisted of my overdraft in the bank and it didn't go away it was right there just where i left it so i was uh i was prescient i saw what was happening in the market and i switched over there um if 20 years ago i would have put my money into amazon i'd be a very wealthy person today so uh anyway but uh that wasn't in the cards for me but uh in any way we're gonna do a text so you know schmonastery is set up that the first three brachas are the middle is bakosha requests and the end is giving thanks so i want to use the baraka of modim and you remember i gave a suggestion to review a uh a a good thing that a kurdish borough did for you at the very beginning of gomes and i do that because spacing out is uh always a difficulty for me so i wanted to get it right at the beginning so uh but a lot of other people suggest doing it in modern way it is more appropriate i'm going to read this very quickly just to point out uh what struck me as a difficulty i'm going to give you my approach that i think of when i do modem but you'll see that it seems as if there's i don't want to see so much repetition as much as almost a duality in uh in the understanding of modem mode hashimoto cannot assemble it for ed we thank you you are our god and the god of our fathers forever see the two different things there you're the rock of our life and the shield of our salvation and we tell of your praise your greatness for the life that you put inside of us and then the summer that you stored in us you see how it's like two things the miracles that you do every day and the wonders and goodness that you do all the time you're good because you never stop your mercy and you're merciful because you never stopped your chest we always hope for you you are tov you're good because you are rakim you're merciful and you're merciful because you do hassen flammable inflammable non-inflammable seems like we could have done that in two words yeah the late george carlin so you say you're tove because you're racheim and you're rakhine because your cassette so just turn to hezek so you're told because what do i need in the middle therefore what's happening is now notice the cellar means there's a stop and all living creatures thank there's literally one phrase that has a seller that says and another one that ends with seller that says hallelu your name is good and to you it's appropriate so what's going on over here so i wanted to suggest as you know at the end of alhanissim which by the way is put into the middle of this bracha that i just read you it says to thank and to praise so those are two concepts is to thank and to hallel is to praise so i'm suggesting that all of modem is set up on two levels the hodos because there's two ways of looking at a koji bagho on your wonders and the everyday miracles the famous basis kasha if there was enough oil to burn for one day so why do we celebrate hanukkah for eight days one day there was enough oil so the miracle is only seven days a lot of answers to this question but one answer is is certainly uh pertinent to what we're discussing now the first day we celebrate the fact that oil burns okay isn't that natural yes it is because there's two ways that a kurdish borough operates in this world systematically and non-systematically not systematically is what we call a miracle systematically is what we call teva what we call nature but there is no nature there's no ordinary when it comes to the world we just take it for granted we had hanina mendeza so there was no uh oil to light for shabbos so he says use vinegar he says does vinegar burn can you even notice he said just like a kurdish borough who can make oil burn he can make vinegar burn the fact that the world works with laws of nature that's also divine hashem hakuresh baruch can run the world according to certain rules that are systematic or you can change those around and run it in a way that's not systematic but both are kurdish baroque the fact that oil burns or vinegar burns is just as big a miracle and so on the first day of hanukkah yes there was enough oil to burn we're thanking you the fact that everything goes well it's an amazing thing we we know this when everything is going well we don't think about it we'll never think about it we wake up in the morning what's the first thing that we say modani life is thank god i'm alive it changes your whole day because you know if you wake up and you're dead it's a whole different day you know hard to go shopping so we take it for granted we wake up in the morning why do we take it for granted people ask me all the time and i see them and say how are you doing it's a great so really i said nothing to complain about i said nothing i said seven years ago i had a heart attack the guy who did the angiogram he was the head of the department inside said he says i don't know why you were alive you're not getting enough blood to keep you alive you should be dead the surgeon who did the surgery said that my arteries had been dead for so long that they got reabsorbed inside of my heart we had the head of the department like every jew you only take the head of the hospital [Laughter] jackie mason has a whole routine on this you know so he says uh he says oh if my my doctor takes a month to get an appointment says oh my doctor takes takes six months to get an appointment my doctor hasn't seen a patient yet anyway so we're the head of the department here and he said you're lucky it was me because you couldn't find the arteries but i knew where they should be so i was able to extract them from the heart in order to be able to bypass them anybody else and he'd be dead so two major doctors told me i should be dead apparently i'm not i i think [Laughter] all right samuel clemons better known as mark twain uh a newspaper printed his obituary and he wrote in a letter saying reports of my death have been highly exaggerated but anyway so uh you know so i wake up in the morning as far as i'm concerned i'm in overtime i'm not even supposed to be here you know when when my wife gets upset about things and i say hey listen i was supposed to die seven years ago yeah that would have been bad right probably been worse than what we're going through now you know so uh although after i'm dead i told my wife just get a cardboard cut out of me and sit in front of the computer no one will even know that i'm gone it'll take years to anybody even notices and you can keep answering my emails you know i mean it'll be fine nobody will know the difference they'll say i don't know what happened with vielowski's a lot more mellow than he used to be he's gonna have more of an edge to him that's because i have other people answering my email hard to come up with that same level of slight sarcastic approach to life but uh so the so every day is mama is a miracle so sometimes you have mama you see what we would call a miracle i met a guy who was in a plane crash everyone died except for him would you call an obvious miracle right on the other hand uh this person was almost in a car crash like he was supposed to take a bus if he had taken that bus the bus got into a crash hopefully he died he asked her if bick and he says should i bench grendel so he says well my trousers were hanging on the line and they fell i was six stories up if i had been inside of them i would have died do i bench claim that but listen these kind of things happen in the life of a person all the time the second should claim we don't take a uh we we take it for granted so we wake up in the morning we say hashem i'm alive then we open our eyes we say thank god we can see we sit up thank god i'm not paralyzed we stand up thank god i can walk thank god i got clothes to wear you know we we the things that we take for granted we sit down and count our blessings quite literally the everyday miracles so la hoda's rahala is a double message we thank akushbaraku for everything that we have in our life but we also praise our kurdish baruch for those unusual sodom that we get because there's two different types and they the first one that's the difference between hanukkah hanukkah and purim is that purim there was no open miracle everything that happened there was political intrigue and by hanukkah there were open miracles we a few people were able to defeat the mighty greek army the menorah burned for eight days you know that we had we had real open miracles and that's why on hanukkah we spin the dreidel because the hand is on the top but on purim we use the garaga because the graga's hand is on the bottom it's underneath but both of them are categorically working it's just one systematic and one's not systematic so what do we say no that's normal you put life inside of me magen yeshenu you are my shield and you save me when things go wrong no delacroix i thank you unasap and i will tell about your praises the great things that you do outside of the ordinary that's our life that we understand and then the summer inside of us which is something much more miraculous that we have this unbelievable everyday miracles and the unusual miraculous things you do now this was the phrase that started me on this journey you're good because you're now what does that mean by you're good because you're rahim right because created the world as a good that was the best thing and he decided the way to do it the best was to create a world of din because then you can earn everything that you get but the world can't exist with just din and so he added in him but didn't rockham are part of the same system if you want to get mercy you have to have a basis for mercy famous example they give is a kid who killed his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan mercy has to have some basis for it yeah in order to work with dinner ahmed khashed is related to hain which is baking for nothing just because who wants to do and that's why rosh hashanah is din in rachel but when we move to yom kippur that's khasid bahem that's just for nothing you're good because you created a world based on dinner ahmed but and that's the normal functioning of the world but if that doesn't work then your rahmanis brings in to allow us even when we don't deserve it to be able to survive is a type of recognition of occurred problems of goodness you throw maim and we raise you up high outside of the normal functioning of the world recall everybody who's alive just because of the fact that they're alive comes about why because of your yeshua's so this is the these are the two approaches to life when we we look at what a coach barcode does we thank akush baruch when we light vinegar and it burns miraculously but the same level we have to thank a kursboroku when we light a uh oil and it burns and therefore in the uh hanukkah story yes they were very happy for the seven days that it burnt when a trinter burnt but they were just as happy for the first day when it burnt when it was supposed to burn when things work normally and what a sad thing i don't know how many people appreciate what they have in their life only when they lose it do they start to appreciate it you hear stories of people who lose their eyesight then they get it back and how thankful they are well yeah it's the same thing you had before yeah but when i lost it then i appreciated it isn't that is that sad do we have to lose something in order to be able to appreciate it if we appreciate it the first time then we don't have to we don't have to feel bad about it we don't have to uh be upset that we lost it we have it now enjoy it while you have it and the more time that you spend appreciating what you do have then the less situations you find yourself in where now i have to come up with some kind of a miraculous solution and i can be happy just for everything that i have in my life hashem lahood we're coming out of hanukkah that's supposed to give us the energy to carry us into the next yom tov that we come to so the more that we appreciate yes the miraculous salvations that take place but the more that a person who studies the digestive system and realizes how much goes into the um goes into being able for your body to function normally i met a young lady whose father was a doctor and she said he just got a kidney transplant he said i didn't know that he was having problems he goes yes because he was a doctor so he was always in the hospital anyway and so he would just go in for his dialysis but now he has a kidney i said uh it must be something when he makes the bracha asha yotar that you make when you come out of the bathroom and she says it's inspirational to watch so something to think about when we look at the everyday miracles in our life so now we come to the part of the show where we answer your questions and i have to say when we started this we had a few questions and now uh there's an outpouring i don't know how many of them we're going to get to at any one time there's so many so i'm just reading the list that is in front of me now not in any particular order so the first question is why don't we hear the producer laughing during the podcast because of tremendous self-control that's why if you we'll go back and watch the interview with mccall you'll see how hard he works to be able to make this show of that tremendous caliber and so sometimes he is laughing into his uh into his sleeve just to be able to keep that professionalism uh when we have a uh we have more of a uh audience so then uh so now we do it but he doesn't want to be the only one laughing that looked professional what does the malfean tubules do in the grasshopper obviously people have heard me make reference to this as to worthless information that we learned in school that has nothing to do with anything um but first of all uh my producer pointed out that it's actually supposed to be pronounced as malpiphian tubules i remember when i went to school we called the male fleeking tubules but it could be that my teacher didn't know how to pronounce it either so i'm not sure uh they are involved in the excretory uh system of the grasshopper part of its digestive system and works like the kidneys and and cleans out the wastes it's just interesting since we finished talking about the prohibition that we just happened to have this question come up what is ruby olowski's middle name all things that's a story [Laughter] i came from a generation where my parents gave english names to match the hebrew names so for example my brother was named godalia label so my parents named him gary lester today uh you can be uh charged with child abuse naming your kid lester [Laughter] but but it didn't make a difference because they needed you know so someone said hey was that the only l name they can come up with i said i guess the alternative was to call him gary larry but i guess they decided not to go with that one but uh so my br my youngest brother who is uh bended of rum they named him bruce adam right because the the the english names have to match the hebrew names so when i started in the hebrew academy of nassau county at the age of five in first grade i was advanced of course so i started at the age of five so uh they said what's your name i said david howard so they said oh it must be david svee i didn't understand my parents naming system or i knew for sure it wouldn't be me if they made me howard but what did i know so they called me dubbed me i got called up to my bar mitzvah david sveebin and for years and at some point we were in uh we were in i know how old i was and my father said who's me i said i am says your name is hirsch that's where we named you howard it makes a lot more sense now postscript i didn't know this at the time but as i went through uh my family uh tree as best as i could i found that a lot of the names came from my father's mother's side um the uh the dubners and sure enough there was a hersh and um there was a dahlia there was a label there were different names that were in our family that i i found over there um so uh so i realized you know okay he's probably right so i went through scheinberg and he says to me sriharsh is the same name so just become demonstration and so i became don't swing hersh from moshi huda coin which is quite a mouthful about a year before he died we were in shore my father says who's to be hearst i said i am dad you know he says your name is herschel i said there is no more room in the dallas bag just forget it just just let it go so uh so herschel is obviously hersh it you know it became it became a such an interesting thing my oldest brother um my father named him yeshiya for my for my mother's father was yeshiya now a quick trip to the basic forest which again is difficult for us because we're kohanim but a crypt you would look at my grandfather's uh um matseva and see that his name was yishayahu so they obviously made it yeshiya you could see something people say shio or shah you know for you so they said yeshiya so when he started in hebrew school they decided it was yahushua so he became yahushua but you know it wasn't the name you have to you have to look into where these names come from it's really really very interesting so what is my middle name [Laughter] yeah such a simple question and such a long story what is your favorite book my favorite book is [Music] particularly with rashi's parish i enjoy that very much it's it's very enjoyable reading i don't think that was the kavona of the person who's writing uh i assume they're asking outside of toro tora works so what would i consider the best um not a big fan of from fiction there are exceptions certain books i've read that were absolutely brilliant but a lot of them not only are trite which i can forgive but sometimes um they uh they actually have anti-torah values so i'm not going to cite any examples now i don't want to get anybody upset you know but uh but to find one that captures the morality that you can often find in certain classical works um les miserables which is a very very large book [Laughter] but has a tremendous amount of muslim so i was actually teaching in the beginner's program in orsamer and one of the guys asked me uh what's your favorite what's your favorite book and i said i would have to say watership damn it's a lot of fun and you can read it over and over again and it's just great now you have to get over the fact that it's about rabbits if you if you can get over the fact that it's about rabbits you know that that it you can get through the first two chapters it's unbelievable but uh it's such musser about how these rabbits have to survive obviously you're looking at the world from a rabbit's point of view but it's so interesting because the chief rabbit is not the strongest he's not the smartest he's not his kayak is finding everybody else's kaijus and helping them develop them that's the brilliance of it and he also believes in redemption and even people get messed up you know he brings them back tremendous amount of muslims anyway this is what i said i said watership down six months later because you know in the intro program there's always people coming and going um another guy asked me what's your favorite book and i said again watership down and there was a guy who said i was here six months ago i went back to america and i took out the book and i read it and you're right it is one of the best books that we've ever written that's my own personal idea there are other books that i enjoy etc but if i had to pick one book to i used to read it to my children when they were little at bedtime you know it's uh i i think the values and the story itself as my children say haribe there's a lot of suspense excitement um all right the last one for this podcast when are you going to publish the book you wrote that you haven't published yet can you please do it soon it's a quandary i wrote this book for and it's over 25 years ago that i wrote it it was supposed to be a book for jews who don't want to read a book about judaism it's a humorous introduction to judaism i have a chapter on the holidays on every chapter on the jewish life cycle chapter on jewish history and it's it's laugh out loud funny i i want people to buy the book not because it's a jewish book but because it's a funny book but in order to do that i have to market it um to uh to the audience this is not a book for iklas you understand this is the book you know to get out there and i'm not sure how to do it that's uh that's my difficulty i don't know how to get out there my friend nakaman mazel who's one of the leading mabitze torah told me an amazing story he says a guy found a uh cookbook from the revolutionary era and uh and he republished it i know he made like 500 copies or something like you know just you know for fun anyway the new york times did an article on it and he gets a call for barnes and nobles they won 10 000 books 10 000 books that's a major undertaking so he went out and took out loans and he published 10 000 of these cookbooks from the revolutionary era and gave him to barnes and nobles and six months later they gave him back 9 800 books didn't sell but when you give it you sell it on consignment so he says everybody thinks they have a book that everyone's going to buy i was working on a book that i thought would be more successful it's called harry potter book eight i think that might sell but uh that might be copyright issues i'm not sure but uh it's really uh hello work it's it's it's in english it looks like harry potter but i really mean harry potter you know if you do this harry potter so except but uh i don't know if that'll pass muster in the court of law but [Laughter] but anyway that's the idea so um uh so if i can figure out how to find a major publisher to take me out for lunch and offer me a book deal with movie rights then i will definitely put it out but if i'm going to like you know photostat it and sell it out of the trunk of my car i find that less appealing so uh as is often the case i i become decision impaired this is why when i was the lawyer director of ncsy my assistant director was joe werfel of shalom a very famous famous individual in the field of general he worked in many many different uh institutions and he was just the one of the finest technical people i ever met and he would see when i would get like this i'd get frozen in a decision then he would just make it you know and i would say to him afterwards why'd you do that he says because you weren't deciding so i said yeah but you know and he said i've noticed it's easier for you to criticize me than it is for you to actually do anything it was so interesting because when i used to work in yeshiva or david sir every flum would ask me to write a letter for this or for that fundraiser whatever it was and i would say yeah i'll get to it so he would write a letter and he said okay this is what i'm going to send out i'll be like no this is terrible and i would rewrite the whole thing he did this to me a bunch of times and finally i asked him you know why don't you just have me write the letter he goes because you won't you're much better at criticizing what other people do than actually doing something on your own so anyways i'm waiting for the book deal so uh bantam uh you know uh you know what all the publishing houses out there uh you know i am available all right that's it for this week if you want to find out more about the show you can go to my website rubyalowski.com where you can leave a comment you can offer send an email you can sponsor an episode you can listen to the rabiolovsky show theme song you can listen to this song that my son wrote in honor of my wife's birthday which i've gotten some feedback from people who did and said that they found it very moving and it is very moving and uh you know leave a comment do whatever you want plenty to do there so much fun there's articles there's things for the kids there's uh you know um you know uh you know projects i'm just kidding there's none of those things but anyway and anyway that's it for this show this is stevie lowsky and this has been the reprolovsky show it's the rabbi orlovsky show torah and simpler ready to go the rabbi orlovsky showed knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to rhyme it's the rabbi orlovsky show [Music] around my orlovsky show till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the raviolovsky show it's the rabbi yorlowski [Music]