Expressing our Gratitude (Meaningful Tefila #3 - Ep. 149)

hi this is david orlowski and welcome to the rabbi alaski show you watching with our friends over attorney time or whoever you watch or listen to your podcast as always thank you for your participation and uh thank you to those who sponsor well we have hashem had almost all the podcast sponsored this past year and this one is sponsored once again by my good friend anonymous thank you thank you anonymous you have probably sponsored more podcasts than anybody in the history of the show and uh this uh podcast he's doing it number one is reforest israel for all of the sikh people in clash israel should send them hera and thank you so much for all the physique you give the spirits you uplift and the valuable torah insights you give over my pleasure i have to tell you it's people like you who sponsor this podcast and people who respond and say that the podcast has meaning to them and that they enjoy it that really gives me the his and the opportunity to be able to do this podcast um because uh you know the the feedback really means a lot and uh to know that people are actually participating there's no way i can't i i've given up there's no way i can track my numbers but i keep meeting people from all over who tell me that they listen i i should really ask them where they listen so i could maybe try to track something down but uh but to all of you out there thank you thank you for being part of our uh kehillah part of our community okay uh we're talking about fila you know twila is such an important thing this is the point i've been stressing and it's particularly important during these times uh between the rambam and the ramban whether or not uh davening is the eraser the rabonan but even those who hold bonon agree the ace sora in a time of trouble there's definitely a mitzvah to daven and i don't think there's anybody who would say we're not in a difficult time uh i i don't want to review events but if you go over what's happening in the united states in israel in australia and so many places in the world and you look at the terrible matzah that we're in it is it's scary so we need to davin and as i mentioned at the beginning of this series the power of your smile is yeshma el that hashem will hear his uh his voice and so uh yeah so it comes down to a battle of tafilah of who's going to be able to use their kayak of coal their voice better than the other and uh we need to work on alex philip so last uh last episode we discussed that there are three different types of things that you can do with tefila the first one is shiva that's what we talked about last time praise praising hashem which means figuring out how to have a sense of or to go wow of everything in the bria they used to say about avigdormilla but you could see him standing on the street in brooklyn surrounded by talmidan and if you drew closer he was holding in his hand apple seeds and he was describing the miraculousness of planting that seed and getting a tree and the fruit that grow and how it's sweet and it comes with a peel that's color-coded to tell you when it's ready you know and all the different things that go into just something as uh simple as simple from our point of view as planting a seed and the miracles that go into it and all of the the power that's uh that that comes out of that um you know if i mention this but uh isaac basheva singer the yiddish writer his father was a rev in warsaw he put out a book called in my father's court he talked about what it was like watching his father as a rov and and warsaw and grow up and there's so many fascinating stories uh that give you insight but uh there was one story i remember where this uh couple was engaged and they got into some kind of a fight and anyway they sent them a shout out where they made a humantash and they baked into it some type of manure i don't know what animal excrement they put into it but they put that into it and of course there was outrage when the two sides were at each other's throats and eventually they come to the roof and the rev didn't address the much like us he didn't talk about um the fact that someone could do something like this or the hurt feelings or what inspired the other side to do something like this he said do you know what goes into making dough that you destroyed and he talks about the plowing and the planting and the harvesting and the threshing and the and all the things and all the nissan that the kurdish borough will put into the creation until we finally have a piece of bread how could you be mavasa a piece of practices the two sides walked away they realized that it didn't matter what their macherekes was they were missing the point when you realized that kurdish baruch's greatness so that's the idea of shivach the next type of feeling you can do is called haida which is to say thank you understand that a person who cannot say thank you will never appreciate anything in this world my good friend pesach crone tells a story about this uh woman who brings her child into a fruit store and the owner sees the little boy and gives him a banana and the mommy says what do you say and he said peel it is that that's the appreciation when i used to travel and my children were young so i would go to america and i'd bring back all kinds of different things clothing and toys and stuff it was always a it was a major undertaking and uh and at the end we'd unpack and we'd unload everything for the children and the little kids were holding a pile it was coming up over their head and my wife would say what do you say to abba says is there anything else was that it i remember seeing a bumper sticker back in the 80s that said god what have you done for me lately yeah that's going to be sad because there's there's no sense of appreciation you know this when a kid says to a parent as kids sometimes do you've never done anything for me an amazing concept i i encourage kids sit down and just calculate how much money your parents have spent on you from the time you were born just how much money is involved getting a crib and getting a carriage and getting a car seat and getting all those children's clothes you know and and uh you know baby food and formula and diapers you know my diapers kid goes through uh forget about all the effort that went into it just work out the money and then all the tuitions and then all the health care and then you know all the extra activities uh at the end the kid could turn around to their parents and say you've never done anything for me how many how many nights they were up with you when you were crying uh all the things that they had to do but it doesn't make a difference i mean that a person could even look at that without a sense of appreciation i was not a i was not a good son i couldn't i can say that i don't know if my parents would have said it yeah maybe my dad but uh i definitely wasn't a good son if if i had any level of appreciation when i was a kid of everything my parents had done for me and everything that they did and and the pride that my father took in the fact that he was able to help his children and he would say that all the time so happy i can help my children because his father gave nothing he was totally self-made and when i stopped to think and i often wonder if i was my father if i knew everything i knew if i would have had these kids so my father would have you know but you wonder you know you you go through all the effort of having children and then they and everything you do for them in the end they can turn around and say you've never done anything for me yeah astounding astounding thing without without appreciation nothing has any meaning to you before before you can um talk about what i'm lacking first stop and appreciate what you have uh it was a woman i know she had several children and she wanted to get pregnant again and she was having a lot of difficulties and she was so angry at a kurdish barracuda she was angry she was upset let's say she was sad disappointed but whatever it was it was definitely tightness of the kushbar i said let me teach you something as a parent when you give something to a kid and that kid appreciates it thank you so much ah but this was so nice of you oh it's so nice so wonderful it makes you want to do something else for them and it's an unusual experience as parents will tell you you know when a kid will sit down with you and say i want to tell you how much i appreciate what you've done for me i mean you've given me and i had one kid once do this you know i don't know what she wanted but uh i'll go so far as to say with sincere what do you think of that cynic that i am [Laughter] she says well you know you and abba have given me such a gifted life i was able to do this and i was able to do that and i was able to do you know hashem i was able to do things for my kids that a lot of people can't do you know my mother would come sukis and she would stay in the renaissance in jewish line and she knew that i would only sleep in a sukkah so she got one of the suites on the 12th floor and had them build a sukkah so i could go up there and sleep and and my family spent if not uh circus but certainly uh yantif of circus in in in a hotel you know kated meals and uh you know and and going swimming and all the accoutrements that go with that uh not every kid gets to do that yeah uh my kids have gotten more than their fair share of trips uh to america very often i'm able to go on a speaking tour and when there was one summer i took the kids to america we did all kinds of things and i paid for it by my various speaking engagements and i was able to take them take them to america and take them to you know all kinds of exciting and interesting places uh that most kids in israel their age don't have an opportunity to do and hashem yeah and and when someone sits down and says wow you do this for me and this for me and this for me it it gives you a sense of gee i'd like to do more because i know the person appreciates it but if whatever you do is worth nothing so i said to this lady before telling a coach parkour how disappointed you are in him for not giving you another kid how about thanking him for all the kids that you do have it changes your whole perspective and instead of looking at all the things you don't have look at all the things you do have and this is a piece of advice that uh i've seen other places since but i've been giving this advice for well on 30 years i wrote it when i had a column in the modia and people told me it was meaningful i used to speak on a radio program here in arizona and i gave the aids and people told me afterwards that they used it and it helped them change their lives and i've spoken about in shiorim many occasions i know it changed my life and i got feedback from a lot of people saying i tried it and it changed my life as well so i give you the answer we say and this is really another aspect of tefila but one of the reasons that people don't find feeling meaningful is they don't know what they're saying so people say to me what do you mean i've got an art school i said good so it used to be you didn't know what you were saying in hebrew now you don't know what you're saying in english because it's not a translation that you need it's to be able to take the words and give them a shot that's meaningful to you that's why we daven with the words that were written by the ancient knesset godola because they had navium among them so it's filled with prophetic meaning so whatever you're feeling and wherever you're coming from the words have that ability to be able to express if you're happy if you're sad if you're angry if you're disappointed if you're desperate the the words the same words can express all of those things that's the power of the words that's what helps when you have it written by a prophet a person said to me uh i i would rather dive by myself i said go ahead good start let's see if you can get through ten minutes without repeating yourself almost impossible uh to be able to compose something that has meaning forever this is always the problem when you when you create something new to fit a particular purpose at that particular time the odds of it having eternal meaning is very slight i'll give you an example uh when i was a kid in school uh the early 70s so the there was the student struggle for soviet jewry triple sj and that was one of the organizations that were working to help free russian jews and i would demonstrate sometimes the school would take us to demonstrate outside of the uh um russian consulate in glencoe of long island two four six eight open up the uh iron gate yeah two four six eight let our people emigrate so uh swaboda freedom okay so just to demonstrate but uh there was this attempt to raise the consciousness of people about silver jewelry so they came up with this idea of adding a fourth matzah to the seder the matzah of hope what a ridiculous concept as if there are not enough ideas of freedom tied into matzah well we have to add another matzah to remind us that there are people who are uh uh uh unable to leave their country and their civil rights are being uh stripped away like matzah itself yeah suman the entire pesach of this emphasis on me abdus lahiris isn't enough i have to add on another matzah that's not gonna have any meaning obviously because uh it's it's it's something that you came up with now to be able to add meaning to something that doesn't have any meaning uh it's it's a it's a meaningless ritual and that's what happens when people come up with new things got to be very careful and chanukah the gemara is very medujak it tells the whole story of hanukkah and then it says and the next year the chama made it into a holiday what do you mean the next year because they waited a year to see if this was a one-time miracle or if there was a power built into the bria into creation on that day that there was a power of bringing light back into the world that this miracle revealed but not that it was the source that there was a power and they started to find all kinds of references the 25th word in the torah is or which alludes to the 25th of kislev there are 25 letters in shemaisha kenosha machad 24 in brookhaven a certain a certain uh progression that takes place and um they started to find all kinds of different things that uh that was being alluded to here [Music] not just those who are smart but bina maeven who could understand inside of things the medrash says that when they started building the mishkan they finished building it on the 25th of kiss slave and they could have put it up then but moshe bedo told him they have to wait till rashford is nissan but but there was a certain level of dedication that was built into that date so they saw it wasn't just something so uh the words have particular meaning so i always say uh you know if you're not appreciating the darvaning it's because you don't know what the words mean i said well i have i have i have an english translation an english translation doesn't help you remember to give thanks to praise to lord to extol to exalt to uh glorify to raise does that have any more meaning to you than it did in hebrew than in english because someone opened up a thesaurus and copied out a list of words that mean praise now it doesn't tell you any more than you knew beforehand an english translation doesn't do anything for you so my approach to trilla is is different than some people because i have add my mind wanders it's very hard for me interestingly enough i i spoke to people how to how to be able to dive in because you know if i if i try to do it the regular way okay avraham abraham oh i have a friend avraham i wonder what he's doing now where is he what's happening here oh i'm sorry okay um abraham took his son up on maria the base of mikdash all we have left now is the castle i really haven't gone to the castle it's been a while when should i go where am i going to park i guess i'll park in vamilla oh there's a place over there i can get coffee and it goes on like this [Laughter] so i have a real problem there's a problem if you have atd you know how many kids with add does it take to change a light bulb want to ride my bike so it's it's it's hard to keep concentration so the advice that i got from people said dive in quickly so you don't have time to let your mind wander right but of course by the time you reach the end there's ray you know i i don't have to be saying yesterday i should be saying to phyllis and eric i've traveled all around the world already and flown around the place it's it's uh it's it's a real challenge for me when i reach the end of davening it's kind of hard that i'm still into it so there are people who give this aza by modem but for me the odds of me still being able to focus by modem is really is uh much less i'm able to work harder on the first bracha and try to keep my concentration so in the first bracha you come to the words gomez so look in the english he bestows loving-kindness and his master of all okay so how do i how am i cone of those words how do i make those words my words so i say gomel khan to vim like what and i try to think of something good that a kurdish borough has done for me lately and i try not to repeat myself i come up with three things every single day the cornea call and it all comes from a kurdish barracuda now when i first started out it was kind of artificial um thank you i can see thank you i have closed thank you uh i could stand you know we have brokers on those already you know um you know i'm i'm bored of myself hair and not everyone can do that one you know uh but family sim card and i said once uh i said we all lobsters we all have our hair we have heart disease and diabetes but we all have our hair you know so at one of my family's simplest one of my son-in-laws said i may not have my hair but i don't have diabetes and heart disease so you you choose for sure i'll take my hair but anyway so uh it's what we call misplaced priorities but anyway so um uh when my senate son had died machola and he was in chemotherapy he lost all of his hair that was a uh that was a really weird event for everybody in the family because we weren't used to having bold people around so uh and he got one of those big yarmulkes he he uh it was meaningful he could do the curly shuffle anyway so uh you you look at the good things right so then you start looking around okay i run ran out of my list you know uh i have a stender oh wood was a good thing thanks for wood you know uh windows glass glass that was a great idea you know a stained glass oh it was even that was a good idea too you know and i'm i'm starting to look around i remember for me the turning point was i went to speak for this school that has kids with all kinds of special needs physical and mental and uh i went down to look at the school i was going to be speaking on their behalf and i saw there was one kid that kept putting drops in his eyes and i said what's that they said his eyes don't make tears and i dive in and i came and suddenly i realized all the things that were going on in my life that i could see every day i didn't have to while david and look around and search for something full disclosure today i often cheat i don't know what to choose i don't know what to choose i go to osha odd that's one of the reasons i have high blood pressure yeah osha ada is this giant supermarket here in itself it's it's really challenging it's a challenging experience um before jantiff the cars are around the block yeah i pulled the nose i found a great parking spot right away um i found a car right away didn't have to put on a coin uh i got through my shopping pretty quick and i came there was an empty line and i checked out right away i got to the house and one of my kids was upstairs waiting to help me with the packages i can't do milk i didn't know which one to choose hassan went on for me just in the course and sometimes i look at it and i say when something bad happened how it could have been so much worse and so you you know you say wow what else did that that happened and it could have been worse and it should have been worse so you solely start to live a different life because three times a day 365 days a year i've been doing this for close to 20 years you make the heisman i i can't to too big of a number for me but how many khasadim i was able to say look what a coach barack did for me stephen covey in the seven habits of effective people highly effective people he writes that there's something called an emotional bank account a person can make a mistake a person makes a mistake with their kids or in any relationship and that's a withdrawal on the emotional bank account and you can do that as long as you've made enough contributions as long as there's enough deposits in the bank then you have what to draw in order to take out but if the account is empty you're moving into overdraft that's going to hurt your relationship that's a famous story uh with david feinstein where his father missed his bar mitzvah to go to the goode convention he felt for clay so he had to go and someone asked him were you upset and he said no no because i knew my father loved me and he said how did you know your father loved you he says every morning he would get me dressed and it was cold i was under the blankets so he would put my clothing on the radiator first to warm up and then he would get me dressed under the covers my father was a god of dark as you can imagine there were many kashuv who came to our shabba suda but no matter who came i always had my seat by my father's right side he never kicked me out of my seat and when we went to the bungalow colony we didn't have a bungalow colony back then it was like a farm just to get you out of the heat of the city and uh there was nothing to do there were no facilities no day camp there's no pool the only fun thing is when the farmer would take his little cart and go into town for supplies so all the children would jump into the cart and that was like that was their ride it says if i was learning with my father and he heard the tractor he closed the command and he says go with the other children. now missing your kids bar mitzvah is pretty dramatic but he didn't feel hurt because there was enough deposits in the emotional bank account i would be lying if i said nothing ever goes wrong in my life of course things go wrong in my life of course we've had we've had um i don't want to say more than our share but we've had our share of difficulties on all kinds of different levels physically spiritually and emotionally and uh i'm able to weather them because i've made so many deposits in the kurdish borough's account because every day i look at at least three wonderful things that he's done for me so when you have a sense of appreciation your whole life is different i live a blessed life and i talk to people who are always sad and always nervous and things are so terrible for them and things are so difficult for them you know why because they don't have anything good going on in their life you know why because they've never stopped to look for it says i've had a life of suffering and pain but i'm still alive i say it and people really think i'm kidding they don't believe it but i really mean it people see me and they say how are you doing i said hashem you know so they give that line you know okay i know you're religious but how are you doing i said no no no hashem i died seven years ago two major doctors told me i don't know why you're still alive the guy who did the angiogram on me said you're not getting enough blood to the heart to keep you alive you should be dead i don't know why you're alive the surgeon who did the operation said that my arteries had been dead for so long that they got reabsorbed into the heart he couldn't even bypass them he just knew from experience where they should have been and he was able to extract them to be able to buy otherwise that's it i'd be dead so two major doctors told me i should be dead kenya red they were wrong or they were right i should be dead my kurdish baroque miraculously kept me alive so every morning i wake up it's overtime i'm not supposed to be here i tell this to my wife all the time i say listen if i would have died seven years ago i think that would have really lowered your quality of life i got to open for discussion but i said just that terrible moment at every simcha and uh we know that abba is with us here up in shamayim and i'm sure he's looking down and participating in the simcoe you know i do that for my parents i do it for my father-in-law you know it's it it's so hard so much better when they're there [Laughter] imagine if i wasn't here so i wake up every morning i may not think about it when i first wake up because i'm i'm crying because i don't want to get out of bed but but at some point i say i'm still alive it's a gift every single day is a gift that's why it's called the present [Laughter] so what else do i have to ask for everything else that happens during the day is gravy but if you sit down and you look at all the sodium every single day every moment i watched my father in his last moments he had lung cancer and the blood clots were growing in his lung so quickly they couldn't get rid of them he was drowning and every breath was just trying to get the effort to to keep breathing in every breath you take it's a it's a wonderful thing but we don't look at the good things we say what else did you get me what have you done for me lately is that it peel it we don't think of all the sodium that the miracle does for us so then we think oh god doesn't do anything for us is such an important part of tefila because the more you say thank you the more you enjoy everything that you have so next time we're going to talk about bakasha which as i mentioned at the beginning is how most people dove it they ask so we'll talk about that uh but now we come to that part of the program the new additional program where we answer questions the last time i answered one question and and i realized i i don't really think i did justice to it what's your favorite food unfortunately there are too many of them i i listed a few but then i started thinking what about this what about that a better question is what don't you like to eat and i have to admit that's a much smaller list and a lot of the things that i don't eat i really have never really tasted i don't know why this is something i find very off-putting about it borscht i don't even know what a fresh pot of borscht would look like but we used to buy those uh bottled washed and with gold borscht something about it i found extremely unappealing although given a choice i would eat that before i would eat shav i don't know what shav is even i just know we would buy sometimes this jar with this greenish yellow goo in it and it looked like a science experiment there i've never eaten shops i don't really know and like i said i don't know so i can't i can't really say for sure i'm not a fan of livers i like chopped liver but whole livers the texture doesn't uh doesn't appeal to me i don't eat tongue i don't really have a good reason for it except i'm always uncomfortable eating something that i feel like is tasting me back so when you're eating something that has taste buds it just kind of freaks me out yeah um there are things like that that uh that i'm not a fan uh i i don't really get into pizza i've never really gotten into pizza i don't have uh a really good reason for it except that it's basically bred with sauce and cheese and i might as well just have pasta which is softer bread with cheese but uh you know hey um i uh uh what else oh there there are certain things that i don't particularly enjoy i don't like drinking vinegar when you have an upset stomach sometimes they tell you to drink apple cider vinegar i don't enjoy that at all full disclosure uh so yeah there are certain there like a much smaller category of foods that i don't enjoy than the ones that i do enjoy sushi i i i don't get sushi i don't understand sushi um i call kavod to those who enjoy it i know it's a i know it's a phenomena but it doesn't doesn't speak to me cold jellied aspect like pacha things like that that doesn't speak to me yeah i used to not like um chickpeas um i still don't really care for chickpeas when i have a salad or something with chickpeas i tend to leave them over you know or soup i'm not a fan of chickpeas until uh purim i went to uh with moshe shapiro zetsel's i would sit by the sudo there i was in the suit there was a kabbalah's point him really more he had the suit afterwards but his rebecca made these arbus made this chickpeas just delicious it really made me re-evaluate um i'm not a fan of challenge when i was younger it was easier for me to eat but now it's it always has ill effects and i uh i don't find that the taste is worth the physical pain that goes if i'm going to do that already i'd rather eat american frankfurters or falafel which also i will pay for for days afterwards but i find that the investment in terms of taiva is uh is a better use of the pain pleasure principle anyway so you can see the the list of uh things that i don't like is much smaller than the list that i do like yeah who's your favorite superhero from either dc or marvel comics all right that's a tough one um when you say uh favorite so does it mean who you like reading again i did this as a kid i did as a kid so full disclosure i couldn't relate to many of the superheroes with all kinds of weird powers yeah um uh superman green lantern flash uh aquaman they were outside of my frame of reference yeah batman but he's a psychopath he's clearly a psychopath he went crazy when his parents were shot in front of him and he just he's a crazy person dresses up a combat and fight crazy people um so i didn't really relate to him too much marvel was nobody liked marvel when i was a kid dc was the comics you know so marvel was there too you know but the hulk anybody really relates to the hulk thor the norse guard i mean like come on you know the of all the superheroes the only one as a kid that i related to was spider-man for two reasons one is spider-man was a kid everybody else were adults he was a kid he was the only kid superhero and what i liked about him was he was reluctant he didn't want to be a superhero he just knew that when he didn't use his powers to help people his uncle got killed and there were bad consequences so he carries that guilt with him but he would much rather not be a superhero and there were a whole bunch of story arcs where he tried to get rid of his power because he didn't he didn't want it just causes trouble for him causes trouble in his relationships it causes trouble in his career his education everything is messed up because he has these powers that he has to use to help people and he doesn't want to and uh that had meaning to me because that to me is the story of the jewish people the jewish people have been given powers and abilities far beyond those of other people and uh we're told to be we're responsible for the world and even if we don't want it doesn't help us we have to go out and we have to help the world and make it a better place it's part of our responsibility when are you coming to the u.s well this i do know i was just booked to speak at the project inspire convention in february so i will be coming in february if i get any other offers to speak anywhere kenzan will come in earlier but right now i know for sure that at the end of february i'm coming if anybody would like to uh see me or we want to plan any events around then it would be around the the end of february what happened to the robbie olavsky show sign you know we're going to put in the highlight reel from the first season and you see the emphasis that was placed on the rebel alaska sign what happened to it well full disclosure i'm not really responsible for that that's the producer and i asked mikhail what happened to the sign and he said if you watch two podcasts ago you will see that there was a whale that went across the bookcase and it ate the rabbionowsky sign what are you going to do and uh we'll finish with this one are there any other speakers other than yourself who's sure you enjoy listening to very important question other than yourself i'm a terrible audience sometimes people tell me wow you know i have trouble uh you know keeping my attention uh when when speakers go but i can listen to you you're such a good speaker and i said i'm not such a good speaker i'm such a poor listener and if it's not interesting i'll fall asleep in the middle of my speech because if i don't enjoy it and that's why people say why do you laugh at your own jokes because i enjoy them that's why because i'm having i may be having the best time of everyone sometimes i'll tell jokes just for myself i know nobody knows what i'm talking about i don't really care and i get a kick out of it so uh so yeah i do enjoy listening to myself and other speakers are really hard now i'm this is a this is a difficult question because i'm going to leave out people uh just by nature there's so many speakers and i i can't remember everything and and i'm filming in the raviolovsky studio so my wife's not here to prop me off camera and say oh yeah yeah right i forgot but my good friend pesach crone uh he just rips your heart out just rips your heart out he makes you laugh he makes you cry he has so much energy it just blows you across the room um on occasion i've spoken in the white shell and robert ayton finer would introduce me and i get to speak and i'd say you heard more sources quoted in that five-minute introduction than you're going to hear in my entire hour lecture [Laughter] the guy is just too darn smart what am i going to tell you my good friend rabbi yy rubenstein who i've pointed this out in the past that often when i'm speaking i'm advertised as the funniest rabbi in the world and um and i always point out that title really belongs to ellie y why he's much funnier than i am yeah uh i'm perhaps more sardonic um having said that i definitely don't have the vocabulary of my good friend hannotella who uses uh a whole bunch of uh big words you know is that i think tell a story he went to renew his passport his visa he was still on a tourist visa he's been here for many years and the woman was being particularly unpleasant and they said why because i i can't stand your charade you're all a bunch of bulge it's like uncultured and tells us what do you mean he says you don't know uh you don't know history you don't know what's your nut now she really picked the wrong guy so he says listen i have a contest she says says there it says you ask me three questions on history and three questions and see a note and see if i know it and i'll ask you three questions on history and three questions on see and see if you know them anyway he answered all of her questions she couldn't answer her questions on history or tzuyut or zionism [Laughter] he was trained by yad vashem to give tours not everybody is trained some people give tours and they didn't have the training he had the training and he told me there's a famous historian he was sitting in his shirt and when he'd make references to the holocaust he would afterwards leave a little page of notes that he wrote of uh corrections on uh on things that he had said so so that's an adventure um [Music] i was on a speaking tour went through ruby tats and we both gave the same speech eight times in different cities and at the end i said i want you to appreciate the greatness of ruby tats that even though he spoke first he could leave now and he stays as a covet to listen to my speech i listen to his speech but that's because i have no idea what he's talking about and each time i listen i get a little bit more of an insight so uh so he has this depth to him that you have to constantly unpeel the layers and layers to be able to to get down to the depth of it i told you i'm going to forget people but i'm a big rubber left fan from moshov matasiahu he has he has a certain power to him rubber wine i'm always amazed because if i tried to speak like rubber wine they would people would kill me he has this way of speaking with a certain folksy gravitas that i can't possibly hope to be able to emulate now when i was growing up in chicago and this is a long time ago and i used to teach history and now i am history so i would go to school and the best is we have every white and basil chrome together because if you put the two of them together you have basically the the the speed that i speak at so uh i'm forgetting people of course i'm always going to forget people i told you that up front uh my very very old wick you know extremely engaging and and of course i had this horse to hear she owned by moshe shapiro um and he had uh this mesmerizing character strictly because of the content of what he was saying it wasn't because he was a polish speaker per se and that he was you know following any of the rules of speaking he just the the fact that you had this course to be able to hear from him was amazing okay well as uh as they used to say back in the 1950s keep those cards and letters coming and uh we'll have uh more questions that we will answer next time in the meantime uh if you want to find out more about the show you can go to my website raviolovsky.com you can leave a comment you can contact me directly you can sponsor an episode uh you can sign up for one of our online shirum either daf yomi or one of the merciless asharam shiorim someone just wrote me and said maybe you should start a online musa class and call it a vod cast because i explained two shows against a vodka vod so make it a vad v-a-a-d vodkas so uh i responded of course you were humorlessly and said i already have that it's called messily showing you can sign up for it if you like that's my vod cast anyway um and uh you could submit a question and that's it for now i'm debbie dolowski and this is and has been the rappyolovski show it's the rabbi orlovsky show tora and simpa 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 no it's the rabbi orlovsky show on rabbi orlovsky.com [Music] till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the rabbi yolowski show it's the rabbi yorlowski [Music]