Gotta be Flexible (Ep. 137)

hi this is devin dolowski welcome to the raviolaski's show and whether you're watching with our friends over attorney time or wherever you watch or listen to your podcast as always thank you for listening i take it as a very very personal endorsement that you take out of your time to listen to anything that i have to say it is uh probably one of the most meaningful things that anyone can ask for in this world is is uh his attention from somebody else that they're willing to take out time and listen to what you have to say and i am truly blessed by the thousands of people who listen to this podcast and uh can you can you uh okay uh we have our sponsor this week first of all sponsored anonymously in honor of mali levinson's eighth grade graduation congratulations now you get to go to high school you shiva katana whatever they call it wherever you come from and uh listen what better gift could anybody want them to know that thousands of people are learning toge what a beautiful thing and uh whoever is sponsoring anonymously i don't know it's sponsored anonymously but they should uh also have tremendous quizzing for this um mrs feldberger wrote me and asked if i would give a shout out to her husband on her on his birthday uh she didn't bother telling me his first name so i'm gonna say mr feldberger happy birthday out there in television land or podcast lander whatever they call it today and uh may you uh may you make a royal royal and have many many happy years ahead okay we're done with our business and now let's get down to um to the fun part real asking rants about different things it's so interesting you know the ravioli show uh when we very we started once and i i started i think on our first anniversary to do a retrospective just take little snippets from different uh shows and um and uh i never finished it of course so i guess we'll have to save it for the third anniversary but um which is coming up pretty fast we started marsha's noah so another event um uh so i had asked for uh suggestions for titles what's it called this uh endeavor yeah those you remember or watched from the very start you know there was the whole discussion is this a show or a sheer and i i was adamant it is a show [Laughter] and somebody said well then why does store any time have it on should it should be show anytime that's a good question should i heston i don't know why but at any event um it could be for the little bits of torah that's sneaking i go people aren't looking but any event um so uh we've been doing picking up us and uh we are oh i forgot the point i was trying to make add anyway um so one of the the suggestions for the name was dave's raves which uh i don't know that i want to go by that uh my english name you know by the name of david david howard i come from a generation where they used to give you the hebrew names to match the uh english names to match the hebrew names so my brother who's bended up rum they named him bruce adam and uh you know they they would give you they would give you english names to uh to match human themselves david howard so when i started in yeshiva so they said what's your what's your name i said david howard he goes oh so it must be uh david's fee because howard was given for tweet anyway i thought i got called up for bar mitzvah for years i was called up that way and once my father says to me who's sv i said uh i am he says your name is harsh that's why we named you howard players [Music] [Laughter] about a year before he passed away he said to me who's i said i am he says i named you herschel i said dad there's no more room sorry we're done that's it finished but uh so i don't know if i want to go dave you know i'm definitely hirsch rancid it doesn't have the same brain anyway but uh yeah every now and then gives me an opportunity to talk about things be bothering man and i have to say this is uh this is a really rare opportunity but mr spear used to say that everybody wants to affect the world and we sense that the way we affect the world is through deborah that's where the maharaja says that the word davar and da bear are the same letters because everything is a word yeah that's actually a mishna in this week's the parrot that we're up to this week yeah but the fifth pericape was by sarah morris yeah curtis baruch who created the world with ten expressions he spoke yeah so we want to affect the world for our power of speech so he says there's some people they read the paper they get upset they yell at their wife what are these people doing what does people think they're doing yeah yeah politics today is just unbelievable unbelievable for your blood pressure if you try to follow this stuff it's really not good i have a heart condition i can't get upset you know yeah so i just got a i got a little message they said you know to have in mind in your shavers husband boss not so funny but anyway it is clever points for gloviness so um uh so at any event we um we read the paper then we yell that away what are these people doing what do you think about that that's it we made our contribution we changed the world yeah and um and some people you know they they feel like they have to do more so they call up a radio show they say i think thank you cola now i changed the world because we understand so me i'm honest i get emails and phone calls from people who tell me that the things that i say that actually have meaning to their lives so uh what an opportunity um i give uh share my silicon in telescope i give a my and uh so we speak about a lot but anyway we've been talking somehow we were talking about in eric hey how you know your society can stop you from achieving what you want to achieve and we were talking about promise in society and the question comes up so why does anybody do anything so i said i am i have to save the world myself i will if anybody wants to help me there'll be two of us i'm not giving up so the fact that i have a form yeah is an unbelievable thing to have a chance to to to share my thoughts yeah i feel so bad there's so many people that sit at home nobody wants to listen to them and they just get very frustrated me i get to sit in front of my uh my computer and just you know rant about whatever i feel like talking about and uh what can i tell you even people who don't like it they say well i have to say he is just so adorable he has that pixie-like look to him in those bright eyes and i just i just love to look at him he makes me feel he makes me laugh someone says you're funny looking there's a good uh eighth grade joke for you over there uh marty you can use that one uh save the carries over at the ninth grade you're funny looking [Music] anyway um so i wanna pick out one line in one mission i'm telling you if i if i was to go through a little quicker let's forget it i'll be stuck for the next 25 years um [Music] uh open parentheses i started doing this thing where i would do a letter of the aleph phase and tie it into the letter in shamnu and the al haids and explain how the avarice that i mentioned with that letter ties into the letter and when i started everyone thought it was pretty funny like what are you going to do is the next 22 years you know anyway i got up to nun this is last year was supposed to be sama but of course things got cancelled because of corona so we'll see if we pick up from that anyway but uh someone says you know you really think you're going to finish it i said listen you know i i call this job security it's not with coach mark who's uh you know getting rid of me you know if i don't finish the series with him so uh la habdil there was this woman jk rowling who wrote this somewhat popular series of children's books that later became adult books based anyway so the uh of course the harry potter series enough and she managed really quite an accomplishment to hide most of the mystery for six books and comes the seventh book you know she has to answer all the caches i think what happens if she dies i saw an interview with uh the guy writes uh game of thrones you know and uh you know they said what question do you you know upsets you the most you know that you don't like to be asked is who's going to finish the series after you die this is like 12 years in between books you know i like unless you plan on living to 110 there's no way you're going to finish this stuff but anyway uh so hopefully it means i should have my have a chance to finish that series but if i do berkey i was talking about to get through everything i was going to hashir with relationship hero and michelle with the guru forget about it he could spend you know 10 weeks on on one puzzle so uh fortunately because rahul took him before he was able to finish the invoda but i don't know who can do justice to michelle with the gru i mean the gross starts in outer space and and rib measures to take off from there you know from the space station yeah so really quite a challenge anyway so i want to take one line from one mishna and that's the following yeah there's four types of attitudes that people have says the mishna shali shali well let's let's do it let's do the russia first that's a russia what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine that's russian everything belongs to me what's mine is yours and what's yours is yours that's a question i don't have to give you everything what's mine is yours and it's yours it's mine zuhama er it's i'm my arts you can translate that a lot of different ways but basically you're uh communist socialist i'm not sure what the difference is really yeah but basically it means i give you my stuff you give me your stuff and you know there's no personal possession it's uh the world doesn't function that way because baruch who set up the world with a lot of halachus relating to personal ownership because morocco was a capitalist yeah he saw the world through that kind of lens and it's the last one that i want to address and what's mine is mine with yours it's yours zoom me this bananas yes i remember me this time wow wow that's really pretty severe i say that's normal or you're like the people of stone who are destroyed by fire and brimstone [Music] that's pretty severe what's the difference well the mafia should explain difference is an attitude the fact that i expect to be able to hold on to my own stuff and that i respect your property rights that's okay but then you can take that to an extreme i have uh i have a cup of water i'd rather spill it out and give it to you that's that stone what do you care give it to the guy this guy gains you don't lose what do you care no throw in the garbage anyway that's me the stone now stone needless to say we present them as a pretty evil place i'm basing that upon the fact that the torah says they're a pretty evil group of people so i think we're on safe ground if we say that but like all people they had a philosophy nobody people aren't crazy the nazis had a philosophy they felt they were saving the aryan race they thought they were arians they thought the aryans were the master race and uh the jews were trying to water down the you know the gene pool and trying to you know make all kinds of problems in the world so we have to get rid of them as hitler said the jews have inflicted two wounds on mankind circumcision on their body and morality on their soul these are jewish inventions this war is between the jews and the germans all else's facade knowledge the historian lucy davidowitz wrote a book called the war against the jews where she says unless you take hitler at his word there's no way to explain his actions if you if his goal was to take over the world why would you kill the jews and ghettos who are making you essential war materials it doesn't make any sense why when you have to fight the allies who've landed on europe would you divert trains just to be able to kill jews instead of using them to be able to take your troops to the front it doesn't make sense so uh be that is it me later philosophy everybody has a philosophy everybody everybody you know thinks that the what they're doing makes sense and uh even though to us it may sometimes be crazy we can't understand can't understand hamas shoots missiles at us we didn't do anything to them it shoots missiles and the whole world condemns us because we responded and i always ask what should we do what should we do and nobody answers this question if you ever look at these clips of people who are talking to the media and they said what should we do when people bomb them no answer yes but you're killing women and children i know because they're hiding their missiles among women and children why don't you ask them why are they hiding their missiles among women and children but what are we supposed to do just let them bomb us yeah we're killing women and children i understand so even though sometimes we can't we struggle to understand stone had a philosophy there are a number of black leaders who claim that the lyndon johnson's war against poverty which made the black community dependent on handouts from the federal government destroy the black community i mean it's not hard to understand there are a lot of businesses right now in america that can't hire workers because they're getting paid more money not to work so why would i work for less money people don't always realize that their philosophy has consequences sounds nice give people free money that's what stone was afraid of stone said we are not going to develop a society of dependence we're going to make everybody stand on their own two feet australia has a policy if you want to emigrate you have to have a certain amount of money in the bank before you come or have a skill that we need america we call that racist but that that's that's what they do in australia why because lots of people want to come to australia so they said we can't accommodate everybody we have to get people who we feel are going to be contributing members of society that's what stone said if you're coming here and you've got enough money to live buy yourself a house set yourself up you can come load load was welcome did he had money would you some poor guy some snare passing through you'll destroy our society you'll give people this idea that they can expect handouts i'll give you anything my father of hashem grew up during the depression and his father didn't have a lot to love him he was in the garment business he worked when he felt like it and uh he liked to play pinnacle and he wasn't very good at winning so my father grew up with real hunger real well poverty no poverty and um and he pulled himself up by his bootstraps it was amazing thing he uh he hung around the fur district and he dropped out of school at the ninth grade i had to try to work so he would hang around the for a district sweep the floors or if we get the guy's coffee and while they were there they would say come here kid let me teach you something you see this stain i'll show you how to get it out you see how you cut this here's hey do this and by hanging around he learned the fur business and became so good at it that at the ripe old age of i think 17 they made him a manager of a factory in boston of a fur factory and he says but my family's here he's only 17 years old so every week they would fly him back and forth it's in the 1940s you know flying was not the same as it is today they were flying back and forth from boston every week and it was hard it was good money he said i was making good money so he became a delivery boy for spitzen peck the florist and he learnt the flower business eventually he opened up his own florist it was very interesting he was a florist in nursery what he bought was a florist a nursery he didn't know the nursery business at all so as soon as he opened up well the salesman came around and my father said to them i'm telling you up front i don't know the nursery business you can take advantage of me and sell me your garbage products that aren't going to sell but only once and i'll never buy from you again but if you treat me right i'll be loyal to you forever so he said okay we'll tell you what it sells i want to sell this we want to sell that you know so my mother would go in to help him in the store she didn't know anything about this but she said she would read the new york times gardening section and every monday somebody would come in and ask the question from the new york times gardening section like to try to catch me well how do you repotted an azalea goes oh yeah well the way you want to do it is like this you know he built it up into the largest floors in brooklyn yeah and uh worked very hard very very hard my father was for sure a self-made man and he valued that one of my brothers told me he was unloading a truck with 50 pound bags of soil that wasn't it was in the summer working hard my father comes out looks and says you need a hand my brother says yeah because look at the end of your arm [Music] now that's kind of rough but that's cause my father didn't have anybody to help him he had to pull himself up by himself and that's what he expected from other people now don't get me wrong i say that and my father was a tremendous belt stalker he had a lot of money for stockholm and he would always give it anonymously that was very important i had a rebbe in sixth grade died very young he didn't have any insurance my father used to make a simple space to show eva every year and a lot of people came and uh we we had things going on they were chafing dishes and food and it was just it was a tremendous event really a tremendous event we had a we had a really special sukkah and uh people used to come just to see ashoka because my father was a florist he made the whole thing out of greens he nailed on trellises and he wired on see the greens on the inside the outside he used the cedar as the schaff and he would only use real decorations he used straw flowers and autumn leaves and indian corn and gourds and you know things like that no paper chains in my sugar growing up and um uh and we had a soda fountain in the back in the in the basement people today don't even know what a soda fountain was like in the old days they used to be a like a soda shop when you think now of a soda you go and you buy a bottle of soda so there used to be a tap for salsa there was a salsa maker and you would take syrup you would pump if you wanted a coke you put in cooks here you add the salsa mix it up all kinds of different drinks and there was a place there for ice cream and for hot fudge and all these kind of things so it was a candy store candy store used to have these things and going out of business my father bought the soda fountain and set it up in our basement and used to have birthday parties down there made a little ice cream parlor and uh we played pin the cherry on the sunday my mom anyway so uh you know so there'd be people downstairs working the ice cream ice cream bar and there'd be people over here it was like it was it's quite a scene anyway my father often had a husband of who he invited so he told the almana of this particular teacher of mine to please come and uh to come to the soccer party yeah civil space situation and she didn't know why she'd never been invited before you know but he says listen i loved your husband he was a very very special man my father really really admired him my father did not give out praise easily yeah but uh he was he was in the of remy and everyone called him brandy and anyway so uh the armani comes at the end she's getting ready to leave and she opens her purse and she goes over to my father and says i can't my father was upset he was like angry he said it's not for you it's for the children she said i can't and she pulls out this giant wad of cash that my father slipped into her purse because he didn't want her to know that he was giving her the money and he fought with her until she agreed to take the money and he would tell me all the time i'm so sorry she did that because i wanted to be quiet he always believed get stuck and give it quiet i came home once from school both my parents worked came home from school and there was a box from gimbals you never heard of gimbals uh i think it's in the uh the third marvelous middles machine tape but anyway so um uh see the recording uh download whatever i'm saying anyway so uh as the gimbals was like macy's i was like one of these pipelines this is boxing gimbals and i called my mother i said what is this she goes get on your bicycle drop it off at this address ring the doorbell and leave i said what is it she said none of your business so of course i open the box because i don't know maybe i'm getting involved in some drug deal you know i mean i i'm not going down for my folks and uh i opened it up into the suit and then i remembered on rosh hashanah we went to shul and there was this teenager whose father had died obviously they were going through difficult times and uh my mother noticed he was wearing a frayed suit that was too small on him so my mother went out and bought him a new suit how did my mother know my mother had six boys now for the benefit of the men out there girls know this already women understand this but for the benefit of the meds i'm explaining them to you to women clothing shopping is a recreational activity like we would go out and you know maybe play ball or you know do something they'll get together with a couple friends and go shopping like on purpose not even to buy things like let's go shopping it's like a recreational activity to a man it's a form of torture what do you think adam's going to be it's got a giant mall it's going to be going from st but uh the women love to shop now my i'm one of six boys there were no girls in my family only boys none of us wanted to go shopping for clothes my mother would take her shopping you know and we'd be hiding inside of the the racks you know we all stop and uh you know it was a uh uh and we'll do good things after a while my mother wouldn't even take us she would just she could just know your size by looking at you and she would buy you the clothes if you say i didn't like it she'd say be quiet and wear it and if you did you almost always got compliments you know my mother had excellent taste but uh so um so she obviously looked at this kid figured out his size bought him a suit but it was so important to them that nobody knew we went back to schwann and kippur it's where i get through soup i think they knew because the mother turned around and looked at my parents i think they figured it out but you know that's how my father wanted to do it but but a person who's an able-bodied individual who should be able to contribute take care of themselves i didn't know how to sit through a meal i grew up in indonesia my mother's mantra was it's the maids day off and so we were always the whole meal we were serving we were clearing we were loading the dishwasher we were you know putting waste down i mean we worked the whole meal that's how it was when i went away to yeshiva and i would be invited out for a meal i wouldn't know how to i wouldn't know how to sit through a meal i wasn't raised that way so i would start clearing i started serving and the husband would be like my wife does that he said sorry i don't know how to sit there and notice the wives never complained the husbands have felt like just sit here and let my wife do it the only wife who ever complained was was was uh reverend shapiro and moshe shapiro's wife you know it was life apartment i was clearing off and she says no no i do that and i said my mom brought me up i don't know how to just sit there with this clearing off to do i just hear my mother going let's go maids day off so the sense of responsibility without the compassion that's what stone was there was no safety net there was no charity the idea was you pull yourself up for your bootstraps and if you can't we'll cut off your faith you want to come here and mooch off of us we work for a living get yourself together they were destroyed esther mcpherson is not one of the shepherd mysteries why were they destroyed they were destroyed because the world one of the three pillars of the world is without the world can't exist so does that mean i have to give away everything that i have no what's mine is mine but yours is yours that's normal there's no there's no fault in that but if it comes to the point that i won't give you something that i don't need i'd rather burn it before i give it to you that stone is it a philosophy sure it's a philosophy but if you take an approach of life of nothing remember shapiro was an issue for his uh mother so uh that went to page shouldn't call a couple of times and uh at one point there was somebody from america and he said to him she says i don't understand these yeshiva come back from america come back from her child they've been learning for years they go into business and they cut throats their words doesn't mean anything they'll chisel you down for a nickel they i've never seen anything like this why are they so cut throat so maisha said because torah is din it's not it's not feel good stuff but it's like rosenberg tells the story um he had a kid in ncsy and uh he went to his very lipsticks to explain the situation he said it's very important that we find the head there david looks them and says listen an armada comes to me with a chicken she wants to know if it's kosher i can cry for her i can give it stucca but if the chicken is strafed it's tray not such a thing as i have to find a head it's always den either it is or it isn't that's it there's no there's no in between so if you lived your whole life and did you can't go that way into life you have to understand shall i shall even what's mine is mine what's yours is yours but there's got to be a little flexibility you gotta you gotta have a little give and take with the fight over everything i know a guy who only uses his credit card i said why because because here in air itself there's no five aggro pieces he says so if it comes out to like uh 98 shekels and 36 aguero they're going to charge me 40 aggro if i pay cash a credit card they can do 36 across so for those extra for a growth he's going to make sure and use his credit card not take care listen you know have to be a little flexible a little flexible i do it i'm sure everybody does you go out to dinner you work out the tips fifteen percent do you ever see people counting out like pennies to make sure that they don't give one it's okay it's okay you can you can estimate up a little bit i do that i estimate up a little bit you know so that i that's a bit counting out 37 cents but uh you know we we can look at life as that's it this is this is oil this is mine you can't have it at all i'll spill it out before i give it to you i have a nephew he can't he can't park on the street because his neighbor gets upset he parks in front of my nephew's house nephew's not allowed to park in front of his house it's the street doesn't belong to anybody it doesn't make a difference then i want it i want anybody park there i was sitting in a ship from my father there were a lot of people coming to pacifico with six boys and my mother and uh it was on the last day i was i'm in my socks the neighbor across the street we had nothing to do with not jewish rings the doorbell when i come out they she shows me her car that somebody when they pulled away they pulled off a fed she says one of the people came to visit you did this i said did you see who says no i said then how do you know it was one of those people who did it well who else did it i said i really don't know i've been inside the house sitting on the floor in my socks because my father died well you're responsible i have to find out who did it i want a list of all the people who came seems that offended come off a number of times my husband stuck it back on came across the street to apologize i'm sorry you lost your father yelling at them because you know defender that came off your car a whole bunch of times you know it came off again and i'm gonna find out who did it it's okay it's okay i think you're crazy that doesn't mean you have to give away your stuff that doesn't have to be mafka everything that means you don't have to let people treat you like a smarter you're entitled to what's yours but uh i lived in far rockaway there was a good i had to get to work somebody parked in front of my driveway i couldn't pull up for an hour okay that's zalopa center i'm gonna park in front of my house okay take my parking straight on the street on the on the street okay i understand it's the street it blocked me in because you couldn't find see eventually he came out after an hour i was pretty upset he said well i couldn't find any park oh oh you don't understand you couldn't find any parking so then that gives you a right to to be me no but if a person wants to park in front of my house what are you doing here i might want to use that [Laughter] felicia leaves got to know what's worth fighting over and what isn't what's a big deal and what's not a big deal and the devil's in the details or in this case the angels and the details i can't tell you on every single case what's right where where where a person's abusing you or not but uh you know here in australia you see it a lot i don't know if you see it in america so much but you know people have an apartment it's not very big they make a similar so they have the men in their apartment and the women in the neighbor's apartment neighbors open up their house let's let you set up over there for the for the opposite gender whichever one it happens to be it's my house i'm not the legend i could say this is my house and you don't step foot in front of me zoom me this time that's it for this week if you want to find out more about the show you can go to my website raviolovsky.com message contact me um you can sponsor the episode and until next time i'm deborah dolowski and this is the rabbi orlovsky show torah and symbol 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 no it's the rabbi orlovsky show on rabbi orlovsky.com torah anytime youtube and [Music] till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the rabbi yolovsky show it's the rabbi orlovsky