Gotta Start Somewhere (Ep. 145)

hi this is deborah dolowski and welcome to the rabbi orlovsky you're watching with our friends over at tour anytime wherever you watch or listen to your podcast as always we are happy to have you along and uh has been crazy obviously because the last podcast i did was before rosh hashanah and since that we've had a serious matchup and jim kipper and sukis and uh i've been uh uh really pretty overwhelmed with a lot of stuff to do yeah and uh as i mentioned my producer mikhail was in america he just got back he's in b dude i don't know how you say that in uh english lockdown i don't know he that's why uh we're not there now with the rubber olowski studios but this is a very special show because it is the last show of the year and it is the first show of the year ah how could it be the last show of the year and the first show of the year that is a oxymoron like jumbo shrimp or a little giant or military intelligence i don't know you know certain terms that don't seem to make any sense when you put the two of them together yeah so uh uh what does that mean so as it says rosh hashanah there are four rosh hashanahs and you can talk about the new year on different things right you talk about when does the fiscal year begin we talk about when does uh [Music] the new year for counting regulum begin we talk about uh when is the new year where the school starts beginning of the school year so there's different kind of things that are uh used with the concept of the year of the new year the rosh hashanah for the trees judgment to the truth very holy day you can find trees dressing up in white going off the synagogue and praying for a good year and doing things also for good science taking a human and dipping him into honey so uh like i got that idea for myself anyway so uh uh there's different versions so the rosh hashanah where we start counting our jewish year what they call the jewish new year is of course rosh hashanah and since the last podcast i did was before rosh hashanah this podcast is the first one of the year but you know in babylovsky land we tell time differently because when we started this project three years ago we started it right after parshas noah the first podcast came out pontius noah since then there's been a flood of interest but anyway all right that closes that arc but um the uh the fact is that that is our anniversary and next podcast we'll be celebrating our third anniversary show three years of this godzills that is absolutely amazing so for the last podcast of the year and the first podcast of the year i want to read our uh sponsorship sponsored anonymously for two reasons one i have so much occurrence at tove to you as i have gained so much from all of your classes and shows it's one of the only ones i can listen to today as an adult and a mother as an adult and a mother those two things don't always go together and as you have seen from the various shout outs that i've been asked to give over the over the three years we've been doing this we have elementary school children listening we've got a high school age children university young adults people who are considered elderly or at least used to be considered elderly before i made it into my 60s now they are considered young elderly is now over a hundred my parents were going to a hotel you know and uh they were in their 60s at the time so they said that's for old people it's not like us you know old people in their 70s you know so uh when i was a little kid i mean what's the oldest you could possibly imagine 40 40 is like ancient yeah i remember when i went for my hair and i graduated high school earlier i was only 16 you know i went for the fight here my father picked me up afterwards and said so who i heard you i said you know some rabbi old guy young guy old guy how old i know 40. my father slammed on the brakes i was like how old do you think i am my mother says ignore him he's a stupid kid he doesn't know what he's saying now i'm almost 63 and i can tell you when i hear somebody is 40 my first thought is what an old guy from that point of view my perspective has not changed at all yeah but uh we have all ages and backgrounds who listen to this year there are people who are talking who listen i know this for a fact there's one yeshiva with the entire seventh listens to it together there are people who are not jewish who listen to it there are people who are uh not happy with the program and they tell me this is the only torah that they learn i have to tell you that it's very meaningful to me and number two either my father-in-law of yatsuki hashoven avraham moshe who we gained so much from and miss dealing the second one i understand if i was going to go and sponsor something i would do it for you know for the uh the memory of a loved one in honor of something you know and i am amazed i i did not do a statistical analysis of how many podcasts have been uh sponsored as a hakarosatov which i have to tell you for me is meaningful on a lot of levels because as you understand i'm hoping now when we move back to the ravioli studios we get to go back to having a live audience i have somebody who keeps calling me and asking when we're gonna you know film live he wants to be part of the audience so uh hopefully we'll be back with a live audience but otherwise especially during this takufa when i'm just sitting you know looking in front of my little computer you wonder who am i talking to what what impact does it make and uh when you get feedback from people who not only say that it's meaningful but uh that it's uh it's it's got um that they want to sponsor an episode to express the hakaras so obviously i appreciate it very much on a very personal level thank you thank you for that shout out uh and on that note uh i want to mention that you know we put up uh video uh from it's already time if you've watched any of these little videos then you know that i am an animated character rabbi sitter and uh i um a lot of the material is my own material that i composed and uh the brilliance of how they animate it and turn it into something that's uh so much more interesting than just me and i know you wonder how is that even possible right but so much more interesting so excite i look at i where would you get an idea like that from yeah so we did a fundraiser for them and i had my own you know little group dedicated group there and a lot of people whose names are recognized from listeners and people who've reached out uh donated money um and and undo with me i i get paid for my recording time i just sit in a little booth and i and i and i talk and they have to do all the rest of the work i did this because i really believe in it i actually believe in the program i've seen what these videos do for kids i see my own grandchildren will sit there instead of watching many other videos of um worthless content i don't want to say questionable content but certainly worthless content you know is george do you understand curious george on any level does this make sense to you it doesn't make sense to me the man with the yellow hat brings this monkey and lets him loose throughout the city without any supervision can he go to jail for that and the monkey runs around and gets into all kinds of trouble all kinds of adventures and you know you know at the end you know he somehow saves the day but where's animal control why isn't this thing under supervision he's a monkey monkeys aren't supposed to be allowed to go to school or run around on their own and do stuff i never got it i don't get the whole curious george then and the first the original books he escaped he ran out of the zoo he got losers okay i understand you know but this guy look at hillary says okay george i'm going so be a good boy what about good boy he's a monkey and kids watch this yeah embarrassing bears when i was younger i used to buy these books and then read them to my kids what miserable values you know the message is that fathers are stupid and lazy and venal and just to be ignored and made fun of which is which is kind of sad kind of sad message and you know if i was doing something that was a little corny in my children's eyes they'd say abba you're being the berenstein bear abba amazing concept to find something that teaches values that's really valuable and it's fun and animated that kids want to watch uh that's an amazing thing so uh so i really believe in the project so that more or less brings me to the topic that i wanted to talk about uh for my last podcast of my year uh and that is a dear friend of mine who i'm not going to mention his name because i know he's sponsoring a episode and he wants it done anonymously and uh he's a dear friend he is one of the funniest people that i know i mean on a very low you know he has when you're a comedian you know they have this thing called observational comedy you have to watch and you see things that other people miss he's brilliant he spots it right away and you're like [Laughter] very funny just hysterically funny in any event uh so he said to me should i give money to this so i said well i've recorded a lot of videos and as you can see me sitting in a little booth and talking they have to have a writer and they have to have a cartoonist and they have to have an animator and they have to you know put all this thing together and come up with a script and turn what i've said into you know an action cartoon so that takes money he said to me but there are so few of them so if i tell my kids they have an hour of computer time there aren't enough videos to keep them busy for that time so they watch a few of them and uh and then there's not there's not any more so what's the point now stay true is the double one is kids can watch the same thing over and over again i have observed this myself and um and uh when you have a book all these children's books and you read it to your kid no sooner you finish it then they turn back to the beginning and say again and you're reading the same book over and over again and if it's like hop on pop you know it's like there's only so many times you can read that after a while it starts to become a chore so let's see how embarrassing it goes cheers george went to school and then he and everything's fine good goodbye no no read it for real for real i want to see every picture five six seven times so one is that when a video comes out a kid can watch it more than once yeah um it's counter-intuitive but it's true that people will often enjoy the same thing frank sinatra the last 40 years of his life saying the same eight songs over and over again you know nobody said oh my way i heard that one already boo they wait for it they anticipated there was a comedy group out of england in the 1970s called monty python's flying circus it came to america it was on pbs on educational television because it was english humor and it was not for everybody now i found them hysterically funny i mean just hysterically funny and uh i grew up in a house with four televisions and wherever i sat to watch it one or two of my brothers had to sit there and say this isn't funny why is that funny this isn't funny i said go away go watch something you like you understand you don't have to watch this i find it absolutely brilliant and very sophisticated i know a particular type of people like that who who were into monty python anyway they performed live at the city center i didn't know this at the time but uh in one of the skits or they had a choir paul mccartney uh was in it because he was also a big fan anyway so for years i've been watching this thing yeah so uh so we go to watch them at the city center and you're filled in a theater with monty python crazies some of them came dressed up like mr gumby mr man that's how crazy they were anyway they did all the skits that we already knew but we didn't care because it was monty python and we loved it now one of their most famous skits is the dead parrots kid if that if you haven't seen it there's no way to really do justice to it but basically this guy walks into a pet store he had bought a parrot and he says the parrot is dead and he says uh yeah no he's he's resting he says he's resting he said i'll wake him up then hello polly wake up molly thanks for watching he says no you stunned him what he was just waking up and you stunned him he goes don't tell me this it's a dead parrot if you hadn't nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up daisies and you get the idea more or less i can't really do justice to it but this is the dead person it's one of the most famous kids anyway three times during the show john cleese walks out with a cage with a dead parrot and the crowd goes wild and he walks off stage everyone knew this skit by heart but they were waiting for the anticipation of it was so exciting yeah i can't can't wait so uh there's there's that sense and then after the show ended you know the house lights come on you know and we're getting ready to leave he walks out and they do the parents kitsch i'm saying that people people heard the song already people saw the skit already people they they something that you enjoy you can do it over and over again and i happen to think that the rabbi sitter videos are just so much fun that kids can watch them over and over again obviously as we add to the repertoire it becomes better and better let me take it further you go to a casino today or something nobody can sing a song for more than three or four minutes sometimes less because they grow bored it doesn't mean anything when i was growing up you'd go to yeshiva they would sing a song for 45 minutes straight and everybody was into it and the more they sang it the more meaningful it became shimona ashrae we say the same exact one x-ray three day three times a day for over 300 days a year year after year after year i don't hear people complain no can't we say something else you know no there's a lot in here and the more you go over it the more meaningful it becomes i may have told this story at one point rebecca shapiro was makable from raputna and the brisker rob that covered the toyota is very important and he maintained conventory even though himself was a very warm and friendly person but he had to maintain cover the tire that was their sheet and the camera told me when he was a little boy he met robert where he met recruitment camp and he was talking to him and she was really very friendly you know so he says oh i'm going to try okay because it's such a nice rabbi you know putin that was very migrant on governor tyra when you walked into the office into where you had jack when you walked in to see him he had to wear your hat and jacket he had to walk out backwards you know but uh he was relaxing you know and uh so he's sitting in the basement and putting the walks down the aisle you know and he stands up and says hi rabbi using one of those looks you know this is the next day i transferred out that wasn't for me but but there is a sheet of cover to tell you and marshbury used to say that he believes that all of the sorrows of our door today comes about because of a lack of covenant fire so um so somebody asked him and put him in a purim he was uh you know a little more flexibility i said how did you become a relationship girl i said that i was a kid i was in ponovich someone told me he had to be like 12 or 13. and there was a blackout we couldn't learn we went outside little kids we hear somebody in the basement i look in the window and it's from tesla vessel is saying over hazal he says it over ten times slowly he says it 20 times it says start to wonder 20 times 30 times we started to giggle 40 times i started to think and at 50 times i had tears rolling down my face and at that moment i realized the power of a hazal if you take the time to look at it deep words so you say the same schwanna yesterday three times a day trust me they were written by the anja dola with naveem and you could say there's a lot there and sometimes it's the act of repetition itself that acts to allow us to be able to be tough or something to take it on and to be able to get it so uh so one answer is you can watch the videos over and over again the other one is and this is the other response i gave to him i said but you understand that if i take your attitude we would never have started the project at all because unless we could instantly produce hours and hours and hours of content 50 hours of content and we can't do it but it's just not possible you have to start somewhere there has to be a beginning of a joshua hartman who wrote the parish on the aye and different other works uh the morale he says to me why don't you write a safer why don't you rage material down i said because i'm afraid i'll look at it afterwards and i'll feel like i didn't write it right it was foolish he says you have to write he says i look back at the gorier and i realize there are things that i would have done differently or things that i understand better now than i did originally but you have to write you have to put it down you have to start somewhere so at some point you have to start with a video an hour two hours it takes time and as you produce it then you have the opportunity where people say well this is a really great thing and we should have more of them so the fact matter is that [Music] rabbi kalish from waterbury has an expression he always says because you know they get a lot of guys who are as the expression go works in progress and uh he always tells them respect the process it's a process and you have to understand that you're not going to become the person you want to become tomorrow maybe not in a month maybe not in a year i always tell people i said you know when you reach my age so a little kid you count the weeks how many weeks six weeks eight weeks then you start going months 12 months 18 months then you start going by years when you reach my age and you tell time by the decades when i was in my 20s when i was in my 30s when i was in my 40s you know it gives you a different perspective on life so a sign once it said god grant me patience and give it to me now people don't don't respect the process you have to work at it anything anything good takes effort takes time i know a guy who is a constant flutist i have someone says i think i never see you play the flute like a you know you should have a simple something and he said to me if you don't have eight hours a day to practice it's not worthwhile eight hours a day when uh i was a magician i was younger so one of the things that all the magic things tell you is you have to learn how to palm a coin climbing a coin means essentially taking a coin and holding it in your palm hence the term palming long enough so that the muscles develop around it so you have to carry it with you all the time this is a coin this is my hand yeah and you have to hold it like this all the time whether you're talking you know if you take a drink whatever you're doing you have to keep the coin now a neophyte magician goes like this and he says and and he keeps looking at his hands so it's quite obvious there's something to you whereas a real magician will take that coin i hope you can see the coin and he will toss it in the other hand and it will disappear where is it in fact still in this hand but but because you do it in such a confident way anyway the point is in order for that trick to work you have to be able to keep it in your hand all the time now i was not a great magician i was a great entertainer i used the tricks to be able to you know do other things i see people do card tricks i know what it takes to do it it's unbelievable i once bought this uh trick we basically take a short rope a long rope and a very long rope and you put the three of them together and you boom and they turn all the same size i know the trick is done i i tried doing the trick a few times it was boring i saw this guy perform this trick he did in my house for me it looked like magic marmish magic i know how it's done that's how that's how complete the illusion was and i said how did you do that he says i used to hang out at the magic store and uh whenever the guy running it was a magician had some spare time he'd say yeah come come kid we're working this trick and i spent hours and hours mastering that trick wow that's unbelievable um my go-to speech for a new group is always my yb jewish which is basically the introduction of themselves and i've given this speech definitely over a hundred times maybe more and i still enjoy it like i was talking about a kid watching the same video and over again i laugh each time because it's it's just that much fun yeah you can find it i'm sure online somewhere but um [Music] when i um given it so many times that i i have had time to work on the nuances you know and the pauses and it it becomes very professional because the more you do it the better you get at it so anything that you want to do is obviously going to take time and effort and there's no way you got to respect the process you're not you're not going to be able to sit down and you know in a little in a little room by yourself develop a hundred hours of tour programming you got to start somewhere we uh just started hashem i've been doing it for many years if you haven't it's not too late to jump in and uh there's only one place to start right at the beginning the word voracious first letter is a base why because it's closed on the top the bottom and the back the only place to go is forward i don't know i know if i remember it anymore so heart rapping in the library and it takes so long to learn everyone i'm sure that i'll never be a thomas so i don't have it right but the word's exactly this we'll start with boracious we're now learning can do start at the beginning you go from the first plus you go to the second you go to the third and you move along that's the process respect the process and it's not going to happen instantly he made a very nice donation anyway but but the point is that uh you know i i understand when you're in the middle of the process it can be very frustrating you know when you're in the middle of cooking something and you taste it in the middle almost can come sometimes it's inedible you don't understand how is this ever going to turn into something the longer you cook it the better it gets the more that it uh becomes what it's supposed to become it's a process yeah they wanted to maybe the love of vilna which was called europe he was only so he said we would love to make you the rough but you're very young he says i agree that it's a problem but you'll find that some problems are solved with time dear friend who uh my seminary class many years ago she had trouble finding a and i would was i diamond with her and went through all the agonizing decisions that all the singles have to make and you know went through the war stories etc she got married she had a baby she said to me i never thought i'd live to see this thing it took the parents who had kids who went off the dare and they come back and they come from they get married they have kids and they say if i knew there would have been an ending i could have handled it all but you just don't know you just don't know respect the process it takes time to do things and so even though i do this podcast now for three years you know if i miss a week so some people they always write the concern that you are right is everything okay not very reassuring reminds me of this fellow indoors man he says you know you go to the bathroom on the airplane and yeah you're there for like two minutes and people are knocking in the door are you all right is everything okay it's really awkward sometimes it's not you know some things take time you have to respect the process all right you know but some people uh write me occasionally and they're like annoying why hasn't there been a podcast this week i'm not getting what i'm not paying for hey yeah yeah yeah so uh that does not deter me um it's a sobering fact for me that there are thousands of people who listen to this and people look forward to it i've gotten uh photographs over the years you know i've uh we were more careful coming at every emergency shoppers hopefully we'll get back to that because the fourth year of the review show but they would sit down and eat my level mauka you know you have a picture of him and his wife eating mother mocha with the computer playing with me over there you know this was their saying night you know and uh listen i i always say the fact that people take time to listen to me whatever i have to say you know and uh we have a special treat on the anniversary show that somebody did i'll talk about next one but uh it's like that there are people who feel like i say you know the there are people who who feel a real attachment to this beyond me and that is extremely meaningful to me and uh sometimes i'm better and sometimes i'm worse and maybe now that producer mcconnell is back in the country we'll get things a little bit more organized but in the meantime as we end the year on the ramiolovsky show i a special thank you to all of my sponsors a special thank you to all of my listeners a special thank you to all of my missionaries i have missionaries out there a young man came to see me i said young man he was in high school and he says he downloads his father has internet at work they don't they live in there lincoln he downloads it onto his device and he copies it to all the other boys in the issue of his devices now i have missionaries out there spreading the word [Laughter] and uh so i just tremendous i curse itself and uh with that we end i had a tremendous question the one who finishes the title so this show is uh is my hustle for year three and uh again from the bottom of my heart i thank everybody who who listens and participates listen i know a lot of people who are dying to have a podcast that anybody will listen to and they like send it around to their friends and they try to get people to listen you know and the fact that you take out time from your schedule to listen to anything that i have to say is to me a tremendous tremendous thing for me and i hope all of us together by doing some good things and that's it for this episode and that's it for year three you will find out more about this show you can go to my website at rayalovsky.com you leave a comment sponsoring an episode listen to the theme song again yeah download it get the lyrics yeah and uh you can see past episodes find out all kinds of interesting things making comments and uh that's it for year three i'm deborah dolanovsky and this is the ramyolowski show it's the rabbi orlovsky show tauren simra ready to go the rabbi orlowski show 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] show till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the raviolowski show it's the rabbi orlovsky