The Purpose of Praise (Meaningful Tefila #2 - Ep. 148)

hi this is dominowski and welcome to the rabbi yolowski show whether you're watching with our friends over at tour anytime or wherever you watch or listening to your podcasts it's always exciting to have you along for the adventure now we have a sponsor this week who was the same sponsor as last week i guess he had such fun and uh he's anonymous i know who he is he knows who he is i'm sure his closest family knows who he is but i uh i cannot reveal his identity because then his enemies will seek to destroy you and so therefore you never know when someone might suddenly target your loved ones so therefore he has to remain anonymous and that's why uh i had to go someplace and they said because of corona you have to wear a mask i didn't realize that my batman mask didn't qualify i thought that would be very effective they told me no you have to wear like a spiderman hood [Laughter] and anyway so uh so it's uh as close for the donors for him and his family and his loved ones and uh me it's hashem you know you know who you are i know you are i love you thank you okay um we are in a series yeah very exciting whenever you get into a series uh the uh atlanta braves just won the american league pennant now the question is after major league baseball boycotted atlanta because of the all-star game because they passed a voting law that they don't like the question is are they now going to point out the world series i don't know and i don't particularly care you see because they were worried that the voting law was racist and so they moved it out of atlanta which has a majority black population to denver which has an white population because at times they are changing anyway uh i don't know i don't know i don't get it uh life is uh so complicated but we're we're not doing a series like that you know we have a different series um and that is we're talking about tevilla we gave a little introduction in the last podcast and we're going to be continuing it so uh i got a lot to talk about got a lot to talk about because tv as i mentioned last time is a struggle it's always been a struggle but for our generation it's more of a struggle i'll give you an example i read an article in the hamadia many years ago that struck a chord with me it was written by a young lady who had been in seminary and in seminary she got ready for a shoniyam kipper they were learning lots of mahshava svarim and musa schmuzen to be able to prepare them for davening and now she goes back to america and she has a job and she doesn't have the time for that preparation and she's going in on rosh hashanah and she's nervous because she doesn't have her preparation she goes into shul with her moxer and she sees the altar bobbers and they're darkening and they're crying with their tear-stained mach zorim and she says they probably never did an organelle yo they probably never did a parhadit they probably never did but there's something inside and it's true we live in a generation where everything is hard for us because our hearts have turned to stone that's the navi talking not me we say you should remove our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh that that means because our our hearts have become hard and so everything's difficult for us the uh mcgillis tightness was mavutal they cancelled it why says because this is what the gemara says that just like a needle in dead flesh doesn't cause any pain so too we don't feel anything we don't feel happy we don't feel say it don't feel anything uh gimmel sivan i will be married 40 years interestingly enough my wife as well i remember my bedekin i hadn't seen my wife for a week i'm walking down with my father and father-in-law on either side my chaverim dancing in front of me it was such a beautiful and poignant moment you didn't need schtick today you need shtick he does a little dance to huss and he carries a rose back face you know because the the moment itself has lost the poignancy to it yeah um so uh so something like tefila which is a voter should be lave and our heart has turned hard as a rock you understand the tremendous a voda that's necessary for us to reach into it so i'm gonna talk around a little bit i'm gonna give some background set things up try to put things into perspective before we get down to practicalities of what we can actually do i'll tell you what you don't do what what you don't do is get one of those books with three pages of commentary on every word because then you're not darvening anymore you're reading and that has to be done beforehand let me give an example if you will davening is something of an art form and if you want to be successful at any art form you have to have practiced to the point that you don't realize what you're doing is complicated in the amateur magician handbook henry haye had learned by t nelson downes t nelson downs is one of the most famous magicians of the last century he was known for basically developing the whole area of coin magic that was through this whole area anyway so the kid henry hayes says i was practicing a trick and the neighbor is watching he says you're good kid but you're not as fast as teddy t nelson downs teddy and he said to the neighbor it's not that he's so fast it's that he's so slow and when he left so t nelson down told him let them think you're being fast but you have to practice a move so many times that it becomes so smooth you don't realize it the famous ballet dancer barishnikov i remember seeing an interview with him back in the 1970s and they asked him who do you think is the greatest dancer of all time and without hesitating he said fred astaire it says man is genius because he makes it look so easy but you have to practice and practice and practice so if a person goes out for a dance and they're not it has to be so smooth that nobody realizes what you're putting into it we're not seeing discovery so they have a certain set number of classes that they teach and i remember the there was one fellow there and i sat in his class five six times it was exactly the same he's been doing this for years the same exact class and i said to him how do you give the same exact class with the same level of enthusiasm each time without uh without getting bored he says because i practiced it so much that i'm able to give the class and leave most of my brain free to watch the people's reactions and see how they feel about it so but you have to practice it you have to get it down to the point where you're able to do that when i was uh teaching in a particular yeshiva it was a two-year yeshiva i suggested that we take two masertas that we know work and pick out two prokim from each one that we're going to do and just switch off every year every other year because the kids only come for two years and this will allow the rebellion to become extra proficient in these programs so that we can teach it extra well and everybody voted me down because they said we'll go out of our minds go out of our minds reviewing said he wants to ask the crea rebbe who had been teaching little kids how to read for 40 years olive bay's face give me darlin no that's not what they do in this you know olive bay's face gimmel or if you want to be a little more dramatic jesse lieber i was out of it's he was doing once a bunch of teenagers and at one point he plays this very vague sticker song [Music] you get the idea and nobody knew what he was doing it was the elephants to the different the different they were the kudot yeah and uh that's why it was ashkenaz says that he has this korea rep he says 40 years you're doing abu ghadah how do you that go out of your mind and he said because i'm teaching children and little boys come in and they don't know how to read and they walk out and i give them the gift of reading now they can read anything i've opened up a whole world to them what could be boring about that which is very interesting because if you understand that that's why there are people who say uh davening you know do the same feeling three times a day every single day okay changes on shabbos and on holidays but for the most part it's the same same tevilla over and over again how am i supposed to come up with enthusiasm because it's the vote that you believe we have to get into our heart okay so those are a little little tidbits that i'm throwing out there uh what can you do with it fella so you know tvs come in three flavors that's what they call shevach is praise praise the lord yeah praise is to give thanks thank you hashem for all that you do right okay and by kosha is to ask and i asked people which of these are the easiest and they say for sure about kosher most people darvin in the same exact way that a small child sits on a stout fellow's lap around a particular holiday dressed in red with a big beard and they go down their list i want a pony and i want money and i want a car and you know peace for israel you throw that in it sounds good but uh i don't know if you know who i'm referring to it's uh it's great here in itself i've never gotten used to it and some of my kids when they got married they they couldn't understand my objection because they didn't grow up in america my oldest was five when i moved here you know and that's how they decorate the suckers with uh xmas decorations that they have left over from the states they put up garland [Music] blinking lights things like this i uh i can't i can't it doesn't it has associations for me my kids once they moved out and made their own sucker they put in blinking lights garlands everything so a friend of mine robert granovski he's been on the show we hope to have him again um he uh he tell the story that he was once in matassador one of the seven doors and um and he uh he sees a sucker he sees this kid and he's hanging up it was like little garland and it has santa's on it so he says to the kid do you know who that is this is some rubber you know he wears a red one he's got a big white beard and his mama's taco looks like a rubber so um but anyway so they sit down they go down the list give me give me give me give me give me give me that so that's what we define as adopting thank you we can manage as well uh someone gets a touchdown they throw the ball to the ground full of their knees thank you lord lordy lordy thank you thank you for this wonderful bounty yeah i have a holiday in america that's supposed to be uh dedicated to giving thanks yeah we were grateful for the fact that we came to america and the native americans helped us survive the very difficult winter and then we celebrated our harvest and then we gave the native americans 24 hours to get out of town because they were hurting the real estate values but um uh that's not true anyway but uh it was actually much early in the year because puritans who founded america were very tied to the old testament what we call the torah we don't call it the old testament they call it the old testament because they've got a sequel called the new testament where god gets married and has a kid it's a whole different story but in hours we don't have that part you know we have the the you know bible part one [Laughter] and uh yo university if you take a look at their emblem it has hebrew writing and in fact the founders were considering making hebrew the official language of america and uh so there was a a strong sense of uh old testament judaism in their observance so what they called thanksgiving was actually the feast of tabernacles the feast of booths what we call circus yeah and and they were celebrating the khaga asif the bringing in the harvest it moved later in the year as time went on and tend to eat a lot of native american food like turkey potatoes they didn't have potatoes in europe and have turkeys sweet potatoes there's sweet potatoes and there's yams one comes from africa one comes from south america you know but you know cranberries also native to north america so so a lot of these things uh was there to thank hakuras baruch so there are people okay with thanks um praise people have a harder time with and i've heard people say it what's the matter god's got an ego problem needs me to tell him he's great okay you're great all right feeling better big guy don't bring any floods or anything all right i'll catch you bye min i hope you're feeling better and this concept of shiva people don't want to praise hashem so i want to start with shavach because i think shevach is the most important thing if you understand that i think that's the key to understanding all of the tvs i'm going to go back to when i was a kid uh i grew up in new york i was born in 1959 so in the early 60s the brooklyn dodgers moved to los angeles the new york giants moved to san francisco we were left only with the bronx bombers who were the yankees that was the only major baseball team in new york in the 60s at some point later on the mets started in queens and to this day there's only one major league baseball team in new york that's the yankees [Laughter] oh is it full disclosure i don't care i really don't care it's like somebody once described hockey as a bunch of french canadians playing another bunch of french canadians nobody really cares guys says i was in a fight and a hockey game broke out but uh you know it's uh it's not nobody really cares so i don't really care that much about baseball but when i was a kid you know everybody was a yankee fan everybody in new york was angry that's all it was some of my brothers were met fans that's why i have to i have to make fun of the meds you know i point out they call them the miracle mets because it's a miracle if they win nobody says that about the yankees you expect the yankees to win that's just how nature works that's why everybody hates the yankees and they made a whole broadway play that turned into a film about how everybody hates the yankees and that's one of the things that new yorkers love about the yankees that everybody hates them and by extension us and we we get a special thrill from that but um so i was a kid and my parents took us to a yankee game now you got to remember the yankees then were mickey mantle roger maris uh joe pepitone um uh whitey ford oh these were these were uh these were very very famous people uh yankees and um kids would go and we would make signs new york loves mickey mantle and you would carry it through the stands for everybody to see because you wanted everyone to know you love mickey mantle and kids would wait outside to try to see their stars maybe get them to sign their autograph because how could you not love this man he can hit a ball with a stick very far and he can spit you know and drink and i don't know what else he did that was of note but wow or you go to a basketball game and a guy can bounce a ball and throw it into a basket we go to a football game you have people the size of refrigerator freezers smashing into each other and knocking each other unconscious for about 12 seconds and then they blow the whistle and then they spend another 20 minutes putting everything back together and then they smash into each other again and people go crazy wow i love you man you're the best we love you mickey there's nothing inherently wonderful about these people now why are we praising these people what's our motivation it's because we're impressed by them we're in awe of them there are rock stars um i don't know who's around anymore i i lost track i i'm going to end up saying something embarrassing so i'll go all the way back to make sure that i'm okay yeah um in the 60s people listen to the beatles they were very popular surprisingly not as popular as the beach boys i didn't know this because we listened to the beatles but it was the beach boys you know when i was growing up i was a kid but uh the beatles were um keenly aware of the fact that they weren't selling as much as the beach boys that's why john lennon wrote that song back in the ussr oh the moscow girls he was making fun of the beach boys you think today but these people were so let's take paul mccartney paul mccartney was knighted he is sir uh paul mccartney beatle and um there was a character with the name of chris farley who was a comedian on saturday night live and he's interviewing paul mccartney and the whole interview is oh my gosh you're paul mccartney that's right i'm talking to paul mccartney this guy's a beetle you're a beetle that's right oh my gosh you're a bubblegum that was the whole interview just him saying this over and over again wow wow that's about it that's as far as it goes there's not much you can say so there was this woman in scotland uh who wrote this very popular uh series of books they started out being children's books then became adult books he had a big fight with the new york times bestseller list whether it was going to be listed as children's book or an adult book the harry potter series and uh when one of the books came out when she was still doing book signings i guess was book four or something children were lining up with their parents in the middle of the night waiting to go in and get their book signed by jk rowling they were waiting for it now what are they gonna say i love your books thank you very much some kids say i'm practicing the spells yeah good good luck with that [Laughter] nobody nobody is going to really engage in a discussion all i want to do is say wow you're my favorite author i love you wow you're terrific wow and people are they call it starstruck people are amazed even when people say i don't like the fans i don't like that woody allen would always say i don't want people coming over and talking to me they'd come over and talk to him anyway wow i love your movies especially the early ones we're funny you know and and uh it it he wasn't interested but it didn't make a difference because people want to say how wonderful i think you are i love your books i love your music actors i used to live in los angeles uh actors would sometimes dress up and go out and try to hide so nobody knew who they were because they get mobbed by people saying wow man i love you man you're the best man wow man so if you live in new york the odds are you never went to the statue of liberty because people who live in new york don't do tourist things when relatives come from out of town and they're like whoa whoa what are we going to go see in the big city you know see you take them to the empire state building you take them to the to the uh statue of liberty you know take him ice skating and rockefeller center whatever whatever new yorkers people who visit new york do for fun but regular new yorkers don't so too in l.a i never did any la things but my brother came out for the summer so he wanted to see a game show so he went to cbs television city to watch the prices right we're waiting online and at the time give you an idea how old this thing is there was a show called hawaii five-o with jack lord now they rebooted it later on but so it hurts the story but the original one with jack lord and jack lloyd is one of these really good looking actors with a square drawer and he's walking down and he's walking past the line of people and everyone going ah jack lord there's jack lord jack lord you know and i and i guess he heard me when i said to my brother who's that [Laughter] i wasn't i wasn't a fan anyway but uh everybody's amazed jack lord now what if it wasn't jack lord what if it was the lord lord creator of heaven and earth master of everything all-powerful almighty all-knowing and you've got a little time schmoozer wow you're you're great you're really unbelievable thank you you're taller than the tallest mountains do you ever see like a relief globe of the earth those mountains really aren't that high oh okay um the seas aren't that db though i guess that sounds a little silly uh um those rings around saturn that was a great idea thank you um the milky way is my favorite galaxy not that i get out that much thank you i think gravity was a great idea because otherwise we'd like float away and stuff you know i feel so stupid [Laughter] why am i amazed about some guy who could hit a ball with a bat somebody who can sing you know and play at the same time not all of them can but many of them can somebody who can act jerry seinfeld once said i don't know why we give these people a wood somebody writes words for them to say the director says stand here and say these words and then we give him an award the man's a genius he said exactly what we told him to say exactly the way we told him to say it the man is that you give that man an award and somehow this bestows some sort of special status but people are like wow wow academy awards wow these people won awards and why are we amazed by these people but kursberku who created the entire universe from nothing knows everything sees everything is all powerful and we don't have a sense of wow yira is mistranslated in english it's translated as fear fear of god yes hashem is or wow not fear wow right so you prepare your dvaratora to give it the shabbaton everyone knows how to prepare the torah in this week's partial we have the dramatic story of abraham of one could ask the question if the then how come none of that uh the mesh answers this with a mushroom there was a king no no no no no so to each one of us in our own lives neither than that good shabbos right okay that's how every title works you have your little door written up and there's this is an old marshall you have to forgive me and there's a little uh noise at the back of the room and suddenly yeah yeah man bible yoshi comes in and sits in the front row and looks up and then we're scheinberg and then and rip motion feinstein we have jakov kaminetsuki river rudiment the brisker rav shock they all line up and say i'd love to hear your devatora what are you afraid of he's not going to hit you no one's going to get up and slap you there's i'm i'm i'm an awe of these people i don't want to look stupid and yet hakuras is not impressive enough to you that's wow and i'll give you a little exercise to work on until next time work on being wowed and amazed if you live in america now or certain other uh countries with deciduous trees the trees are changing colors i always found that awe inspiring i grew up in long island you go outside and the leaves are red and crimson and orange and yellow and and and green and and and gold and you're looking at it it's just it's just breathtaking here in eritsel we get these sunsets that are just gorgeous sometimes you get a view when i was in south africa they said that in cape town the kiev movement is less successful than in johannesburg because the people feel like they already have spirituality the entire city is built around this giant rectangular mountain called tabletop mountain there's often a cloud on top of it it's surrounded by the ocean and you just look at it and it takes your breath away wow marabou practice being wowed practice looking at the bria and saying oh my gosh that's what shevach is wow so that's uh that's our um our beginning of our series we'll talk about next week and then we'll talk about by kosha and uh and then we'll talk about uh other aspects that i wanted to uh bring in but i'm starting just by giving the foundation so uh you know that we uh we have a uh a new uh program at the end of the podcast we have questions i have a whole list of questions here i don't know how many i'll get to but the first one i'm going to do is by ari rasna arie rasna is the one who made the rabbinovsky mug and he said now that we have a new logo he's going to have to make a new mug so uh you know what can i tell you life is filled with challenges but anyway i'm going to keep my mug in any event but and he writes there's a lot of talk about what's wrong with our generation what do you think our generation is doing right [Laughter] as much as it pains me to say something nice [Laughter] it is so incredibly important and uh you're right we don't talk about this enough we talk about all of our shortcomings and all of our failings and that's a mistake it's a disservice so let me tell you what i think the most amazing thing is we've been beat and we've been down but we keep on defending we intend to stay around because we are never ending [Music] time once said you know why all the jews and rod and keep shabbos because all the jews and rod and keep shabbos and if they go someplace where they don't keep shabbos they won't keep shabbos because they never sat down and made a choice never sat down and made a decision do you realize for a person today to be associated with orthodox judaism is such a tremendous thing because the forces out there are so dramatic to pull us away so the fact that a person's willing to stand up and be counted as a torah jew in the eyes of a kurdish borough you have no idea how valuable that is when everybody was doing it everybody was doing it but to be able to do it because i've made a choice and everybody makes a choice because you all know there are plenty of people who are leaving the program and going off on their own and the fact that people are still willing to stand up and be counted is the most amazing thing and we we have to celebrate that anyone who's still around today and and i always point out uh you don't have to be the best you just have to be there at the end they used to have these things called dance uh marathons and people would keep dancing and dancing until people would collapse and you know the people who won were not necessarily the best dancers they were the last people standing yeah uh i remember when afghanistan fell there were people compared it to the full saigon i remember i was alive at the fall of saigon but i didn't know that much about it it's just i just remember my mother had this expression when you'd be at a kiddush and everybody was pushing and and shoving she'd say it looks like the last helicopter out of saigon this was one of her expressions i i wasn't sure exactly what she was referring to but i found a first-hand account of the guy who was on the last helicopter out of saigon and he said when we saw that saigon was falling to the north vietnamese we said anybody who can get to the embassy compound we will get them out and so people who could made their way to the compound and the helicopters kept taking off to the aircraft carriers and battleships out at sea he says we would load everybody up as much as we could and we would take off and as long as we could take off we would let people load on we'd go back and we just keep doing it he says and i was of the last soldiers left and we were dedicated we're going to get everybody out of the embassy who was there we couldn't get everybody out but everybody who was in the compound we got him out and i was waiting for the last helicopter out of saigon and i thought to myself the people who got rescued were not necessarily the most deserving but they were the people who were there at the end we're the people who are still here and there have been many jews throughout history who have not survived the test of time and we are still here we can look at a kurusbaraku and say we're here rebellion once said listen the jewish people may not be great but who else you got we're the best that you got and there's no question about it so could we be better of course we could be better are there areas that we need to look at of course i'm by nature of a social critic that's what that's part of my role that i that i get because i'm a public figure and i always love it when i have these people say to me i think you're speaking lush and horror about the jewish people i said you mean like gisha yoho and yumiyo no you listen look at what they write about the jewish people you know i i tell the story that uh we had a menschmare solution and we were trying to get with bulman's exile to come and speak and he kept making excuses and finally i said rebbe why won't you come and speak and he said i feel that the public emphasis on smear salution is being used to stifle legitimate criticism of the jewish community everyone's afraid it's lush or not so you have to point out the problems but those are the problem but those are the problems for the good people i was giving a uh i was giving a drusher once in a short i was talking about intermarriage and then assimilation and someone came up to me at the end and said why are you telling us we're we're in an orthodox show in shabbos and i said who am i supposed to talk to i haven't got anybody else to talk to talk to you so the only people that we can work on is ourselves we don't have anybody else left so yeah it's a tremendous uh celebration okay i got time for one more uh kermit the frog asks what is your favorite food well it's not frog legs i can tell you that much it's difficult being a baltimore there are a number of foods that i uh really enjoy what's my go-to for oh it's my go-to food um i really enjoy lasagna american lasagna at least the way i make lasagna israelis don't really get it they they take like 12 lasagna noodles they put a little bit of sauce in between and you're basically just eating a big piece of pasta but i make a filling with cash cheese and and grated cheese and i you know use uh tomato sauce and then i use you know like uh runzoni lasagna noodles and i stack it up and it's uh it's really really good on the other hand my mother's veal with peppers which only works with american veal i bring it back from america you saute it and then you fry up onions and green peppers and fresh mushrooms and then you cut the cutlets into little pieces and you put it in with some uh with some white wine dry white wine and you let it simmer a little bit and then you add honey's tomato sauce and you wait till it thickens give me a second ah anyway so i'm i'm fond of that as well uh on the other hand i make a vegetable soup just vegetables yeah and i happen to think it's delicious so what's what's a favorite food it's really hard it's hard to say i've uh my mother used to make people's favorite foods on their birthday so for my brother mitchell she used to make this white fish with vegetables this baked white fish that he really liked for my brother jason over shalom she used to make this chicken salad she would make her own dressing chicken salad and potato salad that would go along with it for me she made a rib roast i uh i'm a really simple guy who's that so a nice thick piece of rib roast can't really go wrong with that so unfortunately i don't have one favorite food i have quite a variety of them that i enjoy uh one last question do you watch the podcast absolutely i really enjoy it i when i used to give a shirt i would listen to my own tapes and then after my cds and my recordings you know i'm always amazed um because we have in halakha the concept cosman chipolte innobelia when something is giving out it doesn't absorb so when i'm busy talking i can't also be listening to what i'm saying so afterwards i listen to it sometimes i listen to old shiurim and i set up all these questions and i'm like oh my gosh i have no idea what the answer is i was in the answer i'm like wow that was brilliant so sometimes i you know i try to always watch the podcast and very often i laugh out loud because i i really i really enjoy listening to myself and i hope you do too and that's it for this show if you want to find out uh more about the show you can go to rabiolovsky.com you can leave a comment you can sponsor an episode you can uh go to the question section and submit a question uh you can go to the music section and get the theme song um you can write me at uh at the contact uh button lots of stuff you can do and that's it for this episode this is deborah olonowski and this is the rabbi yolovski show [Music] it's the rabbi orlovsky show knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to write [Music] youtube and more it's rabbi orlovsky show [Music] show till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the rabbi orlowski show it's the rabbi yolovsky [Music]