Gelilah Guy

I've noticed that there are a grand total of ZERO comments on my previous entry which discusses the various elements of a "favor". Should I take this to mean that no one is interested in this topic? Perhaps no one is reading this blog anymore and everyone has forgotten about me. Or perhaps I'm not funny anymore. No matter, I will continue to rant starting now:

I used to be good at this thing called "going to morning services" or "minyan". Now, I don't go as often as the glory days (years 2001-mid 2003), but I still try to put together some good streaks. For example, during the 10 days of repentance, I made it to every morning service except for one...so that was pretty good. Anyway, I'm not so hard on myself for this lazy behavior because I have rollover minyans from the glory days. What are these rollover minyans, you might query? Well- rollover minyans is a system I thought off back in the days of Reishis. I decided that I should be allowed to miss one morning minyan a month. Now, since there are some months I haven't missed any minyans from back in the day, I have all these rollover minyans stored up for now. And I am cashing in baby. Now that I think about it, I think it was that I could miss one minyan a week or maybe one a day. Yeah...that makes more sense.

Anyway, it seems now that every time I show up for these services I am offered the honor of "Hagbah", or lifting up the ToYrah using only the power of your wrists. I think that this is happening to me b/c G-d is playing a practical joke on me. I have a bunch of normal fears- clowns, bees, long-term relationships, the dark, fruit, but I also have this one fear that isn't very normal. I am afraid of Hagbah. There. I said it- and i feel better. I'm simply not a Hagbah guy, I'm a Gelilah guy. In fact, I'm pretty good at Gelilah, and I once was able to dress the Toyrah in under 8 seconds. Granted, that was one of those small Toyrahs that kids sometimes have for some weird reason but still. Also, I have been know to perform 3 Gelilahs in one service! This obviously occured on everyone's favorite- Shabbos Rosh CHodesh CHanukah, but you all knew that.

Why am i so afraid of Hagbah anyway? It is a culmination of other fears- it stems from the fear of the unknown and the fear of failure and public embarrasment . All 3 of these factors come together to cause my fear of the Hagbah process. Hagbah is not something I have ever had the chance to practice, and so I don't know if I can even do it. Sure, my friends "chief" and "kogz" would sometimes spend random afternoons going to the Beis Medrash and taking out all the Torahs to practice Hagbah, but I had better things to do with my time like watching the Steve Harvey show. (hey steve!) As a consequence, I missed out on all this potential Hagbah practice, and now I am paying the price. By the way, re-runs of the steve harvey show are still available on BET- subscribe now.

I also just don't think I'm physically capable of this feat of wrist strength. I need not look any further than the activity of bowling to prove that I simply don't have strong wrists. I once went on a date to a bowling alley that cost like 45 dollars a round or whatever its called. A frame? I don't know, who cares, not the point. First of all, the girl, who appeared to be of averege female strength, was able to choose a ball that was much heavier than mine. I chose a 7, which is the same size ball I chose when going on bowling trips with ruach day camp 15 years ago. But this girl was able to choose like a 9 or 10. Secondly, she was able to bowl the right way, with the straight wrist s, but everytime I gave it a go my wrist would strangely turn and the ball would be sent to the gutter. Overall this date was a debacle for me, and it made me question my manhood. Luckily, I was able to stare at the girl's rear end every time she bowled, so the date was pretty good. But I think she knew I was doing that because my mind, like my bowling ball, was in the gutter.

Anyway- bottom line: Hagbah, like the mundane act of bowling, requires strong wrists. Clearly, I lack that. (and i'm not even getting involved here with the cases of "uneven Hagbahs" i.e - where one side is much heavier than the other...man, I am so afraid that the Torah is gonna drop during those dangerous Hagbahs. Am i the only one?) Since I lack the physical wrist power, I must stick with my Gelilah talents. Although, maybe if I am staring at a girl's rear end, I shouldn't be allowed to do Gelilah either.

How to ruin a favor (or maybe not).

Let me just start by saying that tonight I will turn 24 years of age. I know this because facebook says so. I will be celebrating this birthday by studying for a midterm in securities regulations. If anyone wants to join in on this festive celebration, please let me know. In all seriousness, birthdays defintely have lost the excitement they used to have. 21 was a big celebration, b/c of the legal drinking and all. 22 was also good for some reason, and 23 wasn't bad. For whatever reason I'm just not feeling it anymore. Perhaps it is b/c of a song that "mom" reminded me of today, which I have probably listened to over 500 times during my life so far. That song is "Old Man" by Neil Young, and it is depressing s. It mentions the age of 24, and if you are so inclined to be in a state of depressing s, i urge you to view the lyrics.

And that is enough of that. Something I always had a hard time doing for other people is this strange thing called "Favors". I'm not talking about when people ask me to do something completely unreasonable; I'm talking about a simple favor- like if you are driving by here, can u pick me up or something. By the way, me and my former roomate ("eric") used to come up with all types of characters as if we were about to write a sketch comedy show and perform it in our apartment. (we did make some small videos, to be viewed by special request). Anyway, one of these characters was "Unreasonable Favor man" - a character that always asked you to do the most unreasonable and inconveniant favors. I definetly have a problem doing unreasonable favors, and when people ask them from me I think that is absurd. But I also had a problem with regular favors.

I decided with the new year rolling around and all that, I should try and work on this and kicked things off with a major favor operation. My former chavrusah who may or may not be named Uri Burger runs a little "4 species business" in his spare time, and sells the species to UPenn. He knew I was driving from NY to Penn and asked if i could bring down the 80 or so species multiplied by 4. Now then, one might even classify this as a manifestation of "unreasonable favor man", but even then- I was willing to do this favor. This all sounds like a major step for a self centered shmuck like myself, but I will now explain how I proceeded to ruin or "federize" this favor.

I Federized the favor in two distinct ways. Uri offered to let me take a set of species for my own use as a reward for doing him this favor. First of all, this might ruin the favor right here. If one is receiving a reward for doing a favor, does that remove the status of favor. Perhaps a small reward really doesn't... but I kind of turned it into a big reward. In the store, I told the people that Uri said I can take an esrog of my own, and asked them where the most expensive esrogim were. I then grabbed a 70 dollar esrog and said "in your face esrog workers of uri". So now I had abused the reward system of this particular favor and perhaps tarnished it completely.

By the way, you might be thinking that this is halachically problematic, b/c I was given my esrog as a gift and it is not really my own esrog. You might be right or you might not be right, but this is not the place for this discussion. But if you were thinking of the Halachic ramifications of this long winded story, good job by you.

The second way in which i "federized" this favor was upon arrival at the Upenn. I found a great parking spot near my house, which is no easy task. As many of my readers know, finding a great parking spot is perhaps the best feeling in olam ha'zeh. Anyway, the delivery spot for all these species was 3 blocks away at the Hillel, but there was no way I was leaving this spot and driving to the Hillel. The result of all this was that 3 guys had to walk from the Hillel to my car and carry all the species through the dangerous streets. And all of this was on erev yom kippur, so these guys were probably busy. But I was busy too- watching Sunday NFL football, and that was no time to complete the favor in the right way. So I watched these 3 pious guys struggle with the boxes of species, and wondered if the Jets would indeed finish the job against the Colts that day. Sure enough they couldnt, just as I couldn't complete the favor.

The Rav's Machzor

This marks the beginning of the third season of the Fades Rant. If you missed the first 2 seasons, you should check the archives. I would say that the first season is the best, and the second season has some memorable moments as well. As for this new third season, I don't really know what to expect. I will attempt to be honest and self-depricating, and all should enjoy. During the break between writing this blog, I was very busily(made that word up?) involved in religious processes. First there was the new year and 10 days of repentance, followed by the day of atonement. Then, we just finished the tabernacles holiday, culminating in a day of drinking heavily and stumbling through the streets of new york city. Here is one of my favorite highlights from this year's High Holiday season.

Using "The Rav's new machzor" on yom kippur davening: I first saw this new machzor at one of those Judaica stores, and was immedietly tempted to purchase it for 35.95 or whatever ridiculus price they chose to charge. Was this another one of The rav's minhagim - overcharging for a machzor? Anyway, I decided to hold myself back from purchasing this machzor, b/cng I realized that I had built up a pretty large collection of religious books which I hardly ever look at . I decided that maybe it is time to read the books I already own, before going out and purchasing every new book that comes out. Anyway, this turned out to be a great decision, b/c when I walked into the minyan at UPenn for kol nidre, there was a table with 400 of these new machzors; apparently someone had decided to donate them for use at Upenn on yom kippur. This makes sense to me. Upenn likes to be one of these very intellectual places, and the Rav was a very intellectual Rav.

I was quite happy to use this brand new machzor, mainly b/c it had that "new book" smell. ON yom kippur, when I cannot use my mouth device for eating, i like to replace it with my nose device for smelling. I feel very satiated when I smell delicious food or other pleasent scents. I think this is b/c 50% of the satisfaction we get when eating is purely from the taste. The other 50% is from the food in our stomach. I made this up, by the way. I'm no effing scientinst. Anyway, so while there is nothing you can do on Yom Kippur about the stomach-satisfaction part, there is definetly a way to replace the taste-satiation part. All you have to do is replace it with smell-satiation. I did this by smelling packs of gum, standing outside food carts during the break and smelling mexican food, and of course- smelling the amazing and incomparable "new book" smell.

The Rav's Machzor also brought me an unexpected source of entertainment during the lengthy Yom Kippur services. I was expecting the machzor to have a different nusach- accoring to the way the Rav davened himself. But ALAS! or LO and BEHOLD!, the nusach was the same as any other artscroll machzor. The main difference was that little footnotes (as opposed to big footnotes) , on every single page with said something like "the Rav's practice was to omit this paragraph" or "the rav would say this only once". etc... Luckily, me and my former roomate who was sitting next to me, are good at the skill known as "mocking". We started making up our ownartscroll footnote minhagim highligted by me saying to him "Here, the Rav would eat a hot dog, but not with sourkraut". After making this joke, I said the AL Cheit for "mocking" with a little extra kavana. The other very bizzare aspect of this machzor was the sources. Most of them are from sifarim written by the Rav or his talmidim, which is to be expected. However, I did come across some "questionable" sources. For example, a footnote told me that the Rav switched the order of a few tefilot during mussaf. The source for this minhag was simply "Shucky Friedman". Umm- was this just some guy who was sitting near the Rav one yom kippur and heard him switch the order of 2 tefilos. Is he sure he heard this correctly? Did he then call artscroll and say "Hey, just wanna let you know, I'm pretty sure there was a switch in the order here...oh, who am i? Well, i'm shucky friedman...no, i'm not a rabbi, just an carpet salesman...i once sat 3 rows behind the rav."

Thanks- Shucky Friedman, u made it into the new machzor.


In all seriousness, the new machzor has a nice introduction and explains some parts of the service very well. Additionally, I am not sure if the Rav had sourkraut on his hotdog.