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.