Better Know a Blogger

Today we meet BOTH, the philo-ist of the blogword's philo-Semites, and a fine friend of the blog. He is also a Talmid Muvak of the RaPas (Rabbi Pinky Schmeckelstein) and the RoshYeshiva of Yeshiva Chipass Emess - West Coast.

His favorite thing about SF:
Strong coffee and Chinatown.

Bloggers he pals around with:
In the electronic world those are Dov, Steg, Tzipporah, Jameel, and Robbie. I also read RenReb and the non-Tefillin Hedgehog and several others. But I have only met Charismatic Megafauna in the world of basarvedam.

Morning routine:
Strong coffee, into the little room with reading material, pen, paper,and small cigars, followed by clothing, tea, rush to work. Head over to the cigar store after eleven to smoke a pipe. On weekends, until fairly recently, I'd wake up late and spend several hours ranting at Fox Newson the tv (only reason to watch: irritation - it wakes you up). Butnowadays I head over to Oakland with a protest sign and flags.

Evening routine:
Leave the office hours after everybody else. Either home for the company of Savage Kitten, or over to The Occidental Cigar Club for Scotch and a pipe. Sometimes to the Karaoke bar around the corner from the apartment o listen to some horrible singing. Once in bed, read until unconscious.

His first encounter with Judaism:
Being called a smous in grammar school because I didn't look or act like the local children (who were all related to each other - you wouldn't believe how appallingly inbred the hinterlands of Brabant are - five facial types, four of them repulsive). Smous is the Dutch cognate of shmaltz. I had no clue what it meant. Until a classmate named Moos (Moshe) explained it to me. But that wasn't really an encounter.

The searching out of Judaic material really got started after a conversation with a bunch of coworkers at the Indian restaurant where I worked in the early nineties. One of them opined that you could always tell the Jews, because they looked a certain way and acted a certain way. Bear in mind, these were Indians talking (who all looked a certain way, and talked a certain way). So I challenged her, telling her that she didn't know what the divvil she was talking about, for all she knew I could be a Jew! At which point they all pretty much screamed "I knew it!".

Later, not a single one could put their finger on what was so Jewish about me. Neither could I. So I started reading. And it helped, at that point, that I still remembered the broken Yiddish which Moos occasionally spoke, as well as the more fluent Yiddish I learned from uncle Chaim and uncle Chaim (one an old-friend of my father, the other a local merchant).

How he met Rabbi Pinky Shmeklestein:
Started when I discovered his shiurim on the internet, and wanted to share the humour with friends. Problem being that the friends I wanted to share the humour with are not strictly "Jewish-literate". So I copied over the texts and interpolated explanatory notes between the paragraphs.

A month or so later, as an example, and to see what he would say, I e-mailed the good rav himself. His response was that a number of his subscriberim had wished that he would do something like that. The people most likely to appreciate the shiurim being somewhat crippled by the language, the ones most likely to scream angrily have no problem at all with the language or the references. So for the next year we went through a large part of the five books together.

Why he hangs out in the Jewish blogosphere:
More interesting than reading food-blogs or political blogs, far far more interesting than visiting Jeebus and friends.

Current status of his relationship with Jesus:
Who? No seriously, who? There is just too much weird stuff in the Jesus story to take seriously, and when there is some real meat, they stole it from the Jewish table. Did he exist? Probably. Did he resemble what his acolytes wrote about him? Likely only in a few details - we actually know more about Rabbbi Akiva than about Jesus. And much of what we think we know about Jesus comes from the filter of Saul of Tarsus and his heirs. So no, I don't have relationship with
Jesus. Why? Did he say he met me?

Favorite torah teaching:
Hard to say favourite - I always find something interesting in the Sfas Emes, and something infuriating in certain Art-Scroll publications. The Ramban (in translation) is some purely great stuff, as is Rashi - but Rashi, as Ed discovered a while ago, also gets my bile going. The entire Abrahamic family history up to Egypt comes across as a great foundation metaphor, and it is easy to read and annotate. But once Moshe Rabbeinu starts lecturing about all the rules and details, it is hard to read between the lines, and hard to read period. Still working on the Hebrew - some words do not occur often enough to get a sense of their shades of meaning.

Who he voted for in 2004:
The lantern-jawed loser of the election.

His plan for ending the war in Iraq:
We stay, it's a mess. We leave, it's a mess. The only reason why we should stay a bit longer is to keep the proxies of the Saudis and the Iranians from blowing each other up and death-squadding each other's civilians. Put differently, give the locals more time to find a safe hiding place. But there's no chance of this ending well.

DovBear: Great blogger or greatest blogger ever?
Oh come now! You know how limited my reading is - there are oompty million bloggers out there.... But yes, after getting spitting mad every day reading the Algemeen Dagblad at the beginning of lunch, Dovbear is the first blog I head into. Followed by the Melech ha gawblinim. Sometimes I cruise into Beis Dov while on hold.

His true feelings about Chaim G:
Really like him. Might not agree with him. But like and agree do not necessarily go together.

The extent of his Jewishness, or the Jewish things he does:
Let's see, anything Jewish..... member of the "International Zionist Conspiracy, Bay Area Chapter", which consists of slightly more people than can fill a van - especially if there are tons of flags and signs in that van.I ended up grabbing flags and signs and heading off to the consulate five blocks away a number of times in summer of last year, once ending up being the only pro Israel demonstrator facing about two hundred very angry Muslims (yes, the SF Police Dept. are a blessing). I waved a shoe at them, and they screamed. In retrospect it was perhaps not a sane thing to do. But it was worth it.

The other Jewish things I do consist mainly of sometimes buying kosherfoods, wrestling with Mishna, and regularly whacking my way through the parshayos. Nothing in an organized or structured Jewish context - not social or confident enough to hunt out a shul, contact a rabbi, or find another chavrusa since the last one Z"L' passed away last year. A friend has encouraged me to come to his shul in the Eastbay, but sofar I haven't made it there yet. Oh, and I contribute to the Chabad telethon each year -non-denominational drug treatment is a darn good thing. Nobody needs to be whacked over the head with Jeebus when they're trying to kick another nasty habit.

Next OrthoMom who doesn't yet know I'm planning to profile her, but will, I expect, be more than happy to play. (What happened to RenReb? She's busy, apparently, with important, private, rabbinic business, and can't spare the time or energy for distractions. I respect that. )