Words From Rabbi White

My dear friends,

We have to begin with sad news. Last Shabbos, our dear friend Malcolm Moscowitz passed away. The funeral was held Monday morning. Malcolm lived near the Shomrim LaBoker, and was a long-standing member there. However, whenever possible, he would come to our Chevra Shaas. 

A ba`al teshuvah, he was meticulous in his observance of commandments: sometimes over serious, yet with an interesting and clever sense of humor. [Example: if you would tell him that you would be flying to Boston, he would say that he hopes your arms won’t get too tired. We remember: the first year we met him, we invited him for Pesach. We were shocked when he brought us sandwiches on bread, assuming he didn’t realize bread is chamets, until we saw that it was fake bread!] [He said that before he became religious, he entered a restaurant and asked the waitress if they served crab. She replied: “sir, we serve all types of people!” Ironically, kosher imitation crab has become a popular shabbat food!] 

As Jerry Seinfeld said this week in his interview with Bari Weiss [as can be seen on youtube] “life without humor is a drudge.”

Malcolm worked for many years at JNF. When we first met, he would create pictures for us using typewriter art [i.e., the art of using the letters of a typewriter keyboard to create a picture. Not as easy as it sounds. Very meticulous and precise work!]

He was a lover of chazanut, and would often send me tapes of chazanim,.

His funeral was held during a pouring rain. As Mrs. Coty Finegold commented, it seemed like the heavens were crying. May his memory be for a blessing.

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The cycle of life: mazal tov to Drs. David Langleben and Victoria Kaspi on the marriage this past week of our former Herzliah student Dr. Ian Langleben to a lovely young lady from Edmonton, Mettanah Jacobson. May they be blessed with a long life together.

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This week we conclude Sefer vaYiqra’. The parasha contains the “tokheicha,” which means “rebuke.”  The basic idea behind it is that HaShem says if you break the rules, you are punished. My ninth-grade English teacher in Boston, Mr. Russo, once returned my composition with a red mark underneath the word “And” at the beginning of a sentence, for which I lost a point. I went over to him after class and explained: “Sir, I was just quoting a verse from the Bible.” Yet Mr. Russo insisted that one can never begin a sentence with a conjunction. “You should have put three dots in front of the verse” he explained, quoting a rule that we had never learned. 
He never gave me back that point!!!!!! He was trying to teach us that we must follow rules!!

Yet see how the world has changed. Nowadays, students can set up camp on a university lawn, create threatening environments for Jewish students, cause change of venue for graduation, recite jingles implying the destruction of Israel, etc. etc., all with impunity! It seems like college administrators are telling their students that rules are made to be broken! As Hamlet might have said, “Frailty, thy name is a college president!”

Shabbat shalom, Shalom `al Yisrael,

Rabbi Menahem White