=purav9 ================================================================== THE BROIGES BEGGAR'S GAZETTE Publiee en Broiges, Belge "I had one Grunch, but the Eggplant over there." =================================================================- OUR PRICE: -- NIE (New Israeli Euro) 1.5 -- -- CHEAP-- ------------------------------------------------------------------ VOLUME 2: #7 Early Tamuz Edition ================================================================ "We had what_to_do, so it was OK." Amy Lilien Shames, if I recall, explaining how folks at Moshav Mevo Modi'in got through the First Gulf War in good form. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Waht is pleasing to man, is pleasing to G_d. Most say: Read not 'man', but '(wo)man'. Each man found his own way through the Reed Swamp. Most say: 'person' ------------------------------------------------------------ Shmuel Silver says: When you have finished morning prayers, go home and eat breakfast. [or maybe he said just: "eat breakfast"] ---------------------------------------------------------------- "There is a balm in Gilead to make the spirit whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. Sometimes I get discouraged and think my work's in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again." Negro spiritual. I forget where 'Gilead' is. The Golan, I think. Or maybe the Galilee. "Rabbi Shmon ben Gamiel says: "The balm is nothing but sap which drips fromthe balsam tree." [Siddur, quoting Talmud, don't knwo reference.] RaBI ShiM'ON BeN GaMLIAeL AOMer: "Rabbi Shimon ben Gamiel says: "The balm is nothing but sap Ha'aRI AYNU AeLA SRaKh HaNoteKh M_'eTzI Ha_QetaKh which drips from the balsam tree." ================================================================ The Assistant Postmaster said: Why did the Rabbi have to pass on in the early '90's -- so they could invent the Pelephone -- because once they invented the Pelephone, he would not have had a moment's Sheket. ================================================================= CAVEAT TABBYCAT: Reading INstructions: NaFShOT residing in the vicinity of Mt. Sinai and outlying districts, as far as Mevo Meshuganim (which is the limit from which one can get to Jerusalem -- walking of course -- in one day -- may read this this from top down. Inhabitants of Greater Australia (with the possible exception of Kangeroos and other Knights), including the Alps and/or Great Barrier Reef, should maybe best read it from bottom up. For those from Kiryat Sefer Emulations: Sei gesund, this is not your cup of tea, except for folks of really eclectic palate. ================================================================= Rabbi Yum-yum lived by the Parking Lot on San Cristobal Mountain. He spoke no word. A small sign read, simply, "Feed the Rabbi." He taught: There is a tora of men, and a tora of women. He who pays less heed to the tora of women than to the tora of men, will in end inherit gehinnon (Cows Defend Us!). {Commentary (sa): In 1982 I went to a Mikveh. It was in the Old City. A sign said, "It is forbidden to discuss tora here." Someone had added, "It is forbidden even to think of it." I went home to Cambridge Massachusetts, more or less, and told that to a chick at Haverat Shalom. She said, more or less, "But I get my best religious thoughts when I'm naked."} =============================================================== AN ADVERTISMENT FROM THE DAVKA PARTY: ***PORK -- BUY IT WITH PRIDE -- EAT IT WITH GREASE*** "Hello boys, fat and thin Hello boys, fat and thin See the gravy run down my chin: GroundHAWG." (US folk song (Appalachian or New England?), 1700's) FIGHT RELIGIOUS COERCION! Every week we are all victims of religous coercion: You're out for a pre-noon stroll down Rehov King George in a chamsin, when suddenly out from the Seat of the Chief Rabbinute rush a bunch of men in black with long white beards, followed by a boy carrying a Shabat_hotplate on a very long extention cord; whereupon you are pinned to the ground and force-fed cholent (chaud lente). {Editor's note: I've never read the stuff, but I reckon that there's nothing metaphysical (not including exegesis of Torah) to learn from Kabalah that can't be learned much simpler and clearer in the terminology of HIK. Except, eg, how to make a Golem; and that's easy -- just feed your husband last week's cholent.} ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Eat more goat" Bumper sticker of the Poquaque Goat Growers Association ca. 1971 ÷"Pork clogs up the subtle bodies(s)" said to have been said by Puran Blair, ca. 1980 ================================================================ ANNOUNCEMENT: Stinkybug Season began this year on 28 sIvaN , which is therefore hereby provisionally designated Stinkybug Day. Comment (sa): However, compared to a squashed little black ant, of the sort who do shmira in my kitchen, the Stinkybug is like unto, not merely Mennon After-Shave, but English Leather (the which there is none better, even on Park Avenue.) Hai said: Lots of snakes in my yard. You have too? I said back: With all the cats hiding under my house waiting for me to try to feed the Housecat, a snake couldn't move without saying slicha, continually. =============================================================== Response to an article in the Moshav Mevo Modi'in Good Times Monthly: A DOZEN REASONS TO JOIN THE REFORMIES: 1. It is our tradition from the Old Country. 2. Shlomo Riskin's article on the portion of the week. 3. Larry Kushner's books, starting with 'Book of the Letters' (which seems compatible with even the strictest orthodoxy), and going on to his -- Jungian? -- fantasy on the midrash of Avraham chasing the calf through a long cave into Gan Eden. Also: almost anything written by R. Zalman Schachter (although he does not define himself as Reform, and remains deeply rooted in Jewish religious tradition; he has termed himself 'ortho-prax' [from Gr. 'praxis', practice, l'havidil (in distinction from) Gr. 'doxa', opinion; contrasted by Plato with 'nous', knowlege). 4. A bit of flute and harp on Shabat goes nicely on Shabat. (And R. Shlomo says, in something I've input: ÷ If the Sages had known how long we would be in galutz [or maybe he said: until the rebuilding of the Temple] , they would not have forbidden music on Shabat.) 5. A better selection of wines for kiddish, even including some more than 3 years old. Or for sweet wine, Bristol Cream. 6. Scallops friend in butter and white wine, with chopped scallions. 7. Swiss cheeses, especially Sbrinz (which is second only to Vermont Cheddar), and the summer's white cheese, with herbs (which is second only to Israeli yogurt sipped cold with chopped chives.) 8. Beef Stroganoff. 9. Rare steak served on toast with butter. 10. Rare roast beef. 11. Steak tartare. 12. The inconspicuous pleasure of walking down a supermarket aisle, picking a pack of top-grade hamburger ("chopped sirloin" or equivalent, top-priced at 99›/lb. as recently as the 1950's), popping the cellophane with a satisfying Snap, taking out a portable salt-shaker, and leisurly eating a few handfulls en route to the checkout stand. ================================================================= ================================================================= 1 Tamuz Otis Redding, "Rolling on the River" "Left a good job in the city working for The Man both night and day but I never lost an hour of my sleeping thinkin' 'bout the way things might have been. Big wheel keep on turnin' Proud Mary keep on burnin'. ... "You don't have to worry if you got no money people on the river are happy to give. Big wheel keep on turnin' Proud Mary keep on burnin' Rolling Rolling on the River." Cf. the Negro Spiritual: "Ezekiel saw the wheel way up in the middle of the air. Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air. And the big wheel runs by faith and the little wheel runs by the Grace of G_d 't'is a wheel in a wheel way in the middle of the air. Hey you sister, don't you walk on the cross Way in the middle of the air Your foot my slip and your soul be lost way in the middle of the air." As I recollect, the Indians used to say to us: Don't play with it. [This was about an Indian ritual they tried to teach us.] I keep trying to tell myself: You're driving too fast to play games; hold the steering wheel steady. ============================================================== So OK: There's 7 floors in Macy's Department Store, or Seven Heavens, whatever. And higher is real-er; one can feel that. (And maybe it's just the LSD salesman's mantra: the more of the brain you use, the more real it feels. Ah, metaphysics.) So of course one wants to be where it's more real (like the guy in Book of our Heritage who finishes up Yom Kippur and says, 'Who can give me another day like that one'). Like I say: I have a 10-speed tractor-trailer truck, which I drive only in top gear, because I am more refined than high-grade diesel. I mean, who says that higher is better. And even if it is, who says that just because cream-puffs are the high point of the dinner party, you can have cream puffs in place of the soup and the salad and the entree which is a heaping plate of Burgoo (burgoo is boiled wheat. Ross was the old cook for Art Harvey's Greenleaf Apple Pickers (this was 1965 at the Whittier Farm in Derry, New Hampshire, just after I dropped out of the SPU because SDS had swallowed up the Peace Movement) Ross said, when he was a young lad he used to work for a Scotsman, who had plenty of good food in the house, but fed his workers Burgoo for the first course at every meal -- a very large plate of Burgoo. The Scotsman would say: If ye hae not had ye're Burgoo, ye shall not have ought else. HIK taught: the Oboe player can't come in to the orchestra one day and say, I really can't play with you guys today, I'm just not into it -- I'm really not in the right mood to do justice to this music. PVK once said (mid-1970's Abode; or maybe I heard someone say he said it): If they ask you to do something, it doesn't necessrily mean you're qualified, it just means they couldn't find anyone else. Everyone says: false humility is not virtue. (Leah Golumb, who is one or R. Shlomo's leading students, noted that last Shabat, in the late afternoon, when the sea breeze comes over the replanted "forest", to the little grove behind the Bet Knesset, where one can sit under the shade of the trees. In the Berkeley High School orchestra, I got a chance to play an E-flat and C clarinet for a few passages. PVK used to pair wazifas. He seemed to be teaching: if you've joined the orchestra, you can play a number of different instruments. In Judaism we say: 6 days a week you should work, and on Shabat you should rest. But Shabat is so much higher than the work-days -- #l2 (happens that one of the best Shabats I had was out at the Abode picking potatoes beside Elijah Imlay; they'd needed a workday and it had to fall on Saturday, because they kept a USA Christian week with the 2-day weekend, not a Jewish week. (And Blonde Larry (McIntire) once said: Every time I try to work on Sunday, it never works out. One year at Zenith Workcamp it was raining on Shabat, and they had to go out and put up something. I reckoned I should keep Shabat, and stayed in the house doing so, but kept thinking of being out there with the challenge of the rain. #l1 -- so why don't we have 7 days of Shabat Like R. Shlomo would say: It doesn't go that way. Everybody knows, sex brings you down from the spiritual (at least, unless you're a woman), so everyone knows, the Christians say, it's better not to do sex, and those who want to be the holymen don't do it. And in the Far East, they renounce the world and go into a monostary or into the jungle and meditate all the time. And everyone knows, Buddhism and Christiantiy are 'transcendent', they try to transcendent this "vale of tears". Whereas the American Indian ways, and Judaism and the old SOW are 'transcendental', meaning, they try to weave the transcendent into everyday life. (An American Indian, so the story goes, looked over at some Evangelists or whatever, and said, "more or less": If they want to go to Heaven so bad, I wish they'd get on up there and leave the rest of "the world to bumble in". We sat on the Merpesset of the Bet Knesset on Shabat afternoon, contemplating the screaming green trim against a sunset_pink. Someone said, why does the Nazir have to bring a sacrifice: it's on account he departed from the Jewish way in being a Nazir. (Of course I want to say: It was Jesus the Nazir, not Jesus from Natzereth.) Last Shabat Leah Golumb said in passing: Korach was so holy he walked down the street with his eyes closed, so hoi polloi wouldn't bring him down. I once walked down the hill after an Abode Camp week, and found that even the Abode dining room -- which for me was -- oh, community, if not quite love, at first sight (one snowy Reb Zalman weekend ) -- with those wood tables, almost oak, and fresh- baking whole wheat brad -- but coming down in late afternoon, as late as I could, after PVK's week had ended, even the Abode dining room seemed a bringdown. On the way down, I turned to Fatah Arifa Miller, z'lb, and she said, "Don't worry dear, the seeds are planted; they'll grow." ================================================================= Gerard Manley Hopkins (1880): Spring and Fall: To a Young Child (I used CAPS to replicate Hopkins' unexpectable ACcents. (And what a delight of rhythm it is, I guess.) MArgarEt are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? LEaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thouight care for, can you? AH! as the heart grows older It will come eto such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now not matter, child, the name: SOrrow's spring Are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart head of, ghost guessed: It IS the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. ----------------------------------------------------------------- From Haiku, Volume 4 (Autumn-Winter), [collected] by R.H. Blythe The Hokuseido Press, 3-12 Kanda-Nishhikicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo (c) 1952; 12th printing 1970 Yane no ue ni kaji miru hito ya fuyu no isuki. Upon the roof People looking at a fire: The winter moon. (Shiki) ================================================================ sa, Meor Modi'in, 22 June '04 -- 4 TaMUZ '04 -- 4 Jumaada al-awal ===============================================================