So this is how Conservative Judaism expresses its values? Barking up the right tree - The Jewish Standard

At first one wants to laugh when he reads this article from New Jersey's The Jewish Standard about the bestowing of Hebrew names on pet dogs.  Then one wants to cry when he realizes that the role of the Conservative rabbi has become more of a performer than a dispenser of Jewish law, lore and kindness.

I have known, and prayed with, several Conservative rabbis in my lifetime.  And I was proud to be a member of their congregations.  Each showed himself to be concerned about the foundations of Judaism - Torah and halacha.  They could teach a course in either based upon traditional viewpoints and explain why Conservative Judaism has moved away from the Shulchan Aruch, the Code of Jewish Law adhered to by the Orthodox.

Says the sponsoring rabbi, Arthur Wiener-

“This was not a bark mitzvah.” That is, it was not a joke, and it was not an opportunity to be cutesy. Instead, “I had a specific purpose in mind,” he continued.

“This was an opportunity to talk about names — about the importance of names in Jewish tradition — and also to try to build from the connection many people have with their pets to a larger conversation about Jewish values. The truth — or at least my truth — is that it’s often very difficult to start a conversation about Jewish values. So we are duty bound to try to find new ways of engaging them with Jewish values, with mitzvot, with those things that previous generations can take for granted but we cannot.

“This event had no straight lines, no sitting in rows,” Weiner went on. “It was in the shul backyard, and there was a lot of laughter.”

It also allowed people the “opportunity to talk about some of the great Jewish values, which we believe we originally shared with the world, about the responsibility of human beings toward animals. That ethos is now very much part of American values and culture, but it is a relatively new advance in human history. It comes from our Torah and teachers.

No people, it is a joke when you cannot have a conversation as outlined by the rabbi without stretching the bounds of common sense in order to attract listeners.  Is that what Conservative Judaism had in mind when it was founded?

Read the full article from the Jewish Standard: Barking up the right tree.

All I can say is gevalt!!

Rabbi Eliezer Zwickler - What happens when you've lost your ethics

Why did God flood the earth?  Robbery was out of control.  Rabbi Eliezer Zwickler of Congregation Ahawas Achim B'nai Jacob and David in West Orange, New Jersey reminds us that ethics in business is just as important as being certain the chicken is kosher.  And I agree.
Stephen M. Flatow

The Red Apple Rest

I was pleasantly surprised to read an article about the Red Apple Rest in the Rockland Jewish Reporter. I have many memories of the Red Apple both as a customer in the 1950s on the way to and from the mountains and in the 1960s as an employee at the outside stand. I can close my eyes and see your father slowly walking in the cafeteria and outside the stand to see if things were up to his standards. My father was Gil Flatow, we lived in Monsey in those days. He was a salesman for Maryland Cup; Herb Freid, an owner, was at my wedding.


I’m not sure what my favorite memory is. I worked a half-day—usually from 4 PM to 2 AM. And in my second summer, 1969, I believe, as night manager I had 12 hour shifts. But the money was great, the food was great, and some of the people I met there, characters out of a Damon Runyon novel, I remember to this day.

By and large, as a college kid, I was impressed by the way some of the long time hands would watch out for us. I remember Sal yelling at me when I asked him for macaroni and cheese with a side order of fries. He told me “no fries” if I had the macaroni and cheese.

You mention important people stopping by. I remember serving a vodka and milk to George Jessel one very early morning when he was on his way down from the mountains. He was dressed in the quasi-military looking outfit he wore in later years and had everyone on the bar side of the cafeteria in stitches with his craziness.

I remember the swarms of kids who came down after the Woodstock festival. They were famished because they hadn’t eaten in two days.

I remember the buses creating temporary havoc, as they would pull in 2 or 3 at a time on their way to Peg Leg Bates’s Hotel. The inside restaurant and outside stand looked like bee hives, there would be lines coming out of the bathrooms and, then, 30 minutes later they were gone. Then, early Sunday morning there would be the buses coming down from Monticello Raceway with the winners and losers creating a tumult in the cafeteria.

I remember Herb mumbling when the high school graduates would leave earlier than they promised him they would, usually a good 2 weeks before Labor Day. I remember going down into the walk-in box and carrying up those racks of frankfurters for the grills.

When I first started, on a Sunday afternoon we would have as many as three grills going but it soon dwindled to two and then one. I can hear the counter people yelling “two off, three off, four back” and I can hear the sound of the hamburgers sizzling on the grill. We used to sell beer from reach in coolers, too, and I remember Bob—the day manager who worked with his wife—yelling, “When you take one out, put one in” so there would always be a full cooler.

I remember the rowdy customers and sometimes the kitchen help, who had to be put on the Short Line bus back to the City by the Tuxedo Police Chief. And I remember the men who had family in the City that they would see only for one day a week during the entire summer. They’d leave on a Monday or Tuesday night and be back in a day and a half.

It was the first time I had heard of Louie’s agency in the Bowery where a lot of the kitchen help signed on for jobs at the Red Apple. I was surprised at the amount of after hours drinking that went on among the help—I was naive, I guess.

It was hard work but the pay was good for a college kid. I don’t long for those days, but I won’t forget them.

Well, that's what I have to say. Stephen M. Flatow

Anthony Weiner

We as a society have lost the ability to blush.  What else demonstrates that fact other than the announcement by Anthony Weiner that he's running for mayor of New York City.  Have you no shame Mr. Weiner?  You will recall that Weiner resigned in disgrace from the House of Representatives because he was caught sending sexy texts to women via his Twitter account.

Michelle Malkin has blasted Anthony Weiner in a recent posting.

Touchy, touchy. Despite Team Anthony Weiner’s best efforts at political rehabilitation, there’s just no way to shore up his sorest scandal spot. As the New York Post reported this week, Weiner had a bit of a snit fit when a local Democratic official boldly slammed his sexting habits with underage girls.

Chris Owens, the Dems’ state committee member in northwest Brooklyn, called out the skeezy ex-congressman at a mayoral candidate forum. “I am outraged and disgusted by you,” Owens told Weiner. “Both by what you did and by the fact that you have the arrogance to run for mayor. I want to understand how you explain to us how you used a public facility to tweet offensive material to … minors you did not know, you then lied about it … and now you come back.”

And this is the nice part of the post.  Basically, Anthony Weiner is an ego-centric politician (OK, a redundancy) who does not blush over his past deeds.

Shame on him and shame and shame on those who are trying to get this reprobate elected mayor of New York City.
Well, that's what I have to say. Stephen M. Flatow

I doubt Anat Hoffman will be happy as Sharansky Urges Equal Prayer At Western Wall

Much has been made over the past months about the alleged discrimination against so-called women's prayer at the Western Wall. So, now Israel's Natan Sharansky has come up with a solution.

But, will it be acceptable to protesters such as Anat Hoffman? I doubt it as I don't see her goal as equality for women at the Kotel but as a tearing down of traditional Judaism's boundaries. At least that's what I think.

You can read the full story at Sharansky Urges Equal Prayer At Western Wall

What do you think?

Buying a car with dad

Two aspects about growing up in the 1950s and 1960s are not repeated today-- how we buy cars and mothers who do not drive (OK, city born and raised folks still excluded.)  I accompanied my father on several car buying journeys.  He was a salesman who needed a new car every two years and, since his credit was good, never had a problem buying one.  He was a Pontiac man, although for a few years in the early 1960s he flirted with Ramblers.  But he was never a top of the line buyer.  No Super Star Chief or Bonneville for him. The Star Chief, Chieftan and Catalina were good enough.

Flush with money due to the successful 1950s economy many Americans bought new cars in record numbers. Detroit, was the icon of post-WII industriousness. (Alas, unions have done in the Big 3.) The Greatest Generation, while all not flush with cash, was looking forward to better jobs and more disposable income. And they found it.

Eager to move out of the high rise housing projects built for the men of a returning army and their new families, everyone wanted to be mobile, especially if they had their eyes on living outside the narrow confines of New York City. Not everyone could afford a new car but even purchases of used cars provided the buyer with a newer car than he ever had before.

Buying a new car in the 1950s and into the 1960s was an adventure.  Unlike today's dealerships, dealers then did not keep storage lots full of cars in stock for two-day or even next-day or same day availability. They couldn't because their credit was still tight, financing floor plans as we know them today were not in existence, and cars were sold stripped of items we today would describe as "of course it has it."  In those days, your car had to be built with the "options" your dad desired, not with packages as they are today. While a buyer today might have only 3 complete packages to choose from, a new car then might have more than a dozen options to choose from.

And what were they?

1. A heater (forget about air conditioning being standard until the 1980s.
2. Whitewall tire.

Whitewall tire

 3. An AM radio with push-button settings. FM was added later on.

Push-button Radio

4. Back-up lights.
5. Chrome trim.
6. Clock (my father never bought it because they broke after a month.)

Dashboard mounted clock

7. Side view mirror, on the driver's side.
8. Automatic transmission.
9. Windshield washers (another dubious purchase because the hoses corroded and collapsed.)
10. Manually operated Day-night review mirror.  (It had a button to switch between the two settings.)
11.  Steel belted radial tires.
12.  Air-conditioning.
13.  Lap only seat belts. (A 60s innovation.)
14.  Power steering.
15.  Power brakes.

The list can still go on but I wanted to give you a small idea of then and now.  What hasn't changed, in my humble opinion, is this fact -- no matter how much research you do, no matter what sources you review and download, no matter how much you get the sales rep to bring down the price -- the dealer is still making hefty dollars on your car purchase.  No one gives cars away at a loss.

So the next time you go shopping for a car, ask the sales rep if the car comes with back-up lights.  But, be careful, he might try to charge you for them.

Time of the long distance call

"These are the days of miracle and wonder
"This is the long distance call."  Paul Simon, "The Boy in the Bubble."

Driving down the Garden State Parkway listening to this song, part of Paul Simon's Graceland album, got me thinking about the true days of miracles, wonders and long distance calls.  It was the 1960s and long distance calls were expensive and something to be avoided by any and all means.  Long distance was any call outside of the towns in your immediate exchange calling area.  Calls to different area codes, when those beauties were introduced, were a dead giveaway that the call was going to cost you more than 14 cents.

My Uncle Lou would call the out-of-town relatives, that is those who lived in Rockland County area code 914, from his company's office on Long Island in area code 516.  He was an on the road salesman but was in the showroom at least once a week, so that was the day we got the call.

My father had this early version Dymo Label Maker.  It was a hand-held little thing through which you would pass the label tape, move the dial to the sought after letter and squeeze the handle.  It looked something like this:

He wrote a label for each telephone in the house, "is this call really necessary?"  Long distance was expensive!


Back to the theme.  As a baby boomer in the 1950s, as many others I was attuned to all that was happening in space and science.  Nothing seemed impossible, the nuclear powered submarine Nautilus under the North Pole, and the exploits of the Trieste were awe inspiring. Where we lagged was in space exploration.

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the talk on the block among the World War II vets was about the commies leaping ahead of the U.S.  No one knew how many failed rocket launches the Soviet's attempted before Sputnik, but every American failure was caught on film.  Depressing, to say the least.

I remember the excitement engendered by the selection in April 1959 of the country's first astronauts, a new word in the lexicon, to form the so-called the Mercury 7 astronauts.  The front page magazine photos of names soon to be known to all, Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, et al, gave us all a new sense of adventure.  All their positives were paraded on the front pages of Life and Look magazine (I remember the photo of Life.)


Yet there was a debate surrounding the launch of the first Mercury capsule piloted by Alan Shepard in 1961-- should the launch be watched by school children?  After all, what would the reaction be if the rocket blew up on launch?  Not to worry though, the launch and the re-entry minutes later was flawless.  An American hero in Alan Shepard was created over night.

With Mercury, American scientists proved they could get it right, but it also opened up a whole new field of using outer space to advantage.  And that brings us to Telstar.

It's hard to accept the fact that all of what we have today is based on one invention. I'm speaking of the transistor. Others might dispute my choice but they're free to be wrong.

Anyone who has looked into the guts of a pre-1970s radio or amplifier knows what a simple thing it looked like-electron tubes of different sizes neatly aligned in rows of sockets of different configurations. underneath were resistors and capacitors of different sizes that acted as switches. Turn on the power and the the tubes would start to glow and get warm, actually hot, to the touch. Minutes later, the radio would begin to play or the amp would power up the stereo system.

If you can imagine the first computers, they were room sized monstrosities requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of electron tubes, etc in various arrays. The transistor allowed for the miniaturization of electronic equipment and it continues today in circuit board technology.

So Telstar, developable because of the invention of the transistor, allowed for the expansion of long distance calls and the eventual lowering of costs until today we think nothing of calling cross country or around the world.

Progress is good, don't you think?


Well, that's what I have to say. Stephen M. Flatow