Rav Menachem Porush ZTZ”L was niftar last week. An askan and shtadlan for the chareidi velt for many years, he was close to many gedolim, and was famed for his ceaseless efforts on behalf of frumme yidden.

In Meah Shearim, however, the patchkevillim announcing his levayah looked as on the right.

This isn’t something I understand. While I can understand the Neturei Karta and their position, why doesn’t the velt’s vort of Acharei Mos Kedoshim apply here? Sigh.

And for those of you who may have never heard this vort, it is simple. The order of these two parshios in the sedrah is as listed. Acharei Mos, and then Kedoshim. Translate them into one sentence, and you get “After death, (they) are holy”. In other words, speak no evil of the dead.

So why not?

BadforShidduchim was talking about Things the other day. I couldn’t resist taking a stab at this (not least of all because I had this cutesy title for it). So here goes. I think that Things are great. And terrible. Depends on the person.

Take Bad4, for example. Clearly one who knows Things.

Bad? Nope. Good? Nope. Neither. The sum total of her Things is neither good nor bad. It’s a nice fat zero. Because the thing about Things is this: No matter who you are, no matter what you know, it’s what you do with the information that will determine your life course, and who you should travel the course with. It’s about how you utilize the Things, or don’t.

So your potential partner might know a little more about the world than you do? So what! You will never, ever, find someone who knows precisely the same amount of Things as you do. You’ll always either be marrying someone who knows more Things than you, or less Things.

The  bottom line?

As Aubrey Graham says:

“The thing is, life is random…If you’re lucky enough to find someone you love, who loves you back, it’s a gift.”

Which translated into Jewish speak means that if you find your zivug, go for it. Don’t look back, or to the side, because there are Things involved.

So it turns out I sorta drunk-dialed Zaide on Purim.

I think I wished him a Freilichen Chanukah. He was not amused.

After a few minutes, though, he calmed down. And left me with this highly relevant quote that more or less encapsulates a good bochur’s Purim.

“There are two people that I hate.

A drunk man when I’m sober and a sober man when I’m drunk”.

And that’s the Purim ma’amar for this year folks.

A guest post l’kovod Purim by The (Yeshivishe) Shadow. This post originally appeared on his blog, “Fleeting Thoughts of the Shadow”.

The scent of Purim is in the air!

Then again, so is the scent of dead fish, raw meat, fruits, vegetables, and about forty thousand different flavors of halvah. That is because I’m traipsing through Machane Yehuda, searching for components for my Purim costume.

It is a time-honored tradition among yeshiva bochurim learning in Eretz Yisroel to invade Machane Yehuda around Purim time. Unless you plan on buying a bear suit for 500 shekels, the standard bochur’s costume consists of shopping at cheap clothing stores in Machane Yehuda, buying whatever weird clothing you can get your hands on, and mix-’n-matching them in the oddest possible way.

This proves not to be too difficult in terms of finding the stuff – since virtually all the clothing sold there is fair game, in terms of outlandishness – but it can be quite challenging to get the stuff you want before anyone else beats you to it. The simple, cost-effective solution is to fire several warning shots into the air with a .22 caliber pistol, then move in and collect the bounty. Should you find yourself arrested, however, it could potentially ruin your Purim plans, so use the aforementioned idea with caution.

While in Machane Yehuda, it pays to check out some of the other stalls there – particularly the ones selling halvah, since they give out free samples. For the uninitiated, halvah is a sesame seed concoction with the density of cement, only less tasty in some cases, and containing more calories per cubic inch than you would have thought physically possible. To compensate for the ridiculous amount of calories, the shopkeepers add chocolate, coffee, cinnamon, mud, roofing cement, etc. – okay, it doesn’t compensate much calorie-wise, but it does make it taste somewhat better.

To lure people into buying halvah, they offer free samples – tiny cubes of one flavor or another, each with enough fat content to clog a major artery faster than traffic in the Battery Tunnel during rush hour. The idea is that after surviving one piece, one will surely be compelled to buy a larger chunk that will take care of one’s caloric needs for a month. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Personally, I just take a few free samples, then lay down and roll home.

If Machane Yehuda isn’t your speed, you can check out the “drinks district” – a series of beverage boutiques on Shmuel Hanavi between Bar Ilan and Givat Moshe. My personal favorite among these is A. A. Pyup, a store that sells everything from (relatively) tame sodas, to alcoholic beverages with enough kick to stun an elephant. Here, throughout the Purim season, you can find many a wine connoisseur (which is French for “unbearable snob”) shopping for fine wines. I, personally, come here for a nice bottle of wine for my Rebbe, and something cheap for myself.

I haven’t actually spent much time in Geula yet, though that’s bound to be a fun place as well, as long as you avoid getting bleached. For instance, I understand that there are all sorts of unique, Purim-only meshugoyim in Geula, as opposed to the year round meshugoyim that tend to inhabit the neighborhood.

I have, in case you’re wondering, been to the Armenian Shuk in the Old City, which is a great place if you like to negotiate (read: yell at the top of your lungs at the Arab shopkeeper that the item is too expensive, then storm out in a huff). Bargaining is not my forte, though, so I brought along a friend to help me out, and we came away with a white robe and whiter pants for a mere 120 shekels. Not too shabby.

As Purim creeps closer, the music gets louder, the streets livelier, and the scenes ever more chaotic. It’s a great time to be around – the matzav is incomparable to anything in the US. The only real drawback is that this time of year is particularly mesugal for gaining weight. And those halvah samples aren’t helping any…

Raw meat. Next time, I’m gonna take a sample of raw meat instead.

“It’s too hard”, he complains plaintively. “He, G-d, will understand. My son, he is a Rabbi. In Brooklyn. He is Lubavitch. (Here, he serenades me with the first few bars of Yechi to prove it. Great. A chiloni taxi cab driver Meshichist. Just what my night needed). For him, it is easy. For me, not so easy”. “Ah”, I nod my head, wisely. Like I know the score. Except I don’t. As long as he thinks I do, I guess. I am, however, interested in understanding this cabbie a little better. So I continue the conversation.

I rip into him. “So explain to me again why you think He will understand your chillul Shabbos, your blatant violation of His laws, and worse, your denial of Him. You do realize that this- I indicate his bare head- isn’t what He wants.” A bit harsh? Perhaps… I’ve had enough of being gentle with politically hawkish but religiously dovish cab drivers who think they’re good people. Maybe they are. But to claim they are doing His will at the same time… It gets my goat, it does.

“Well, I am good, I do what he wants. I give tzedakah. Also, I learn Torah, sometimes. Look.” He holds up a laminated pamphlet version of some Chabad sefer that he supposedly studies in his off time. More likely he glances at it every now and then and uses it for show and tell purposes in order to extract a larger tip from his Chareidi clientele.

I tell him that’s wonderful. And ask him again, for the third time, why he believes the G-d he believes in is going to give him a free pass. Nothing is free. The cab ride certainly isn’t free- in fact, it took three minutes of hostage-rescue-style negotiation to secure a rate that would have matched the meter, had we used that. (Why didn’t we use the meter in the first place? Because it’s “broken”. Much like this fellow’s logic abilities, and my grammar.) But I digress. He, like so many others in this broken world we inhabit, has mastered Orwellian doublethought. Somehow, he believes in Torah, in it’s validity, it’s legitimacy. In its, in our, heritage. But not all of it. Only the easy parts. Doublethought.

Finally, he answers my question, or attempts to. “I simply can’t keep the Torah. It’s too difficult. Shabbos, Kashrut, all that. And I think that if I’m a good person, He’ll understand. He knows how hard it (Torah) is, how impossible. I just can’t do it. So why should I? For you, for people like my son, it’s easy”.

Right. Like I don’t have my own nisyonos, my own failings. I’m all too cognizant of the many nisyonos I fail, and the too few that I pass. Like I don’t rise and fall, every day, like the sun. Like I don’t sometimes feel that it’s only a matter of time until the yetzer hora gets me on a biggie, and then it will be too late. Oh, I know it’s hard. I need him to tell me this? And just to be clear, he initiated the conversation. He started the schmuess. Not I. I was just stuck next to him in the passenger seat. A hostage.

I truly don’t know what to tell him. How do you explain to someone the fallacy of such an obviously inherent contradiction in logic, in belief, in weltanschauung? What is the therapy for a patient experiencing hallucinations? The brain can instantly workaround any logical argument with a fresh creation by the brain.

“Oh, so you’re seeing purple dragons on the table in front of you? Try putting your hand through the dragon!” An effective strategy, right? Wrong. The brain will explain that this dragon is a substance-less dragon. Either that, or the brain fools the sense of touch much the same way it fools the sense of sight. Maybe not. I’m no psychiatrist, that’s for sure. I don’t know the precise mechanics of how people fool themselves. I just know that it works, and works well. Whatever you want to believe, as long as you aren’t constricted by absolute intellectual honesty, go ahead and believe it. Don’t worry about the logic issues. Your brain will create the necessary constructs to let you sleep at night. Be sure of that, if not the lie.

So I leave him with a pithy, cliched answer. Sadly, cliched is the best I can muster in my depressed state. (These types of people occasionally get me down, get me depressed.) I tell him that the Creator knows the catch-22 he’s created for himself, and that he’s already supplied an exit strategy. That the truth is there if he’s looking for it. That truth seekers will always find what they’re seeking. Perhaps if I’d been in a more comfortable state of mind…oh well. Spilt milk.

Stepping out of the cab, I tip five shekels more than necessary (I know, a sucker is born every minute, but still, that doesn’t mean we throw manners out the window).

I thoroughly enjoy the rest of my evening. Exiting the venue, however, my phone manages to sneak out of my pocket and worms it’s way onto the counter, unbeknown to me. The attendant, a kindly Russian chiloni fellow with a wonderful walrus mustache, spots it just before I leave. Calling me over, he presses it into my hand and bids me a good evening. But not before delivering a show stopper of a line, neatly packaged into two words. “Yetzer Hora” he tells me, in his brutal Russian accent, gesturing to my phone. Numbed, I stop and stare. I hadn’t even been sure that he was Jewish. “What is it?”, he asks silently with a lift of his eyebrows. He has no clue what his innocuous comment meant to me.

“Nothing”, I answer, turning and leaving.

He’s pointed out something I knew already, but preferred not to think about. Or thought about, but created enough constructs that it became a non-issue.

I, too, am a hostage to doublethought.

Maybe we all are.