My father Leo was what I call a ba'al she'ela, 'one who questions'. For those unfamiliar with Hebrew, this is a play on words, a pun, on ba'al tshuva, or one who returns to the fold of the devout, essentially a born again Jew. Whence the pun? Well, tshuva means 'answer' as well as 'return', so anyway...
Yeshivish till he was 18, Leo began to spend too much time with his handful of buddies at the Brooklyn Public Library, reading all sorts of apikorsus. The ringleader and poisoner was a certain Jerry Eckstein who began to whisper in their tender ears all sorts of sexy new ideas, and lead them to the forbidden books, the tree of knowledge. This leader of the teen delinquents would eventually become an esteemed philosophy professor at SUNY Albany. Hard to believe that whole bunch of 'em are all about 80 years old today -- All except for my father who died 14 years ago.
Leo learned many interesting songs at pirkhey, which he passed down to me, and I figured I'd share with you one for Shabbes and mitzva night:
Yeshivish till he was 18, Leo began to spend too much time with his handful of buddies at the Brooklyn Public Library, reading all sorts of apikorsus. The ringleader and poisoner was a certain Jerry Eckstein who began to whisper in their tender ears all sorts of sexy new ideas, and lead them to the forbidden books, the tree of knowledge. This leader of the teen delinquents would eventually become an esteemed philosophy professor at SUNY Albany. Hard to believe that whole bunch of 'em are all about 80 years old today -- All except for my father who died 14 years ago.
Leo learned many interesting songs at pirkhey, which he passed down to me, and I figured I'd share with you one for Shabbes and mitzva night:
Down the ol' Canarsie line,
Down the ol' Canarsie line,
For ev'ry hundred people,
The Jews were ninety nine,
So on a hot Yom Kippur day,
All the Jews, they stayed away,
So the BMT went bankrupt
On that Yom Kippur day!
Rivkeh my dahling,
Rivkeh my love,
Hop into my pushcart,
And I will take you home...
Shabbes, is coming,
We'll eat gefilte fish,
But Rivkeh, my dahling,
You ah my fayvrite dish!
Rivkeh my dahling....
Today in the life of the Jews: The arrest of Jews in France by Philip Augustus in 1180. His father Louis VII was more tolerant, but even before Louis died, Philip was find of persecuting landsmen. One Shabbat he whisked a large number of Jews from synagogue into prison. They were liberated only upon payment of a ransom of 1500 marks of silver, which incidentally didn't protect them from the general expulsion of 1182. At this time however, the domain of the French king was rather small, but the territory under French control gradually expanded, and Jews were expelled from any new territories that came under their control.
2 comments:
Nice songs. Pirchei has sure changed much since then.
has indeed. what was once colorful, has turned black & white.
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