Shana Tova to all

I just wanted to wish a Shana Tova to all and sundry.

I hope HKB"H will shower us all with brachos of peace, prosperity and happiness this year and in all coming years, and will hasten the coming of the geula, b'mheira b'yamenu.

Shana tova u'mesuka to all!

Good for us... or not?

I saw an interesting story on VIN about Madonna visiting the tomb of a famous Kabbalist in Safed.

I'm really curious what everyone thinks about this? Does this new spotlight help or hurt Judaism on the whole?

I'm kind of on the fence about this. On one hand, it 'legitimizes' Judaism in the minds of non-Jews, on some level. On the other, I don't think the Arizal wanted someone like Madonna dabbling in what is really a very holy subject matter (and should be kept that way).

Comments?

Oh, the horror!!

I have something to confide in you. It's... well, it's... it's really just... just really embarrassing. Traumatic even. You see, well... oh boy this is hard... you see, well, um, uh, well... I'm scheduled to be raped in a couple of months.
It's OK, don't gasp like that! Really, I'll get through it. I'll be OK, shaken and shocked, but I'll pull through. I know I will because the perpetrator has struck hundreds of thousands of other people, if not millions, and they seem to have come through their ordeal just fine, maybe a little shaken, but OK. So I know I will.
But you see what's galling is that none of the perpetrator's victims really were ever able to seek justice. See, there was nothing that could be done, no recourse. So while I know I'll pull through, I have to resign myself to the facts of the situation. Wait - what's that? You say you know a good lawyer that could help me, break new ground in bringing this despicable rapist to justice? I'd have to disagree, see, because the perp here is a real baddie, remorseless and cruel, and he's got lawyers on his side up the wazoo to kingdom come. See, his name is NEW YORK STATE.
Yes, I see your face blanching at the mere mention of his despicable name. But it's true. He's going to get me, I know it.
See, Mr. NY State will be forcibly relieving me of some thousands upon thousands of our hard earned, blood sweat and tears dollars, for absolutely no real reason I can discern. Maybe deep down, in his brooding, loathsome heart he fancies himself a modern day, perverse Robin Hood. But I really can't tell, his very thoughts and actions are constantly shrouded in a veil of secrecy and mystery. He calls this despicable act of rape - oh, the horror of its name! - New York State mortgage tax. Can you even comprehend the heinousness of the crime!? He even lends his name to this despicable act, as if it's his signature, his calling card move! It's not enough for him that he violates me year after year after year after year after year, like clockwork, on April 15. Now he wants more with this disgusting crime, the bloodthirsty savage that he is. I guess I should take some kind of perverse satisfaction that I draw so much of his attention, no? Then again, hundreds of thousands of innocents have fallen victim to this dastardly crime. But still. Each time leaves its scar and pain. There is no justice that can be served. One day, maybe, sometime in the future, I'll run and hide somewhere, into the nurturing arms of one of the other State family brothers or cousins, of which my perp is a member, where he can never touch me again, the dirty b**tard. May he be smitten one thousand times!

Those crazy French!!

I was reading Ikea's 2010 catalog last night on the train home, trying to find some Scandinavian inspiration for home decor, and I noticed a woman and her daughter pointing at my catalog.
Turns out they were French tourists, from Paris, on a 5 day visit to NYC as part of a 3 week North American tour.
So they took 5 whole days out of their 21 to see this stinkhole!!??? They were staying in Queens, even better!!! So they couldn't afford a pricey Manhattan hotel, the city even prices those crazy enough to want to visit out of it's touristy areas! I asked them how they liked Queens - they said it was a nice hotel, but the area was loud and dirty. Um, YEAH, that pretty much describes all of NYC!
I couldn't get over why someone who lived in freakin PARIS, FRANCE of all places would want to shlep all the way across the Atlantic to visit this hellhole??!!!!

I guess it's just those crazy French.

A little housekeeping

Got a request.

Can everyone just post comments to the blog itself? Just click on 'comments' under each post or, if you click on the title of each post, look for a window that says 'post your comment' or something like that.

Please do this vs responding to the blog email. Makes for better management of the whole thing + encourages & facilitates discussion.

Thanks!

Watch out

Watch out, makeup artists! If this spreads around, it'll eat a chunk out of your revenue!! Somthing tells me this won't be very popular though. Girls don't like to look like hell on their wedding day and I for one don't blame them.

I don't think the funding for this is really big $$$ at this point, but if it gets larger, wouldn't you think of 1,001 better uses for this tzedakah money?

Arggghhhh..... The (potential) waste of $$$ continues.

Postscript - it looks like there's already a lively discussion on YWN about this. Wow, news travels fast in the Jewish world! Viva la Internet!! Viva la blogosphere!

The happiest day of my life!

Today's our anniversary. I just wanted to publicly thank my wife for making August 31, 2008 the happiest day of my life, and every subsequent day even happier.

And... I also want to thank her for putting up with me and all my... shall we say misheggassim. Including this blog.

THANKS DEAR!!!

Why, O why????

So we're moving close to buying a house. The whole process is nerve-wracking - making sure you get a good price, inspections, and last, but not least, making sure it's an affordable undertaking.
I've found that budgeting for a house is a tricky thing, especially if your expenses are lower now (aka having no kids yet) but will shoot up later (aka having KIDZ). It costs an enormous pile of cash just for basic monthly expenses around here. It costs a HELLA lot of money alone just to piss it away to fund our wonderful and bloated state and local services, much of which we'll never avail ourselves of (public school) and a lot that many of my fellow brethren defraud with gusto (here and here and here, for starters). What I also found is that you really can't get a decent house that you'd want to grow into in a NY Metro, tri-state area, frum community for less than $450,000 - $475,000 or so. Sure there are houses for less, but they tend to be out of the Jewish area, fixer-uppers you need to pour like $75,000 at least just to not wake up each day staring at an eyesore, or just plain POS properties that no one would want to live in, unless they're desperate (which if you're coming from anywhere in NYC, you might be).

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. Budgeting for a home purchase here as gotten my ever-fertile mind thinking. And when I think, I blog.

We orthodox Jews around here are constantly bellyaching (often times rightfully so) about the prohibitive costs of living. We all know that frum living, while giving us deep meaning and direction in our lives, comes at an enormous price tag, what with tuition, utilities, taxes, housing, kosher food, yom tov gouging, and communal obligations all thrown into the mix. Many people I know can't hit their head on the pillow at night without either worrying about their negative financial situation or about something that may likely happen down the road that will put them into such a position. The truth may very well be that most frum Jews in the NY area are one kid, tuition bill, stock market drop or tax hike away from turning an affordable lifestyle into a financial nightmare. News and comment sites abound about this problem and about the rising cost of tuition and how to deal with it. It may well be possible that the "silent holocaust" isn't intermarriage at all, reducing the number of Jews in the world - it's the annual tax and tuition bill. But, there is an answer. It's so simple and clear, I don't know why no one else thought of it. It's not for everyone, but it works.

What if I were to tell you that you could put say, $15,000-$30,000 annually back into your pocket? You think I was a crazy man, right? Wrong.

This event holds the key. The OU sponsored a forum this past June allowing emerging, vibrant, flourishing Jewish communities to showcase themselves to NY area residents. A whopping 1,000 people attended to explore freeing themselves from the financial shackles of frum life in metro NY/NJ. For many, simply moving your butt from one locality to another can dramatically change your quality of (frum) life. I did some searching on housing, tuition, and tax costs and the cost differences of living in town vs out of town are staggering - it could translate to tens of thousands of dollars a year in cost savings, with possibly only (depending on your industry) a small dip, if at all, in salary and income.

We get a raw deal living in NY/NJ metro. We pay some of the highest income and property taxes in the country, and we don't even use most of the state services and programs that we're paying for!! Especially education. For those living in NYC itself, I think anyone who reads this blog knows how horrible it is to live in the city and the direct and intangible costs city living imposes. Just see my last few posts. We pay criminally high costs for taxes, housing and utilities in this area, plus higher costs for child care, tuition, and just about everything else.

So why the hell do we stay here? Is there some perverse relationship between the amount of financial suffering one has and one's share in the afterlife? Don't think so. So what do we gain by staying here? Let's look at some of the possibilities:

Reason 1 - family and friends. OK, I'll concede a lot on this one. Moving away from one's family and/or friends can be traumatic, unless you hate your family or get into a snit fit with your friends that festers forever. But with the amount you save in costs you could freakin' fly once a month to see the fam, you can always make new friends, and keep well in touch with the old via social networking, email, phone, etcetcetc. This is a personal choice though that only an individual and spouse can weigh for themselves.

Reason 2 - job and salary. I'll concede a little here. Many people have businesses here that they can't just pick up and relocate; for them, they are chained to this area. Those who are salaried employees though have less standing here. If you can't get a job somewhere else or don't want to leave a (possibly) sure thing in NY/NJ in this economy, I understand. But if your sole reason for staying put is you think that your salary would, hands down, be higher, that's not necessarily the case. Look up your salary and the salary you'd command in an out of town location on salary.com. Depending on the industry and other factors, you may be surprised at how little a pay cut you may take, if at all. At the worst, telecommuting may also be an option (though you'd still be paying those criminally high NY/NJ income taxes) should your job duties and employer allow for it.

Reason 3 - quality of life. Don't even get me started. Quality of life here SUCKS if you live in NYC. If you live just outside NYC and drive to work in NYC, quality of life still SUCKS. If you live in the NYC metro area and ever drive near the city for anything, that alone makes the quality of life go right down the tubes as well. Plus the aggravation of paying your hyperinflated mortgage and taxes and getting no tangible benefit from either is enough to put a little damper on anyone's existence.

Reason 4 - Jewish amenities. OK, I can hear this one, a little. It even sounds plausible at first. The NY/NJ metro area has, bar none, the richest menu of Jewish amenities you could think of. Mikvah lady's been eyeing you a little to lasciviously for your taste? Go to the one down the road. Don't like the fact that your shul 'inserts the names' for the mi shebeirach for cholim? Go down the block to another one that does. Want to go out to eat but want Chinese food tonite instead of pizza? Go to the local kosher Chinese place. Don't like the haavara (accent) in which your child learns Hebrew? Send him or her to another school. And on and on and on, you get the picture.
The issue is that all this choice really isn't as advantageous as it seems. Having a new school, kollel, shul, and mikva on every block costs the community at large money that isn't necessary to begin with. Having 110 flavors of shul and school within a 30 mile radius gives you choice, but it doesn't do much to promote achdus in the community at large, either. And having 20 different schools in a small area doesn't really drive down costs either as they're not really competing with one another as much as filling a perceived need within a small subsection of the community. So you've got cost redundancies up the wazoo. Plus these are all in no small part donor (read: you and me) funded through hidden tuition subsidies, the ominous, wasteful 'building funds', etc.
Think about the tradeoffs you're making here. Do you really want to forgo cost savings of tens of $000's just so you can have the choice of saying the tefilla for the medina or not? Do we really place such a high value on having like 15,000 pizza places in one square mile and kosher sushi in every corner?

Reason 5 - many more Jews like us. The argument is that there are so many more Jews here than anywhere else. We're 'the Man' over here where out of town, we're nothing, and the KKK is just waiting around the corner to nab us. Plus, us NY/NJeans are just a more sophisticated, less backward lot. This argument, to put it succinctly, is b******t. In fact, it's a reason NOT to stay around here, since all of the financial pressures of frum living plus being cooped and self-ghettoized into these small geographic areas has mutated us average NY/NJ metro area frum jews into a stereotype of being yentish, pushy, self-aggrandizing, money-hoarding conservatives. I'm not saying ch"v that everyone is like this, just that the need to out gun and 'get ahead' and survive in an arid and hopeless financial climate creates a pall over life in this area and is a necessary attitude to have when faced with such a bleak economic future. It's no coincidence that it seems that the bulk of the fraud and money laundering and deception and the stealing and cheating and dishonesty that seems to be going on in our community under our noses originates or has some significant connection to this area.
The common NY/NJ perception that your average out of towner is a more moronic, backward individual is just self-compensating for our own pitiful existence here. Out of town communities can be more low-key, laid back, nicer, more pleasant and less rife with divisive politics than we have here. And no. The KKK is not waiting, rubbing hands with glee, for us to move house to New Orleans or Atlanta or whatever so they can set fiery crosses on our lawns and molest our young 'uns en masse. And there are plenty of anti-semites in the NY area.

So what do we really gain as a community by continuing to cling to the NY/NJ metro area? I think that the current, younger generation has been asking the same question and finding that the answer is: not much, essentially. If the attendance at the OU fair mentioned above is any indication, many young couples and families are starting to realize that there is, for many, a better, vibrant world outside of the self imposed NY/NJ ghetto and are actually contemplating breaking out. Kudos to the brave ones that take responsibility for their families' financial future and do.

Continued dominance of the NY/NJ metro area as the go to place for frum Jews will wane with time - it had better. The tortured and deeply flawed economic model we've created for ourselves here cannot and will not be sustainable. My prediction is that you'll see a vastly changed demographic landscape in this area in the next 20-30 years as younger, more dynamic families realize they owe no allegiance to this northeastern ghetto.

Warning follow up

I've been playing around with my blog, and I added a feature which lets anyone subscribe easily through RSS readers like Google, Yahoo!, etc. See the options on the upper right corner. Have fun!

Warning

Just to let everyone know, I'll be removing the auto-email feature of my blog soon. I think everybody's weaned, almost.

To continue to follow my blog, all you have to do is use an RSS reader. For those who don't know, an RSS reader is a program - either accessed online or install on your desktop - that aggregates 'feeds', or items/articles of interest to you, in one place. Google Reader is an excellent RSS reader and is so easy to use your pet fish can do it. Just go here, to access Google's account page, click 'create one for free', and create an account. Sign in to the account on the top right when done, then click the 'More' drop down link on the top of Google's home page, click 'Reader'. You should be able to access a 'help' link or something like that that shows you how to add 'feeds'. Add my blog - musingsofabaldguy.blogspot.com - and every time you sign into your Google account, fire up the Reader, you'll see my blog and all the updates.

Thanks.