Rabbi’s Musings & Amusings

 The other day I made an appointment to get a haircut. When I arrived at the barber shop, the barber asked me if he could take a customer before me, as the customer was a chasan. I allowed the chasan to go first. While getting his haircut, the chasan shared some of the sardonic quips people were telling him about marriage. “Enjoy your last days of freedom,” “Marriage isn’t a word; it’s a sentence,” and other such lines.

Say the words “finding teachers” to any yeshivah principal and chances are he’ll roll his eyes and perhaps even snort. He may likely also break into a sweat and his heart will begin racing. I think it’s safe to say that finding qualified and competent teachers is the bane of every yeshivah principal’s existence.

One afternoon, before I got married, I went with a friend to a Yankees game. We brought sandwiches from home and figured it would be a good idea to wash our hands in a bathroom on the way up to our seats. After we washed, we realized it would be easier to buy drinks before we went up to our seats. There weren’t many people at the concession stand, so we got on line. When it was our turn, the cashier gruffly asked us what we wanted, and we both wordlessly pointed to the soda we wanted.

Recently, I came across a word I was unfamiliar with: defenestrate. I had to look up the definition to find out that defenestrate means to toss out of a window. I’m not really sure why throwing something/someone out of the window needs its own word. Just say it was thrown out of the window. But then there are many strange things about the English language.

If my memory serves me correctly – which it generally doesn’t these days – it was about 25 years ago that I typed and emailed a d’var Torah for the first time. This was back in the days when AOL and the ubiquitous “You got mail” ruled the email world.

For the last number of years, I have uploaded a brief video d’var Torah on the weekly parshah to TorahAnytime.com. The videos are entitled “Instant Inspiration.”