After I moved to a new apartment, I did not realize the problem with cockroaches. I do not know if they bite or other bugs come along with them. And I was getting bites and sores until I realized from where the problem was coming from. so i bought chlorine  but that worked only partially. Then I found this Israeli invention of a kind of paste that you leave on the floor and the bugs eat it and disappear, That works wonders. but the bites and sores remained. I found out there are bugs that burrow under the skin. So doctors might give different things to take care of skin disease. But this was not a disease. It is bugs that burrow.  I found alcohol, olive oil, peroxide, iodine and stuff they call חומצת מלח salty acid to help. But only after squeezing the infected area. For these bugs leave a protective covering that no ointment can penetrate until the liquid covering is squeezed out. 

 It was aggravating and disappointing that after I spent so much time and effort to join the yeshiva world  to discover the religous world that surrounds the great Litvak yeshivot [based on the gGra] to  be morally challenged. But I do not mean to exonerate the great yeshivot either. -they did a great evil by ignoring the letter of excommunication signed by the Gra. This left the door open for the Sitra Achra [Dark Side] to enter even into the great yeshivot.   

music file

 z91

how to blow a shofar. i have rarely heard this done right.

 tekia=one long. Count up to three.

Shevarim= three short. Each of length one.

Truah 9 bursts. 

So the first is Tekia shevarim truah tekia

_________ then ___ ___ ___ then --------- then _________

Do this all together three times..

Then Tekia shevarim Tekia _________ then ___ ___ ___ then _________

Do that three times.

Then Tekia truah tekia. _________ --------- _________

Do that three times.

You can see all this in the last two pages of Tractate Rosh Hashanah. 

 I really do not know why I was run out of every yeshiva I tried to sit and learn in. I figure this must have been a decree from Heaven that declared that I had to learn Physics and Mathematics, Otherwise I would have been perfectly happy to sit and learn Gemara.

 Even though I think that learning Torah [Gemara Tosphot Maharsha] is the greatest of all service of God the environment for this activity is a Litvak Yeshiva but for some reason I have never been able to find my place in any such institution.  So as second best, I try to do this at home. But it is hard to match the energy of an authentic Litvak Yeshiva --the energy that one gains by sitting in one and learning.

At some point I realized I was not welcome in the yeshiva world. So just from pure desperation I went to the Polytechnic Institute of NYU and majored there in Physics. After all I needed some way of making a living and had discovered a little before then the opinion of many Rishonim that Physics and Mathematics are a part of learning Torah. This is the opinion of many Rishonim, but you can see it most clearly in the Rambam in Laws of Learning Torah where he says - ''The things called 'Pardes' are in the category of learning gemara.'' And what is 'Pardes' they are defined by the Rambam in the first four chapters of the Mishna Torah and at the end of those chapters he writes the things discussed in these four chapters are in the category of what the Sages called 'Pardes'.'' [Those 4 chapters are Aristotelian physics and metaphysics. The Rambam is even more explicit in the intro to the Guide where he says the things are what the Greeks called physics and metaphysics.]

[I had been at the Mir in NY but then came to Israel. My time at NYU was after all that.

 I also think that to learn Musar on Rosh Hashanah is important. Also that even though it is unspoken, it must be  that Reb Israel Salanter must have had in mind the fact that strange an foreign trends were taking over the world in general, and the world of Torah  in particular.   So he saw Musar as a cure for the evil doctrines that were taking over in the world of Torah. [''Musar'' refers to the books of ethics written mainly during the Middle Ages]