Gail Weintraub (Stern)

Judy, thanks for the compliment and your thorough and accurate explanation. You definitely rocked it!! A very Happy and Healthy 5780 to you and your loved ones.

For those of you on Facebook, please check out my recent post about my experience attending Rosh Hashanah services in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The two week trip was memorable and allowed me to experience Russia through the eyes of its citizens.

Jerry Ochs

Because I do not accept the concept of sin I cannot atone but I can toss and turn in my bed late at night reliving the 10 worst things I have done.

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  One of the ten worst things you have done is "toss and turn in your bed."  For god's sake, sincerely settle down!  Not getting to sleep at night is one of the worst punishments the good Lord has inflicted upon me (which is why I write these posts instead of going to bed)!  (Ahem!  As a Christian, and yeah, as a subscriber to the Jewish Old Testament as well, your sin is not accepting the concept of sin.  But, I guess if you do not accept the concept of sin, you cannot be sinning.  On the other hand, you are from Cin-Cin-nati.  For a-tone, check in with Paul Simons, our music guy.)  But, taking it all in all, who am I to judge?

Gail!  Tell us about your St. Petersburg experiences!  (I assume 5780 is the current Jewish year?)

Judy:  Rabbi or not, you are educating your non-Jewish classmates in ways that are useful to those of us who are regulars on this Forum.  [Note:  Um, isn't sex always pleasurable?  I'm reminded of the old joke of three young French schoolboys on their way to school, when they pass a window, the shade of which is slightly up, and there is a couple inside on a bed, wrangling, let us say.  The youngest schoolboy, 7 years old, says, "Sacre bleu!  They are fighting!"  "Non!" says the second, 10 years old, "They are making love!"  "Oui!" says the third boy, an adolescent of 13, "And doing it very badly!"]

Oh, and Judy:  You're probably right about newspapers; at the risk of entering crudity into the discussion, these were often used in the days before sanitary napkins came into general use; and, as to the use of leaves for wiping, well, yeah!  When my son was at Scout camp using the outhouse, and suddenly there was no toilet paper to be found in stock anywhere [Uh-oh! Scouts!  "Be Prepared!"], I gathered some large-leaved, innocuous-looking plant leaves that he could use for the necessary purpose.  [I will tell you another time about what I did when I had "Montezuma's Revenge" in Mexico City and hit a typical Mexican toilet with no toilet paper.]

And on Shaving:  In my view, whoever invented shaving as one of the first activities to be done when up in the morning was definitely suicidal.

Paul Simons

Gail - beautiful photos on FB. I had forgotten what a beautiful alphabet Hebrew is.

About not wearing leather- complex-see link    https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/577480/jewish/Why-Sneakers-on-Yom-Kippur.htm

Jerry Ochs

Phil et al.,

To answer the alternative to toilet paper question, I turned to the classics.

Rabelais claimed that a live goose was the best thing to wipe your bottom with. The full quote from Gargantua is: "'I have', answered Gargantua, 'by a long and curious experience found out a means to wipe my bum. The most lordly, the most excellent, the most convenient that was ever seen. I have wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf's skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney's bag, with a Montero, with a falconer's lure. But to conclude, I say and maintain that of all the torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest of the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains.'"

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Sex 144: Sadly, sex is seen as a duty by many, even if not under pressure to ensure continuing a dynasty; as an obligation by unfortunately way too many women, I suspect, even in the 21st century.

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  Your Rabelaisian quote, no doubt, is where the term "to get goosed" comes from.

Dale Gieringer

       Like Jerry I'm a sincere unbeliever and hence sine sin.  What I'd like to know is, does that mean we're entitled to cast the first stone (John 8:7) ? 

Jerry Ochs

I may have been a pothead but I was never a stoner.

Jerry Ochs

Am I the only one who wishes Peewee Herman was president?

Stephen Collett

I just noticed that Mr. Bean takes a lot after Peewee Herman. Where did we see Peewee, did he have his own TV show?

Jerry Ochs

He starred in a television program called Peewee's Playhouse that ran from 1986 to 1990 and made a silly movie or two.

Philip Spiess

Dale:  So Jesus is out addressing the crowd, saying, "Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone."  Immediately a chunk of rock comes winging it out of the crowd before him and catches Jesus square in the right temple (Jesus' temple, not King Solomon's or Herod's).  Bleeding slightly from the impact, Jesus searches the crowd to see whom the miscreant might be.  He spots her, and shaking his finger, says, "Some day, Mother!"

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

I don't get the joke, Phil.....

Stephen Collett

I think I do, Judy. It´s the conceit that Mary was without "sin" (ie Sex) in conceiving Jesus. So she got to throw a stone; but he is mixing his stories a bit, as it was not J. who was the adulterer. But that´s Mom.

Philip Spiess

No, Steve, J. was not the adulterer, but, while the Virgin Mary may have been without sin, nobody ever said she had good aim or a good throwing arm.

Jerry Ochs

Somebody should google "original sin", which I find to be a repugnant concept.  I think Christian women who abort or miscarry or suffer the death of an infant are told their baby can't get into heaven and will spend eternity in limbo or purgatory (much like the cages at the border with Mexico).  Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Philip Spiess

As Tom Lehrer once said, most sin isn't original enough.

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

And this is why I'm not a very good Catholic....

I do love Tom Lehrer!

Philip Spiess

While we're still close to the topics of sin and atonement, I'd like to offer the following little story of rural America:

It seems that well south of where my wife and I live here in northern Virginia -- to wit, in southern Virginia -- in a very rural community quite near to the West Virginia border, there is a small, born-again evangelical Christian church located well up an isolated valley and submerged deep among the darkling pines, with a congregation that dates its establishment back to several years before the first McKinley administration.  The actual structure of the church itself, severely Gothic Revival in style and all wooden fretwork in fabric, is nearly as old, and thus it recently was in serious need of having its coat of paint replenished.

The church fathers (no, there are no church mothers -- it is strictly a patriarchal church government down there) deemed it prudent to raise funds to purchase the necessary paint, and thus church bake sales, rummage sales, and pleas for donations of a fiduciary nature made to the pious and holy ensued, and in due course enough funds were subscribed to buy the necessary paint.  Or so it was thought.

On a fine spring morning the elders, trustees, deacons, and lowly lay persons of said church assembled on the ridge behind the church with buckets of paint, brushes large and small, rollers, ladders, paint stirs, drop-cloths, and rags -- in short, all the accoutrements necessary to successfully accomplish a major church painting project.  While the painting was going on, the ladies of the church served their menfolk and themselves with ample draughts of coffee, homemade rolls, and spicy Brunswick stew (the kids got cider and doughnuts, much to their satisfaction).  All was going well:  the front of the church, featuring its historic stained-glass doors purchased abroad, was painted first, then the long east and west sides, with their rows of Gothic clerestory windows, came under the stroke of the brush, and finally the rather plain back side of the church -- 

But here the paint they had acquired at such effort began to run out!  Desperate, the most knowledgeable among them studied the labels on the paint cans and determined that, with a little bit of water and a little bit of luck, they could stretch that paint just far enough to finish the job.  And so they did!  They conquered that sucker and were standing back admiring a job well done when -- a sudden spring rain came on and drenched that back wall of the church with a mighty downpour . . . and all of the paint on said back wall washed right off and left it as bare as before!

As this unexpected and melancholy surprise, the congregation looked at one another in less than mild surmise and more than sad dismay, and at last, in the quiet gloaming of an evening in the woods, someone uttered the words that were on everybody's mind, if not their lips:  "Oh, God!  What are we going to do now?"  And immediately a ray of sun broke forth from the dark clouds above them and burst down among them, shining immaculate from the blessed heavens, and a mighty voice spoke to them as from the deep:  "Repaint -- and thin no more!"

Larry Klein

Who knew that the man upstairs "thpoke with a lithp"?

Good thtory, Phil Thpieth!

Larry Klein

I haven't been posting much lately, but thought some of you might be interested in seeing this.  Last month at the Grizzly course at Kings Island (noe Mason City course) I managed to tear up the second nine (played back nine first) and make a 10 ft birdie putt on the last hole to shoot my age on the button.  I've been close the last two years, but never got the cigar 'til 9/5/19.  Now, if only my body holds out....who knows? Note - Al put the wrong date on the card.

David Buchholz

Larry, congratulations to you for shooting your age.  I, too, shot my age once...but then I had to play the back nine.  It's a wonderful accomplishment for you, that as we age our bodies give us less strength and agility, both of which are necessary to play competitively.  That's why many golfers leave the rigorous PGA circuit at 50.  It's commendable that you're keeping up both your bridge (mind) and golf (body) as we find ourselves heading to the middle of this seventh decade.

Jeff Daum

Well done Larry!

Richard Winter (Winter)

Congratulations, Larry!  If I could improve a little, I might shoot my age when I'm 90...