Animal soulese

Reb Zalman Moshe Yitzchaki, father-in-law of the famous Reb Avrom Mayor Drizin, was known for his liberal use of profanities. This was even (or especially) evident during  chassidic farbrengens (get togethers).


When asked why he resorted to  foul language so often, he'd reply that this is the only language that the animal soul understands.


Once, he got mad at a gentile and was cursing him up and down, hearing that, his son remarked - Totty, farbrengst yetz? (Father, are you farbrenging now?)

The Netilas Yadoyim Code

There's a fascinating story about Rav Mordechai Eliyahu ZT"L during the 1973 War.

The war was very difficult for  Israel  on the Egyptian front


One night, towards morning, the phone rang in the home of Rav Mordechai Eliyahu ZT"L.  On the line was a phone operator.  The female soldier  asked, "Are you Rav Mordechai Eliyahu?"  The rabbi said yes and asked how he can help.  "On the line is a soldier who wants to ask an emergency operational question,".  She explained that every post had a half-hour every day to communicate, and the time for this post has arrived.  She asked if the rabbi would be able to take the call.


The rabbi answered positively and listened to the question.  The soldier started saying, "The water situation at the post is sparse and rationed out.  Due to this situation, what should I do regarding Netilat Yadayim?  Wash once in the morning or wash every time I eat and go to the bathroom?"


The rabbi answered, "You are exempt - you are in a time of war - it is Piku'ah Nefesh!"  The soldier then asked the rabbi, "How is it possible to refrain from Netilat Yadayim?  It is very difficult for me to think about doing so.  Is it possible to eat my sandwich with a napkin?  I don't want to be lenient. I want to know what the halacha is in the matter."


The advice was that in the morning to  wash once and make a stipulation that he is not taking his mind off [the cleanliness of his hands] for the entire day.  As a result of this stipulation, he would not be required to wash before any meal.  After leaving the washroom, he should wipe his hands on anything that cleans, and this will be good enough.


During this discourse, the operator who was listening in, interrupted the soldier, "Excuse me!  You told me that this is an operational conversation that is related to the war.  I hear that there is a regular conversation going on.  This is definitely not an operational conversation."


The soldier, without batting an eye, replied, "We are speaking in codes.  This is a conversation that is very important for the success of the battle..."


The rabbi understood that the soldier had gone to great lengths to make this phone call to ask this halachic question, and couldn't bring himself to hang up the phone.  While the phone was still in his hands, the rabbi looked upwards and said, "Master of the universe!  See what kind of soldiers You have!  In such conditions, they are careful in Mitzvot - even Rabbinic Mitzvot!  I beseech You, Hashem Yitbarach - save them from all evil!"


The operator, hearing the words of the rabbi, understood that they were speaking with a direct connection to HKB"H, and she asked the rabbi to bless her as well.  The rabbi granted her request, and blessed her with good life and peace.


Many years after this event, Rav Mordechai Eliyahu was invited to a gathering in a school.  One student asked the rabbi a question in the laws of Netilat Yadayim.  The student's question was, "What do we do when there is no water in the area we are in?"  The rabbi explained to him the laws about this: that one must go 4 Mil ahead and 1 Mil back in order to find water, etc.  After discussing the halachot, the rabbi added the story about the soldier from that post in the Suez Canal who called him at night and asked what he was to do under war conditions.


Suddenly, one of the teachers of that school approached, with a lot of emotion and teary eyes, and told the rabbi, "I was that soldier that was there and spoke to you on the other end of the line."  Afterwards, the teacher continued and described in front of the rabbi and the students who were present in the hall what occurred from the moment that telephone conversation was over.  This is what the teacher said, "Immediately after the telephone conversation began heavy shelling of the post [by the Egyptians].  I was struck with amazement when opposite my eyes, an exciting vision was revealed that looked like it was a hallucination.  The image of Rav Mordechai Eliyahu was revealed in the battlefield and every shell that came from the Egyptian side was moved over to the side by way of the hand of the rabbi..."


Was this connected to the insistence of carefulness about the laws of Netilat Yadayim?

Original here

"Billions and billions...."

Just 20 years ago, astronomers had no direct evidence that planets orbited other stars. Now, researchers estimate the Milky Way galaxy contains a huge number of planets, with Earth-sized worlds vastly outnumbering the rest.

“On average, every star has a planet, there are at least 100 billion stars, there are at least 100 billion planets,” said astronomer K. Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who co-authored the new study, appearing Jan. 11 in Nature.

They calculated this number by searching for planets using a technique called gravitational microlensing. The method works because, according to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, a massive object bends the fabric of space-time.

Though a planet’s mass is relatively small, it is enough to curve space-time and create a “lens.” An exoplanet bends light as it passes in front of its parent star, causing a slight brightening of the star’s light.

Microlensing allows astronomers to look at a much larger sample of stars for exoplanets. Unlike other detection methods, such as looking for the slight wobble a planet exerts on its parent star, microlensing can discover planets with many different masses and distances from their star.

The team looked at roughly 30 different microlensing events and found that extrasolar planets caused three of them. Because microlensing observations are known to miss a certain percentage of planets, the researchers could use statistical analysis to get the true number of exoplanets in the galaxy.

“We think about one-sixth of stars should have a Jupiter-like planet, half have a Neptune-sized planet, and two-thirds should have an Earth,” said Sahu.

Believe it or not

Once in awhile an event takes place that can only be properly described as a 'Baalshmeske maise', i.e. a supernatural occurrence, after Rabbi Yisroel Baal Shem Tov who was known as a miracle worker. Here's one of those stories related by Rabbi Laibel Groner, the Lubavitcher Rebbe's personal secretary,  this past Shabbos:

A woman had been married for five years but wasn't getting pregnant. Someone suggested she go see the Lubavitcher Rebbe for a blessing, which she did. During the meeting, the Rebbe asked if she had been previously engaged to someone else, turned out that she had but had broken off the engagement. The Rebbe then inquired if she had asked for forgiveness from that man, she replied that she had not. She was then instructed to travel to Tel Aviv to a certain location at a certain time and see if she could locate the man and ask for forgiveness. The woman did as instructed, found the man and asked his forgiveness. He was happy to oblige and they parted ways. Soon after,  the woman became pregnant and after the baby was born, she had a "chance" encounter with the matchmaker  who had arranged her first engagement with that man. She then began relating the whole episode. When she came to the part when the Rebbe told her to go to meet the man in Tel Aviv, the matchmaker's face became noticeably  pale and by the time the woman was finished, the matchmaker looked as if she was about to faint. She then told the woman  that the man she had seen a year before had been dead for four years!

This is an example of  a) the power of the Rebbe to summon a soul from the afterlife and have it come down in a body for a mission and b) the love and care the Rebbe displayed towards regular people to help them solve their pressing problems.

The Size of the Universe

Space, as Douglas Adams once so aptly wrote, is big. To try imagining how big, place a penny down in front of you. If our sun were the size of that penny, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 350 miles away. Depending on where you live, that’s very likely in the next state (or possibly country) over. Attempting to imagine distances larger than this quickly becomes troublesome. At this scale, the Milky Way galaxy would be 7.5 million miles across, or more than 30 times the distance between the Earth and the moon. As you can see, these are rather inhuman dimensions that are almost impossible to really get a sense of. But that doesn’t mean it’s completely impossible. Astronomers have made observations and simulations that in some way capture the enormity of our cosmos. No one knows exactly how large the universe is. It could be infinite or it could have an edge, meaning that traveling for long enough in one direction will bring you back to where you started, like traveling on the surface of a sphere. Scientists argue over the exact shape and size of the universe but they can calculate one thing with good precision: how far away we can see. Light travels at a specific speed, and because the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old, we can’t see anything farther away than 13.7 billion light years away, right? Wrong. The strange thing about space is that it’s expanding. And that expansion can occur at more or less any speed — including faster than light speed — so the most distant objects we can see were in fact once much closer to us. Over time, the universe has shuffled distant stars and galaxies away from us as if they were on an extremely rapid conveyor belt, and dropped them off in far away locations. Strangely, this means that our observational power is sort of “boosted” and the furthest things we can see are more than 46 billion light years away. While we are not the center of the universe, we are at the center of this observable portion of the universe, which traces out a sphere roughly 93 billion light years across.