how to eat when you have to

Our learning group finished the "Moed Katan" Tractate of the Babylonian Talmud today. I was the only one who studied with the group from the beginning to the end, so they suggested that I would make the Siyum, a very short  speech and reading of the last lines of the tractate. The audience had about 50 people, and I was quite nervous. All my public speaking skills vanished, all the plans evaporated and I felt like in second grade. (That time I had to read a short poem in front of the entire school, and the size of the audience was so overwhelming that I forgot my lines. Everything.) This time I also forgot my lines, but very fast I regrouped and ended up saying something that had to be said. Right before the speech they let me know that instead of 5-7 minutes I planned for I will have 1-2 minutes. So there was just enough time for the very essence of what I know ( not much) , what I feel  ( overwhelming mixed feelings ), and what has to be said ( G-d knows what). I went int...

I've never let my school interfere with my education. Mark Twain Pressure's in the air. December 31st is such a high pressure holiday for many. New Year's . I'm glad I'm not a part of the New Year Resolution Club. And Jewish New Year was in September, so I should be done with goal setting by now... But pressure's in the air:  "was it a good year? am I a good person? do I have a good life? did I have a good day? do I have a good job? am I doing a good job? where do I go from now? where am I going? how do I measure up?" Are you setting goals today? Are you evaluating our progress? Then consider this simple tip: set educational goals for yourself. You see, there are two kids of goals you can set: Project-Based Goals and Educational Goals. Most New Years Resolutions focus on Project-Based Goals: lose weight, find a new job, finish a project. Measuring your success by looking at  Project-Based Goals could be very frustrating. After all, we all k...

I threw my first independent, unsupervised , bombastic New Year party when I was 15. It was one hour before the winter break, I was secretly in love, and I did not want to let the girl go away from me for such a long time. I wanted to see her again, see her soon, but I did not have the guts to ask her out. So right there and then, I decided to improvise a party. But remember, we're talking about Soviet Russia here. I did not have a big house to invite the guests over. We lived in a 1 bedroom apartment I did not have funds to sponsor a bombastic event. I wasn't old enough to buy alcohol. And worst of all, It was the first year of high school, in a special physics and mathematics honors program, and I had no idea if I was cool enough to throw a party... Ladies and gentlemen, do you ever entertain an idea of trowing a party? Do you entertain guests? Do you want to be a more entertaining speaker? Today I'll show you three approaches to entertainment. I used the first appr...

(A draft of the 30th speech for my speaking club.) At the time of the cold war, American spies got hold of the blueprints of the top secret Soviet Army Fighter Jet. The American Engineers made all the parts according to the blueprints. They assembled the parts according to the instructions, but instead of a fighter jet the result looked a lot like a big tractor. They fired all the Engineers, brought the blueprints to a different facility, built everything again - just to see another Tractor. Many years later, after the cold war was over, they asked the Soviet Engineers: what did we do wrong? And Soviet Engineers answered: You forgot to polish. you missed this little note on the bottom of the blueprint: Make sure you polish the parts with sandpaper prior to assembly. Ladies and Gentlemen, you are such a great audience! You listen, you cheer, you empathize, you even write notes after the speech is done. What is the most popular improvement you suggest for me? Preparation. Take time to...

A guy comes to the doctor as says: " I have a head ache and a stomach ache." The doctor answers: "I have just the thing for you. Wait." He leaves and comes back with a giant pill the size of a car tire. He breaks it in half and says: "This half is for your head ache. This half is for your stomach ache. Just be careful not to mix them up..." When I was in my twenties I used to love this joke. I did not realize the joke was on me. My hero back than was Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors. He died young. Back than I thought it was a good idea. The three other members of the band tell that when the Doors were doing a live concerts, the fans would bring and offer them pills. You know, the pills they used to take in the 60-s, some pills take you high , some pills take you low, some pills speed you up. Some pills slow you down. Well, some members of the band refused to take the pills from the fans, or took one sometimes. And they lived to tell the story....

What do you know about real Jewish cooking? You know Kugel? You know Chulent? You know Kishka? You know Gurnisht! Actually, you do know Gurnisht, because Gurnisht is "Nothing" in Yiddish. "Nada" in Spanish. When I was a kid, and I refused to eat what grandparents offered, they used to say "Well, you can always eat Gurnisht". This post is an intermission between a long introduction into how to eat when you have to and a more practical and applicable how-to guide. The real thing is coming right away. But before that I want to reiterate, what will be our approach to cooking and how will it be different from the usual cookbook , cooking show, cooking blog cookie-cutter approach. As we showed in the previous post, EVERYTHING is a problem. You can't buy EVERYTHING. You can't cook EVERYTHING, you can't make EVERYONE happy, you can't follow EVERY dietary guideline and you can't make EVERY meal exotic, memorable or even blog-worthy. You can...

Today we are going to talk about grocery shopping, and the best way to start it is with the condom commercial from the 90-s: The boy wants the sweets, the father wants to check items off his shopping list and get out of the supermarket, the son throws a tantrum, the father regrets not using a condom 7 years ago. Why do I bring this up? Because I hate food shopping. Every time I enter the supermarket I feel like the combination of the son and the father. The son wants to buy EVERYTHING, and the father wants to save money. The son wants sweets, and the father wants nutrition. The son is tempted by new products and exciting flavors, and the father realizes that whatever you buy you would have store, cook, eat, digest and pay for it again in the gym.  We will try to analyze what kinds of problems are faced with in the supermarket and will learn how to deal with some of them. The first and evident problem is the problem of EVERYTHING. I am surprised that Mark Bittman did not wri...

Now-days, who has time to cook?! Who has time to do the dishes? Who has time to have a life if you have a career? Who has time to hear the nonsense your kids keep saying day after day? Who has time for themselves? Who has time? I don't. I don't have enough time. I asked you what hurts you in the kitchen, and John T said just one word, all-caps, three exclamation points: TIME!!! Well, John T, I feel your pain. I feel it now. I have 5 minutes to tell everything I have to say about time - cooking time, time spent in the kitchen, time given to us. It's an impossible task. I might as well give up, because I don't have the answers. And I don't have time. So let's not talk about time. Let's talk about three things that will help us to transcend time. Today we are going to talk about Obligations, Ambitions and Priorities. Obligations are the things you need to worry about. Ambitions are the things you want to worry about. Priorities are ways to arrange your am...

I delivered the speech today and here is the list of pain points from the audience: John T : TIME!!! John O: I have a tendency  to cook "by the book". I want to use all the ingredients and measurements given in the recipe. Then when we don't have anything called for I lose all confidence in the meal Doug: Getting my kids to eat the veggies Doug: Cleaning the kitchen every day Doug: Getting home late at night: what's for dinner? Penelope: consomme, flan, white wine reductions, meat loaf Alice: I hate cooking! I only like the 'bad food': Beer and Chocolate! Jurate: I don't like cleaning the kitchen Jurate: I don't like to cook if there are too meany complicated ingredients in the recipe Andrew: I don't have to cook. Washing dishes is what I least enjoy in the kitchen Ian: What hurts me is that  I don't have a kitchen where I feel comfortable cooking without being interrupted or monitored and  I don't currently live in a place wh...

The second project in TM CC manual is called "Organize your speech". This is not the project I am doing today. The name of today's project is "Organize the Mother of your speech" and the objectives are to build a platform that will let you deliver a number of speeches on a topic you are passionate about and the topic your audience can appreciate. The topic is "How to cook when you have to" and today I am going to define the problem that keeps bothering me for over 20 years. Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, do you have to cook? I am not asking: "Can you cook"? I am not asking "Do you like cooking?" Do you have to cook? It's a simple yes or no question. And to help you answer this question I am going to give you two examples of two people who did not have to cook and two people who had to cook. That will help you assessing where you stand and at the end of my speech we will see if I found my audience. First example. When ...

" and they perceived the G-d of Israel, and beneath His feet was like the forming of a sapphire brick and like the essence of the heavens for clarity." Exodus 24:10 This shiur is le iluy neshamat imi morati,  Mila bat Zacharia . Who passed away on 24th of Shvat,  22 years ago. Boys grow up and they start asking questions. Here is the popular question: Can G-d create a brick that he will not be able to destroy? A possible answer is a question: even if he does why would he show it you?  We will answer the question later from this week's Torah portion. We will talk about brick education. Jewish people have a history paved with bricks. Our father Abraham was thrown into the burning furnace. Not just any furnace. It was a brick oven. It was used to make the bricks for the Tower of Babel. Nimrod ("Gibor Tzaid")  used technology to produce bricks and persuasion techniques to make people work on the Babel Tower Project. He was so successful at persuasion th...

Do you ever struggle picking a title for your speech? A good book says, you can entitle every speech you make "How to be more like me" because this is essentially what speeches are about. You give a person 5 minutes of undivided attention to learn a little bit: maybe you're missing out? So being in a speaking club is about learning how to be more like everybody else, in other words, how to be unique. In that sense the Icebreaker is different. It's not about how to be more like me, it's about. "How did I get to be the way I am". Which is 20% less interesting then every other speech. That's why you give you 4 minutes for that, not 5. I better start my icebreaker. There are 3 kinds of TMs: Professional  (DTMs, Presidents, VPs), Potnential ( Guests)  and Habitual. I tried all three approaches. When I first joined BPTM I was so terrified of the Icebreaker that I joined a second TM club and Did my CC in parallel , in two clubs. I don't even hope t...

Hi Girls and boys. I decided to leave the group again, this time for good. I really enjoyed the times when we were able to talk to each other about interesting stuff , such as love, life and the meaning of it all. I did not mind paying $10 a week for the privilege to do it.I was ok with the occasional product placements and mini-Tupperware parties that were added to the mix. But unfortunately things changed. The space, the meeting, and the company changed. After all, the goal of a publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value, whether the firm makes money selling cigarettes, barb wire or weight loss. The meetings became a non-stop Tupperware Party. Instead of talking to each other we were watching to a never ending infomercial lightly seasoned with short human interest stories. I understand. The company has to make money, the leaders have to make their sales quota, the new tools need to be promoted and explained. I understand, but  I don't want to pay $10 to be a...

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the lion or it will not survive. Every morning a lion wakes up and it knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn't matter if you are the lion or the gazelle, when the sun comes up, you better be running                                                                   African Proverb Dan Woods writes in his Forbes article : Gamification is about achieving goals using an engaging set of metrics-based interactions. It takes something usually seen in hindsight–performance–and breaks it down, looking at its most important component parts. Once performance is measured, participants can begin getting immediate feedback. Gamification can actually become an integral part of process design for a business, moving well be...

Devar Torah for Friday Night - VaYigash Did brothers go to Egypt because there was a famine and they needed food or because it was G-ds plan to make peace between brothers and Josef ? Yes and yes. Did Jews stay in Egypt for 400 years because it made economic sense at the time or because it was G-ds plan and part of his promise to Abraham? Yes and yes. Did Jews become enslaved as a result of assimilation or because it was G-ds plan and a necessary part of Jewish education for generations to come? Yes and yes. But what was the point in the scripture that signified the beginning of enslavement? Our Sages tell us it's "Ve-Yahazu Bah" at the end of this week's Torah Portion. The Jews acquired the choicest  land in Egypt and took hold of it. Did they take hold of the land or did the land take hold of them? Yes and yes. Did we come to US because it made economical sense or because it was part of G-ds plan for our growth and development? Yes and yes. Are we living i...

Scarlett : As God is my witness, as God is my witness they're not going to lick me. I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.               “Gone with the wind” (1939) As God is our witness, we did not go hungry again. In 2011, every third American is obese. In 2008 I was obese too. Now, after losing 50 pounds, I want to help others to do what I did. And people do ask all the time: “How did you do it?” And I always answer: “Gradually...” What else can I say? I don’t represent the 50-billion weight loss industry. I have nothing to sell. I have no easy answers.  What I do have is a story. And it starts with Victor Frankl. Victor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and the founder of Logotherapy , the “ Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy”.  In h...

Dear Wurzweiler Office of Admissions, Please join me on a special ride. We are going to go back in time in search of life experiences. The journey of this kind is nothing new, and the older we get the more often we find time to go back in time. We go back to re-live the experiences and make sense of it all. First Stop: Two weeks ago. Midtown Kollel .             We finished learning the fifth chapter of Talmud tractate “Sanhedrin” that deals with Jewish approach to judging capital cases. I gave a short talk summarizing the most interesting parts of the chapter. What touched me the most was a note about Rabbi Yochanan, who lived 120 years and spent first 40 years “ Be Pragmatia ” - doing commerce, next 40 years - learning and the last 40 years – teaching…  Soon I’ll be 40 too, and it keeps me wondering: how did he pull it off? Can I do the same?            ...

                        Almost no one puts in the work to create or invent                                                                         Seth Godin, “Linchpin” For the last 10 years of my life I was putting myself in the same challenging situation: I would get a Software Developer job and would try to keep it for a while. It’s not very hard for me to get a job, because I interview well. Keeping a job is not hard either, because I’m a fast study and I welcome feedback. But it’s very hard for me to contain m...

A couple of weeks ago we started learning Gemarah "Taanit" with Shalom. I love it. On the third page there is a discussion of 4 seasonal additions to the prayer, that mention Dew, Wind, Clouds and Rain. And it says that one has to beg for rain only, because other three will be there anyways. I thought of a metaphoric way to interpret it: Dew is a metaphor for your daily livelihood, a slow and steady progress you make in your endeavors (the mannah was covered with the layer of dew). Wind is a metaphor for changes, moving and shaking, excitement and unexpectedness. Clouds are a metaphor for the comforts of life. (Ananei ha Kavod , the clouds of glory followed the Jews in the desert and provided the shade. Not a necessity, but very nice-to-have) And Rain is the metaphor for Torah. So here's what I learned: you will get your livelihood, your unexpected changes and your little comforts anyways. Don't worry about them too much. Don't ask for more. ...

This blog is gradually turning into collection of speaking points, speech drafts etc. So be it. This is an overview of a personalized weight loss program for a friend of mine. Mostly speaking points. What do you want? So you think you want to lose weight? Good for you! Because this answers the very first question we are going to ask every week. Have an answer every week. Think hard about what you really want - every week. The answer may change overtime. The answer SHOULD change eventually because eventually you are going to get what you want. And then you should find something else you want as badly as you want to lose weight - now. One week you might want to lose weight, one week you might want to learn to run fast, one week you might want to squat 500lbs, one week you might want to kick and punch like Bruce Lee. It's all good. But whatever you choose, stick with it for a while. All the specific results in a particular sport, all the side effects of weight loss are just a...