Why I hate davening

To be fair, it’s not davening (praying) itself that I hate, it’s doing it in shul (synagogue). It’s been drilled into my head since 5th grade that if you don’t daven with a minyan (quorum), your tefillos (prayers) are less likely to be answered and you're pretty much a bad Jew. That probably has something to do with why I rarely go. 

I find it hard to concentrate on davening to begin with. If I go to a shul that davens fast, I feel rushed and don't know what I'm saying half the time. If I go somewhere that davens slow enough that I can concentrate on what I'm saying, I get bored and leave early.   

Then there are the distractions. The worst is the guy that davens louder than everyone else, but only for a few words at a time. I'll be in the middle of concentrating on my tefilos and all the sudden I'll hear him and completely forget where I was. Then there’s the obviously needed repair to something in the room that hasn't been done. There’s one shul I davened at once (I wish it was just one) that was in such a state of disrepair that I spent the entire davening imagining how I could fix it up. Throw in a few talkers and shushers, and chances are I won't concentrate at all. 

When I daven at home, I don't feel like my tefillos are being ignored. I feel like I can have more concentration (at least when Matis isn't there “davening" with me), go at my own pace and overall have a more sincere and meaningful conversation with G-d. Isn't that what davening is all about? 

It doesn't help that staying home is a lot more convenient. I wouldn't make a big deal about all the minor annoyances that go along with going to shul (weather, leaving the house, seeing people, being seen by people, talking to people, finding a seat), if I felt the davening was good. 

People talk about shuls as a family of sorts, or at least as the center of a community, but that hasn't been my experience. I went to the same shul for well over 20 years and by and large nobody there would know if I completely disappeared, least of all the Rabbis. One day around Rosh Hashanah, one of the Rabbis made a speech saying that when you daven alone, you're judged on your own. When you daven in a shul, you're judged by everyone there. I took a look around the room and said to myself “Darn, I'm screwed” and that’s when I finally realized it was time to leave that shul. I realize that it wasn't a mature or nice response, in reality the majority of the congregants were good people, but at the time I couldn't see past the few I had issues with. 

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are hard times for me. I understand the severity of the days and I want to be in shul, davening in a way that is fitting for such days. I finally found a way to do that. A new shul opened that I actually enjoyed going to. The pace was nice, the people were friendly and actually spoke to people they didn’t know. Unfortunately, it was only for Shabbos and Yom Tov, which are times that I generally go to shul anyway. Even more unfortunately, all I've heard about this shul from anyone who doesn’t go there has been negative. So much negativity. I constantly have to remind myself that I'm not religious because of how religious people act or talk, I'm religious because of what I believe. 

I find myself once again, the day before Rosh Hashanah, dreading going to shul. I’m in a strange land, which I like, but which lacks the comfort of my hometown shul. I have to choose between going to a YU yeshiva and a French shul. The yeshiva will likely be overcrowded and I don’t believe there’s a way to reserve a seat. I’ll be uncomfortable the whole time, because I’ll feel like I’m in somebody’s seat, but at least they speak English. The French shul is confusing. All those French language courses I took for a couple weeks only taught me how to harass ladies who don’t want to go out for drinks with me. Quite useless, as I’ve never had a French lady refuse drinks with me. I’m leaning towards going to the French shul and davening at my own pace and nusach. I always feel like everyone there is staring at me, they probably are, can’t say I blame them, just look at me :). 

Here’s to next year being better. Maybe my doctor will finally let me take some ADHD medicine and I'll be able to find a way to enjoy going to shul (not sure I can blame it all on ADHD and OCD, but maybe?). Until I figure that out, I'll just have to trust what we say in our tefillos, that G-d knows the thoughts and intentions of all men. 

Shana Tova! 

SANDSTORM!

I woke up Tuesday morning, to an apartment flooded with a weird orangish light. I went out on the mirpeset to see what was going on and was greeted by the scene in the pictures below (sorry for the spot in the middle, I think my iphone lens is scratched) . There were police and ambulance sirens all around the roads below us, but we couldn't see what was going on. I checked the news and found out that there was a sand/dush storm that came from Syria (does Syria ever export anything good?). 

The air pollution in Jerusalem on Tuesday and Wednesday was rated 999, the worst possible score. They said that young kids, the elderly and anyone with asthma should stay inside. Of course nobody (myself included) listened and over 300 people had to be treated for severe respiratory issues. Fortunately we rented a car so we could get around and run errands before Yom Tov, so we were able to get around without breathing too much air. The one time I had to walk outside with Matis, someone from our building picked us up on the side of the road and gave us a ride. 

Even without spending too much time outside, my lips are drier than they get in the Detroit winters and my throat has been itching like crazy. Thursday was a little clearer so I was outside more and when I came back home it felt like there was a layer of dust in my lungs, not fun. The air pollution is down to somewhere in the 300s (normal clean air is 50 or lower), but they don't know when the air will be clear again. It doesn't help that the temperature has been close to 100 every day this week. Is it too early to pray for rain? 

Banning Tesla

In my last post I wrote about causes of death and injury in America. One of the things that resonated with me was the number of deaths (over 30,000 per year) and injuries (around 2.3 million per year) from car accidents. While this is a huge improvement from the numbers just a few years ago, we obviously have to make driving safer. Which begs the question; why did Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Texas, New Jersey, Michigan (I'm disappointed in Rick Snyder, but I don't blame him, it's career suicide to go against the big 3 and the "we need to save the automakers" mentality), Maryland and Virginia all effectively ban the company (Tesla) that made the safest car ever (according to NHTSA testing)? 

If you guessed something to do with lobbyists and political contributions, you're absolutely right. The issue in dispute is Tesla's sales model. They sell directly to the consumer from their small showrooms which seem to be modeled after Apple stores. Car dealerships are not really worried about losing business to Tesla. Only a small segment of the population can afford one, they only produced 35,000 cars in all of 2014. Compare that to the 2,480,942 sold by ford alone and you see how insignificant they are to the overall industry.

What is it that they're worried about? They claim to be worried about the precedent. That GM, Ford and Chrysler will realize they can copy Tesla and cut out all the car dealers. That sounds more than a little far-fetched to me. They also claim that car dealerships have such investments in their communities, so they care more about them and offer better service. Even if you buy into their first claim, that doesn't make the second claim true. Why would a dealership owned by a car company care less about their customers? 

It seems to me that what this is really about is protecting themselves and their profits from higher demands made by their customers. If people see that they can walk into any Tesla store and buy a car at the same price and pay the same amount for service at any store, with transparency, they may wonder why other dealerships make the whole process so difficult and muddled. If you've ever bought a car, you're undoubtedly familiar with the sales games that go on("My manager is so mad at me for giving you this deal (even though it's $2,000 higher than the dealer a mile away), you better take it before he changes his mind") and the maintenance/repairs are even worse. 

To tell you the truth, I'm a little sympathetic to their concerns about cutting out the middleman. My father is a computer reseller and when Dell came out with their direct to consumer sales model, it practically eliminated all reseller profits on computer hardware. The result of that was that prices for computers dropped drastically and more people were able to afford them. Resellers had to change their business model to either make up for the lower margins, with higher sales volumes, or sell services instead of hardware. 

If the computer industry had the same laws that the Auto Dealers have successfully lobbied for, there would be no Apple stores and  more depressingly, no Microsoft stores. Jokes. If the government is going to be involved at all, it should be to increase Tesla sales and make them more affordable for the average consumer. If that happened, it wouldn't take long for the other car manufacturers to add the safety and technology features that Tesla already has. Tesla does not have a monopoly on ingenuity and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the other manufacturers came out with a car fairly soon that improves on just about everything that Tesla has. In the meantime, let the people buy the cars they want and let me keep dreaming about being able to afford one (I like to pretend that the reason I don't have one yet, is that I'm waiting for longer battery life).

In case you don't know what all the Tesla hype is about, check out this video. If you can get through Elon Musk's geekiness (I really like watching him talk, b/c he's so excited about what he's saying), it pretty cool. If you can't, here's a short summary of the Tesla model S  features:

• Completely battery powered, no gas at all. 
• Automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, lane departure warning.
• Traffic-aware cruise control, automatic lane centering, self parking.
• Autotpilot (some features not available yet): automatically follows the road, steering around curves and varying its speed to match the flow of traffic.  Automatically change lanes by tapping the turn signal. Parks itself, on private property it can even pull into and out of your garage without you being in the car. 
• Uses radar, cameras and sonar to protect you from objects you can't see. The cameras can see stoplights, red lights and speed limit signs and take action based on those. 
• Two trunks (there's no engine)
• 250 mile range.
• Stereo that goes up to 11. It's cute and most people will like that, but I have an OCD thing about radio volume numbers and just knowing that it goes up to 11 might be enough to keep me from buying the car.