I spent Simchas Torah in an out of town shul that has a fairly strong yeshivish influence, and I was honestly taken aback by how much of the celebration among the bachurim and young adults seemed to revolve around drinking.

All the "yeshivish with it" bochurim and young guys came with bottles of whiskey, and I was surprised that even guys in their mid-20s and 30s seemed to treat getting drunk as just part of what Simchas Torah is. The younger kids were drinking too.

At one point there were kids lying flat on their backs on the steps right in front of the aron kodesh, with other kids sitting on top of them. Later I saw another kid lying face down in a back room across a couple of chairs, in full public view, totally knocked out and unaware of his surroundings apparently masturbating in his drunken stupor.

As I don't spend much time in shul, I'm just wondring: is this kind of thing becoming the norm in yeshivish communities?

Well, an OTD Tisha B'Av sure is interesting.

With two extra hours to kill during kinos, I took the risk of going to Panera Bread not too far from my community. I had a moment where I couldn't quite place the distinct taste in the soup until I remembered the nutrition facts on the kiosk: milk, cheese, butter. Ah, butter. The joy of butter. Anything fried in butter is just so much better. We're really missing out.

With all the extra time in the afternoon, I discovered two things: I absolutely detest Michael Jackson's music. It does absolutely nothing for me. And I discovered the Beatles! I knew they existed, but I had never checked them out. Wow! They're phenomenal. Honestly, discovering the Beatles was almost worth having Tisha B'Av for.

I have no idea how I got there, but I somehow ended up listening to Nochum Rosenberg, the Satmar chassid from Williamsburg who has been completely ostracized and says he can't even walk i to a shul because of his relentless campaign against child abusers and the rabbis who protect them. (Incidentally, he has semicha from the the Eida Chareidis and has built mikvehs across the U.S. Funny how rabbis are happy to use his expertise while shunning him everywhere else.)

I found a collection of his recordings on https://reference-url-citation.invalid/0. If you understand Yiddish, it's a treasure trove, but you have to dig for the gems. The recordings are long, mostly his commentary on current events and dated hock, but they're peppered with juicy stuff and very creative name calling. What surprised me most is that after everything he has seen, experienced, and accused the rabbinic establishment of, he remains such a fervent, ardent believer.

One line had me laughing out loud. Rosenberg frequently refers to abusers and rabbis who cover up abuse as chazerim. Then he asked: if chazer is basically another word for rabbi, why does the Torah say, "Don't eat the chazir"? It could have just said, "Don't eat rabbis."

His answer: dibra Torah belashon nekiyah, the Torah speaks in clean language.

Pure gold!!

I’m running a notebook from a pipeline activity. The notebook contains a bunch of Spark SQL cells, and some of those cells are frozen.

Some frozen cells are just for manual checks, eyeballing data, or occasional setup/diagnostics that I don’t always want to run interactively.

What I’m trying to understand is:

When a Fabric notebook is run from a pipeline, does the pipeline respect frozen cells and skip them? Or does “frozen” only affect manual notebook execution in the UI?

This may be a basic question, but I haven’t found a clear answer.

https://preview.redd.it/h4x8j1rxe1zg1.png?width=588&format=png&auto=webp&s=f0a264ad03b48c7f683daf23e4a29415d1cade81

The Chafetz Chaim : Rabbi Moses M. Yoshor : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The intensity of religious grief reveals that people do not actually believe in a good afterlife, or that the belief system itself is psychologically nonfunctional and poorly fitted to human nature.

Here's why:

In Abrahamic religions, people claim to believe:

• God exists
• God is good and just
• There is an afterlife
• Morally decent people receive a good outcome
• God is capable of ensuring this

If taken seriously, this implies:

> Death is not a tragedy, but a transition to a better place for good people.

However, in reality:

• Grief is intense, overwhelming, and often devastating
• It looks essentially the same in religious and non-religious contexts
• It is experienced as a catastrophic loss, not a temporary separation

Even when the deceased is considered a good person and the mourners affirm belief in eventual reunion

Now, If someone truly believed that “The deceased is in a better state, and I will see them again in a finite amount of time,” then grief should resemble a painful separation not existential rupture, but it overwhelmingly resembles the latter.

Option A:

>People do not actually believe these claims, they merely pay lip service to them.

They may even think they believe them, but at a deeper level, the level that governs emotional reality, they do not.

Option B:

If people do genuinely believe all of this, and yet it has no effect on one of the most powerful human experiences (grief), then:

>the belief system itself is a dismal failure, as it fails to meaningfully map onto the experience of even its most devoted adherents.

If such fundamental beliefs which religionists are supposed to orient their lives around cannot penetrate and significantly change experience, then the religion as a whole is a faulty product and not a viable framework for it's intended audience.

Final thought

Either:

• people don’t really believe what they say they believe

or

• the religious system they believe in, doesn’t work

I’m ITC with a bunch of kids. My wife knows where I’m at, but my kids don’t. My older boys especially my teenage son just see me as someone who maybe struggles at times, not someone who fundamentally doesn’t believe.

I’ve also been active online, writing vehemently anti God and religion.

I made a serious mistake and left my computer open. My teenage son found it and read what I wrote.

He’s shattered.

He’s a good yeshiva kid, and I feel like I completely pulled the rug out from under him. I don’t even know exactly how much he saw, but it was enough to really shake him.

Now I have no idea how to handle this. I don’t know how much to say, how honest to be, or whether explaining more will help him process this or just make things worse. Part of me feels he deserves the truth, and part of me is scared of destabilizing him even more.

I also feel awful ,like I caused him real harm.

Has anyone dealt with something like this? Either from the parent side or as the kid? How do you even begin that conversation, and what actually helps?

My wife called me at work and told and I'll be going home soon.

I’d really appreciate any advice.