Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Okay, hello everybody. Welcome back to another week of Answering Your Shailas. And again, as always, every time we do this, this is as a chus for our dear friend, Rabbi Jonathan Cohn. Joko, we should have a rufuah. Shalem, you should feel good, you should feel strong. And we thank him so much for conceiving of this idea and of implementing it every single week, even though it is not always easy.
Okay, question number one. How is one supposed to do tshuva for something that one will most likely end up doing again? Even if one will end up doing it less than previously, is it not dishonest to say we won't do it again when we likely will? So I don't think it's dishonest. Meaning, yes, if you're saying, I guarantee that I will not do it again, meaning to do tshuva shalema, to say tshuva,
that meir alov yodea talumos, that HaKadosh Baruch Hu could be meir about the person, that he will never do it again. That tshuva may be inaccessible to you at a certain point in life, and you have to build toward that. But part of the way of building toward it is doing tshuva each and every year to some degree. I'm going to do this aveira less. I'm only going to do this aveira on Tuesdays.
I was asking around my table on Rosh Hashanah if anyone ever had any kabbalos that particularly worked well for them over the years. And one of my daughters-in-law said that one of her teachers had suggested, don't say I'm never going to talk Lashon Hara, of course you're going to talk Lashon Hara. But say, I'm never going to talk Lashon Hara about this person.
And don't make it someone that's really hard not to talk. You know what I mean? But someone that you have some access to, some connection with, that you'll know that about that person, you're never going to speak Lashon Hara. So is it me? The person's never going to speak Lashon Hara again?
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Chapter 2: How do we perform teshuva for sins we will likely repeat?
Of course not. But it's a step in the right direction. It's partial tshuva, meaning tshuva is not an all or nothing situation. It's something that you can achieve part of the way with, meaning think of it like someone just asked me today, what's more important, Kavanah and davening or davening with a minion? I said it's an unfair question because davening with a minion is a yes or no.
It's an on-off switch. Kavanah and davening is a dimmer light. It's a sliding scale. So tshuva is also a sliding scale. Tshuva is not a yes or no. I did tshuva, I didn't do tshuva. Tshuva is a sliding scale. So you do some level of tshuva. In addition to that, as we've mentioned before, saying vidur is a value statement.
Meaning saying vidur is a way of saying, I know that if you look at the way that I behave... you would get the impression that I think speaking Lashon Hara is the right thing to do. But I am hereby saying, I know that it's an aveira, I know that it's a failing, I know that it's a weakness. One of the problems people often have is that we take our failings and we make them into values.
rather than understanding that they are failings, that they're problems. So we have to remind ourselves, and part of that is going through the tshuva process, even if we may not be 100% ready to go all the way, to be all the way better. But we have to go through that tshuva process as a way of stating what our values are. And also, by the way, sometimes it works.
Sometimes you don't think you're ready for something, but you really are ready for something. Like you can't imagine, you know, I was just talking to someone who got rid of his smartphone, like almost on a whim, you know, not really a recipe for success. And if you would have asked him five minutes before he did it, do you think that you would be able to get rid of your smartphone?
I'm not saying everyone must get rid of that. I'm not saying anything about it. It's just an example. He would have said, He would have said, impossible. There's no way. I'm not ready for that. And yet, somehow we did. So there is great, great value in identifying where our weaknesses are and doing tshuva for those weaknesses, even if we're not ready to fully 100% address those weaknesses.
Question number two, what does Rabbi think about playing board games on Shabbos? So board games on Shabbos, there are a few different issues. There are some games that involve ksiva, so obviously you're not allowed to violate kosev on Shabbos. But Avram writes that it's sort of kosev if you take letters and form them together, you know, on the background of a baguette.
Sort of Moshe has a famous shuva where he talks about the pagination, you know, the page turner things and shuls. Some shuls had where people didn't know the proper page, so they'd have a thing in the front of the shul to let you know what page they're up to.
So Ramosh has a discussion about that, and he says, well, if it's a loose-hanging thing, and they're not really kavua in a luach, they're not kavua onto a board, that that's not a violation of koshev. So that's what the postman discussed, scrabble, you know, bananograms, things like that. So Bananagrams, they say, is not Kosev because it's not Kavo and Eni.
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Chapter 3: Is it permitted to play board games on Shabbat?
So Tashmisha Kedusha, the Akher Zeman Mitzvah, so let's say you have, Rav Shechter points out in her Tzvi, Tashmisha Kedush is anything that has Ksav Shal Torah in it. So you have an old mezuzah, old fillin, things like that. So it requires geniza. You can't throw it out. But Tashmisha Mitzvah, when the mitzvah is over, it's in his rocket and you're allowed to throw it out.
It's just not, you're not allowed to be... with it, but you're allowed to throw it out. So the question is asking, okay, here's Tashmishim Mitzvah, and it's a Minuch B'Zayon, that it's all over the floor of the shul, because leaves just fell off of all of the Hushanos, and now they're going to be swept up, or they're going to be stepped all over.
We assume in Halacha, stepping on something is Minuch B'Zayon. So it's interesting, Ramah, in Siman Tafresh HaMachtal, it refers you back to what he said in Siman Chaf Aleph, And over there he says that if you have old tzitzis, you shouldn't be knowing minik b'zayun with them. And he says, If you put them in Genezan, that's even better.
So the poshness is, he's only making the connection to Dalai Lama with the first half of the sentence. Not to be no, but that by Dalet Minim, it's not an issue of, there's no, we never heard of anybody who puts the Dalet Minim into Geniza. As far as the leaves that fall off though, I'm not sure that we need to be Machmir at all.
Meaning it's understood that leaves will be swept up after clapping the Hoshanos. Shartzian quotes a Chayad that you shouldn't throw the Hoshanos bundles themselves on the ground, meaning where people are going to step all over them. But the leaves, there's no mention in post-cum as far as I know, about cleaning up the leaves separately before anyone has a chance to step on them.
Meaning that it's understood that some leaves are going to fall off, and I would imagine that that's ke'ilu, that it's a tanai, that that shouldn't have, you know, that that should be able to be treated with a certain level of bizayim or whatever, when it's divorced entirely from the original mitzvah. There is a strange mitzvah, by the way, about the hoshanos, it's quoted by the Maram,
a marsham rather, it's called a marsham, to throw the hoshanos, when you finish with them, over the Yaron Kodesh. It's a strange minhag, because the Yaron Kodesh is Tashmisha Kedusha. So you're not supposed to take something that has less holiness and put it on top of something that has greater holiness.
I wrote about this in one of my slurms, trying to explain that minhag and where it might, A, where it might come from, and B, why it might be okay. I think in Hakono Lamo, I would guess Chalik Beis probably is where I wrote about it. Question number six. When davening for one's immediate family members, such as a wife, child, parent, does one articulate their full name Ploni Bas or Ben Ploni?
Or just say the appropriate word, Ishti, Avi, Mori, Bini, you know, something like that. So to answer that question, I've got to back up a little bit. Why do we mention names of Echol at all? Meaning, God knows who you're talking about, right? So apparently, there's some maila in being as specific as you possibly can in your tefillah.
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