CYHSB Weekly 9/23/2022

CYHSB WEEKLY

Cooper Yeshiva High School for Boys

Volume 17, Issue 3

Homemade

Post-Season Fever: Down all the

Weekly Puzzle:

Parshas

This Week’s Weekly is sponsored by Yaron Weiss in honor

Moving on and Moving Forward: How the Queen’s Death Afects the Jewish Community

Nadav Lowell (’25) Coming to power in 1952, the constitutional monarch Elizabeth II of England was a significant figure and diplomat that lived as a symbol for world leaders across the globe. Queen Elizabeth ruled for over 70 years and bore witness to a century's change from the 1900s to the fast-developing 2000s. She accomplished much during her reign as Queen. This

included anything from humanitarian relief efforts, to transitioning the monarchy of England to the modern age. Unfortunately, on September 8th 2022, the Queen passed away, leaving the world with the question: what comes next? However, an even more important question for us as Jews is how this affects Jews in Britain and around the globe.

Queen Elizabeth II receiving a menorah from Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l, Source: rabbisacks.org

During her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth was a good friend of British Jewry and Judaism as a whole. One of her notable acts was knighting the late chief rabbi of Great Britain: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. The Queen also had a friendly relationship with the other chief rabbis of her time, including Rabbi Israel Bodie, Rabbi Emmanuel Markovitz, and the current chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. Queen Elizabeth also had a good relationship with Dr. Jacob Snowman, a mohel who performed the circumcision on King Charles.

Even before her reign as Queen, Queen Elizabeth and her family helped Jews. Both she and her husband Prince Philip served in World War II against the Nazis. Princess Alice of Battenberg (the Queen's mother-in-law) hid Jewish families in her home. Queen Elizabeth was also associated with Jewry in numerous other ways. In 2005 Queen Elizabeth hosted an event for Holocaust survivors at St. James Palace. Even after being at the event for some time and being informed by her aides that it was time to end the gathering, the Queen persisted and mingled with her Jewish guests. Also present at the said event was the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks who stated, “When the time came for her to leave, she stayed. And stayed. One of her attendants said that he had never known her to linger so long after her scheduled departure. She gave each survivor - it was a large group - her

focused, unhurried attention. She stood with each until they had finished telling their personal story.”

While Queen Elizabeth’s relationship with the Jews is significant to our history, it is also important to look at King Charles III as he takes the throne and see how he will affect the Jewish community with his beliefs. If possible, King Charles is known for being even more enthusiastic about Jewry. He is known on several occasions for showing his respect and admiration for the Jewish people and the nation as a whole. In 2017 at the World Jewish Relief Charity in central London, Charles met several Jewish leaders in aspects of art and sport. He was very impressed with the Jewish athletes, who, despite having lived through the Holocaust then went on to compete in the Olympics. Charles stated that “To meet Ben, and others who, like him, have endured indescribable persecution, is to be reminded of the danger of forgetting the lessons of the past,” this is just one of the many ways he

recognized the Jewish people. Even more recently, as further recognition of Jewish Holocaust survivors, he commissioned several portraits to be made featuring Holocaust survivors. These paintings have been displayed in Buckingham Palace since January of 2022.

King Charles even goes out of his way to accommodate Jewish beliefs. As per normal, when a new monarch takes the throne, a meeting with the United Kingdoms' religious leaders is held. Unfortunately, as the event was set for 6 PM on Friday, Chief Rabbi Ephriam Mervis would not have been able to attend. To accommodate this, King Charles moved the meeting to 5:00. Rabbi Mervis stated that this was “an amazing gesture” on the British government's part. As he was to be the only rabbi in attendance.

The start of King Charles's reign is an important event in several ways and has many ramifications even for Jews in the world and in the ranks of the CYHSB itself. Sophomore Nathan Greenbaum states, “As the longest reigning monarch of the United Kingdom, it is at the very least right to mourn her loss.

Furthermore, it is very important to me personally as a former resident of the commonwealth and a Jew to see how Jews around the world are affected by King Charles's reign.” In the end, only time will tell what will happen for England's future. May Queen Elizabeth rest in peace.

Prince Charles Meeting with Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. Source: timesofisrael.com

Homemade Round Raisin Challah: A Great Rosh Hoshana Recipe

Gavi Peiser (’23)

The chagim are fast approaching, with only a few days left until Hoshana, and with it comes a lot of great food. One of the most exciting aspects of the chagim experimenting with new and exciting recipes.

Even though there are many recipes to choose from, I picked my favorite recipe to make and eat during the chagim, and that is homemade round raisin challah. The reason why I chose to share this particular recipe with you is that this one is just as fun to make as it is to eat. I know that not everyone has the time to make it, because I am not going to lie, homemade challah takes a long long time to make, and it isn’t easy. But if you are willing to fail, try and try again, then there is nothing more rewarding than to see the challahs come out of the oven.

• The first step before you even begin making this recipe is to procure King Arthur Bread flour, you could use other flours but none of them would come out quite as good as the King’s.

• Next you want to activate 4.5 teaspoons of yeast by mixing it with 1 ⅔ cup warm water, ½ tsp sugar, and 1 cup of flour and let it sit until it is fully developed.

• After your yeast is ready, start to mix in all your additional

ingredients which are ½ oil, ¼ cup honey, ⅓ sugar, 3 eggs, and an additional 6 cups of flour.

• Add these ingredients slowly until a sticky and wet dough is made. After that you should flour down your workstation and start kneading for ten minutes. If you are unsure as to whether your dough has been kneaded enough, poke it and if it springs back slowly it's done.

• After it's fully kneaded, let it rest and rise for an hour, then after that, you can go ahead and shape it to your heart's desire. After that go ahead and plop it into your pre-oiled or lined pans and let it rise for an additional 45 minutes until it is proofed.

• Before the dough is fully proofed, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. After that you should bake it for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes have passed, go ahead and lower the oven to 325 degrees and continue baking for an additional 20 minutes. You’ll know when its done when the tops are fully golden brown and the internal temperature hits 200 degrees. After that you can let it cool.

This is one of my favorite recipes as it's really fun to make, and it tastes great with honey. I hope yours come out well too, have a good shabbos and chag sameach.

Last Week’s Solution

Completed Homemade Round Raisin Challahs. Photo: Gavi Peiser

Post Season Fever: Breaking Down all the Remaining Races

Ezra Davidovics (’24)

All Stats are accurate as of 9/18/22

A cool breeze passes, the leaves rustle softly, October is approaching and with it postseason baseball. With the new expanded playoffs, which lets six teams from each division make it to October, there are some of the tightest races, with the highest implications that there have been in years. Let's break them down.

NL Central:

Last Week’s Solution

This division race has been pretty much over for the better part of a month as the Cardinals are running away with the division. Led by NL MVP frontrunners and dynamic corner infield duo Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, the Cards look to make a deep postseason run. The biggest storyline in St. Louis this season has been a resurgent 42 year old Albert Pujols, who has a higher OPS than Ronald Acuna Jr. by almost 70 points. Pujols’s last couple seasons in Anaheim and LA were disappointing to say the least but as soon as he got into the familiar threads of the Red Birds he’s been hitting like it's 2009 and is currently chasing 700 career home runs.

NL West:

Led by Mookie Betts, Trea Turner, and Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers are going to be the best team in the league for a long, long time. Not only do they have the highest WRC+ in MLB, a hitting stat where 100 is always average, they also have the lowest ERA for pitching. The Dodgers run differential, a stat which subtracts runs allowed from runs scored, of

+328 leads all MLB teams since 1940 with still nearly 20 games left. They say you can’t buy championships but the Dodgers are trying their hardest to prove the old adage wrong. Needless to say, they are well ahead of the competition in the division as the three team race everyone expected before the season has turned into a demolition.

NL East:

This race is going to come down to the wire. After going sub 500 in the first two months of the season, the Braves came storming back and have gone a ridiculous 69-29, which is a 114 win pace, since June first. Led by star third baseman Austin Riley, and breakout rookie Michael Harris, the reigning World Series champs are barely flinching at Ronald Acuna’s down year in which he has relatively the same

level of hitting as Mark Canha. However the Braves are not in first place this year due to the more consistent and grittier Mets. The Mets are up by one game and despite the Braves losing basically zero games since May, have only left first for one day. Led by Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso, the Mets have swallowed injury after injury, including two transcendent pitchers Jacob Degrom and Max Scherzer, and kept on chugging.

NL Wild-Card

The NL Wild-Card has turned into a three team race. The first spot is already taken by the loser of the NL East, barring a spectacular Braves collapse, so there are only two spots left. The Phillies, led by reigning MVP Bryce Harper, are looking to break the NL’s longest

Francisco Lindor has had an MVP caliber bounce-back season. Source: thespun.com

reigning MVP Bryce Harper, are looking to break the NL’s longest playoff drought and hang on this year. After choking hard last year, the Padres, who are missing star shortstop Fernando Tatis, look to not repeat history and halt the Brewers in their tracks. The Brewers, on the other hand, look to try again in the postseason after last year’s disappointing first round exit, although making the playoffs would require another stunning collapse from the Padres.

AL Central:

The AL Central is what some may call a “mid-off” as the Cleveland Guardians, the team currently leading the division, would be a third or fourth place team in every other division. The Twins offseason addition of Carlos Correa looked to make them a force to be reckoned with in the AL, but Correa’s bat lost its bang this year and the rest of the team couldn’t pick up the slack. The White Sox lineup was looked at as one of the most well rounded in the league last season, but with down seasons from key pieces, like Yasmani Grandal and Yoan Moncada, the Sox have struggled to

stay above 500. Although the White Sox and Twins are still in it, the Guardians are the heavy favorite to win the division right now at 85.9% by Fangraphs. Cleveland is the youngest team in baseball by far and leading the charge for them is perennial all-star Jose Ramirez and breakout youngsters Andres Gimenez and Amed Rosario, who came over in the Francisco Lindor trade in 2021.

AL West: Three things have remained constant in the AL West the last few seasons, the Angels wasting their stars' primes, the Mariners being super fun, and the Astros being an American League juggernaut. The Angels are so bad outside of their two once-in-a-lifetime talents, Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout, that the entire rest of their team has 0.8 batting WAR. To put this in context, the Oakland Athletics, one of the worst teams in baseball this season, have 5.9 batting WAR. After losing Carlos Correa last year many wrote off the Stros as a second or third place team. Led by slugger Yordan Alvarez and Jeremy “Correa Jr.” Pena, the reigning American League

Weekly Puzzle:

champs, did not write back and have returned as the premier team in the AL.

AL East: Widely considered the best division in baseball, the AL East has four teams which all would be playoff teams if they played in other divisions. The Yankees were slated to be the best team ever but severely fell off in the second half, giving the Rays and Blue Jays an outside shot at the division. However, most likely, The Yankees, Led by MVP frontrunner Aaron Judge, will win the division with the biggest almost choke in history. Judge is currently on a chase for the AL record in home runs in a season.

AL Wild-Card

The AL Wild-Card field is pretty set as the Blue Jays, Rays, and Mariners will almost certainly be the three teams in it. The Mariners, led by star rookie Julio Rodriguez, look to break the longest ever postseason drought if they can hang on this year. While the Orioles are very fun this year and are having the best season they have had in a while, they have almost no chance at the playoffs this year.

There will be a different puzzle each week, so stay tuned!

First person to send the answer to ezra.wiener@mhafyos.org gets a prize!

Shoutout to Eric Schubert for being the first one to send the answers to the crossword!!

Parshas Nitzavim: Try and Try Again

Avi Becker (’24)

It doesn’t matter how good you are, it doesn’t matter how amazing you are, we all fail. There are times when things happen that are out of our control and there are times when we’ll work on ourselves and it won’t go our way. It might be your missed basketball shot taunting you as you walk away from a lost game. It might be a 0% on your test mocking you as you leave the classroom. It might be a stubbed toe watching you hobble down the hall in pain. All of these leave a mark on you, but it doesn’t have to be a mark of defeat, it could be a mark of triumph.

In Parshat Nitzavim G-d commands us an overarching mitzva “יכנאָ תכלל a mitzva telling us to follow all the mitzvot. Sometimes we fail at these mitzvot. Sometimes we will try and we will fail, and then we’ll try again and we’ll fail again. Sometimes we will feel like giving up, sometimes we’ll speak some lashon hara or maybe lie to a friend, and then later that night we won’t feel worthy to say Shema, or it won’t feel right to daven just minutes later. But Hashem is always looking for you to turn back to him.

When you sin, whether on purpose or by accident, G-d is not sitting in shamayim pushing you away, He’s sitting up there in His Kiseh Rachamim pulling you closer, waiting for you to finally come back to Him. When you go to daven after you sin you should go to HK”

BH and say “Hashem, that isn’t who I am, what just happened isn’t who I am and isn’t who I wanna be, I want to change and I’m turning to you for help.” Hashem commands us in all the mitzvot, not to be seen as a burden but rather to be seen as a guide to the nature of reality itself. But how, then, are we supposed to look at and keep all of these commandments and not see them as a burden on us? This is how. Don’t think too far ahead in the future, don’t worry about finishing all of Shas, worry about finishing the next

line of gemara that appears before your eyes. Don’t worry about finishing all of Mishna, worry about finishing the next few words of the mishna. Live every moment at that moment. When you have the urge to do an aveirah just think to yourself “just right now I won’t do this aveirah.” Don’t worry about never doing it, just worry about not committing any averiot in the moment, then it won’t seem like a burden. Sure if we think of it that we have to learn one daf a day for the next seven and a half years it might seem like a burden to finish daf yomi, but if you look at it as just finishing one daf today and then as the next day approaches thinking about just finishing that daf on that day, then before you know it all of gemara will be known by you. Sometimes events in life will make you, and sometimes events in life will break you, but Hashem is always there for us to turn to. Sometimes we’ll commit an aveirah and we feel like G-d doesn’t want us anymore, but I guarantee you, with full confidence, that all Hashem wants is for you to turn back to him and say those three words “I love you.”

“When you sin, whether on purpose or by accident, G d is not sitting in shamayim pushing you away, He’s sitting up there in His Kiseh Rachamim puling you closer, waiting for you to finaly come back to Him.”

CYHSB Evening of Divrei Torah

Images, top to bottom: The four speakers delivering their divrei Torah, group picture of the speakers with the rebeiim. Photos: Netanel Aaronson

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CYHSB Weekly Staff

Editor-in-Chief

Ezra Wiener | ezra.wiener@mhafyos.org

Layout Editor

Ezra Davidovics | ezra.davidovics@mhafyos.org

Editors

Ethan VanderWalde | ethan.vanderwalde@mhafyos.org

Nathan Greenbaum | nathan.greenbaum@mhafyos.org

Raanan Vanderwalde | raanan.vanderwalde@mhafyos.org

Complaint Manager

J.J. Stein | jacob.stein@mhafyos.org

CYHSB Weekly Staff

Akiva Levine | akiva.levine@mhafyos.org

Amit Zalman | amit.zalman@mhafyos.org

Avi Becker| avi.becker@mhafyos.org

Baruch Finkleman | baruch.finkleman@mhafyos.org

Rafi Davidovics | rafael.davidovics@mhafyos.org

Joshua Parcover | joshua.parcover@mhafyos.org

Yaron Weiss | yaron.weiss@mhafyos.org

Benny Freiden | benny.freiden@mhafyos.org

Rafi Goldkin | rafael.goldkin@mhafyos.org

Yosef VanderWalde | yosef.vanderwalde@mhafyos.org

Nadav Lowell | nadav.lowell@mhafyos.org

Jojo Ardestani | jonathan.ardestani@mhafyos.org

Yonah Lynn | yonah.lynn@mhafyos.org

Administrative Advisors

Mrs. Ashley Brown

Rabbi Dov Rossman

From the Editor

When life gives you challenges, all you can do is try until you succeed. Whether its baking delicious challahs for the Chagim, or trying to learn a day of gemara, all Hashem wants from you is to try your best. With Rosh Hoshana right around the corner, let’s try to make this upcoming year a year one where we try our best no matter what comes our way.