Minnesota Zen: Melt Snow, Carry Water!

If you have been watching the weather on the news lately (and who hasn't?) you know that the upper Midwest has been going in and out of the arctic deep freeze for weeks.  Here in Minnesota we normally have cold winters, but even for us, it has been record-breaking.  Yesterday it was 20 below zero (F) at dawn, and it never got above zero all day.

The dogs went out, did their business, and came right back in within minutes, looking at me as if to say, "Do you really expect me to stay out in that?"  No, I don't.  All ten of our cats are in the house now, too, and showing no sign of wanting to go outside.  Who can blame them?  We are all beginning to feel that "snow" and "cold" really are four-letter words.

The chickens, geese and guineas are snug inside their coop, which I designed with a passive solar collector on the south side that helps keep their water liquid during the day.  Out of the wind with the sun shining in, the air inside is actually above freezing at noon.  Still, I have to go down there and empty all the waterers at sundown, or they will be frozen solid by morning.

Snow on top of my sukkah frame --
I hope it doesn't collapse it  like
it did a few years ago.

Speaking of water, we have a shortage right now -- when it gets this cold, the plumbing freezes up.  Not enough to split the pipes, just enough to block water from getting from the well pump to the house upstairs.  It's an old house with an unheated basement and this is a recurring problem in the wintertime.

The pipes to the shower are in a outside wall, so we are just about guaranteed to have days with no water there -- meaning you try the faucets in the morning and take showers when the water flows.    This morning the shower was frozen but the sink was still running, so I washed up and did the dishes.  Three hours later, there was no water, period.  Hence the title of this post:  Melt Snow, Carry Water.

The bird feeders have been busy --
this downy Woodpecker
is a regular visitor.

The snow we have is light and fluffy, which makes it easy to shovel but a lot of work to melt down, because it has less water content.  Since we live out in the country away from traffic and pollution, the snow is also clean, if I get it off the beaten track.  (The trails I've cleared to and from the buildings are being used by cats, dogs, rabbits, squirrels and an occasional deer, all of whom leave their calling cards behind. So you don't want that "yellow snow" from on the trail!)

I am finding that it takes about 5 times the snow to make one unit of water.  Luckily I have a lot of big pots and kettles from canning and pickling, so I fill these with snow, then haul them in on a sled.  To save propane, I let the pots just sit at room temperature until I need some water.  The snow packs down as it melts,  making slush that I can put in a smaller pot to warm as needed.  It's a lot of work, but we are surviving.  Snow might shut down Washington D.C., but here in Minnesota we know how to deal with the white stuff.  As the saying goes, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

The arctic blast a couple weeks ago lasted over 60 hours below zero.  It was during that cold spell that the engine of my car died when I tried to start it at 30 below.  The timing belt broke which, if you know cars, is major engine damage that I can't afford to fix right now.  so I'm stuck in the country without a car, relying on help from others to get things we need.  Still, I'm a lot better off than all those people who have no power or heat.

Missy Cat has the right idea:
Stay inside and find a sunny window!

My ebay business,  The Happy Rooster, is suffering, though, because getting to the post office during business hours has been sporadic.  I posted a notice on the homepage and people have been very understanding about the delays.  Most of the orders have been for wildflower seeds, which nobody is planting now anyway.  But a lot of customers are "thinking spring" and planing their butterfly gardens.

In spite of all the hassles, the snow can be beautiful, and offers some interesting photographic opportunities.  Every other day we have been getting another inch or two, refreshing the landscape and adding to some interesting natural sculptures, like the "loaf of bread" below.  I take my cell phone along when I go out there, though, and I tell my wife where I'm going and when I expect to be back.  A fall or other mishap in this cold can be very dangerous.

That's all for now -- I've got to log off and go melt enough water to last me through the Sabbath (when we don't cook things) -- so stay warm, stay safe, and have faith:  Spring WILL come!  Shabbat Shalom!

That's not a giant loaf of bread --
just snow piled on top of my potting bench!

Oy vey! I'm being cyber-bullied by IDIOTS!

In the last few months I seem to have picked up some "followers" who think it is fun to track me around the net, posting libelous insults.  At first I just ignored them, but with all the talk about bullying lately, I finally decided to confront these people and bring their stupidity out into the open.

The childish vandal(s) on Wikipedia

A lot of the bullying has been rather juvenile, such as the anonymous vandal who changed "Jewish Vegetarians of North America" to "Jewish Cannibals of North Africa" on the Wikipedia page about me.  (Whether that was intended to be anti-vegetarian or simply racist is anybody's guess.)  The bogus edit was quickly caught by a page-watcher and reverted.  The same bully made a few more equally inane edits before disappearing into the void.  Somebody else added a claim that I "wrote manuals" for NAMBLA (a pedophile/pederasty group that I have never, ever had any contact with, and I certainly would not write anything for them, not even on contract as an editor.)  This was libelous but easily removed, since anybody can edit on Wikipedia.

My reaction to such childish graffiti is to say, "Get off your mother's computer before she comes home and grounds you for life."  I mean, who in their right mind would really believe that Adolf Hitler is my "hero and inspiration"?  (Yes, some dumbkopf really did put that on the Wikipedia page.)  Luckily, Wikipedians are very vigilant about such vandalism and have reverted the page back to the original -- numerous times.

The YouTube stalker

A lot more nasty was the jerk called "mosesmaimon1" on YouTube, who certainly was no Moses Maimonides.  He started out by posting this bully-flame on all my YouTube videos:

"Yonassan Gershom is a complete and total fraud. he is no rabbi at all. rather, he is a self-hating Jew, a left wing liberal lunatic marxist islamofascist loving gay homosexual. and those are his good points."

Apparently this ridiculous contradictory diatribe was supposed to deter people from watching my videos on Judaism and vegetarianism, since that's where he put it. "Self-hating Jew" has become a catch-all in the Jewish community for belittling anybody you don't agree with.  Similarly, "Islamofascist" is now a buzzword for anybody who dialogues with Muslims or writes anything positive about Islam -- which I have done, both in a chapter about Islamophobia in Professor Richard Schwartz's book, Who Stole My Religion?  and in several book reviews on Amazon.  Dialogue, tolerance, and understanding are not words in this bully's vocabulary. 

When I deleted the comments and blocked him, he proceeded to follow me everywhere on the YouTube site, posting this same junk after every comment I had made -- even the one on the video tour of the handicapped-accessible shuttle bus at Como Park.  Go figure.  Clearly he was not watching anything I "liked" or wrote, just searching my name to spam it with insults.

Given the references to liberalism, I expected to find a lot of militant ultra-religious right-wing videos linked to his YouTube channel.  But when I went there, all I found was secular stuff, most of it meaningless drivel.  So does this guy even know enough about Judaism to understand what my books and videos are about?  Be that as it may, getting rid of this guy was easy:  I reported him to YouTube and he disappeared from my life -- and apparently off the site itself, since a search for his name today brought up nothing.

"Four legs good, two legs bad"? 

It appears these attacks are reactions to my stances on politics, vegetarianism, and, most recently, my opposition to using live chickens for kapporos ceremonies.  It saddens me to see that Judaism, once a bastion of debate and diverse opinion, has, for some people, now become an Orwellian "four legs good, two legs bad" haven for bullies with atrophied brains.  This is especially true of any criticism concerning policies in Israel.  It has gotten to the point that a Jew can say "I don't believe in God" and nobody bats an eye, but criticize Israel and they will burn you at the cyber-stake.   When I was growing up, I was taught that worshipping the state -- any state -- is idolatry.  And isn't democracy all about the right to criticize the government?  Apparently not for these guys.

The identity thief:  "rabbigershom.com" is NOT ME!

UPDATE:  I got the URL back -- and it is mine again.  So the bogus site described below is gone, gone, GONE!  But for the record, I'm leaving the story up here as a warning:  Don't mess with me, because I will fight back!

All of this could be written off as life on the Web, which is what I did for a long time.  I've been deleting hate mail for years.  But the most recent attack is an actual case of identity theft, using an old website address (that I no longer own) to create a bogus site advertising some escort service in London, which probably doesn't even exist, given that the owner of the URL lives in Russia.  The purpose of the site is to hijack searches for my name and misdirect them, apparently to discredit me.

For the record:  There once was a website called "rabbigershom.com" but it no longer exists.  I took it down when the Minnesota state legislature passed a law requiring all online "nexus" corporations to collect state sales tax if they had representatives in the state -- and that includes Associates accounts.  Amazon responded by shutting down all their Minnesota Associates accounts, including mine.  Since I had literally hundreds of Amazon book links embedded on over a hundred website pages, and since I was no longer getting paid for these referrals, I retaliated by taking the whole site down.  (It was outdated anyway, but that's another issue.)

When the time came to renew the domain name, I didn't bother, since the site no longer existed and I was now using JewishThoreau.com for my blog.  Never in a million years did I dream that some sleezeball would come along and buy "rabbigershom.com" and turn it into a page for an escort service.  But that's what happened.

In the beginning, they actually had my full name and title -- "Rabbi Yonassan Gershom" -- in the title of their homepage (which tells me that it really is an attack on me, not just some other guy named Gershom.)   I cried "Fraud!" and got that removed, but there is not much I can do about them using the domain name itself, since there are hundreds of people named Gershom and some of them are rabbis.  It would be like trying to copyright "Doctor Smith."  Hindsight is always 20/20, they say, and I probably should have kept the URL in my name even if I did not use it.  But such things cost money and they probably would have just gone to using dot-net or some such.  I can't afford to protect every variation of my name.

Raise your voice and stand by me!

Unfortunately, since I've been on the Web since the 1980s, there are still tons of links on various websites that supposedly go to the old homepage but now point to the bogus one instead.  I'm still getting notifications about this from intelligent readers who can see plainly what is happening.  If you find one of these phishing links, please notify the webmaster that I'm not that guy, and ask for it to point to my blog at JewishThoreau.com instead. (If you need proof of your claim, just point them to this blog post.)  And if you want to go further, go to the rabbigershom.com page and spam their contact email with protests.  (Update: Not necessary anymore, because I got the URL back and it now points here. But it was a good tactic.)  Stand up to the bullies!

I will not be intimidated!

The motivation behind all of this cyber-bullying seems to be to try to shut me up by intimidating me and/or smearing my reputation.  It is significant that none of these people actually debate issues with me or have even met me.    I highly doubt they have actually read any of my books, or if they are even educated enough to understand them.   As far as I know, none of them have ever come to this blog to discuss the things I wrote here. Of course not -- to do so would mean being confronted by people who actually read the blog, and these cockroaches can't take that kind of daylight.  So they just scurry around the Web, posting canned insults and hiding behind their computer screens like the cowards they are.   Apparently, when God was handing out morals, these people thought He said "laurels" so now they think they are some kind of heroes.  Not!

It is also interesting how many of these libels center on sexuality -- from the accusation that I'm a homosexual (not true, I've been married to my female wife, Caryl since 1980, although I do support gay rights as human rights and have done so since the 1970s), to the escort site phishing off my name and a claim that I promote polygamy (also not true, probably another slur on my dialogues with Muslims, or maybe somebody was dumb enough to actually believe the escort site was real.)

If you can't debate, just post some hate?

 This seems to be the mindset lately:  If you can't intelligently refute somebody's stance on an issue, just make up some sleeze or circulate lies and hate mail to try and take them down in the public eye.  This has become so common that there is actually a service called  Reputation.com where you can hire people to watch out for (and refute) attacks on the Web.  I can't afford that service, but I'm thankful I've got a lot of loyal readers who are doing the same thing.

As an old man in my 70s, I can often laugh at all this, but bullying is really no laughing matter.  Even at my age, it hurts, but I've lived long enough to deal with it.  However, when it happens to vulnerable teenagers, it can lead to nervous breakdowns or even suicide -- which has actually happened.  Thus my decision to come out and confront this issue, to tell these stories and reveal these lies for what they are.  Bullies are bullies, no matter where, why, or whom they attack.

* * * UPDATES * * *

See also: What does Judaism say about bullying? -- a good collection of statements by rabbis from various backgrounds and denominations, on The Free Library site.

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A ripoff report has been filed in reference to the bogus use of rabbigershom.com described in this article.  Feel free to read and respond to it.

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A number of insulting and libelous comments were also written as "reviews" of my books on  Amazon.com.  Amazon graciously removed them, as they violated their reviews policy.

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Rabbigershom.org is not me, either -- but it flips over to a website called B'chol Loshon ("in every tongue") which is a legitimate site promoting diversity within the Jewish community.  Their "Rabbi Gershom" is Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the leader of the Abayudaya Jews of Uganda, and the first black rabbi from sub-Saharan Africa to be ordained at an American rabbinic school.

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A reader emailed me to point out that the slur referring to Hitler might have been connected to the persistent claim that Hitler was a vegetarian.  (This is a myth.  Although Hitler did sometimes refrain from eating meat for health and hygienic reasons, he also regularly ate meat and was fond of sausage and liver dumplings.  Read more...)  People who use this argument against vegetarianism base it on the classic false logic of:  "Hitler was a vegetarian.  Hitler was evil.  Therefore all vegetarians are evil."  But as Peter Singer once said, Hitler had a nose, but that does not mean everybody should cut off their noses.

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February 26, 2014:  Now that I've written this protest, Google's stupid robot is flagging the insult I quoted above in searches for my name.  By defending myself, I'm spreading the libel.  Can't win for losing.  I suppose this is happening because this is a new post that is getting a lot of traffic -- and it's on a Google blog, so of course the Google search engine plays favorites with its own apps.  (A Bing search did not bring up that quote.)  But since the link brings people to this page where people can read the truth, maybe that's not so bad.  Make lemonade out of lemons...

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June 20, 2014:  Absurd as it may seem, some of this bullying may really be directed at my vegetarianism!   Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, a rosh yeshiva (head of a Jewish seminary) in Israel, has gone on a  vehement campaign against the entire vegetarian movement.  He believes that teaching vegetarianism leads to terrorism and cruelty to people.  Yes, I know that is bizarre, and I have written a challenge to  it on this blog:  Vegetarianism leads to Terrorism, says Rabbi Eliezer Melamed,  in which I analyze and refute that stance. His real agenda comes out of Israeli politics and the right-wing settler movement (which he supports.)   I doubt that Rabbi Eliezer himself is bullying me but, given the vehemence of his rhetoric, I would not put it past his followers.

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March 19, 2015:  The latest bully is a guy who goes by "Jacob" on Amazon and has demanded that I remove "rabbi" from my profile there and -- get this -- he also suggested I remove my photo!   He thinks my appearance misleads people because, in his words, I am "fringe beyond fringe" and not a "mainstream Orthodox rabbi."  (Whatever that is.  Orthodoxy is so splintered into different groups that everybody is "fringe" to somebody somewhere.)   Exactly what would he suggest I put up there instead of my own face?  At least I'm honest enough to be myself and not some troll named "Jacob" who could be anybody -- he has no photo or other info on his profile page.