To the Editor,
I very much appreciated the article, “Chayei Sarah Mania” by Raphael Blumberg, that appeared in the December 2011- Kislev 5772 issue of Where What When. I would like to provide my personal Chayei Sarah story to supplement Mr. Blumberg’s excellent piece.
The parsha Chayey Sarah (I believe this spelling to be preferable to that in the article) normally falls either very late in October or in the first two thirds of November. Since I work in academia, I had been frustrated for many years not being able to get away for Shabbat Chevron. Several years ago, while preparing for the then imminent fall semester, I noticed that Rosh Hashana came out that year unusually late, near the very end of September. I asked myself, “Is it possible?” as I quickly pulled out the calendar for the coming Jewish year. Sure enough, it turned out that Shabbat Chevron that year coincided with the Thanksgiving Day weekend!
I immediately set out to make my travel arrangements, which were abetted by my university’s practice of giving off the Wednesday immediately preceding Thanksgiving as a “travel day.” I never did understand this practice, since more than 99 percent of our students’ homes are situated not more than a six-hour drive from the university, which enables nearly everyone to travel on Thursday and arrive home in plenty of time for Thanksgiving dinner. Nevertheless, the university’s policy was to give off Wednesday, so who was I to argue?
When Thanksgiving week arrived, I taught my graduate class in Cryptography on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday morning, I boarded an airplane at BWI for the first leg of my trip to Eretz Yisrael and arrived at my daughter’s house in Yerushalayim on Thursday afternoon. On Friday, at around one o’clock in the afternoon, near the tachana merkazit (central bus station), I boarded the #160 armored bus to Chevron, and had the enormous satisfaction of being present at the Ma’arat Hamachpeylah and of hearing Chayey Sarah read at the very location where the events described there had taken place. Shortly after havdalah – s aying goodbye to Shabbos is what we call it in my house – I made my way to the airport and boarded my flight back to the U.S.A. Then on, Monday morning, precisely at 9 o’clock, I sauntered into the classroom to teach my undergraduate course in Computer Organization. I greeted my students, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I trust that you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving break. You’ll never believe what I did during the break.” I then told them how I had traveled more than 12,000 miles round trip to spend Shabbat at the Maarah and why. Most of them were amazed. It was certainly an experience that I shall never forget.
Sincerely yours,
Charlie Abzug
To the Editor,
It is unfortunate that, with the closing of the Kosher Subway of Baltimore, another Jewish business has succumbed to economic pressures. Sadder still, because there was something about this particular business that set it apart from the rest of the businesses in the Baltimore community that I want to share.
Since losing most of his vision about 10 years ago, my husband has suffered greatly. First and foremost there was and remains the issue of blindness itself, which the Torah likens to a form of death, lo aleinu. There were myriad unsuccessful operations meant to restore his vision, which were physically and emotionally exhausting and financially draining on the entire family. Finally, there was the pervasive issue of how Dovid could regain his standing as a working man. Anyone who has faced unemployment for any reason or any length of time can relate to the emotions that we faced: the lack of self-esteem, the fear, and the uncertainty of where the next paycheck would come from. Business after business turned Dovid away. It was a grueling and distressing experience.
But Harry Kozlovsky was completely open to the idea of having Dovid work in his kitchen. Coming into Kosher Subway with a lifetime of catering, food service, and hashgacha experience, Dovid quickly established himself as a reliable and knowledgeable employee. Dovid developed a warm and pleasant rapport with his non-Jewish coworkers, which was helpful when he needed to educate them in the essentials of kashrus and Jewish tradition, and Harry came to rely on Dovid for advice, opinions, and support. What evolved was a healthy, symbiotic relationship. Dovid shared his knowledge of the kosher food business with Harry, and Harry provided a safe, clean, and pleasant work situation for Dovid.
Many of you may not realize it, but hiring the handicapped isn’t just the law – it’s also a mitzva. Harry understood this, and I am so grateful to him for giving Dovid the opportunity to showcase his abilities.
My entire family shares my hope that there is another compassionate and wise employer out there willing to open his (or her) business to Dovid, and that Harry and his wife should be blessed with much nachas from their children, long, healthy years, and success in all that they do.
Yours sincerely,
Hana-Bashe Himelstein
To the Editor,
According to A Fellow Driver, none of us would anticipate a car driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Yes, we should all drive the right way on Labyrinth between Bonnie and Falstaff. Please respect the law and residents along this stretch.
Arthur Solomon
To the Editor,
Part of the beauty of our Baltimore community is that people look for ways to do more chesed. I have discovered a chesed that is easy to do and so helpful to the recipient. I am talking about the Share-a-Ride-Gemach. In the short time of a week, I was the beneficiary of this gemach twice.
Someone needed to send a full size crib to Lakewood and called the gemach on the off chance that someone with a 12- to 15-seater empty van was going there. Believe it or not, someone had called the gemach that he was going to Lakewood with an empty van and would gladly take the crib!
The second occasion was on Thanksgiving day. A Chai lifeline volunteer who came from Brooklyn to spend the day with a sick child, needed a ride to Brooklyn in the late afternoon. I called the gemach on Wednesday, and by Thursday, 9 a.m. I received a call from the gemach that someone was leaving for Brooklyn at 5:30 p.m. Perfect timing!
All it takes to do this chesed is a quick call to 410-358-7433 (RIDE) to let them know your travel plans. Even if you can’t or don’t want to take a passenger, you could be so helpful by transporting a package or an important forgotten item, like a key, passport, tefilin, or bag full of Shabbos clothes. Or you could help out someone stranded on the highway due to a broken down vehicle.
A Grateful Fan of Share-a-Ride
To the Editor,
Many of the responses to A Kollel Man address the need for earlier and more proactive career planning for today’s generation of bachurim than might have been necessary in earlier generations. I wonder, however, if broad change is possible without our gedolim and some of the larger institutions being on board.
I can see this happen if we could meld the best of the yeshiva and the Torah im Derech Eretz approach. Too many times, changes are proposed and are soon ambushed because they carry the stigma of being either “too modern” or only for those “at risk.” But change in the right way could also help alleviate many other problems in our community, namely financially strapped families, schools, and shidduchim, just to name a “few.”
If the yeshivas took on a more Torah im Derech Eretz approach, their goal would be to not only develop a select cadre of students who would carry the mantle of Torah scholarship and chinuch for the generation but would also build a generation of balabatim whose identity and pride rested with their Torah learning and emunas Hashem.
Let there be a “mashgiach gashmi” who ensures that everyone is on a materially responsible path. Fathers are supposed to ensure that their sons have a parnassa, so why shouldn’t there be a shaliach (representative) for them in the yeshivas to help with that obligation?
For those young men who have the potential to be religious leaders, mechanchim (educators), or scholars, let them also start to get professional training from Torah U’Mesorah and other centers at younger ages. In my opinion, not everyone being sent that route is really suited for it. Let the young men develop the confidence that their hopes for parnassa in klei kodesh (the Jewish field) have substance, that their “plan” is more than just a vague wish.
For those who want to pursue college, that avenue is already possible at many yeshivas. For those who don’t want to pursue either of those paths, why not engage the entrepreneurial spirit and establish several profit and not-for-profit “work centers” based among the kolleleit? Businessmen in the community could be engaged for advice on this project. In our day and age, isn’t it possible for our people to be among the trendsetters in how to use the internet for making small enterprises work? Instead of shying away from technology, why not use technology to actually assist us in separating from the secular work world?
Whatever skills are needed in these “work centers” could begin to be developed at the high school level. If those courses fit neatly into state ordained curriculums, wonderful. If not, make them enrichment courses.
It appears to me that in the yeshivish world, our young women are encouraged from high school on to think of what “well paying” careers they’d like to pursue post-seminary, so that their future husbands can remain in learning. Thinking along these lines does often stem from idealistic roots. For some girls, imagining anything else is almost painful; their devotion and love of Torah is that great. But I wonder – and pardon me for expressing such a heretical thought – whether there isn’t a fair number of women who feel pressured to find a “well paying” career to support a husband’s learning, because the “market” is such that the kind of young men they seek are only to be found in that candidate pool. If the young men saw a path of integrating deep devotion to learning with developing financial independence, might our young women feel less pressured? And if the yeshivish world as a whole supported such a mission, wouldn’t the young men who do opt out to work feel less stigmatized? Isn’t it also “idealistic” to want to stay home and raise a Torah-true family? Perhaps the answer the young girls hear is that it’s not a burden if its purpose is to support our husbands in learning. And I can hear that. But wouldn’t it be nice if the men had a parnassa ready and waiting when their wives found it too hard to continue?
To what degree are the men taught the manly virtues of supporting their families: practically and not just as some vague ideal? We are readily able to see how upside-down the secular world is when it comes to men’s and women’s roles, but do we have a blind spot when it comes to ourselves?
To sum up, my vision of yeshivas integrating “work centers” into the kollel and infusing the needed skills into the high school and bais medrash could help alleviate community and personal financial strains. Isn’t it worth considering?
Name Withheld Upon Request
To the Editor,
I usually enjoy the articles in this publication but found Avraham Sonenthal’s “The Best Place for Your Money” to contain a number of simplifications and even misinformation. While I don’t doubt the pure intentions of the author, and even a fair amount of financial literacy, it is especially true in financial matters that a little information can often be a dangerous thing. For the sake of the public who might follow the suggestions, I will point out some of the nuances that I perceive to be absent in the discussion.
Experts believe stocks (equities) tend to rise more than bonds over extended periods of time. There is a wealth of statistical evidence supporting this, based on returns on stocks and returns on bonds over the last 100-plus years. The logic behind that phenomenon is that rational humans would prefer to avoid risk; they therefore demand a higher return (e.g., 8 percent) for investing in stocks vs. investing in bonds at 5 percent or less.
A diversified portfolio means not only a mix of stocks and bonds but, importantly, a diversified portfolio would also be diversified among many stocks (and in many sectors and geographic regions) and many bonds (among many companies, sectors, and geographies).
There is an important distinction between investing in the stock market and “speculation” or “gambling,” as the author characterized it. Taking risk for no gain is gambling. In a casino the odds are not in your favor but in the favor of the dealer. Speculation generally suggests unjustified risks. According to most financial experts, however, investing in the stock market, as with most forms of investment, involves taking calculated risks: that is, the odds are in your favor. This is true even more so over extended periods of time.
The fact that financial expert Jim Cramer made some mistakes does not indicate that he is always wrong or even that he is wrong most of the time. But even if he is wrong most of the time in his short term estimates (which would not surprise me), that does not contradict the evidence that stocks most often earn higher average returns than bonds over extended periods of time. Stock appreciation has been compared to a person climbing a flight of steps while playing with a yo-yo. It rises over time but does a lot of up and down along the way.
There is a lot of research about whether actively managed mutual funds (those whose strategy is to pick stock winners) are able to beat the stock market indexes. Many people believe that the markets for U.S. stocks are so well studied by the thousands of professional investors that stocks are already priced for all the available information (efficient market hypothesis). Mutual funds also have expenses that they need to cover, including salaries and marketing, which means they often fall behind the market average after expenses, even if they are slightly above average before expenses.
Passive Index funds and ETF funds are alternative types of mutual funds, which hold a very diverse basket of stocks and only make changes on rare occasions, based on their guidelines. They therefore don’t need to pay large teams of financial analysts and typically employ only a couple of people. The annual fees on those funds are extremely reasonable – less than 0.2% per year (i.e., $200 per $100,000 of investment), which is less than one-tenth of what some actively managed mutual funds charge). These index funds and ETFs track the stock market averages extremely closely. Fidelity and Vanguard offer such options.
Investing in individual bonds is almost as risky as investing in individual stocks in terms of event risk. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had many billions of dollar of publicly traded debt (bonds) which defaulted. Suffice it to say, lenders (bond holders) did not get paid in full or even close to that. With both stocks or bonds, it is never good to have too many eggs in one basket. There are other companies that no one suspected to have risks that were implicated in fraud and were quickly brought to their knees in default, with large losses to bond holders.
In contrast to the assertion in the article, bonds tend to have terms (maturity) much less than 15 to 30 years, especially corporate bonds. Often they have a maturity of 5 to 10 years at issuance, but there should be bonds available with maturities much shorter than that (ones that had been issued a few years ago but have not yet matured). You would be hard pressed to find bonds with such short maturities, and with such high ratings, offering a 5 percent yield. Indeed, the 5 percent return is probably in large part due to being exposed to such long maturities.
Importantly, the author understated the risk of a change in interest rates, especially on bonds with very long term maturities. This is a very common mistake. The extent to which the value of a bond moves (falls) in value from a change (rise) in interest rates is measured by/referred to as “duration.” Duration approximates the weighted average life of the bond. So, let’s assume a 30-year bond that pays a 5 percent coupon has a weighted average life (duration) of around “15” (years). (Part of the money comes back every year in years 1 to 29 and then the $1,000 at maturity). That means that if interest rates rise by 1 percent, the price of the bond could drop by 15 percent (assuming a parallel shift in interest rates – which is too complicated to explain in these paragraphs). That is, a rise of 1 percent would lead to a decline in value equal to the duration/100 or 15/100: 15 percent in this case).
The unappreciated risk here is if we experience elevated inflation, or if the markets start to expect an extended period of inflation (i.e., interest rates moving from 5 to 12 percent), the author could easily lose the majority of the value of his investment. And even if he held the bond to maturity, that wouldn’t help him much, because what he got back at maturity (the $1,000) would then be worth not-too-much in terms of purchasing power. (It may not even buy a set of tires for a car.)
The benefits of compounding (compound interest) are not limited to bonds. In fact, it is even more pronounced in investments where returns are higher over time (such as stocks), where it compounds more quickly.
The idea that a person should invest in a bond with a 15- to 30-year maturity and expect to be able to hold to maturity, neglects to acknowledge the unpredictability of life events. People often end up having to sell investments to deal with unanticipated expenses (hopefully for simchos, but sometime for health, disability, house repairs, or extended unemployment). The ability to liquidate investments on short notice without significant loss is absent here.
Another downside to bonds not discussed is that there is not a lot of trading in many bonds, so if you buy it for $1,010, don’t expect to be able to sell if for $1,010 or even $1,000, even one minute later. There is a bid-ask spread (the price to buy and the price to sell are different at the same bank) sometimes as big as a couple of percent, which comes out of your pocket (a form of fee that you may not even be aware of). Stocks, by contrast, generally have a very narrow bid-ask spread of a couple of cents or less, and trading fees are therefore more transparent, for example, $10/trade.
Importantly, your investment in bonds can go down, and in a big way. The author sounds like he is exposed to the following risks: 1) is not diversified (only has bonds in a small handful of companies); and 2) is vulnerable to a rise in interest rates, which is about the only way interest rates can move from here – with potentially severe losses if significant inflation becomes an issue. Almost all advisors I follow recommend not investing in long-term bonds at this point in time.
There is a saying that goes, when someone with money does business with someone with experience, the person with experience ends up with the money and the person with the money ends up with the experience. Some, and perhaps most, stock and bond brokers are honest. Perhaps the article’s author has been adamant in insisting what he wants in his investment portfolio, and his broker is eager to please. Whatever the case, it doesn’t sound like a well-designed portfolio or an optimal investment strategy.
I prefer to remain anonymous but, even so, emphasize that the views herein are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
Works in Investments
Related Articles: