The sleeping shoes

Is there anything worse than shopping for shoes? Sure, shopping for clothes is a miserable experience, but at least it's a fairly standardized experience. You walk into the store, find ten white shirts size 16.5, try them on, take the three that fit best, and exit the store. The same goes for pants sized 35/36. I understand that some people might have difficulty picking out which color they want. Heck, I even had a pair of dark green pants in LA, and wore them happily until they ripped in the keester. Point is, though the experience may take up way too much time and provide little benefit to humanity, at least it accomplishes something: You walk away having exchanged valuable assets for machined bits of cloth.
Shoe shopping, on the other hand...You know why they called it "The Devil wears Prada"? Because only the devil could find shoes that fit. First of all, is it too much to ask of the shoe department to stock the shoes in the open, where people can actually get to them? What is up with this having to go over to the counter clutching three single shoes and beg the overworked person there to bring you what you want. It's embarrassing, really, because after the seventh time the shoes didn't fit or whatever and you ask for more the salesperson starts to look at you funny. And I'm like, "Hello, what do you want from me? Stock the stupid shoes out here where I can do this myself!" But of course I just politely ask for some more shoes and feel like a moron. Secondly, in this pantheon of idiocy, is the seeming lack of 11.5s in this state. Am I the only male in New York who wears an 11.5? Somehow I doubt it. And yet I couldn't find a single shoe which came in this size. Even when I went to another shoe store which, mercy of mercies, actually had shoes available for customers to try on without making a whole song and dance out of it, they had no size 11.5s. And besides, they had 10, I kid you not, 10 aisles of shoes. Double sided. And how many of men's shoes? 1. One! Are these people crazy. Do female New Yorkers really buy shoes ten times more than their male counterparts? Absolutely ridiculous.
And yes, I didn't end up getting any shoes. I'm almost ready to move to a cave somewhere on the Serengeti and give up this material world we currently inhabit.

Meanwhile, in slightly more positive news, I had a nice Shabbos. I'm sure you're all happy to hear it. Once again the Shliach I was by asked me to say something, and once again I had what to say. It wasn't necessarily the best thing in the world, but the joke got a big laugh, and I figure that means something. So here's a not-so brief synopsis of what I said. Oh, and if it doesn't all make sense, that's ok, because I didn't think it all made sense at the time either. Still, as I said, everyone seemed to like it.

So my roommate has a problem with waking up in the morning, and he invariably comes five minutes late to seder every day. This past Monday the mashgiach got really fed up, and called him over for a chat. "Why can't you come on time?" he boomed, "this is ridiculous!" My roommate responded, "Hey, it's five minutes. What's so terrible about missing five minutes every day?" The mashgiach said, "You know what it's like? There's a train that leaves Penn Station every evening at 7:14 to Great Neck. If you come late to that train, well, sorry Charlie, because that train ain't coming back. You missed it. The world of Yeshiva works the same way. You come late to seder, you missed the train." My roommate was suitably impressed by these words, and vowed to improve his performance. So the next day Tuesday, he doesn't show up at all. The mashgiach finally gets hold of him and begins a'screamin and a'hollerin. "What happened? Not only did you miss the train, but you didn't even make it to the train station?!" My roommate replied, "Well, I was all ready to come at 7:31, but I realized that I had missed the train, so I knew there was no point. I just went back to bed."
That afternoon was the inauguration of the messiah, and Itzik Perlman, Yo Yo Ma, and company played a funeral dirge-excuse me, an inaugural ditty. Later it was revealed that this was in fact the first scandal of the new Obama administration. Turns out that they were play-syncing. Shocking, I know.
The big question, though, is "why do we care?" After all, it's the same music. The same players. The same instruments. So what difference does it make if it was recorded a little bit early?
The answer, of course, is that it wasn't authentic. It didn't have the proper verisimilitude. And people care.
Those same people often ask, "Why is it so important for me to keep all the crazy laws in the Torah? Does G-d really care?" And the answer is that yes, G-d does care. Everything you do makes a difference. When you miss the train, you miss the train. When you're not really playing , you're not really playing. Even if it seems like "Hey, I came to seder, just a little late." Fact is, you missed the boat.
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Everyone around the table laughed long and hard at the train joke, even the Shliach. At the time he said, "Is your roommate telling the same story about you by a shliach this shabbos?"
Later he asked me, "Is this story really true? Because I know you're in smicha..." I told him that I had been waiting for ages to be able to tell this story, and when the opportunity came...I felt like Rabbi Akiva.