Airplane Conversations

I sat next to a man on the plane from Lakewood. He was actually pretty interesting. He was fascinated by the fact that I was from Alabama and managed to become frum in such a setting. He had visited Mississippi recently and someone gave him the number of another Jew they knew there. Kind of funny, but I am not incredibly surprised.

We had a conversation about some of the books in recent years that have been not incredibly welcomed by a lot of the frum world (Making of a Godol, One People, Two Worlds), and he was impressed by the fact that I knew about them.

He kept offering me the number of a shadchan he knows, but I told him that wasn't really my style.

He impressed me because of two things he said. The first was that he made a couple of comments about non-Jews that were not negative at all. The other was that he decried the politics that goes into writing books published by Jewish publishing houses, and some of the incredible stories that are left out, and therefore, not known about certain people of past generations. He had a remarkable memory for the historical details of many great rabbis of the past.

It was definitely one of the better conversations I have had on an airplane.