The Yeshvish Choke

The yeshivish choke is something I have noticed for year, this is when the person davening for the amud (he must be yeshivish) does a fake cry in the middle of a word, it comes out as if he were crying in the middle of the word and hence I call it the yeshivish choke.

The yeshivish choke is so important because we are already in the month of Ellul, a time to practice your fake crying so you can sound and look more frum when you get called up to do some sort of davening. I find it unnerving that all these people are crying one minute during their davening and the next minute they are speaking with clarity as if nothing happened.

I almost feel that all the rabbis in yeshiva used to cry and pound their fists because they were trying to beg forgiveness for the entire yeshivas sins – that would have taken years. Or were they just trying to rouse us yeshiva guys out of our food-less stupor to try and do teshuva now so we could be redeemed. I’m reminded of the way the roch yeshivas brother used to wake us up on Yom Kippor – he would bust open doors screaming in this campfire ghost story voice – “Do Teshuva Now or you’l never be redeemed.” I would roll back over because the only time we could actually sleep late was the high holidays because the Rabbis didn’t want to disrupt their shtender pounding (the mechitza was tall don’t worry) and yeshivish choking to wake us up.

I heard the yeshivish choke during eicha this year and I heard it in Palo Alto when one of the seed boys (I should do a satire on the seed boys, the name sounds so wrong) decided to try his hand at the impassioned kabalas shabbos choke – I believe it may have been at the end of the one of the Hashem Melechs.