Of course not.
All smoking is extremely damaging to the body and leads to heart disease and cancer, G-d forbid. Smoking through the shisha pipes that Arab Muslims use is just as damaging as smoking cigarettes.
Chaim, you are exactly right. I just don't get the fascination with smoking and never have. I guess I should be glad that I am living now rather than 50 years ago when literally everybody did it and guys who didn't were thought of as weird or unmanly.
But still--there's way too much of it both here and in Israel. In particular I don't understand why nonsmokers feel the need to experiment with tobacco. You have no idea how many nonsmokers I know of that feel it is important to try a cigarette "just once" in order to "experience how terrible it is". Very few nonsmokers that I know have never tried tobacco at all, or will never try it.
Yes it was crazy even in the 60's my dad remembers that when he was like 10 or 11 he used to fly from NY to LA and the airlines would give complimentary cigarettes and all the people would be smoking on the plane and in the air etc. He remembers when he was little kid that his dentist would take a break every 2 minutes to take a drag on his smoke DURING his treatments of patients.
As far as my smoking goes, well, when my mom and lived with my grandma, my grandma was a chain smoker. My mother HATED it. I did too. We were both allergic. Then 10 years later, at age 17, one of my friends was smoking and she offered me a drag. I figured I'd try it, "It can't hurt I said." I got this incredible head rush and I figured "wow, no wonder people smoke." So I kept trying cigarettes until eventually I got somebody of age to buy me my first pack. Well 5 years later, I'm still smoking. The good news is that I quit before going to Yeshiva in Israel and after a month I couldn't take it anymore. It was EVERYWHERE. The guys would smoke in the dorms, the bathrooms, outside the Beis Medrash. And everywhere I went I'd see it and smell it. Malls, restaurants, on the street, bus stations, even in HOSPITALS. So the yetzer hara won and I started again. Then I started dating somebody for a month and I quit until she dumped me. I quit again last summer but I went to back to Yeshivah and this time after 2 weeks I was back on the butts because it was EVERYWHERE. My roommates smoked in the room all the time. Our room was known as the smoking room. Now, a year later, I cut down TREMENDOUSLY. I went from smoking 5 cigarettes a day, to 10, to 20, back to 5, now I'm at 1 or 2 a day. Shabbos used to be the hardest especially before I became religious. I wouldn't smoke on shabbos and for almost a year I accomplished it. Then I became frum and now, Baruch Hashem, I have no problems on Shabbos anymore. So hopefully, I'll get married in a few years and she'll make me quit COMPLETELY.
Topic: Do Jews smoke hookah / shisha? (Read 9451 times)