What's So Hard About Stopping?

The purpose of this blog is transform Friday night into Shabbat. Please print and share.
The closest red light to our home has four crosswalks.

However, I have taught my children to avoid them.

Please, I beg them, cross only a block away, where there is no crosswalk.

First question for your table - can you guess why?

Routinely - meaning daily - I see cars running this red light.

Or turning there (on green) with pedestrians in the crosswalk.

It happened to me - once I was crossing with two children and a turning car very nearly hit us.

Another time I chose not to use the crosswalk and then saw a car run the red at the exact moment that I would have been there.

Until now, I thought this was perhaps a local Baltimore phenomenon.

It turns out that more people are running red lights (causing more fatalities) everywhere.



Every day, on average, two or more people in the USA are killed by someone running a red light.

My state is at the exact national average (2.4 annual red-light-running deaths per 1M population). What would you guess is your state's ranking? Do you feel like it's getting better or worse where you live? Here's the data.

Even scarier, a new AAA survey found that 16 percent of teenagers and six percent of drivers overall say that it is not particularly dangerous to run a red light.

The AAA researchers cannot explain this increase in red-light-running and its increase in fatalities.

I personally suspect it may be rooted in more and more people - especially young people - being socialized to be impatient.

What do you think?

And what's the solution?


Shabbat Shalom

(PS - Clicking on the above image will take you to one suggested solution)


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Flexing Your Muscle

The purpose of this email is to build some strength at the Shabbat table. Please print and share.


Many thanks to those who sided with me in last week's debate!

This week's topic for your table is about airports.

Question for your table:

Do you have an airport nightmare story?

Who doesn’t?

Delayed flights, lost baggage, missed connections...

Anyone who has traveled has been there. How many times have I heard, “I’ll never fly on X Airline again”, when all of these problems occur on every airline.

13 years ago, when we had to cut short our Israel trip after two days for my grandmother’s funeral, my mom’s suitcase didn’t make it to San Francisco and the airline knew where it was but, maddingly, couldn’t figure out how to get it to us. But every time I found myself feeling the slightest twinge of frustration, I thought of the next woman in line at the lost baggage claim, who was weeping.

“What’s wrong,” my mom asked her. “Did you lose something particularly valuable?”

“Yes,” sobbed the woman, “My daughter!”

It seems her unaccompanied-minor daughter didn’t show up, and an airline rep had sent her to lost baggage for help!

No matter how bad it seems, there’s always someone who has it worse.

Not only that, but the fact that we have a functioning air transport system is a wonderful thing. If I plan ahead of time for contingencies, I don’t mind the delays. I’m puzzled by the fact that while 100 of us waited at baggage claim for 45 minutes, I appeared to be alone in opening a book. Everyone else seemed to prefer watching the pot boil.

Anything as complex and human as an airport is bound to have snafus. So many people responded favorably to what I wrote on June 9, it maybe bears repeating here.....

Every experience and every person in our life has a purpose in our life. It seems to me that the purpose usually falls into one of three categories:

A. To make you wise
B. To get you to ask for help or to say thanks
C. For you to give or to receive an act of kindness.

Sometimes a single experience can have more than one purpose.

Here’s an interesting question to ask: which is a better quality, firm v. flexible?



Shabbat Shalom


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Rings a Bell?

The purpose of this email is to help everyone sharpen their vision. Please print and share.
Happy Birthday shout-out to Shelli in SF - one year older and a lightyear wiser.

I'm having an ongoing debate with a good friend. Perhaps you (and those at your table) can help us resolve it.

If you try stargazing in or near any city, you're only going to see about fifty stars, one percent of what ought to be visible without a telescope. If you try - once a year, perhaps - to "get away from it all" - somewhere at least 30 miles from the nearest city, you will be see the missing ninety-nine percent.

First question to resolve: It takes a lot of effort to get to such a remote place, and there are many benefits; would it be worth it just to see the stars?

Now, if you are unable to get away just now, but you happen to have a small (30 power) telescope or binoculars (with a tripod), and a clear night tonight, look south around 10 pm.

That bright star about 40° up from the horizon is Saturn. The other bright star to the SW is Jupiter.

Get your scope focused on Jupiter (again, this only works with a tripod). You should see 3 or 4 tiny dots of light near it. You are witnessing what Galileo discovered with his 20x telescope in 1609.

Question for your table - what are those dots of light?

Yes, they are the four largest of Jupiter's moons.

(Note - Galileo didn't give them their the famous and rather immodest names of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto: that was Simon Marius, who independently discovered them (and he and Galileo accused each other of plagiarism...), and the names didn't catch on until the 20th Century.)

(Bonus question - how many moons does Jupiter have? [79])

Now let's turn our scope to Saturn. You should be able to see its rings, albeit a bit fuzzy.

(Bonus question - how many moons does Saturn have? [62])

BTW, at their closest to us, Jupiter is about 365 million miles and Saturn about 750 million miles. That means that we can see the rings because sunlight travels 890 million miles to Saturn, bounces off the rings and then returns 750 million miles, a total round trip of more than 2 hours.

Sorry for all the "science" but this is all leading to today's final question:

Is it cool and beautiful to see the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn with your own eyes, or is it just as well to look at much more stunning Hubble or Voyager photos?

Shabbat Shalom


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Eat, Drink and Be Wary...

The purpose of this blog is to help everyone unplug. Please print and share.

Thank you for your kind replies to last week's "Seven Bridges Run" email.

Another thing I learned from my father - multi-task (within reason). For insance, he kept a small radio in the bathroom to listen to the news while brushing his teeth.

Nowadays, brushing my teeth is about the only time I get a chance to hear the radio.

And yesterday an ad came on that began:

"Want to unplug? Want to get away from the constant stream of the digital world?"

Three questions for your table:

1. What would you guess was the next line of the ad?
2. Is unplugging a want or a need?
3. Other than Shabbat, is there any way to truly, fully, one hundred percent unplug?

By the way (pardon the awkward transition), for most of Jewish history, this time of year has been the darkest.

Unfortunately, massacres of innocent Jews can happen and have happened in all seasons, but the worst have been saved for mid-summer, leading up to the 9th of Av (Tisha B'Av) which begins tonight (since it's Shabbat, the fast is pushed off until Saturday night).

(Can you name the 5 catastrophes that occurred on the 9th of Av?)

The Rabbis of old tell us that the root of these tragedies is baseless hatred.

Final question for your table: If so, how should we be responding to ongoing tragedy?


Shabbat Shalom



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What's Your Seven-Bridges Run?

The purpose of this blog is to add a little fun to the Shabbat table. Please print and share.
In memory of my father Dovid ben Eliezer, whose 14th yahrzeit was this week.

Two questions for your table:

1. How many people do you know who exercise regularly?

2. How many of them make it fun? Not just enjoyable - but actually FUN???

At my father's yahrzeit celebration this week, several of his old friends spoke about how he would do things that most people would be too inhibited to do.

For example, in the summer of 1965 he left his pregnant wife and traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi to provide legal services to civil rights workers.

In case you forgot, Neshoba County was the least welcoming county of the least welcoming state to Yankee Jewish civil rights workers.

If he were visiting a museum and there was a closed gallery that he wanted to see, he might just ignore the "gallery closed" sign and go in.

As long as he felt he wasn't breaking any laws, he lived as though every day might be his last. If that museum gallery had a guard on duty - and he very much wanted to see it - he would try to talk his way in (although I never once saw him resort to actual bribery).

I believe that what drove him was a tremendous sense of carpe diem. He would say, "Why not do it today? Who knows if you'll have another chance?"

For him, daily exercise was a given - because (I think) his own father used to say, "Take care of your health! If you don't have your health, you don't have anything!"

But it was never a chore; he would always find ways to make it fun. For example, he would play tennis or squash or any game that got his legs moving.

He never ran on a treadmill or even around a track - that would be dull - he would run outside. But each run was a different route - let's go this way and see what there is to see!

Eventually, in his native Tacoma, Wash., he proudly discovered that he could run over seven different bridges without repeating, and this became his jocular authenticity-test for anyone claiming Tacoma blue-blood: How can you run over seven bridges downtown without repeating?

In his memory, the downtown Y holds an annual Denny Seinfeld Seven Bridges Run on one of the Fridays in August. This year it will be on Friday, August 16 at 5:45 am. If you'd like to exercise your own carpe diem muscles, maybe I'll see you there.

If my dad knew you were going to show up, he'd be honored, but even more honored if you made up your own.

 

For your table: What's your seven-bridges run?


Shabbat Shalom

 

PS - the buttons in the image above are worn by the Seven-Bridges Run runners (and the image is, as always, clickable).

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