Begin Again ... When?

The purpose of this blog is to turn the Shabbat table into a renewal... Please print and share.
In memory of Jeremy Dossetter - Yermiahu Matan - whose second yahrzeit is observed tomorrow night and Sunday.
Happy Birthday shout-outs to Jeff and Steve in NY, Susan and Tricia in San Fran - wishing you health and wisdom til 120.

We're now out of the annual man-cave and ready for something new.

But there's still a big gap until the Festival of Eights (quick: guess how many days?)

Speaking of eights, when I was about eight years old an adult in my life told me that she wasn't as friendly with a certain friend because the friend had become "born again".

At that moment, the phrase "born again" became embedded in my subconscious as meaning "unfriendly".

Ironically, we have a "born again" idea in Jewish tradition. In a nutshell, the Talmud says that sleep gives us the taste of death, and waking in the morning is a quasi-rebirth.

This is the concept behind that wonderful prayer for that waking moment, called "Modeh Ani".

Click it for the full text. In a nutshell: "Thank you for giving me my soul back!"

Here's a musical version.
Here's another.

Question for your table: Can a person ever really begin again, or are you always saddled by the past?


Shabbat Shalom

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Ultimate Man-Cave?

The purpose of this blog is to turn the Shabbat table into a retreat... Please print and share.


Thank you for the ++ feedback on last week's Does the Song Remain the Same? (apologies to those for whom it was too technical).

Yesterday we took the kids on a drive through agricultural "heartland", picked some apples and fall vegetables, saw how a dairy farm works, sought out an apiary, and so on.

The undulating hills were beautiful, and usually capped with a farmhouse of one sort or another. But every once in awhile you encounter a farmhouse which is such an enormous stately mansion that it seems to belong

Which leads to this week's lead question:

Would you rather live care-free in a shack, or full of worry and anxiety in a palace?

I'm guessing most people would choose the former...?

But then why do people spend so much time and energy pursuing the palace but almost no time learning how to conquer worry and anxiety?

(I think the answer is obvious, but I'm wondering what the folks at your table would say.)

And a related question: Are men and women different on this matter?


Shabbat Shalom

...and happy Sukkot.


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Does the Song Remain the Same?

The purpose of this blog is to add some music to the Shabbat table... Please print and share.
Happy birthday to my dear Mom. Welcome to the age of GEVRUAH!

Last week's Tale of Two Kippers was about color; this week we turn our attention to sound.

Here's a provocative question for your table that links them together:

What do color and sound have in common?

After you let everyone ponder that for a minute, you might want to share the following follow-up questions:

What if we lived in a world without color - only black and white - what would life be like? Would we manage?

What if we humans were only able to speak in monotone, like a pre-Star Wars robot? Would we manage?

If the answer to the above question is, yes, we would manage, then what is the advantage to seeing colors and multi-tonality?

By the way, there is a little-known subtle way in which color and sound seem to be connected.

If you start with the notes of a major scale - say "C" - can you name the notes? [C, D, E, F, G, A, B]

If you measure the frequencies of these notes (starting with middle-C on the piano, or C4), they go like this:

262, 294, 330, 349, 392, 440, 494 (approximately)

So what?

Well now let's look at color.

Can you name them from shortest to longest wavelengths? [violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red]

Their wavelengths are (approximately):

400, 450, 500, 540, 600, 640, 720

So what?

So the ratio of C to D to E etc. is almost exactly the same as the ration of violet to indigo to blue etc.

Why should that be? Who ordered that?

Why are the seven colors of the rainbow related to each other’s wavelength with the same ratios as the seven notes of a major scale to each other’s frequencies?

But since that answer may stump some people, here's one for everyone:

If you had to choose between seeing in color or hearing polytonally for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

Shabbat Shalom

...and happy Sukkot.


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Tail of Two Kippers

The purpose of this blog is to add change the colors of your Shabbat table... Please print and share.
Happy birthday to Keith in Seattle!

Congratulations... you made it into another year.

Hopefully you didn't rush.

When I was a teenager, I loved the speed you could get on a bike whizzing down steep hills.

At some point my grandfather realized I was old enough to ride my bike safely around town and would occasionally send me to the fish store to buy him a bag of kippered salmon.

Now, if you're Jewish, it's probably a good bet that you eat salmon (in one form or another).
Question for your table: What color is sockeye salmon?

I'm going to guess that everyone said red?

Look at the above photo: a sockeye salmon lives most of its life as blue as the ocean it swims in. It turns red (among other changes) when it returns to the river to spawn, in what the NYT's best science writer calls "one of the most miraculous costume changes of the animal kingdom."

Some say it looks copper colored.

Now "copper" in Old English is "cypera". This word became "kipper".

Therefore, when you split open a fish of any sort - let's say herring - and salt it and smoke it, giving it a reddish color, you are kippering it.

So you can imagine my confusion when my grandfather asked me to pick him up some kippered salmon. That's like asking for salmoned salmon. But he assured me that if I asked the fishmonger for kippered salmon, he'd know what I meant.

He was right.

Now that I'm older and wiser, I'm no longer confused. That's what etymologies can do for you.

But we never ate the fish head. This made a great deal of sense to me at the time, but today it confuses me.

Because one of the traditional foods for the Rosh Hashana table (along with apples and honey) is a fish head.

Dip the apple in the honey and say, "May we have a sweet and healthy year!"

Take a bite of the fish head and say, "May we be heads and not tails!"

Cute.

But what of all those discarded fish tails? (Not to mention the discarded fish tales?)

Just like tashlich and the scapegoat, we toss them away (or feed them to the cat?), a symbol of the old self we're trying to shed, like ol' Dr. Konigswasser stepping out of his skin.

Now, here's the clincher question for your table: the salmon somehow knows exactly what it wants to transform itself into. But we - how are we supposed to know?

Wishing you and yours a happy and holy Yom Kippur (when is it again?).

Shabbat Shalom

May you be sealed in the Book of Life.

PS - If you didn't get my Questions to Think About From Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur, reply to this email to request.
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PPPS - There is an ancient tradition of increasing one's tzeddaka during these Days of Awe. To support this blog and other JSLI projects, click here.

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