Hodu You Do?

The purpose of this blog is to serve some hodu at your table and beyond... Please share.

Hodu You Do?

Thank you for all the validation for our posture of incredulity in last week's Genuflection Reflection.

This week - it's that special week in November when we pull out, dust off, revamp and update our annual Hodu message.

Here are a few questions to stump everyone at the table.

Try this one first: Why turkey?

Serious question: Why do Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving?

(I.e., like it's their religious duty, like matzah on Pesach.)

If anyone says, "They ate turkey so we have to eat turkey," you can politely let them know they are wrong on 2 accounts.

First of all, would it really be so bad to have a Thanksgiving pizza? Or Thanksgiving hamburgers? Or a red beans and rice Thanksgiving? How about a Chinese Thanksgiving? Curry Thanksgiving, anyone?

Second, they probably didn't eat much turkey.

At that original Thanksgiving in 1621, they apparently ate mostly venison.

I know, shocking, right?

Let's go back in time.

Imagine you are on the boat with Columbus.

(Maybe you're even a Jewish refugee from the Spanish Inquisition.)

Of course, you and all your geographically-challenged buddies think you're in Asia.

It's a strange world! Strange people, fauna and flora.

And you see this funky chicken.

The Wampanoag Indians call it neyhom.

What do you, O Spanish sailor, call it?

Remember, it looks vaguely like a chicken and you think you're in India, so naturally you call it "Indian chicken."

Are you with me so far?

French explorers agree that it looks like a chicken and they call poulet d'Inde (Indian chicken), later shortened to dinde (pronounced "dand").

English settlers think it looks more like a Turkey pheasant than a chicken, so they call the bird turkey.

Jewish explorers side with the French and call it tarnegol hodu — "Hindu chicken" — later shortened to hodu.

What's interesting for us is that the Hebrew word HODU also just happens to mean "give thanks" (in the imperative mood for all the grammarphiles out there).

So back to our main question for your table: What food should you eat on Hodu Day?

(Hodu, of course.)

Now try asking somebody Jewish at the table this stumper:

You're Jewish, right? Can you explain what "Jewish" means?

Forget the religious or cultural meaning; we want to know the etymology of "Jewish".

It means something like, "a state of being thankful".

Ergo, if you're living up to the name "Jewish" then you are....

....living in a state of being thankful.

Let that sink in before asking the next question: How often?

(Once a year? Once a month? Once a week? Once a day?)

That could be a lot of hodu to stuff yourself with.

Final question for the table: Hodu do you do it?


Happy Hodu-Day and

Shabbat Shalom

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Genuflection Reflection

The purpose of this blog is to add some spring to your step at the Shabbat table... Please print and share.
Happy birthday shoutout to my dear wife - wishing you another amazing year!

This morning I was sitting in a local shul library working on my daily page of Talmud when an acquaintance walked in, using a cane.

Our "hello" led to his cane, which led to his new shoes which lead to Amazon Corp....

....which lead to the observation that they seem to have become the efficient middleman between Chinese suppliers and consumers, expanding to every market.

My friend said, "I got a tour of their downtown facility - it's incredible. Little robots running around, you have to see it to believe it."

And then he showed me his new $30 Amazon shoes. They are supposedly cushioned in a way to relieve his long-term knee pain.

But he's a skeptic. So he also went to a local shoe store and bought a $130 pair of customized shoes, and is now alternating between them to see if he can tell the difference.

Now, exactly how shoes, which are downhill in terms of gravity, can significantly relieve knee pain is not so clear. It seems to me that a better fix might be to lighten the uphill load on those knees.

So I said to my friend, "Please forgive me for asking, but would it possibly help your knees to lose thirty pounds?"

As if on cue, as he was replying, "Yes, it surely would," a third person arrived, bearing packages of cookies and cupcakes to share with everyone.

So I took the cue and said with a smile, "Well that stuff's not going to help you!"

First question for your table: What would you guess he replied?

 + + + +

Answer:

He said, "You're right, but I'm going to eat it anyway."

Which leads to today's 2nd question for your table — Why?

For the record: If a person makes consistently healthy food and exercise choices, they are likely to live longer, stronger and healthier. There is compelling evidence for this (and here and here [original study is here]), and the biology of aging is no longer a complete mystery.

Therefore I repeat the question: Why?


Shabbat Shalom



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No Your Limits

The purpose of this email is to negotiate some deeper thinking at the Shabbat table... Please print and share.

No, that's not a typo.

One reason this email is so late is because this morning I spent about two hours working on the wedding plans for our daughter.

(Yes, that's the breaking news - our oldest daughter Goldy is engaged. It's a great guy from a great family and we're humbled.)

Anyway, the caterer said to me this morning, "I've been in this business for thirty years and the most important lesson I've learned is to know when to say no. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Know your weaknesses and don't agree to take on things you can't do."

First question for your table - Is that true? If so, is it always true, or are there exceptions?

I told him that I'd like to add a corollary: Know how to say no.

To which I'll add a 2nd question for your table - What are the best and worst ways to say no?


Shabbat Shalom

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Bingo There, Done That.

The purpose of this blog is to create some random excitement at the Shabbat table... Please print and share.

My wife and I did something new and eye-opening this week.

We attended a Bingo.

It was a fundraiser for our son's camp, and we went as volunteers, not participants.

But it was a real Bingo, in a large synagogue social hall which has been running this program for decades.

The people there ranged in age from a couple in their 90s (married over 70 years) to a young single mother (there with her two children).

Most of them brought a kit with two main items:

1. A tote bag of paint-pens that they use to mark the numbers on the bingo sheets
2. Scotch tape to keep the sheets firm while they played (they played up to 27 bingo cards simultaneously), 

Many of them set up a row of various lucky charms and idols.

In between rounds, we were asked to offer them instant-win lottery tickets.

I get Bingo - there is some (I stress some) skill involved - one has to concentrate and move quickly.

But the lottery tickets are different. First of all, there were many sets of tickets with different names like "Pot of Gold" or "Money from Heaven", but they all had the same prizes ($1, $2, $5, $20, $200) and odds. So why did some people buy some tickets and not others?

One lady asked me, "Are they paying one or two jackpots?" - meaning, will the $200 go to one winner or be split among two winners?

I went to find out, and the answer was the latter. When I came back with the answer, I asked her, "Was that the answer you wanted?"

"No."

he was only interested in playing for the $200 jackpot, not the $100 - even though it had better odds (let's say 1 in 50 as opposed to 1 in 100).

Question for your table - For a $1 bet, would you rather play for a 50% chance of winning $100 or a 5% chance of winning $1,000?

What if the bet cost $5?

What if it cost $50?

It's obvious that most gamblers think with their gut, not their brain.

And that gut is so stimulated by the temptation of the Jackpot that they are willing to go out night after night and spend their few extra dollars for that tiny chance.

What's less obvious (but has been proven) is that we all do this kind of thinking every day.

In the book I just linked to above, Dr. Kahaneman shows many examples of how people make choices based on their irrational gut and not on their head.

Would you rather have 5 minutes of excrutiating pain or 5 years of low-level pain?

When you remember that vacation 10 years ago, when that disaster happened, how much does that disaster loom in your mind versus the pleasant parts of the vacation?

When you planned your wedding, how much time and money went into each detail? And which of those details do you actually remember today?

The final word on this - and question for your table - is what matters more, the experience I'm having right now, or the memory it will create?


Shabbat Shalom

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Babble On...

The purpose of this blog is to create a bubble amid the babble at the Shabbat table.... Please print and share.

Have you ever tried to communicate in a foreign language with someone who didn't speak English?

How about with a baby?

What did it sound like?

"Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba..."?

Open a dictionary of the English language and you may find a puzzling entry.

Go to the first page of the "B" section:

babble. 1. To utter a meaningless confusion of words or sounds....etc. [Origin unknown.]

babel. 1. A confusion of sounds, voices, or languages. 2. A scene of noise and confusion. [From Babel.]

Babel. A city (now thought to be Babylon) in Shinar where, according to the Book of Genesis, the construction of a heaven-reaching tower was interrupted by the confusion of tongues. [Hebrew Babhel, from Akkadian Bab-ilu, "gate of God".]

They've got it completely backwards.

"Babble" is onomatopoea. It means "baby talk", or any incomprehensible speech. "Babel" got its name from the babble that began there. "Babel" is a more metaphorical way of writing "babble".

Even though there were have been some languages that became widespread (Greek for a period, Latin for an interval, French had its season, and now English has had its run), there has never been a fully universal lingua franca. Yet now technologies like Google Translate are taking us closer and closer to the true end of babble envisioned by Kurt Vonnegut.

Question for your table: Do you think humanity ever have a single universal language? Would it be a good thing or a bad thing?


Shabbat Shalom

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