Collaboral Damage?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The purpose of this blog is to make the Shabbat table more collaborative... Please print and share...

Here's your countdown to Shavuot. (Rather count up? Click here.)
Dedicated to the memory of Dovid Shalom Pesach ben Yaakov Zev.

This morning we buried a good man, Mr. David Glick.

A neighbor and friend, older but not elderly; after a lifetime of medical challenges, his time was up.

(This photo is the only one I have of him - taken on Purim this year.)

At the burial his nephew commented that Dovid never complained about anything. From my experience with him, it was absolutely true (and I had seen him during some of his most difficult challenges).

Without a family of his own, one of the things that kept him going was his frequent shul attendance. The shul had become family to him. He did something that I never saw anyone else do. At the end of the Friday night service, everyone always chats and are friendly enough to those around him. Dovid would walk (with difficulty) up and down the aisles to wish a "good Shabbos" to everyone he knew, extending his hand. And if you were sitting down out of his reach, he'd hold his hand there until you got up to give him a shake. 

The last time I was able to physically visit him, he was practicing his bar mitzvah parsha (Shmini), hopeful that he'd be able to lein (chant) it in shul. That would have been last Shabbat; it wasn't meant to be.

His leining that parsha was one of the few constants he had in his life, it kept him going year after year, and I'm sure it broke his heart last week when he could not lein from a Torah scroll. A few days later his heart stopped working.

It is sometimes hard to work together, and Skyping and Zooming have their pros and cons.

Question for your table - What's better for collaboration: video, phone, email, text... or none of the above?


Shabbat Shalom

PS - Here's an creative and uplifting video collaboration that appears - at least in the end result - to be none of the above: https://www.inbflat.net/

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