Anger Management Clinic

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The purpose of this blog is to add some YK prep to the Shabbat Table. Please print and share...
Happy Anniversary to Kyle and Shelli and Happy Birthday shout-out to Anita! You are all inspirations!

Announcement: During these Days of Awe, when we are trying to elevate ourselves, one of the most basic ways to do so is to give extra tzedaka.  My new book, Body and Soul: A Torah Guide to Health, Fitness, and Longevity, Medically-Annotated is nearly complete and like most Jewish books, there are opportunities to help bring it to press (3 publishers have made offers, and now we need to raise certain publishing expenses). If you would like to pledge a dedication in someone's honor or memory to be printed in the book, please send an email to dedications@jsli.org for instructions and may the merit of your contribution uplift them and the Jewish People and the world. Eight years in the making, this collaboration of Torah scholars, doctors and dietitians will, we hope, change the way we relate to our bodies and to food. 

Question for your table:

Is Yom Kippur - just a couple days away - a(n):

A) Test
B) Ritual
C) Holy day
D) Opportunity
E) All of the above?


It seems to me that Yom Kippur is an opportunity to reach a new level of self mastery over:

- anger
- frustration
- worry
- anxiety
- laziness
- over-indulgence
- etc.

How so?

Eating is our most primal urge. Giving up food and water for 25 hours is a message to myself: "Hey body, I'm in control of you, you're not in control of me!"

That's a metaphor for any area of self-mastery.

If I know I have a bit of an anger problem, I can say, just like I'm giving up food and water for 25 hours, I'm going to give up anger for 25 hours. Or frustration, worry, anxiety etc.

Doesn't mean that I can maintain that abstinence for longer, but it's a chance to cleanse myself. 25 hours of abstinence from that trait that I know I should really conquer.

Then, when YK is over, maybe I'll be a little bit better at it in the long-run.

Question for your table: How can a person turn Yom Kippur clarity into long-term change?

(Hint: think 30-day plan)


Wishing you a happy - yes happy - Yom Kippur. Happy because you're going to cleanse yourself of that one trait that is most holding you back in life.

Shabbat Shalom

PS for a list of common negative traits for self-reflection, send me an email.
 

 

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Good Riddance?

 The purpose of this blog is to create love and wisdom at that Shabbat table and all year round. Please print and share...  By the way, Isn't tonight the night?

Does that photo look vaguely familiar? 

I used it last week. The repeat is to show our solidarity with those who are suffering out West.

One of those suffering out West, a long-term subscriber to this email, sent me the following email the other day:

I would like you to remove me from your weekly email distribution list. You might be surprised to know that I read nearly everything you send. And over the years I have found that in doing so my heart is not made more loving.  My ability to use my mind in service to wisdom has not been strengthened. And instead I find myself increasingly agitated by and sad after reading what you write. 

(I was indeed surprised - I sometimes wonder if anyone reads what I send. I figure most people stop reading after awhile. And I was also uplifted to know that he continues to be a seeker of love and wisdom.)

I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to interpret both the content and the timing of his missive. On a related note, last night I heard a rabbi speak in less-than-glowing terms about the departure of the Year 5780. He said,

"I don't need to tell you that this has been a very difficult year, for the world and for the Jewish People. Many people have suffered, many are still suffering. Many are simply depressed or afraid. I don't think many of us are sorry to see 5780 go, and we are all hopeful that 5781 will be a better year."

I wonder .... without minimizing anyone's suffering, haven't there been many Rosh Hashanas when we could say that? Right now the plagues and fires and economic woes etc. seem historic and unprecedented. But maybe that's because they're happening right now?

Maybe we could reframe: it seems to me that having a new year is a great opportunity to ask three questions:

1. What's something important you learned in 5780?
2. What's something you did in 5780 that you're proud of?
3. What do you dream of accomplishing in 5781?

(For a list of 28 such questions, plus a few more for Yom Kippur, send me an email.)
(In addition to the RH/YK questions, we have an updated Significant Omens sheet and a couple other Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur specials - shoot me an email.)

This is one of only a couple times a year when we mention the costs of sending this email. What a coincidence - this happens to be the time of year when Jews give more generously than usual. Please consider showing your appreciation and support with a tax-deductible contribution of any amount - with many options available at http://jsli.org/donate . Your support not only keeps our computers running and lights on, it helps us make an impact on thousands of lives through our educational programs. If you'd like details on our programs and their outcomes, shoot me an email.

Like public radio, we have some cool thank you gifts - become a supporting member and we'll send you something special.

And now I'm going to leave you with an intentionally provocative question for your Shabbat/Holiday table:

What would be worse - a year of peace and prosperity when you learned absolutely nothing, or a year of suffering when you gained great wisdom? In other words, is wisdom ever worth suffering for?

Shabbat Shalom

L'Shana Tova - Happy New Year
May you and yours be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life!

May 5781 be a year of great blessings and see an end to great suffering.

 

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A

Stranger Than Fiction?

The purpose of this blog is to create a controlled-burn at the Shabbat table. Please print and share...

Do you realize how very soon we'll be dipping apples in honey??

Walk into a room full of Torah scholars and you'll hear a lot of heated arguments. Why is that?

Dialectical argument is one of the best ways to get closer to Truth.

Most of these arguments depend on logic and reason. But every once-in-a-while, a scholar may find support for his position in the writings of an earlier or more senior scholar.

Upon such validation, the scholar may utter a two-word quasi-blessing: Baruch sheh'kavanti. It's something of a humble alternative to "I told you so."

I had a baruch-sheh'kavanti moment last week here in this space. You may recall that I asked, "Is tribalism the same as racism?" and, "Does being Jewish mean to be tribalist?"

While I was writing that blog last Thursday, it turns out, a fellow member of our tribe was blogging her confession to having posed (and built her career) as a member of another tribe.

In case you didn't hear the story (because you might have something bigger to worry about?), here's the basic outline:

• Jewish woman from Kansas City gets a prep-school education, goes to University of Kansas then University of Wisconsin-Madison for a PhD.
(Her dissertation: "They glorify in a certain independence" : the politics of identity in Kisama, Angola, and its diasporas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries"

• At some point, probably during a post-doc research fellowship in the Caribbean, she decides to abandon her own people's ship and join the tribe of "Afro-Latina".
(Here she is in character.)
(She may have even started a trend at UW-M.)

• Pens a critically-acclaimed slave-history (finalist for Yale's Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize).
(Here's a taste of her writing: "To gloss Kisama as a simple toponym referring to the arid lands between Angola's Kwanza and Longo rivers is to miss the cross-regional, trans-Atlantic political processes thru which thousand of the most individually weak and vulnerable people of the 16th and 17th century Angola collectively fashioned dynamic political identities originated around renouncing state formations, martial idioms for social organization, and resisting slavery, the slave trade and the imbrication in market economies.")

• After eight years of this conversion/charade/fraud/satire, she's about to be outed so she comes clean.
(Not surprisingly, her academic career is evidently over.)

In her blog-confessional, she calls her tribal conversion "the very epitome of violence". Others have called her decision to convert to Afro-Jamaican "racist." 

So which is it? Is tribalism itself racism (per Michele Norris, last week's blog)? Or is it racist to join another tribe uninvited (per Jessica Krug's critics, and Krug herself)?

Or, wonders Professor Jonathan Zimmerman from the University of Pennsylvania, is it racist to heap praise on her book when we thought it was written by a woman of color, and to trash it now that we know it was written by a Jewish woman from Kansas City with no blackness in her genetic and cultural history?

OK, it was bad to lie and say she grew up Afro-Latina. But if she wants to be black, shouldn't that be her choice? (If a person can become transgender, why not transracial?)

Or perhaps Michael Laitman is onto something when he frames Krug's tale as a very Jewish story because "there's a Jessica Krug in every Jew"....?

Final thought and question for your table:

In her confessional, Ms. Krug writes, "I have no identity outside of this. I have never developed one. I have to figure out how to be a person that I don’t believe should exist, and how, as that person, to even begin to heal any of the harm that I’ve caused."

Question - if you could speak to her right now, what would you say?

Shabbat Shalom
 

 

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Are You a Tribalist?

The purpose of this email is to add a bit of tribalism to your Friday night dinner table... Please print and share...
Are you still counting the days?

Do you remember Michele Norris (formerly on NPR's "All Things Considered")?

As you can see from this image, she is a black woman.... ?

(Well, that's how I heard her describe herself once. But she looks whiter than I do.)

Eight or so years ago she joined an on-air discussion on racism, fueled by the Trayvon Martin shooting.

This was her closing line:

"I've learned that all over the world, they may not call it racism, maybe it's bias, maybe it's tribalism."

My question for your table is going to be: Is tribalism OK, or is it the same as racism?

But before I ask the question, let's ask a more personal question for most of the readers of this blog.

Does "being Jewish" mean being a tribalist?

Some will say that being Jewish means what we tell a potential convert: that you are always a potential target for someone.

Not a random target; a premeditated, cold-blooded target.

Such as the victims of the 2012 assassination in Toulouse, shown here with their now-widowed wife/mother:

Or non-violent words, mere words.... or mere images....

Sometimes it's even more "casual"....

(And see this report on COVID-related antisemitism; and here for longer-term trends.)

Others will say that being Jewish means acting in solidarity with Jewish victims, such as the Chabad Centers in Portland and Delaware, both of which have been hit by arson.

Michele Norris has an online project cleverly called "The Race Card" - the idea is to invite the public to submit 6-word statements about race. Here's the link.

Question 2 for your table: What 6 words would you submit?

Here are mine:

Tribalism is okay, racism is not.

3rd question for your table: Agree or disagree?

Shabbat Shalom


PS - Yes, the image is clickable.
PPS - Shopping on Amazon? Please use https://smile.amazon.com and Amazon will donate a % of the sale to the non-profit of your choice (such as Jewish Spiritual Literacy), at no extra cost to you. Why not?

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