Thanks-Jew-Giving

Please print this post and bring some hodu to the dinner table, whether today or tomorrow or anytime..
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Question for your Thanksgiving table – do you remember how last year Columbus had become so controversial? How come nobody is talking about that today?

Tradition?

Well, the tradition of this email is to pull out, dust off and rejewvenate 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?

(Why does it seem like a religious duty, like matzah on Pesach.)

If anyone answers, "They ate turkey so we have to eat turkey," that would be incorrect.

In fact, they would be wrong on 2 counts.

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? Do vegetarians do Thanksgiving? 

(I know I'm not the first to ask this question, but it seems far from resolved.)

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.)

PS - If you'd like to know about the Jews who sailed with Columbus, send me an email.

Of course, you and 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: How do you do hodu?

Happy Hodu-Day and

Which may be the same as saying...

Shabbat Shalom

PS - the links above are mostly very cool, check them out!


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Sir Nick-a-Lot

 

Please print this post and create some heroism at Friday night dinner table....
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Last week's tribute to a Jewish hero challenged your table to consider the definition of a moral compass.

This week another latter-day Jewish hero steps up to the plate.

Sir Nicholas Winton organized the rescue of 669 children destined for Nazi concentration camps. 

(He died in 2015 at age 106.)

And he kept his story secret for fifty years. Not even his wife knew about it, until she discovered an album in their attic with the names and photos of the children he rescued.

He didn't seek any attention, but he was gracious enough to allow his story to be told. Watch this.

Here's the gist of his heroism:

It was not a straightforward matter: the British bureaucracy was complacent and slow, believing there was no urgency as war was deemed unlikely, and the government demanded bonds of £50 – no small sum in those days – to sponsor the children. The arrangements were, nevertheless, better than those of countries such as the US and Australia, to whom Winton appealed in vain. “If America had only agreed to take them too, I could have saved at least 2,000 more,” he said.

Frustrated by the slowness of the British authorities, Winton made newspaper appeals and personally organised the children’s placements, with no time for checking suitability or haggling over who should go where. As the situation in Czechoslovakia grew more desperate following the German occupation of the entire country in March 1939, he took to forging the Home Office entry permits. That summer eight rail transports were conducted. A ninth Kindertransport, which was due to leave on 1 September 1939 with 250 more children, was cancelled by the Germans, and most of those who would have been on board were subsequently transported to concentration camps. Nevertheless, Winton and his colleagues had saved at least 664 children: 561 of them Jewish, 52 Unitarians, 34 Catholics and 17 others.

Here's a detailed story about how he pulled it off.

Britain's Chief Rabbi Mirvis said:

"He lived to see thousands of descendants of those whose lives he saved who were proud to call themselves members of his family, and who were inspired by his example to undertake outstanding charitable, humanitarian and educational initiatives. I knew him to be a gentleman of unfailing old-world courtesy, with a warm heart and a ready self-deprecating wit."

Question for your table: What's greater - his rescue of the 669 children, or his humility?


Enjoy the podcast and Shabbat Shalom


Podcast details: there are ten ways to hear it:

iTunes/iPhone … YidPod … Spotify … Google Podcasts … Pocketcasts … Stitcher … Podbean … Amazon Podcasts … RSS … or just on the web (if you use the latter, scroll down to see all the episodes).

PS - When shopping at Amazon, please use http://smile.amazon.com and support this blog by choosing Jewish Spiritual Literacy as your designated charity. Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases - it doesn't sound like much, but if everyone reading this did so, that would translate to hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars.

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Humane Society?

Please print this blog and help it achieve its purpose - to keep business open at the Friday night dinner table...

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Happy birthday shout-out to Amy in West Hartford!

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After three weeks of space tales, here's something more down to earth for your Shabbat table.

We were saddened to learn this week of the death of Aaron Feuerstein at age 95.

Does the name ring a bell?

Imagine you're the 3rd-generation owner of a successful textile factory that employs 3,000 Americans.

One night, a boiler explodes, engulfing the factory in flames and burning it to the ground.

Is it time to move operations overseas where labor is much cheaper? Is it time to retire (let's imagine you're 70-years-old). 

This is the question for your table: What would you do?

If your name is Aaron Feuerstein, you would continue to pay your 3,000 employees after the factory burned down in 1995.

In December 1995, shortly after Malden Mills invested millions of dollars into new equipment and research into creating Polarfleece out of recycled materials. A fire destroyed the factory complex and left all of the employees out of work. At the age of 70, Aaron Feuerstein could have easily pocketing insurance money, closed up shop and retire. He also could have followed the trend of other large corporations and relocated overseas. Instead, Feuerstein decided to rebuild the factory right where it had stood and kept the jobless employees paid at full salary during the downtime (at a cost of $1.5 million per week). He also pledged to keep their family’s benefits for at least 3 months.

Feuerstein - the Mensch of Malden Mills - said that his moral compass came from studying the Talmud.

(By the way, when he reopened the factory a year later, he enjoyed 95% customer and employee retention and business increased 40%. However, the debt incurred by these events forced him eventually to sell the business.)

“I think it was a wise business decision, but that isn’t why I did it. I did it because it was the right thing to do." - Feuerstein

Question for your table: What's a moral compass?


Enjoy the podcast and Shabbat Shalom

PS - Here's a moving tribute to Feuerstein.

Podcast details: there are ten ways to hear it:
iTunes/iPhone … YidPod … Spotify … Google Podcasts … Pocketcasts … Stitcher … Podbean … Amazon Podcasts … RSS … or just on the web (if you use the latter, scroll down to see all the episodes).

PS - When shopping at Amazon, please use http://smile.amazon.com and support this blog by choosing Jewish Spiritual Literacy as your designated charity. Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases - it doesn't sound like much, but if everyone reading this did so, that would translate to hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars.

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Zero-G Whiz...

The purpose of this blog is to defy gravity at the Friday night dinner table. Please print and share...
This week's podcast info below.
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Believe me, it's not like I'm looking for these space stories.

They are just, well, falling into my proverbial lap.

First we had the meteorite landing on a grandmother's pillow in the middle of the night and then the city-destroying asteroids coming too-close-for-comfort (and they're still coming).

So maybe you're wondering if you'd be better off out there in space than on this fragile blue spaceship we call Earth?

Maybe you've fantasized about going to Mars one day? Or beyond?

Well, we unfortunately learned this week that in addition to weakened muscles and bones — I mean severely weakened — a newly discovered side effect of zero gravity is apparently brain damage.

Um.... no thanks.

(Unless of course the Chinese figure out how to make artificial gravity.)

In the meantime, ask everyone at the table if they know....

• Among the many things that the Earth's atmosphere does for you, we all know it stops small meteors from hitting us (they burn up and become shooting stars) - but how many every day??? [about a million]

• You've probably heard the idea that the tropical rain forests (especially the Amazon) are like massive barely-understood pharmacies with countless plants that may contain cures to many diseases - but what percentage of the rainforest species have been studied? [less than 1%]

• Some of the species in the Amazon occur in tiny areas of just a few acres; so if you destroy even a few acres, you may be wiping out entire species...what's the current rate of destruction? [1.5 acres per second, 137 species per day]

• The tires on our cars contain a mixture of rubber, plastic, and other materials; so that wearing down tire tread means shedding microplastics into the environment; when it rains, guess where those tiny bits of plastic go? Guess what percentage of the tires is plastic? [40%]

These are just some random Earth-appreciation thoughts.

So here's two questions for your table: 

When is the last time that you learned or experienced something about Planet Earth that made you say, "Wow!"?

Imagine you traveled to another planet and discovered intelligent creatures there and you managed to learn their language. They would be of course very interested in learning about the Earth. What would you tell them? 

Shabbat Shalom


PS - Regarding the new podcast:

There are eight ways to hear it:

iTunes podcasts ... Spotify podcasts ... Google podcasts ... Sticher podcasts ...
 Podbean podcasts ... Amazon music podcasts ... Pocketcasts ... Yidpod

This week's 8-minute episode is called "Betselem or Beheima?"


PS - When shopping at Amazon, please use http://smile.amazon.com and support this blog by choosing Jewish Spiritual Literacy as your designated charity. Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases - it doesn't sound like much, but if everyone reading this did so, that would translate to hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars.

Appreciated this Table Talk? Like it, tweet it, forward it....