Who Is Like You?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

March 3, 2023 •  11 Adar 5783 • Parshat Titzaveh/Zachor (Ex 27-29)
The purpose of this blog is to mix things up at the Shabbat table. Please share.
NEWS FLASH - The Torah Health and Fitness book went to the publisher this week... stay tuned...

 

Did anyone have more success than I last week with the AI Rebbe? 

In response, someone told me that the standard chatGPT could be used to craft a credible (i.e., cliché) bar mitzvah speech. I tried it: "Write a 1,000-word father's bar mitzvah speech." Indeed!

Speaking of futuristic technology, in this week's news, the BBC ran an off-beat story about a retired physicist whose career was inspired by the desire to figure out time-travel in order to save his dear father who died in 1955.

That's an interesting story in its own right. But the reason I'm bringing it to your attention is because of a minor Jewish detail of the article:
 

One day, as Mallett and his brothers were walking around their new neighbourhood to meet friends, they saw four white boys playing nearby and approached them to say hello. When they got closer, one of the kids spat the N-word at them. No one had ever called Mallett that before. Something in him snapped and he punched the boy until he apologised. “I was in the dark already. And that just added to that, I think. I was becoming unravelled because I was in a very deep depression after he died,” says Mallett.

Mallett never had cause to contemplate his race in the Bronx. “The neighbourhood that we lived in was predominantly a white Jewish neighbourhood. And I’d never experienced any feeling of prejudice. I was actually the only African American in the predominantly white Jewish Boy Scout troop, and I felt I was not treated any differently from any of the others,” he says.

Question for your table - Mark Twain said it, Winston Churchill said it, Louis Armstrong said it, but what do you say - does the above anecdote reflect something special about Jewish people?


Shabbat Shalom and

¡ɯᴉɹnԀ ʎddɐɥ ∀


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