Gezundheit!

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

December 29-30, 2023 • 18 Teves 5784 • Vayechi (Gen 47-50). 

The purpose of this blog is for healthy conversation at the Shabbat table ... please forward/print/share.

In memory of Pinchas ben Meir HaLevy z'l whose yahrzeit is tonight.

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Here's an opening question for your table: Did you ever wonder why we bless someone who sneezes? What's up with that?

It appears to be a universal custom: see Gezundheit in 80 languages / Berlitz.com.

After everyone ponders that question, you might want to share this interesting midrash about the origin of gezundheit.

Once upon a time, sneezing was a bad, bad omen.

People didn't get sick before they died. They just sneezed and died. 

So sneezing was burned into our collective psyche as a potential sign of imminent death.

Along comes Jacob (Yaakov), the ultimate Patriarch. He wants to buck the trend. He wants to end his life not with a blessing from others but with a blessing to others. He wants to give his children a final testament. He wants to be able to say goodbye with dignity.

Being that he's a prophet - he and God were, you know, "like this."

So he asks for a change in the natural order - that there should be the possibility of some warning - like sickness - prior to death, to give him the chance to say a proper goodbye. 

And perhaps to prepare mentally for death?

Once he is granted that request, that new way of dying becomes part of the natural order. 

Illness became a blessing and death became dignified.

One more question for your table: If you could choose the circumstances of your own death (hopefully not for a long, long time!), how would you want it to be? 

Shabbat Shalom,

Alexander Seinfeld

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The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm shift in spiritual and moral education to enable every human being to access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.

Lazy Days?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

December 22-23, 2023 • 11 Teves 5784 • Vayigash (Gen 44-47). 

The purpose of this blog is to foster energetic conversation at the Shabbat table ... please forward/print/share.

Is it a mitzvah to conquer worry and anxiety? Check out the new link on TorahHealth.org.

Lazy Days?

Opening question for your table: Who knows what major event occurred last night at 10:30 pm EST?

Give up? Here's a hint: it was celestial...

Before we reveal the answer, here's a story.

This past Sunday, I received a surprise and very brief phone call from a certain rabbi. It went like this:

— I just want to thank you!
— You're welcome! For what?
— Thanks to you, for the first time in many decades, I didn't eat a single donut on Chanukah — and I didn't miss it at all!

Wow, I kvell.

You see, outreach to rabbis is a part of our strategy to correct the course of the great ship of Jewish food culture. Here in Baltimore, a generous donor sponsored gifting copies to 50 local rabbis and school principals. 

(If you would like to foster a similar program in your community, send me an email.)

So last Friday, after faithfully sending your Table Talk email (about not letting Chanukah end - remember?), your Faithful Correspondent hopped in the car and delivered copies of Body & Soul to local rabbis and principals with a humble request: please consider choosing at least one way to publicly and consistently be a role model for this mitzvah.

Now, I know that a few rabbis are on this weekly email list, but to those who are not Jewish leaders, what's your role and responsibility?

Let's circle back to the first question above – what momentous celestial event occurred last night?

The answer is winter solstice - when the sun finally stops retreating to the south and starts migrating north again. Which means we're currently at the shortest day of the year up here and the longest day Down Under.

And in six months, we'll be at summer solstice - the longest day of the year.

The solstice inspires me to ask you this question, designed to stimulate your thoughts about your own response and responsibility.

Which of those two solstice days would you say is lazier? Do you feel lazier during the colder, longer nights, or during the warmer, longer days? 

I know at least one person's answer: also on Sunday this week, I asked someone I know to be an avid cyclist  what he does for exercise during the winter? Answer: nothing. He'll go literally months without exercise, until it warms up again. 

As I've said in a recent Instagram and video, sometimes slowing down is anti-lazy. But at other times (longer version) we perhaps need to push ourselves.

Final question for your table - what's the right balance?

Shabbat Shalom,

Alexander Seinfeld

Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers! Like it, tweet it,  email it....

The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm shift in spiritual and moral education to enable every human being to access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.

Don't Let Chanukah End!

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

December 15-16, 2023 • 4 Teves 5784 • Mikeitz (Gen 41-44). 

The purpose of this blog is to beautify Shabbat table conversation ... please print & share.

Last day to get our special TorahHealth.org Chanukah download.

Here's a three-pete of the theme of "learning from everyone"...

(We began two weeks ago with Christopher Hitchens and last week added the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn.)

This week: the dastardly Greeks!

First question for your table, What can we learn from the Greeks?

Today is of course the climactic eighth day of Chanukah - "Zos Chanukah" - when we can lock in the potentiality of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot which are all "sevens" at the level of Simchas Torah which is an "eight"....

What in the world does that mean, you ask? 

There is a big myth about Chanukah that it's about our triumph over Hellenism. 

Judaism good, Hellenism bad. We won, they lost, let's eat latkes.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong....

Hellenism is not only good, it's necessary. 

Here's a good Jewish vocab term to share with your table: hidur - pronounced "hee-dure".

It means beautification.

There is a mitzvah to do every mitzvah with a hidur. That is, to do it in a beautiful way. When you light Menorah, use the nicest menorah you can afford. When you give tzedakah, give it with a smile and kind word. When you build a guest room, make it handicap accessible. 

Get the picture? This is the way Jews incorporates the seven into our eightness.

Don't shun the seven, let it shine - but don't let the seven (the physical beauty) be your end, it's an agent to achieve the eight (the spiritual purpose of every mitzvah). 

Challenge question for your table: Name one mitzvah that you do every day that you could do with more hidur? 

Happy Zos Chanukah and

Shabbat Shalom,

Alexander Seinfeld

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The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm shift in spiritual and moral education to enable every human being to access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.

Poison Ivy?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfel

December 8-9, 2023 • 26 Kislev 5784 • VaYeishev (Gen 37-40). 

The purpose of this blog is to foster colorful conversation at the Friday night dinner table ... please forward/print/share.

Happy Chanukah! Check out our Hannukah page at BestJewishKidsBooks.com

And check out our Chanukah special download at TorahHealth.org.

Do you remember last week when I quoted the controverisal Mr. Hitchens — because "a wise person learns from everyone" (Talmud).

On that theme, here's an opening question for your table: 

What can we learn from the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn?

Hat-tip to Rep. Elise Sefanik holding three Ivy League college presidents' feet to the fire.

(Yes, I know that MIT isn't an Ivy, but it might as well be.)  

But here's the follow-up questions I wish she had asked:

If a group of students dressed up like the KKK and marched through campus chanting for black women to be lynched, would that be allowed, prohibited, or would it depend on context?

What if they chanted for women to be raped, would that be allowed, prohibited, or would it depend on context?

What if they called for the destruction of Asians, or Arabs or any other group in the world besides Jews?

(It's also too bad they didn't call in many other college presidents who should be held accountable for blatant antisemitism on campus from Yale to UNC and everywhere i.

Maybe we should learn from Harvard President Claudine Gay and take a peek at some context.

In my first job after college I was surrounded by all kinds of Christians — Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists and even a few Witnesses. I remember being struck by the seriousness and sincerity of these folks' faith - they studied their religious texts, believed deeply, and carried their faith openly wherever they went. Their religiosity was a far cry from the Judaism I had grown up with, which was joyful ritual, but very much limited to those rituals. I certainly can't recall my parents or any adults every discussing how the Torah might inform business ethics etc., let alone attending regular Torah study.

It seems to me that the great mistake of Hamas's non-Moslems supporters is the very common human fallacy known as projecting: "I assume that you must be more-or-less similar to me. All humans are basically good, and if we give you freedom and dignity, you'll stop fighting."

A liberal who projects liberal values onto others despite evidence to the contrary simply cannot believe that there are actually people in this world who are that evil; Hamas must be a legitimate political struggle, not a religious-ideological one. It cannot be that these Hamas guys - mimicing their patron, Iran - really mean it when they say that they intend to make the Land of Israel Judenrein and from there lead a worldwide Islamic movement to convert or kill every non-Moslem human being on the planet.

Their statements and actions are 100 percent consistent with the proposition that they actually believe this, and any peaceful offers they make are actually a strategem of deception or taqiya toward their stated goal. 

For the Harvard president, the possibilty that Hamas really wants to destroy Harvard and its faculty and students (unless they convert to Islam of course) is so crazy an idea and so remote a possibility that it's easy to dismiss and just regard this as hyperbole in a poitical struggle.

Easy to say when the rockets can't reach you... yet...

(In case you didn't hear, they appear to be receiving weapons from their buddies in North Korea. Can you imagine what could be unleashed on the world were the Palestinians to have their own sovereign state?)

There were an estimated 30,000 Hamas fighters at the start of this war. That's a about 1.5 percent of the Gaza population. If that rate of conversion to terrorism were applied to worldwide Islam, we'd be looking at nearly 30 million committed terrorists worldwide. That's a lot of people who could do a lot of damage. Even 1/10 of that is frightening. Was Hitchens right, that "the worst is yet to come?"

So then, now what? Wither Harvard? 

Final question for your table: Are these elite college presidents morally vacant? Antisemitic? Brain-washed? All of the above? 

Happy Chanukah and

Shabbat Shalom,

Alexander Seinfeld


PS - Check out our Hannukah page at BestJewishKidsBooks.com

Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers! Like it, tweet it,  email it....

The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm shift in spiritual and moral education to enable every human being to access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.

Was Hitchens Right?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

December 1-2, 2023 • 19 Kislev 5784 • VaYishlach (Gen 32-36). 

The purpose of this blog is to foster a unblur distinctions at the Friday night dinner table ... please forward/print/share.

Check out our Hannukah page at BestJewishKidsBooks.com

The late British author Christopher Hitchens had a take on antisemitism that you rarely hear.

Hitchens was beloved by many because he was very smart.

But smart obviously doesn't mean right, and some may dislike my quoting him. His strength of distilling a nuanced and complex into its essence often blurred or outright ignored important distinctions and often asserted controversial opinions as established fact.

(For instance, he apparently never read his contemporary compatriot rhyming namesake Kenneth Kitchen's essential book.)

But in the spirit of the Talmudic value of learning from everyone - here is a quotation that in itself is great material for a Shabbat table discussion.

In 2007 Hitchens said,

If the Nazarine preacher from Galilee really existed, there's no question whom he met first: the Jewish People; he came from their tradition. If the prophet Mohammed really ever existed, the first encounter he had was with Jewish people. The Jews took a look at both of these guys and said, "No, this is not the Messiah, this is not the Redeemer, we reject him."

Do you suppose they're ever going to be forgiving for it? Of course not, of course not. There isn't a Christian or a Muslim in the world (the serious kind) who wouldn't give everything they owned for some face-time with either Jesus or Mohammed. It would have to be the thing they most wanted to do. They must want it the same as I would like to meet Shakespeare or George Elliot. It must be the most important thing to them. And only one people - the same in both cases - met their false prophet. And in both cases they turned away and said, "This isn't genuine." You think that's going to be forgiven? No. Do you think this has led to a huge go-round of violence and heresy-hunting and fascism and genocide? Yes. Do you think it's over yet? Better not believe that. The worst is yet to come. They're never going to forgive it.  

(Here is a 23-minute clip of his speech at UCLA where he speaks about antisemitism and related topics. Here is a 2011 article he wrote for the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.)

There you have it. For your table: Was Hitchens right?

Second question: Does his take on antisemitism have anything to say about Chanukah?

Shabbat Shalom,

and Happy Chanukah!

Alexander Seinfeld

PS - Check out our Hannukah page at BestJewishKidsBooks.com

Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers! Like it, tweet it,  email it....

The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm shift in spiritual and moral education to enable every human being to access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.