Pop's Senior Moment?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

June 28-20, 2024 • 23 Sivan 5784 • Shelach (Num 13-15).

The goal of this blog is a memorable Shabbat table ... please share.

In honor of my grandparents' yahrzeits last week (and senior citizenship being in the news this week), perhaps it's time to retell a favorite story about each of my paternal grandparents.

Here are two anecdotes that inspired me and that I hope will inspire you and your table.

First, grandma. We called her Gigi. She had this small, well-appointed writing desk that she used for letter-writing and newspaper clipping.

The letters and clippings went hand-in-hand.

You see, there were three reasons Gigi would write a letter:

- To say Thank You
- To say Happy Birthday
- To share a newspaper clipping of interest.

She was so meticulous about the first two that she always had a checklist of people she needed to write to or send birthday greetings to. 

But the third item - sending newspaper clippings - was just her way of saying, "Thinking of you!" 

It's such a kind and loving action that takes a bit of time, but not too much, and so easy to emulate now that our news is digitized.

Perhaps that's the ultimate use of the Share button - not to spam your network or friends or family with the clipping, rather to share it with one person only, just to say, "Thinking of you!"

The anecdote about my grandfather, whom we called Pop, occurred about a month before I began college.

They came by for a random Sunday visit as they often did, and Pop cornered me to give me some grandfatherly wisdom, as he often did.

"I have one word of advice for you before you go to college."

"One word?"

"One word." 

(I felt like my life had become a movie. This was momentous, a scene that I'd be able to tell my own children about!)

"Don't take courses in college."

<BIG PAUSE>

(Umm... are we having a senior moment Pop, or is there going to be a punchline?)

He looks me in the eye with a smile: "Take teachers. With an interesting subject but a lousy teacher, you won't learn anything. But even with a boring subject but an excellent teacher, you'll learn everything."

He was, of course, 100 percent right. Whenever I followed his advice, I learned everything, and when I didn't (or couldn't), I learned very little.

In my experience, this wisdom applies to any subject, including Torah.

Pop was born 113 years ago, the son of immigrants from Galicia. Many life experiences fueled a natural wisdom that the Torah says everyone achieves by age 70. But some seem more able to articulate it than others.

Question for your table - When a child goes off to college, they are for sure going to encounter articulate, persuasive teachers whose moral alignment is let's say "different" from the parents. Why are some young people more impressionable and vulnerable to such influence than others?


Shabbat Shalom 

PS - Want to know how you can improve your mind and memory and slow or even stop cognitive decline? Click the image above and get that book.

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

Would You WANT to Be a Prophet?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

June 21-22, 2024 • 16 Sivan 5784 • Behalosecha (Num 8-12).

The goal of this blog is a prophetic Shabbat table ... please share.
Congrats to all the recent grads! Happy birthday shoutout to Elliott and Gina!
In memory of my grandparents, Eliezer ben Zelig and Sima bas Mordechai Yaakov (Les and Sylvia Seinfeld), whose yahrzeits were observed this week.

As I asked last week, since Rosh Hashana is months away, is too soon to start waking-up?

What's stopping us?

Try this question at your table: Did someone ever knock on your door to offer you a new religion?

I'm guessing that this has happened to most people at least once.

I suppose these people must have some success sometimes? But I've never heard of anyone who accepted the offer. Have you?

Why not?

Presumably, most people don't consider converting unless they're unhappy with the status quo.

That's the same reason that people don't start taking care of their health until they get sick.

But there's an even more important reason - the price is too steep.

Ironically, people will be willing to pay any financial price to be happy, but they're not willing to pay the ultimate price.

They will sell assets, borrow from friends and family, do whatever they can to buy happiness or health.

But they won't do the one most important thing you can do to improve your health or happiness: change yourself. Change your habits. 

Not just your physical habits. Also your mental habits.

Perhaps a key to motivating true change is in this week's Torah portion. 

In my opinion, the parshah includes one of the most profound lessons in the entire Torah on the present topic.

During the tenure of Moshe (Moses), two men - Eldad and Medad - become prophets and start prophesizing. 

This is apparently unexpected and unusual and Moshe's disciple Joshua is upset at this apparent chuzpah and asks Moshe to stop them.

Question for your table: How would you expect Moshe to respond?

Moshe's reply is a bombshell:

"You misunderstand prophecy. I don't have a monopoly on it. The goal of Judaism is for every person to become a prophet!"

Hear this lesson - it's the absolute key to changing yourself and your life - whether it be in matters of health, relationships, enterprise or creativity: you have to have a vision of what you can become, of the person you have the potential to be. 

Your potential is likely far higher than you think. You have greatness inside you waiting to come out. Inside you is a more disciplined person. A more loving person. A more generous person. A more patient person. A happier person. Don't lose sight of that!

Inside of you is a prophetic person!

But this is a serious question for your table: Would you WANT to be a prophet?


"Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."

(Anyone remember who said that?)


Shabbat Shalom 

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

Summertime, Living Is Holy....?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

June 14-15, 2024 • 9 Sivan 5784 • Naso (Num 4-7).

The goal of this blog is for a down-to-earth Shabbat table ... please share.

Last week was about the stars. This week, back down to earth.

Here we are with nearly four months until Rosh Hashanah. (Check out our countdown.)

Time to go to sleep, Jewishly speaking?

How can you up your game for the summer?

A couple ideas....

Idea #1 - This morning I received a phone call from someone who saw Body & Soul at someone's home and realized he and his family need it, he wanted to know where to find it. I suggested his local Jewish bookstore. (:-)> 

But obviously you can also get it online. 

There are 25 chapters - read one a week and that will get you all the way through the High Holidays.

Idea #2 - Shoot me an email and let me pitch to you my new program of Body & Soul "chizuk" groups for family, friends, or co-workers.

Idea #3 - Browse the excellent books for all ages at bestjewishbooks.com, another compelling not-for-profit project of yours, truly.
 

Question for your table - By the end of the summer, what would you rather be able to say:

(a) I relaxed.
(b) I learned something new or became wiser.
(c) Both of the above.
(d) None of the above.

Shabbat Shalom 

(The image above is a famous picture of Rav Moshe Feinstein at a summer camp in the Catskills.)

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

Can You Count Them?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

June 7-8, 2024 • 2 Sivan 5784 • BaMidbar (Num 1-4).

The goal of this blog is for a stellar Shabbat table ... please share.

Imagine a project at Harvard to convene the greatest scholars in every field over a period of several hundred years in order to create an encyclopedia of their collective knowledge. Who wouldn't want to see the final product?

This is the Talmud: a unique collection of wisdom that would surprise experts in any discipline, including law, ethics, psychology and economics. In the realm of cosmology, too, the Talmud makes assertions -- sometimes literal, sometimes metaphoric, and sometimes both.

To give one example, consider the Talmudic estimate of the number and distribution of stars in the universe.

In order to appreciate this passage, bear in mind two things.

First, the vast bulk of Talmudic wisdom is claimed to be a transmitted tradition, from Moses to Joshua, to the prophets, to the Elders, to the Great Assembly, and then to a chain of scholars until the completion of the Talmud 1,500 years ago. Hence it is called the Oral Torah.

Second, we need to appreciate the limitations of science 1,500 years ago: the telescope was invented in the 16th century and the number of stars visible to the naked eye is approximately 9,000.

So what did these ancient rabbis say about the number of stars?

In Tractate Berachot, page 32b, the Talmud records a tradition in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish that there are roughly 10¹⁸ stars in the universe. This number is remarkably big and much closer to the current scientific consensus of 10²² than common sense would allow.

Now, although it is interesting for an ancient people to have such a large estimate, this single coincidence could perhaps be explained as an extremely lucky guess. Never mind that no other ancient people had an estimate anywhere near this order of magnitude, nor did they have a conventional way to write such a number. (When I queried a chat-group of professional astronomers, none could identify a single other ancient culture with remotely similar numbers.)

 

However, the Talmud relates more than a raw number. The passage explains that the distribution of stars throughout the cosmos is neither even nor random. Rather, it states that they are clustered in groups of billions of stars (what we today call galaxies), which themselves are clustered into groups (what astronomers call galactic clusters), which in turn are in mega-groups (what we call superclusters).

To describe the stars as clustered together, both locally and in clusters of clusters, was far beyond the imagination and the telescopes of scientists until Edwin Hubble's famous photographs of Andromeda in the 1920s. Galactic clusters and superclusters have been described only in the past decade or so. Moreover, the Talmud states that the number of galaxies in a cluster is about 30. And by coincidence, astronomers today set the number of galaxies in our own local cluster at about 30!

(OK, that latter point needs a footnote....In recent years, astronomers have discovered “ultra-faint” dwarf galaxies in our local group, so the official number of galaxies in our group is presently 54. Some of these are not clearly “galaxies”, such as Andromeda VIII; some are visible to the naked eye while others are invisible to all but the best telescopes. The term “local group” was coined by astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1936 and originally included 12 galaxies. Today, astronomers now recognize that 31 of these “local group” galaxies are satellites of our Milky Way galaxy. It seems to me that exact number is less relevant than the remarkable fact that the fractal pattern described in the Talmud is indeed what we observe with modern telescopes.)

Further, the Talmud adds that the superclusters consist of about 30 clusters each, and that superclusters are themselves grouped into a bigger pattern of about 30 (megasuperclusters?) of which the universe has a total of about 360. Thus, the Talmud appears consistent with one major theory that the overall structure of the universe is shaped by the rules of fractal mathematics. I've shown this data to numerous astronomers around the world and the consensus are pure astonishment.

Could it be that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish made an extremely lucky guess? That might be plausible if he had used a number that had symbolic significance in Judaism, such as seven, 10, 18 or 40. What is the significance of the number 30? To my knowledge, there is no spiritual or religious reason for choosing that number. It therefore seems to be exactly what it claims to be: a conscientious oral transmission of a received tradition, not simply one person's guesstimate.

Moreover, the Talmud singles out Rabbi Shimon among the many rabbis of the Talmud as having a distinctive reputation for impeccable honesty; it is unthinkable that he would have invented these numbers or guessed without telling us so. The clear intent of the passage is to convey an oral tradition.

You are now in on the secret of Shavuot: There is something special about the Torah (and rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated!). The Torah is much, much more than a mere "cultural expression" of one tiny group of ancient people, so numerically small that we reminded Mark Twain of a "nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way."

This passage about the stars is a mere five Talmudic lines, itself about as significant as a puff of star dust. But it also hints to the treasures available to those who seek them. Shavuot (next Tuesday night) is a great time to begin

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach


(Yes, the image is clickable - try it, you won't be disappointed!)

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