Shabbat Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld
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Greetings from Toronto!
The flight path yesterday took us over beautiful Lake Ontario.
That name is actually a funny redundancy - "Ontario" literally means "beautiful lake."
But I suppose if you don't speak Huron or Wendat or Wyandat then it's just a name.
In classical Hebrew, there's no such thing as "just a name." Your Hebrew name is connected to your soul and its mission in this world.
In other words, if you know your Hebrew name, then you have the most important clue to your life mission.
We have a tradition that after a person leaves this world and goes before the Evaluation Committee to see how they did in this lifetime, the first question asked is, "What's your name?"
Unfortunately, many people are unable to answer that very basic question, making their appearance in that Heavenly Court quite.... uncomfortable, shall we say.
Regardless of your name, there's are some universals that I can say we are all meant to achieve in our lifetime, including being "courteous, kind and forgiving" etc.
Regardless of your mission, there is a universal challenge that I call the "half-cup test."
I refer to the cliche - an optimist sees a cup as half-full, a pessimist sees it as half-empty.
You can try this at your Shabbat table - fill a cup to fifty percent and ask everyone at the table, Do you see this cup as half full or half empty?
Now for the punchline: It's neither. The happiest people in the world look at such a cup and say, "It's full."
The good news is, if your gut reaction is "half full" or even "half empty", and you want to be a "It's full" type of person, you can change your thinking. It takes daily work - every time you are feeling hopeful about the future, or even feeling a lack, train yourself to pause and appreciate all that you have right now. Become a my-cup-is-full type of person.
Shabbat Shalom
PS - Here's my photo of Lake Beautiful Lake - what do you think? Aptly named?
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