Wheel of Fortune.... How does it turn?

The goal of this blog is to not leave the Friday night table talk to chance.... Please share.
In memory of Moshe Simcha Moskowitz and wishing a speedy recovery to Tamar Adina bas Kayna Shulamis.

A horrific accident this week.

A mother and her son drop older sister off at the airport, going to Israel to study. What a happy goodbye!

On the way back, in front of her is a disabled vehicle on the highway - she slows down, but the semi behind her does not slow down and rams her into the stalled vehicle.

How long it took first responders to arrive, who knows and who wants to know. Both mother and son were airlifted to separate hospitals in DC.

The mother is presently in ICU, fighting for her life.

The son - a 13-year-old in our son's school - did not make it.

The funeral was yesterday.

It looked like the entire Jewish community was there. Not only were all 600 seats filled in the huge sanctuary, so was every foot of the standing room, so was the overflow room, spilling out into the hallways and the foyer.

First question for your table: Was it because the parents are well known and loved?

But speaker after speaker told of how special this boy was. His name was Moshe Simcha - and he was always happy (simcha means happiness). He wasn't an extroverted, joking kid. He was mild-mannered, soft-spoken, but extremely friendly and even more than friendly, he was helpful.

His seventh-grade teacher said, "You know those days when you come in to school and you really need a coffee but you don't have time because you have to go copy your handout? Moshe would make sure you had a coffee on your desk and the copies made before you even had a chance to ask him for help."

His father said, "At home, he was always asking, 'What can I do to help?'"

It seems that he had perfected the mitzvah of honoring your parents.

 
Other kids loved him, because he was super nice to everyone, of all ages.

Our son called him "really nice". (That is a very rare compliment.)

He was a fighter - he didn't let diabetes stop him from training for and completing a 120-mile bike-a-thon to raise money to help disabled kids go to camp.

He was a learner - he recently asked his father if they could spend five minutes a day learning together the laws of lashon hara. Why? "Because it's really important and I don't think I know it well enough."

His father, a beloved first-grade teacher, said, "Moshe taught us all something. He was a teacher - a rebbe - to all of us."

Even those of us who never met him.

(Even those of us who merely read about him in an email?)

His family ask:

• In his memory, that we aspire to emulate him;
• As a collective "prayer" for his mother, that we light Shabbat candles five minutes early today.

Hence I share the story with you, and ask you to forward it to everyone you love.

Second question for your table: What's a greater tragedy - a meaningful life cut short at 13, or a long, healthy life without meaning or mission?


Shabbat Shalom


PS - After 2,500 years, there is finally a new way to play dreidel. Click on the image above.

Like this post? How about putting your gelt where your gab is: Like it, tweet it, or just forward it.

What do you do when things go horribly wrong?

The purpose of this blog is to help you get your head out of the sand. Please print and share.

Originally this was going to be a very short email:

"Sewage backup this week. Life is good. Shabbat Shalom."

After this week's journey, that's really all that I had in me to write.

But as I was about to send it, the following story appeared in my inbox.

It shows the power of one. It shows the power of vision. It shows the power of perseverence. It shows how a tragedy can lead to blessing.

And it shows the importance of putting life's challenges into the right perspective.

Alisa Flatow grew up in West Orange, NJ and attended Brandeis University in the mid-1990s.

She chose to spend the spring semester of 1995 studying in Jerusalem. On April 9, a Sunday morning, she and her roommates hopped on a bus to visit the beach resort in Gaza.

This was soon after the Oslo accords, and Gaza was still under Israeli control. It seems unfathomable now, but people used to vacation in Gaza at the beach resorts.

En route to the beach, a man rammed the bus with his van. As the collision occurred, he flipped a switch on the steering column which detonated a bomb. Seven Jews on the bus were killed.

53 others on the bus were wounded, including Alisa. The van was filled with shrapnel that exploded through the windows of the bus and struck her head. She was unconscious, but her body was unharmed.

The doctors called her father in America and told him to come right away. When he landed in Ben Gurion airport, government agents met him on the runway, and escorted him straight from the plane to the hospital.

By the time he arrived, Alisa was brain-dead. The doctors offered their condolences and asked the father if he would be willing to donate her organs.

This was not a simple question. The Flatow family was Orthodox and observant. It was not customary for Orthodox Jews to donate organs, and they were not sure it was allowed by Jewish law. So the parents called their rabbi and asked what to do. He told them to donate the organs, and so they did.

That single act became a sensation in Israel.

Background: there is much in Jewish law and custom that would discourage organ donation.


It has been our longstanding tradition to treat a dead body as sacred. Our custom is to watch over it, cleanse it, and prepare it carefully for burial. The body is buried whole and unaltered. That is why rabbinic authorities have generally discouraged autopsies.

But organ donation is special. It presents the opportunity to save a life. In Jewish law, the saving of a human life takes special precedence. You can violate just about all the other commandments if you can save a life. Therefore, some believe that Jewish law not only allows organ donation, it requires it.

The problem was that most Jews in Israel were not aware of this. The rates of organ donation were extraordinarily low. Israel was part of a European consortium of organ sharing nations, but was suspended because too few Israelis were registered donors. It was a stunning irony for a nation famous as an innovator of advanced medical technologies. The problem was that Israelis knew about the tradition of burying a body whole; they were not so aware that their rabbis allowed organ donation.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, various medical groups and the government in Israel tried to educate the public, but nothing worked. Organ donation rates were terribly low. People were desperate for organs, but few were donating. It just wasn’t what people did.

And then the Flatows offered their daughter’s organs to the people of Israel. The news made headlines in every newspaper throughout the nation. Her heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, pancreas, and corneas were able to save six lives in Israel. Notably, at least one of the recipients was Arab Palestinian. The people of Israel were amazed, and grateful. They had felt so alone in suffering against terrorism, and here this family from America made such a gesture. They felt that the world Jewish community was with them. We were one.

Days later, Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin came to Washington DC and addressed a gathering of 12,000 American supporters of Israel. He warned about the danger of radical Islam and the role of Iran in sponsoring it worldwide. He also spoke about what Alisa’s gift meant to the Israeli people: “Today, her heart beats in Jerusalem.”

After Alisa’s death, the Flatows lives were shattered. Alisa’s mother withdrew into herself and her home. But her father Stephen decided to take action. He wanted justice. It was widely reported that the State of Iran was the sponsor and financial backer of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It angered him that there were no consequences for Iran. They had funded his daughter’s murderers, and no one was doing anything about it. The bomber himself was killed. The terrorist ring was being pursued by Israel. Stephen Flatow decided to take it upon himself to go after Iran.

A lawyer by training, he sought justice through the courts. He had an idea. If he and other victims of terror could file suit against Iran, they could exact punishment on the regime. They would make it costly for states to sponsor terror, and then maybe Iran would think twice about doing it again.

But there was a problem. United States law did not allow private citizens to sue foreign governments. It was expressly forbidden. So Stephen Flatow went to Washington to change the law. His senator, Frank Lautenberg, happened to be in Israel at the time of Alisa’s death. He took a special interest in her family and drafted legislation. Flatow testified before congress, and even gained the backing of President Clinton. Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996 to make an exception to the longstanding rule. In cases of state-sponsored terror, individual US citizens could sue foreign nations for damages in US courts. It was the first victory.

It did not last. The courts threw it out. So back to Washington he went for a new law, one written specifically to override the objections of the court.

Once again he sued the state of Iran in a US court. But his time, one of his allies became an adversary. The Clinton administration began to see Flatow as interfering in national diplomacy. The White House was against Iran, but they did not want Flatow dictating the terms. So the U.S. Department of Justice intervened in the case, and actually filed a brief in support of Iran and against the victims of terror. Once more, Flatow returned to Congress and this time he got a third law that gave citizens even more strength to sue foreign governments, this time with teeth.

Finally, in 1997, he received his judgment. A court ruled in favor of the Flatows and against Iran. The family was awarded $26 million in compensatory damages, and over $200 million in punitive damages.

But the issue was hardly over. How do you collect money from a rogue state? They weren’t paying. Stephen Flatow devised a plan. Since the United States had ended diplomatic ties with Iran following the rise of the Ayatollah, the Iranian embassy in Washington and the residence of the Iranian ambassador have been in control of the United States Government. The State Department holds them in trust with the goal of returning them to Iran someday when relations resume. Stephen Flatow now had a ruling that said the Iranian government owed him $247 million.

He sought possession of the embassy and the residence, property owned by Iran. The State Department refused. They feared that if the United States confiscated sovereign property here, our embassies and properties abroad would become threatened. So instead, they paid Flatow $20 million from US funds with the understanding that the United States would collect that money from Iran someday.

Stephen Flatow was furious. His goal was not to get money. His goal was to make Iran pay so they would stop sponsoring terror. He had won in court and he had received money, but Iran had still not paid one cent.

And this leads to the third chapter of this amazing saga. Stephen Flatow did not give up. He began to look for other assets in the United States that were owned by the government of Iran. Officially, there were none. United States sanctions prohibited Iran from doing any business in the United States, or for anyone to do business with Iran in the United States. But Flatow had suspicions that a charitable foundation in New York was actually a front, laundering money for the Iranian regime.

Why would the Iranians funnel their money through New York? Because the financial exchanges are there, and you can’t get anything done internationally without going through New York’s markets. Iran’s economy, its nuclear weapons development, its sponsorship of Hezbollah and other jihadists groups – all required moving money across currencies. They needed a secret foothold in New York. The Alavi Foundation was established decades ago by the Shah to promote Iranian culture abroad. It owned a gleaming skyscraper on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, between Rockefeller Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Ivan Boesky used to office there. Stephen Flatow did a lot of digging, and then filed papers in court demonstrating that the foundation and the building were secretly operated by the Iranian government. And if they belonged to the state of Iran, they were subject to his financial ruling.

(Note: the Government of Iran has a different opinion.)

Stephen Flatow’s case was a civil matter, but it came to the attention of a young analyst sitting in a cubicle at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. If what Flatow was saying was true, there was some serious criminal wrongdoing going on. That young analyst’s name was Eitan Arusy. Before he starting working for the District Attorney, he served in the Israel Defense Force as a spokesman. He was one of the first responders to the scene of the carnage on the day that Alisa Flatow’s bus was bombed. He had a special interest in the case. The district attorney’s office did their own digging, and came to the same conclusion as Flatow – the Alavi Foundation was actually a front for Bank Melli, the State of Iran’s government-owned national bank. But how did the Iranians do it? How did they get their money in and out of the United States?

The district attorney’s office soon discovered that two European Banks, Credit Suisse and Lloyds of London, were moving money and falsifying documents for the Iranians. When the FBI raided the records of the charity, they found vast deposits from Credit Suisse and Lloyds. The banks cooperated with investigators. They provided emails and memos detailing how they took Iranian money and sent it to the United States in their own names. Without admitting guilt, Lloyds agreed to pay a fine of $350 million, and Credit Suisse $536 million.

They were not alone. It was soon discovered that most of the major European banks were laundering money for the Iranians into the United States, in direct violation of US law. Barclays Bank settled in 2010, paying the United States $298 million. In 2012, ING, Standard Chartered, and HSBC also settled. HSBC agreed to pay $1.9 billion.

Flatow wasn't exactly floored by these tiny settlements.

Then came the big one. While all these banks were making deals with the US government, two employees of BNP Paribas became whistleblowers. They shared with investigators that their bank had laundered tens of billions of dollars of Iranian money. They had also laundered money for Sudan while its regime was committing genocide. BNP is the largest bank in France. This summer you may have seen the news. BNP became the first bank to admit guilt in laundering money for the Iranian government. They agreed to pay $8.9 billion in fines to the United States. It was far and away the largest penalty ever paid by a bank in history.

The New York Times headline said it best: “A Grieving Father Pulls a Thread that Unravels BNP’s Illegal Deals”. A dad lost his girl. The hole in his life will never be filled. He thinks about her every day. He never gives up. He is a small-time attorney doing title work in New Jersey.

But his tenacity and his grit and his smarts were beyond anyone’s estimation. This one man in New Jersey uncovered an international conspiracy of bank fraud

The story is not over. Stephen Flatow is not done. The man who instantly changed the culture of organ donation is Israel is trying to do the same here in America. He takes every opportunity to speak to Orthodox congregations to encourage organ donation. Though the rate of donation consent in America is strong at 60%, the rate among Flatow’s fellow Orthodox Jews is only 5%.

He is on a mission to change that. He and his wife have also established a foundation in Alisa’s name. They sponsor young Jewish women from around the world to take a semester of study in Jerusalem. The money they have received in their fight against Iran is now sponsoring women’s Torah study and the vitality of the State of Israel.

Flatow has also become a credible voice speaking truth to power, such as in this anti-Netanyahu op-ed.

And, in the months ahead, he may finally achieve his goal of making Iran actually pay. A federal judge has the ruled that the assets of the Alavi Foundation be liquidated. The gleaming office tower in New York and other properties around America will be sold and the proceeds will go to the victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism. That will be Iranian money. Finally, Iran will pay a price.

All of this because of one man who never quit.

Sort of puts a sewage backup in your basement into perspective, doesn't it?


What do YOU do when things go wrong? Even horribly wrong?
 
Shabbat Shalom

PS - It is time to start thinking about Pesach - 3 weeks! Browse books and toys here and don't forget the Art of Amazement Haggada — Leader's Edition. You can download a preview here.

Sandy Hook: Blame the Maya?

The goal of Table talk is to turn the Friday night dinner table into Shabbat experience. Please print and share.

20 Sandy Hook Teddy Bears

Someone asked me the other day if I was going to write about Sandy Hook Elementary School.

To be honest, I wasn’t.

What more can I offer for your table talk that hasn’t already been offered?

Half of the victims have yet to be buried; emotions are too raw. Words of comfort are what are needed.

There are no words. Maybe hugs.

But he insisted that you, dear reader, would want a table talk on this theme.

As I have noted in the wake of other calamities like the earthquakes in China, Haiti, and Japan, the daily level of human suffering in the world is high.

Since last Friday’s massacre, approximately 50 American children were killed with handguns.

Some of them are accidental, like the father who accidentally shot and killed his seven-year-old son in the gun store parking lot.

Today, some 16,000 young children died of starvation. Oh, and yesterday too. And the day before that.

Vibrant young Americans continue to return in body bags from Afghanistan, more than one per day, yet their photos never appear on the first page of the newspaper. Most of them don’t even appear on any page of the newspaper. (If you'd like to do the media's job and know their names, bookmark this page. If you want to gaze into their eyes, click here.)

American bombs – sent with your dollar and by your government – accidentally kill and maim  thousands of women, children and other innocents in Afghanistan, but we don’t see their pix or hear their names on NPR. Here's a site that tries to humanize this tragedy.

Yet unlike these daily tragedies, our collective grief for the angels of Sandy Hook reached such a level that Newtown had to open a special branch of the post office to handle the influx of care packages.

We’ve got big problems, but together, we have the wealth and knowledge to end hunger, eradicate many diseases and reduce violence.

But our wealth and knowledge has to be mobilized. Otherwise we’re back to auto-pilot.

So here are three questions for your Shabbat table… and I’ll venture one suggestion below.

Q1 – Why wasn’t the Batman massacre enough to get us moving?
Q2 – Do you think Newtown might be the same – all too soon forgotten?
Q3 – If you were personally moved to action by Sandy Hook, what would it take to get you to stay awake and not slip back into business-as-usual?

Jewishly, there is simply ethic that – should you choose to adopt it – will guarantee that you will put your money where your mouth is.

The ethic is – if you are really serious about doing something to help repair the world – right here and now make one commitment.

Commit - out loud - to give X percent of your net income for the rest of your life to worthy causes.

10-20 percent is the recommended range, but if that's above your comfort level, start with less. But make that commitment in this rare moment of clarify.

It’s hard to do, right?!!!

But if you will just do it, you might just find that not only will you heal the world, you’ll heal yourself.

Teach this to the kids: When you get 10 bucks, a dollar goes to the charity of your choice.
As I wrote in May, 2008, I’ve never met someone who didn’t want to leave the world better off than we found it. Anyone who has ever loved a child wants to. So here's a fourth and hopefully uplifting question for your table:

Is life on earth getting worse, or is the world in balance getting better?


Shabbat Shalom  

(PS – volunteer time counts)

(PPS - One of our biggest needs is demonstrably in the area of education.... How did the Maya, an abhorrent civilization of warfare and human sacrifice, become a respected source of futurism? Or any other wisdom? Should this man have been protected from himself? How about this one? Finally, read this and weep.)

Harvesting Grapes

Four years ago I planted a couple stubby grape vines.

Four years later, they are HUGE, covering our entire deck in a giant embrace.

We have been staring at these luscious bunches, wondering when is the right time to harvest them?

The birds and bees have also taken notice, so the time to harvest got decided for us - now or never!

Yummmm. Sweet white grapes, sweet reds.

It was a long wait, those four years, but so worth it.

What a great way to pass the time on a summer day.

Yes, we know they're starving in Africa. We know that millions are unemployed. But to suckle a piece of fruit after four years of waiting, that's a sweet moment.

It's all going to end next Monday night.

"Next Monday night?" you ask....

If you have to ask, you have to read this.

Next Monday night is the 9th of Av

So what?

It takes enormous effort to connect with this holiday.

Even if you consider yourself "Jewishly connected".

Is it worth the effort?

Here's a story you can read at the table. See how people react.

Imagine the Taliban were to conquer America.

Would our lives really change that much?

Well, we can assume that they would move quickly to abolish Hollywood, destroy museums, dismantle universities. Probably convert all synagogues and churches into mosques.

Now just imagine that you join a few families on a boat to escape. You set sail for the South Pacific. You are hoping that the forces of Good will triumph, but in the meantime, you're saving your own skin. Nothing wrong with that.

But the forces of Good do not get the upper hand so quickly.

Not even in your lifetime.

Nor your children's lifetime.

Not even your grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

So your great-great-grandchildren are born on this South Pacific atoll, they have a decent life with plenty to eat and great surfing. They hear stories from their parents and grandparents about where the family came from, a place called Amerika where there were amazing cities, magical technologies, etc. etc. But that all this was destroyed by the Taliban.

It would be very hard for your great-great-grandchildren to relate to these stories as much more than legends.

That's what Jewish history is for us. We are so far removed from what was, we have almost no appreciation for what was lost.

Why bother?

Because when the Taliban are eventually overthrown, a boat will be coming to offer us passage back home. If we don't appreciate what we lost, we won't want to get on that boat.

Think about it.

The very best things in life often take years of toil and patience before they are ready for harvest.

Three things for your perusal:

1. Here is a packet of Tisha B'Av readings that I compiled for you. I've uploaded it to our jewishspirituality.net teacher-parent resources page.

2. Here is a class I gave in Los Angeles on the topic of how to find a silver lining in any tragedy.
99¢ link .... Free link

(Why a paid download alongside the free one? The first download is for those who recognize the costs incurred in creating and sending you this content and choose to support it. But there will be no hard feelings if you take the latter!)

3. Here is a video by the incomparable Charley Harary:


Shabbat Shalom

PS - Did you know you can send someone my amazing Jewish iphone/ipad app even if you don't use the iphone/ipad yourself? Here's the link.

For the biggest enjoyment of this email, try printing it out and sharing at your dinner table.

Five Years

In memory of Dovid ben Eliezer: tragedy, wisdom, greatness and Jerry Seinfeld

+ + + +

Five years ago yesterday, my father passed away.

He had been up on a ladder, trimming "one last branch", preparing the house for our visit a week later.

One leg of the 4-leg ladder was over the dirt. As you go up a ladder, your center of gravity moves towards the back. The right rear leg did not have solid ground under it to support his weight.

When my father died so suddenly, many hundreds of people felt that they had lost a father or a brother. They lost a person who was not just central to our lives, but essential to our lives and to the community. The shock we felt was the shock that someone would feel if he woke up without his left arm.

When people start talking about my dad, certain qualities come up again and again:

Personable
Professional
Empathetic
Zealous
Charitable
Easy-going
Humble

These are all words that described my father and probably only the tip of an iceberg. They were all true, and just about any anecdote you tell about him shows that.

In my father's memory, I'm going to focus over three weeks on three qualities that are not on the list, that you did not hear people say, but I think that when you hear the depth of the concepts, you will agree that this is who my father was, and what we should all strive to be.

My father had a very Talmudic way of discussion. He called it Socratic. But you know, he didn’t realize how very Jewish he was. (Or did he? The beard – so he claimed – was because it was so much easier than shaving every day — that’s what I claim too.)

So at his funeral, in my father's own Talmudic fashion, I asked the hundreds of mourners about these three qualities:

Was my father a wise man?
Was he a strong man?
Was he a rich man?

The first one’s easy to answer – climbed too high on a ladder? Mmm, no, not wise. Scratch that one off the list.

No really, what’s wisdom in the Talmudic sense, not according to Webster’s?

There were mourners that day, five years ago, who remembered him as a kid.

His 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Marsh, had a different perspective on his social skills, writing that he “could show more initiative and exercise leadership by looking ahead and anticipating situations,” in other words, he was short-sighted, not able to see the outcome of situations. However, Mrs. Marsh was also confident that he would develop those qualities as the elected class chairman….

By the spring, she reported that he indeed had.

The Talmud asks, “What does it mean to be wise?” and of course when a rabbi asks you that question, you know that the right answer is not “knowing a lot of stuff.”

The Talmud gives two answers.

The first is: “Someone who foresees the outcome.”

This ability was my father’s strong suit. He was the kind of person you love to have on your committee and you hate to have on your committee at the same time. You love to have him there because he asks the tough questions. You hate having him there because he asks the tough questions. He had not only the ability but the all-important tenacity to ask the tough questions, to push us – believe you me, his children included – to consider all the possible outcomes. He taught this to us, and those who were good disciples learned to do so naturally.

The Talmud’s second definition of wisdom: Someone who learns from every other person.

It’s a remarkable statement, if you understand Hebrew. The language is clear, it doesn’t mean every other man, nor every other Jew, nor every other adult: it means every other human being.

Is there a better description of my father’s relationship toward other human beings?

All he wanted from people was to hear their ideas, their beliefs, their hopes and dreams – from the elderly to young children. My father was a feminist before anyone talked about feminism (although I suspect he may have picked some of this up from someone he met in college), he was the trailblazer whose equal treatment of others was so natural to himself that it disarmed you if you weren’t used to it. Even when two of his children went by Tacoma standards completely nuts, if he was judgmental, he kept it to himself, he certainly didn’t ever make us feel ashamed of having chosen a different path than his own.

His ability to learn from others was a key to his successful relationships, because of all people, my dad had so few, if any pretensions. He was not impressed by anything that Madison Avenue would have impress us. Money didn’t impress him. Status was irrelevant to him. His definition of success was hard work, strict ethics and a good heart.

I remember when Jerry Seinfeld came to Tacoma. It was 1984 or 85, I think. Dad couldn’t care less that Jerry was a comedian – what mattered to him was that here was another Seinfeld and we didn’t know of any other Seinfelds before then. So he went to meet the guy, and years later flew down to LA for a taping of the show, because he was family.

This wisdom I think is what drove his passion for Tacoma Community College. I don’t remember him more proud than when he told me about the award ceremony where they would honor students who had come from nothing – no education, no money, no support – and graduated from TCC. Displaced people, people with no direction, who found their way. He loved getting to know the student, finding out their story.

Finally, he set up a scholarship fund there, not at one of his own prestigious colleges but at TCC where he felt he could help the most people.

The point of recalling the greatness of a person is to remind us that if he could do it, so can you and I.


Shabbat Shalom

“It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.” – Churchill

(PS – one word about tzedakah – my Dad and Mom raised their children with this value from a very young age: Give a substantial portion of your income – even 10% - back to the community. He was quite pleased when I told him one day that that’s a recipe right out of the Torah.)

Instant Karma

Dedicated to the memory of Galit Schiller, who died last Shabbat from complications after the birth of her third child. Our deepest condolences to husband Judah, son Tomer, daughter Naomi and baby Satya.
To dedicate a future Table Talk, send an email.


Question for your table: From a Jewish perspective, what do you think is the most problematic aspect of Christianity?

For me personally, growing up in America, one of the things that I found most challenging about the dominant religion was the idea of some guy “dying for our sins.”

Preposterous, right? How could someone die for my sins? And why should my belief in him have anything to do with it?

Well...

Actually, it turns out that 95 percent of Christian and Islamic theologies come directly from Jewish thought. They just changed some of the key details.

For instance, the Talmud states: “The death of the righteous atones (for the living).”

Gee, that sounds a lot like the religion that I just dismissed....

To understand the Talmud, consider two questions:

1. What does atonement mean?
2. Why it should be only the death of the righteous that atones. Why not anyone’s death?

The answer to #1: atonement means purifying the soul of negative karma.

The answer to #2: it isn’t the death per se that atones, rather how we react to it.

When a less-than-righteous person dies, we may be sad but we don’t feel that sense of incomprehension, “Why did this happen?!!”

When a righteous person dies, we feel that overwhelming shock, “How could this have happened?” Some even say, “How could God let this happen?” It’s much more than a mere shanda.

And it is precisely that deep-down shutter of realizing that I don’t understand that atones, because negative karma can come from ego, which is characterized by feeling that I know something, that I’m smart, that I’m good because I know what good means. The shocking “unjust” death of the righteous wakes us from this ego-trip and thereby atones for all who hear the tragic news.

Is this what Lennon meant?



Think about it.

Shabbat Shalom.

(By the way, in that video, what's the deal with the knitting?)

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Upcoming speaking schedule:

June 25 – Philadelphia: The Foundation of Ethics (Business lunch)
June 25 – Philadelphia: The Kabbalah of Wine (evening wine tasting + class)
(For details, send an email)

Yiddish of the week:
shanda — shame

Yiddish review - how many do you know?
anee — poor person
koptsen — panhandler
ballaboss — homeowner; layman
nu — various meanings (see archives)
mishpocha — family
mameh — mother
tateh — father
mazal – (MAH-z’l) luck or fortune, as in, “It was good mazal that....”
beshert – (b’shairt) - meant to be, as in “It was beshert that...”
mine eltern – my parents
mine lair-er – my teacher
hamantashen – Haman-pockets
zeigezunt – all the best (said upon parting)
kesher - connection
Ikh volt veln a kave, zayt azoy gut. - I'd like a coffee, please.
...kave mit shmant. – ...a coffee with cream.
...kave mit milkh. – ...a coffee with milk.
...kave mit tsuker. - ...a coffee with sugar.
Di Fir Kashes - The Four Questions
Oy vey! - Good grief!
mensch — a decent person
rachmanos — mercy
neshoma (neh-SHOH-ma) — soul
minig — custom, as in, "Why do you do that?" "It's my minig!"
Gavaltig — wonderful
Oy gavalt — how wonderful (sarcastic)
Azoy gait es! — That’s how it goes!
Shabbos — Cessation; stopping; day of stopping; weekly sabbatical experience
"Gut Shabbos" — "Enjoy your weekly sabbatical experience"
Neshoma — Soul
meshugass — insanity
meshuganeh — insane
kyna hara — no evil eye
shvitz — sweat