Our Biggest Problem?

The purpose of this blog is to turn the Friday night dinner table inward. Please print and share (+ like it, tweet it, forward).

 

How did you do on last week's "5 Thanksgiving Questions"?

Current events have brought up a long-forgotten memory.

In college I spent a semester in Rome, the so-called "Eternal City".

Every day we had a field trip to some part of the city or around Umbria, to look at something Classical or Baroque.

On our big trip to southern Italy, this incident occurred on a bridge in Naples.

We were waiting for the bus to fetch us when a couple of Italian guys came up to me and wanted to negotiate a price for being intimate with one or two of the women in our group.

At first I assumed they were joking and so I played along with it.

But then one of the women became suspicious and asked me what they were saying.

Only then did it dawn on me that they were actually serious.

And that it didn't really matter.

What mattered was that, the entire premise of the conversation, joking or not, was highly offensive. But it was so absurd that I played along with it...."guy talk".....

Q1 for your table: That kind of "guy talk" is bad, but how bad?

And let's flush this out with a few random comparisons.

(Q2 for your dinner-table conversation.)

We all have limited time and attention spans, so we should focus on the most urgent problems, right?

Therefore, what's worse?

Guys talking guy talk, or guys like Matt Lauer having a secret button?

Guys like Matt Lauer, or plastic choking our ecosystems?

The steady destruction of marine ecosystems, or the loss of young people to opioid overdose ?

The opioid epidemic, or the technology-depression-suicide epidemic?

It is interesting that Judaism addressed some of these issues thousands of years ago.

For instance, there is a millenial-old prohibition against a man and woman who are not family to be secluded together. Even to touch each other beyond a formal handshake.

This is not the path of "orthodox" Judaism. It is Jewish wisdom. Just like you don't have to be "religious" in order to decide not to speak lashon hara and to practice shmirat halashon, you also don't need to be religious to practice shmirat hanegiah and save your hugs and kisses for your family.

But don't we live in a culture that expects hugs and kisses at every social gathering?

We also live in a culture that honors lashon hara.

Think about it.

They said the following story of the late Dayan Erintroy - he was once visiting a factory in Germany for a kosher food inspection. The manager was a woman who extended her hand. He said, "I'm sorry, the only woman I touch is my wife."

She smiled and said, "If my husband had had that attitude, we'd still be married!"

Q3: Maybe some habits simply too engrained to make it worth the fight?


Shabbat Shalom

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Our Man in the White House

The purpose of this blog is to help you turn Friday night smalltalk into bigtalk. Please print & share.

Is President Obama good or bad for Israel?

That's not the question of the week. That's just to get you to read the rest of this post, since eleven out of ten Jews have a very strong opinion on this question.

(And they're all wrong, of course.)

It's such a charged question that I've been sitting on this topic for weeks, afraid of appearing partisan.

This is not an endorsement of any candidate, party or platform, OK?

But here is an interesting story, worthy of table talk.

First, as you probably know, the Jewish blogo-twitter-facebook-sphere was all abuzz before November 2 about whether or not President Obama is "good for Israel".

During all of these discussions, I never saw anyone mention Jack Lew.

Yaakov Who?

If you google "Jack Lew" you will find many articles about the White House Chief of Staff.

Most of them are highly flattering.

Jacob Lew

Most of them for some reason mention the fact that he doesn't work on Friday night or Saturday.

Such as the Huffington Post:

"He packed in long hours six days a week, taking off every Saturday to observe the Sabbath (he is an Orthodox Jew), honing the type of negotiating acumen that would prove useful for Obama."

The Atlantic Monthly at least finds a reason to mention Lew's private life:

"Faith is another guiding force in Lew's life. An Orthodox Jew, he tries to observe the Sabbath. This means forgoing work, cars, phone calls, and other technology from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday, hardly an easy commitment for a man who has answered to two presidents. The full day of respite from a bruising Washington schedule helps him maintain his characteristic calm, friends say."

The Forward profile revealed even more:

When Jack Lew was appointed chief of staff to President Obama in January, many in the Jewish community wondered how he could observe Shabbat in such a demanding position.
Luckily, Lew has the most powerful man in the world to keep track of time as the sun starts to dip low in the sky on Friday afternoons.

Yaakov Lew

“I saw the president on many occasions on Friday afternoons look at his watch, and ask: ‘Isn’t it time for you to get going?’” Lew said, “or, ‘Why are you still here?’ The president was not checking the clock “because he doesn’t think I can keep time,” Lew said. Rather, the extra care on this issue reflects the President’s wish “to remind me that it’s important to him, not just to me, that I be able to make that balance.”

Questions for your table: With Yaakov Lew as one of the smartest and most powerful players in Washington, does it matter to you that he's Jewish? That he keeps Shabbat? Is that good for Israel? Is it good for the Jews?

Shabbat Shalom

PS - don't forget our awesome suggestions for Channuka here.