The Summer of Self-Esteem

Okay, ready to get a little heavy-handed?

This has been a summer of many changes (most summers are like that). I say “has been” even though at the moment of this article’s publication it is merely the middle of August. I’ve got a few weeks left for summer to turn my life upside down all over again.

And yet I have the feeling that my chance for changes has passed. Maybe that’s because I can see the start of my first “real” job looming around the corner. Maybe it’s because all my friends who went away for the summer have come back. Maybe because I finally realized that I’m not going to take a class, get in shape, or have a torrid, chaste, Orthodox love affair this year.

I don’t know why I expect these things of the summertime in New York City. It’s that magical time of year when the movies are outdoors and free, when people have enough time to stroll through air conditioned museums or the sun-baked zoo. If they’re still in school in any form, people put their lives on hold for a bit.

People who are usually up all night studying suddenly have a moment to sit on a park bench and breathe. Those who spend their time with clubs and activities find they can lounge about like the lazy bums they’re not.  Coffee comes iced.

For me, the month of August is just a longer extension of that time of day called the gloaming. Yes, you can call it dusk or twilight, but I’d prefer to avoid any association with certain vampire-driven melodramas for the moment. Besides, no word seems to capture that mournful mood quite as well as “gloaming”. It has “loaming” and “gloomy” in there all at once.  

The gloaming used to be my favorite time of day. The end of the long afternoon, when the sun looks down at us as if to say, ok kids, you can stay up for five more minutes. August is pretty much like that. You can see the dark of the year up ahead. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are looming on the horizon (darn it, we’ve got to think about our conscience again?).

It’s summer’s last hurrah. What’s so different about this year that suddenly, I don’t especially care to enjoy the gloaming of the summer? Maybe it’s because this year, the three weeks fell a little later than usual.

That sounds dumb, but let me explain.

The three weeks stretching from 17 Tammuz to 9 Av are the most mournful days of the Jewish calendar, where an inordinate number of tragedies and disasters have historically plagued us. But to us modern New Yorkers (those who keep anything to do with the three weeks, anyway), it’s that inconvenient time where it stops being our New York summer. No public shows to attend, no more late nights in the park, enjoying the Jazz. No summer blockbusters. We have to stop being entertained, and look for ways to entertain ourselves. No concerts, no Broadway shows, no giant Imax screens.

And usually, these three weeks fall earlier, during the month of July, maybe at the end of June (like they did last year). So when they culminate with that mother-of-all inconvenient days, Tisha B’Av, we can get up the next day and still see a whole month ahead to get our summers back and do all the things we didn’t get a chance to do.

This year, Tisha B’Av fell well into August, so when it left, it took summer with it. Good bye, class I never took, track I never ran, boy I never stood around awkwardly, blushing.

It’s time to think about class and work again, the big scary future.

But before you all call the emo police on me, I have to say that while part of me mourns the loss of those attitude-changing summers filled with fun and experience, I’m also sort of grateful for the more grown-up version I found this year.

True, I haven’t had any romantic moments in Central Park or the East Village like last year. Okay, I haven’t buckled down and emerged with a completed art project like the year before. Fine, I didn’t go to Prague or Rome or Venice. But in some ways, I faced real life in a way I never have before.

I got a job. A real, yearlong one. I got an apartment in the city, moved in, bonded with my roommates, and spent my fast day dragging around Ikea bookshelves. I spent two weeks babysitting toddlers and changing diapers. I learned some lessons about people and their nature that I never wanted to know. I got disillusioned about a lot of things.

But oddly, and unlike some of those other summers, I emerged feeling…well… good about myself.  I faced some scary things this summer. Not horror and violence scary, but change scary. I realized that the people I spend my time with may not always be there for me when I need them... but that I can still deal with it on my own. I learned that (despite my concave biceps) if need be, I can rearrange an entire living room. I can deal with dead birds on the fire escape and 90 degree weather sans a/c. I can make rent (if only barely).

This may sound utterly ordinary, but it’s a big step on the maturity ladder, I think. Especially when you reach your goal and then have that horrifying moment of wondering whether you made a big mistake. Most of all, I learned to accept stupid situations that are not my fault. You know what I mean, when you show up to a costume party dressed as an over-sized rabbit only to see that the venue was changed to be black-tie, and that nobody bothered to tell you.

Well, that, but in more realistic scenarios. This is when we are challenged in that weakest of spots, our self-esteem.

I feel like having self-esteem is a little like falling in love. It’s a beautiful thing, and when you get it, it could be because of hard work and self-examination, but it could not be by your merit at all (some do get that natural born charm and dumb luck others so covet). Once you have a little of it, bucketfuls more seem to appear out of nowhere (when it rains, it floods your basement). The two are forever caught in the realm of self-fulfilling prophecy, sometimes overlapping. How many times have we been told that all it takes to get noticed is a little confidence? But then, don't we gain that confidence when someone takes notice of us?

When you lack love or self-esteem, you can’t help envying those who seem to be rolling in it. While you have it, you may not realize what a blessing it is. But even if you do, it can be easily broken by someone whose actions are out of your control. And when that happens, the rebuilding process often takes longer than you’d like to admit.

And worst of all, you have a tendency to blame yourself.

I hate to say it, but I’ve found that sometimes nasty disillusionment (which is less like love and more like accidentally getting the hot and cold knobs confused in the shower) is the key to gaining back that self-esteem. Sure, it was nice to see life as this wide-open sky, just waiting for us to fly out into the blue yonder, and our apartment as self-cleaning. And we loved to picture our friends as incredible people who were more interesting, more cheerful, more confident than we are, as people who would drag us up out of our personal depths.

But it’s those moments when we notice that life as a sky isn’t clear and blue, but stormy, and that the people we love are flawed… the time we notice that no matter what we did differently, nothing would have changed… the second we see that we must depend on ourselves, that we feel we’ve earned some self-esteem.

And maybe that’s where the similarities between self-esteem and love end. Heck, I don’t know. I’ve only just begun to build a little of that confidence. I’ve still got a lifetime of living with it to see if it does me any good. But I’m hoping, and optimistic, that it will… if only because for once, I’m not mourning the end of August, but looking forward to the start of September.  To the start of Tishrei.  To the New Year. This one’s going to be different than the last, just like this summer was a whole new type of summer. I can’t wait to see what it brings. 

Judge Not, Lest You Be Judged

So here I am, sitting in my bed at 9:30 on a Wednesday night, just starting to write my post. Natch. However, the difference between now and all those other times is that now I’m in a fantastically good mood. I just finished my last day of class, so summer school is over. I have two finals in the next few days that I’m very well prepared for, so there’s that. I’m about to head into an awesome weekend. In Waves, Trivium’s new album, just hit the shelves yesterday and I’m blasting it so loud that the walls of my currently empty-except-for-me house are shaking. Awesome music effectively serves as my ultimate muse. Speaking of which, I’m really happy the last few weeks were not my posting responsibility because I find that I write better with background music, and that’s a no-no during the three weeks. Conveniently, the posting schedule gave me the day right after Tisha B’Av, so music is once again allowed. That in and of itself should be enough of a reason to launch into another music post, but I’m actually thinking more along the lines of the Tisha B’Av side of this than the music side. You see, now that it’s passed, I can avoid thinking about my favorite pastime (i.e. fasting) until October when Tzom Gedaliyah and Yom Kippur roll around, a fact that is contributing significantly to my good mood. But, of course, when you’re trying desperately not to think about something, that’s all you end up thinking about. So now that I’m thinking about fasting and Tisha B’Av, I’m going to run with that and return to a favorite topic of mine, the quick-to-judge nature of the worldwide Jewish community. With any luck, I’ll come out of the other side of this in as good a mood as I was when I started…

This story begins, as do most things these days, with Facebook.

Before fasts and holidays, people tend to post inspirational or comforting statuses and notes. Mine was about how Tisha B’Av last year saved my life, but a good friend of mine put something up with a decidedly different angle, and I quote:

“Tisha B'Av, in my opinion, is not a day where we mourn the destruction of the Temple. It is a day where we mourn the failure of solidarity and [our] intolerance [of] each other.” –Jonathan Heller

Bingo! My thoughts exactly. Aside from the fact that I totally agree with the overall theme (i.e. why the heck can’t we all just get along despite our differences), if you take a second to actually analyze the situation, it’s even historically accurate. What’s the reason given by just about everyone for the destruction of the Second Temple? Baseless hatred. There you go. I’d imagine it manifested itself in the same ways as it does these days, except it’s probably easier to stone a guy driving on Shabbat if he’s riding a horse-and-buggy as opposed to a Lambo. I know, I know, it’s an extreme example and I keep using it, but it’s completely accurate and it conveys my point in stunning clarity. People are too quick to judge based on appearances and jump to conclusions based on circumstantial evidence. As I mentioned when I brought this up last month, what if that guy was driving on Shabbat to save someone’s life? It’s hard to always think that way, but the importance of doing so is unparalleled.

A colleague of mine told me a parable recently that illustrates this point perfectly in a few lines: There was once a chassid who was running after his rabbi who was leaving town on a horse on Shabbat. The chassid was chasing him down, yelling and crying. What was he yelling? “Rebbi, please don’t leave me! I still have so much to learn from you!”

I don’t think I need to explain that story; the message pretty self-evident. Also, I don’t think I could put it any better than Heller did up there, and to try to would be to repeat myself. There are only so many times I can say the same thing and keep it interesting, and given that I have a tendency to get long winded when I get on a roll, I think I’ll stop right here. I hope we can all be a little more cognizant of this idea, as were never going to get our third chance at the Temple until we can all look past our individual differences and accept each other for who we are: brothers and sisters in a small tribe that need to support each other as much as we can.

Now excuse me while I go continue with my good mood :)

Song of the Day: In Waves – Trivium

The Face of Farce: Jewish Humor in American Film

There’s an old Yiddish joke I recently heard for the first time. I think it’s absolutely hilarious, but only one other person I know finds it even remotely funny, and believe me, I’ve tried it out on more people than I like to admit. It goes as follows:

“What is purple, whistles, and hangs on a wall?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“A herring.”

 “But a herring isn’t purple.”

 “So? Paint it purple.”

“But a herring doesn’t hang on a wall.”

“So hang it on a wall.”

“But a herring doesn’t whistle.”

 “Nu? For one little technicality you ruin my joke?”

I know, I know. It’s an example of what my sister calls “Kvetch humor,” or a joke that revolves around whiny people being petty. Honestly, I like to think of it as working around obvious problems to try to make a fit, albeit an unnatural one, but maybe that’s stretching it a little. And now that you’ve all had a good groan, it’s time to get to my post here.

My relationship with Jewish jokes is as love-hate as the stereotypical marriage said humor often depicts. As with all types of comedy, I believe the Jewish kind has its hits and misses. Some examples make me laugh with familiarity, while others make me cringe in a sort of defensive shame. What can I do, it’s targeting an ethnicity, and one I’m rather invested in. Naturally, there are situations when its very use is offensive and inappropriate.

But I’m not talking about anti-Semites making snide comments, a pun at a funeral, or a race joke gone too far. What’s to ponder there? I’m speaking more about that sort of mark of Judaism, at least in American media. It’s been pointed out before by various people that a seemingly inordinate number of Jews go into show business, or more specifically, comedy. 

(Note: This post specifically addresses Jewish Humor in modern American film, not literature or the original Yiddish works, which are rich and amazing in their own way, but I don't know nearly enough about to discuss here.)

We’ve got the greats, like the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Jackie Mason, Jerry Seinfeld, Gilda Radner… the list goes on and on. Then there are the token Jewish characters on TV shows like The Big Bang Theory, Friends, and The Simpsons. It seems that the Jewish relationship to humor is natural and deep-rooted.

And yet, if we watch these shows without any real knowledge or experience with Jewish culture, a rather nasty stereotype emerges. Heck, a visitor to Earth learning about mankind through these TV shows would assume there were only three kinds of Jews in the world.

The well-meaning, but ultimately clueless authority figure (see below, the Rabbi in ‘Radio Days’):

The overbearing mother (see The Big Bang Theory, Friends, The Nanny, Dharma and Greg, every single show, comic, or movie to feature a Jewish mother):

The nebbish nerd/hypochondriac who still lives with said overbearing mother (see The Big Bang Theory, Scrubs, any Woody Allen movie):

All of these are Kvetchers/complainers and neurotic. In fact, these stereotypes are so widespread one has to wonder whether the nebbishes and rabbis all marry each others’ mothers, since apparently all Jewish females are lox-eating, spanx-wearing mamas in their sixties.

Sometimes I wonder whether the repetition of the old jokes and characters of our culture have helped or hurt us in the eyes of the world. Have they made us more accessible? Sympathetic? Or have they just made us look like a bunch of whiny buffoons and Disney sidekicks? 

Like any good joke, I believe the reaction depends on how well (and with what intention) you tell it. 

Let’s compare two greats of the genre, shall we? Contemporaries, who have been lauded by critics and audiences alike…and leave aside their personal lives and career bests and worsts. Let’s have a look at Allen Konigsberg and Melvin Kaminsky, better known as Woody Allen and Mel Brooks.

Oh, Woody. Never has there been a writer I so long to both laud and slap upside the head. If you’ve never seen a Woody Allen movie, I recommend you do so, and soon. Just make sure it’s one of the “good ones,” and that you aren’t too defensive about your Jewishness. You see, Woody Allen is the stereotypical nebbish case, a little guy with a stammer and thick glasses, the ugly duckling surrounded by tall, beautiful, New York WASPS. His humor ranges from gross and lowbrow to intellectual and refined (I strongly favor the latter), and his writing, when it’s good, is top notch.

If only, if only, he weren’t so...well, Jewish. Woody Allen has the seemingly uncontrollable tendency to bring up his background in embarrassing and needlessly cruel ways, in places where it doesn’t belong. It’s like he just wants the world to know that yes, he was born this way, but only because he didn’t have a say in it. Take, for example, an otherwise good movie called ‘Radio Days,’ a nostalgic look back at New York City in the 1940s, the world in which Allen Konigsberg grew up. A Jewish mother catches her young son listening to the radio, and worries about the effect it will have on his studies. So off she drags him to the rabbi, who instantly asks, “Have you been hitting him?”

Unabashed, the woman replies, “Yes, but it hasn’t helped.”

“So hit him harder.”

And an exchange ensues, which I assume is supposed to be funny, in which the rabbi and these parents argue over who can hit the kid harder. This exchange left me wide-eyed with confusion and revulsion, but not surprise. In most of his films, Woody Allen’s biographical character is one to be pitied, intelligent in spite of his background, and yet somehow, always notably full of sexual stamina (you read that right. I wonder if he wants to prove anything).  

So why do I bother with his movies at all? Well, it’s because he’s produced some excellent stuff, mostly when he’s behind the camera, and especially when he doesn’t make any mention of Judaism at all (see “Midnight in Paris”).

On to Mel Brooks. If Woody Allen has his highbrow moments… well, Brooks doesn’t. His work revolves around film parodies and body-function humor, often with gratuitous mention of certain anatomical areas. But where Allen prefers the company of the rich, Fifth Avenue crowd, Brooks surrounds himself with his fellow Jews. Some of his best works star the likes of Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, and Madeline Kahn, all comic greats of the Hebrew Nation. And where Woody’s Jew-jokes are often spiteful, Mel’s seem to ring with a genuine affection. When the wise Rabbi Tuckerman in Robin Hood, Men in Tights exclaims “Let’s bless things ‘til we get feshnickered!”, we don’t feel guilty laughing about it. And while he also takes every occasion to take at a stab at his background, he’s also an equal-opportunity offender. Brooks isn’t pointing out Jewish ridiculousness, just ridiculousness in general.

In both cases, I believe the directors do their best Jew-humor when it’s subtle, that is, not labeled as “Jewish”. Take, for example, the opening scenes of Allen’s Annie Hall and Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. 

In the former, a worried-looking Allen looks directly at the camera and summarizes his life in two old jokes:

“Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.”

 “The other important joke…is usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,"…"I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships…” 

 There’s something to be said for the great use of these two clearly Jewish jokes to illustrate a broad topic, without actually screaming from the rooftops that this is the Jewish experience.

In Young Frankenstein, the film opens on a college biology classroom, where Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, the infamous scientist’s great-grandson (played by the incomparable Gene Wilder), is discussing the central nervous system. A student raises his hand and addresses the doctor as “Dr. Frankenstein.” Frederick turns from the blackboard and, with a wild-eyed look of revulsion only Mr. Wilder can pull off, hisses:

Something about the defensiveness of the remark speaks volumes about the minds who came up with it. A man who wishes only to be judged for his own work, and not that of his ancestry, is so bogged-down and jaded that he cannot stand to even share a pronunciation with that well-known relative. If that one sentence doesn’t echo the new-immigrant in America experience, I don’t know what does. Not a single character in Young Frankenstein is labeled "Jewish," and yet it drips with the flavor of Jewish humor (a result, no doubt, of both writers and most of the actors being members of the tribe).

I’d make that a rule of thumb: when in doubt, the flavor of Jewish humor goes a lot farther than the stereotypes and the direct finger-pointing. Some of my favorite bits of Jewish humor in comedy come from decidedly non-Jewish characters and sources. Futurama’s resident giant lobster, Dr. Zoidberg is a paragon of Jewish nebbishness, despite literally being treif (“Friends! I finally found a new shell! It looks just like my old one, and it was in the same dumpster, but THIS one had a live raccoon in it!”). The old man in the barbershop of Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America closes the film with one of the most fabulously terrible bits of Kvetch humor I’ve ever heard.

But my favorite bit of pure Jewish comedy gold must come from William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, where the fairy tale characters end up at the home of the mystic Miracle Max, played in layers of makeup by Billy Crystal. Miracle Max and his wife Valerie have only one short scene, and yet display one of the most impressive old-married-couple arguments in all of film. (Watch that link. Really.)

Gold. In my opinion, it just doesn’t get better than this.

But as for Jewish humor on the whole, what can I say? On the one hand, I genuinely love that we are a group known for its humor (there are far worse things to be known for, after all). But on the other, I sometimes flinch at how that humor is used, and at the way we Jews are viewed because of it. This misuse or negative spin used to disturb me so much that I couldn’t even sit through Blazing Saddles. It took me years to appreciate Jewish humor for what it is, a legacy of using laughter to get through some of the more difficult parts of reality. 

It’s kind of a grown-up version of what our parents taught us in Kindergarten: if your classmates are teasing you, you can sit and cry (which will only encourage them), or you can laugh with them and shut them up good.  And when your history is as sad and scary as ours and it seems like people hate you for no good reason, your choices are limited. You can become depressed, removed, and bitter, or you can try to laugh at the absurdity and hope for, someday, a miracle. 

Interwebz and Small Miracles

I see you there, stalking the Facebook pics of a random friend you met at camp when you were fourteen.

Yes, you.

And I see you, too, stalking the wall of that guy you met in Israel to catch e-glimpses of his friends at Bar Ilan and IDC.

Isn’t the internet fun? We can frolic anonymously through pages of information about the lives of people who will never know. Or, at least we hope they will never know, for fear of being arrested and excommunicated.

The story starts back in chilly weather. I sailed on the internet seas and stalked the wall of a friend of mine, who I met in a hotel lobby in the Holy Land. She is involved in international Israeli activism, and through her page, I happened upon the profile of an Australian gal involved in Jewish student life at the University of Melbourne, who seemed to spend entirely too much time in exotic locales such as Japan, New Zealand and Alaska. Naturally, I stalked her travels, providing much fodder for many a daydream.

Fast-forward a few months when snow covers the ground. I escaped the suburbs to meet a friend in Manhattan for lunch, but had an hour to kill betwixt exiting Penn Station and entering the subway. I slid up 34^th Street into Macy’s and entertained myself by aimlessly wandering through the store.

Wandering through the second floor, I stopped here and there to browse through the aisles and just… think. While pawing the dresses, I wondered if I should buy something just in case I had somewhere fancy to go in the near future. But what if buying the dress jinxed the future possibilities of nice occasions? On the opposite side of the coin, what if buying the dress would put in motion precisely the things that would have to occur in order to make those fancy occasions happen? Where are those Three Witches hiding out, and could they spare some time for my inquiry?

I wandered on, forgetting about the dress and focusing on the mysteries of fate. I guess anything can and will happen, I thought…

Someone was sitting with her legs crossed on a platform beneath two well-dressed mannequins. As she came into focus, I thought she looked more and more like… no way… what kind of insane joke is this…

Well hello there, Australian gal. The twenty-something certainly looked just like the pictures, and the accent she and her male pal spoke with gave away their country of origin. Trying not to be too creepy, I said nothing more than, “Awesome accent!” while she laughed with her friend and made my way to the exit in a mix of shock and wonder.

There are various messages to be taken from this tale: People can be put face to face with you by a higher power, it’s just a matter of leaving your house and getting out into the world. (Question: Do we write the pages of our story or is the story already written and we are merely flipping the pages by walking forwards in life?) Back in yeshiva, we learned that life is like a tapestry, but people are rarely privy to the backstitches. This time, I saw the backstitching in all its glory. I frequently kvetch and moan about how divided we are as Jews, but I saw how the universe can connect two Jews from different ends of the earth and have them meet in the middle. People are like the thoughts that ping-pong around in our heads as we shop for dresses or otherwise go about our daily lives--We are always moving. If we make more of an effort to stop each other once in a while, we might be surprised at the results.

Connection. Connection. Connection.

And now, to connect my tale to a theme of this here blog: If different Jews from all around the world could just overlook the differences, we would be an unstoppable force. Human connection and relationships make the world go round. Imagine if we could find each other and band together. Imagine the possibilities.

(PS For any skeptics out there, yes, it was actually the girl from the bottomless pit that is Facebook. I checked her page after the occurrence and she had a new album of pictures up from her trip to New York. What are the odds, eh?)

Respect for Dummies

This time, I’m going to get right to it. I guess there really is a first time for everything…

I’ve had a few experiences involving religious debates and similar things lately, so I’d like to share a loosely connected collective of thoughts on that subject:

As you may recall, Joanna’s post from a few weeks ago was short and sweet, but garnered quite a bit of attention. The resulting discussion in the comments section involved someone other than one of our close friends (who are generally the only ones who comment on the blog HINT HINT), so it was our first real opportunity to respond to someone who is not entirely of like mind with us. Reading over that conversation now, I think we were courteous, but also honest. It is important to be respectful of other opinions and of the person who has them, but it is equally important to remain true to your views and values when faced with a dissenting opinion. It is a difficult balancing act of ideas, but mastering it is extremely rewarding.

My American History II professor during the Fall 2010 semester at NCC was chock full of quotable quotes. Many of you might already know this since I quoted him in my Facebook statuses at least once a week. However, one of the more profound things he said, something that I actually mentioned in the comments on Joanna’s post, is, “you can’t ever say anything politically significant without offending someone.” While this line was said specifically in reference to politics, I believe it applies across the board, especially in regard to religion, and even more especially to one divided on as many lines of thought and practice as Judaism. There are some people who seem determined to be offended by everything everyone says. There are also those who are so itching for an argument to the point that they’ll jump down your throat the instant you verbalize an opinion, regardless of whether it’s remotely controversial or not. For these people, I have no answers; for everyone else, it is important to recognize that a) what you say, as innocuous as you think it may be, can offend someone, and b) if something someone said offends your principals, consider that it was probably not on purpose. I think that will make for fewer arguments and more discussions.

The famous saying “Two Jews, Three Opinions” may or may not be true, but it’s certainly true that Jews have an opinion on almost everything involving Judaism. Considering that our Jewish opinions are the basis of how we live our religious lives, it would seem logical to assume that we hold fast to those opinions and believe very strongly in them. As such, it is a foolish goal to engage in a religious debate with the aim of convincing someone else of your religious convictions.

I think these religious discussions are, or should be, about an expression of ideas as opposed to a debate of who’s right and who’s wrong. Firstly, right and wrong as concepts are very context sensitive. Yes it’s probably wrong that this guy is driving through your extremely religious neighborhood on Shabbat, completely ignoring the big billboard at the entrance that tells people not to, but then you stone his car and it’s kind of hard to pick who was more in the wrong there. Second of all, it’s pretty presumptuous of you to try and force your lifestyle on someone. What works for you may not work for them, and what you see as wrong might not be wrong for them.

A lot of religious choices, lifelong or temporary, stem from a person’s current life situation. I didn’t go to shul at all this past Yom Kippur. At face value, that might make me a terrible person according to some. With only that fact in mind, you might even be within your rights as a fellow Jew to rebuke me. However, if I responded that it was because I was suffering from a serious kidney disease at the time and my Rabbi said that the fast is more important than the prayers so if by going to shul I would not have the strength to fast, I should spend all day in bed, well, you’d feel pretty stupid for going off on me about it. It’s extremely important to consider that maybe you don’t know everything about the situation. The famous “going into McDonalds for a Coke” example plays itself out so often in our lives and it’s prudent to judge everyone favorably. Hell, it’s a mitzvah to do so. I should know, I lain the parsha it’s in.

So anyways, there are a couple of ideas I’ve been thinking about of late, and I figure it’s important to keep these things in mind. As I’ve said before, there are so few of us in this world; despite our differences, we should try to get along. I feel like taking some of these ideas to heart is a good step toward that goal of harmony.

Song of the Day: Broken Wings – Alter Bridge