A Soulful Journey

Life is not fair.  You've heard that before.  One thing that tends to make life fairer is to put our cards on the table, say what we want to say.  It does not always change bad to good but it does make an opportunity for dialogue. Example: Rube Waddell, the Hall of Fame Pitcher liked to eat crackers in bed.   When they used to travel with the Philadelphia Athletics the players slept two in one bed.   Rube Waddells’ bunk mate was Connie Mack, the manager, who put an anti-cracker clause in Waddell’s contract. -George Will

Emperor Franz Josef of Austria visited a prison and asked every prisoner why they were there.  Each defended himself, saying that he was innocent, having been falsely accused.  One prisoner confessed and said that he was serving his sentence because he committed a theft. "Such a scoundrel can contaminate all the good people here," exclaimed the Emperor.  "Throw him out immediately!" While the story sounds backward it speaks a great truth: If you stay in good company you will likely start following what others do.  Stay with bad people, or even those who use improper language, and soon you will be imitating them. Choose your companions wisely.

Not all stories are the same although many bear striking similarities.   Here are some memories of fathers.   Some are good.   Some are not so good.   All of them point out the necessity of healing and love. “He’d take me out and get to drinking.   We'd go to a joint called the Jackson Bar.   He’d sit me up on the stool and start throwing back V.O. like it was water.   Get all loud and rowdy and ready to destroy Detroit.   Funny, he liked to fight with his friends. “Daddy,” I’d say, “we better go.” “And that’d be it.   He’d chill, just ‘cause I told him to.” Smoky Robinson “I remember thinking when they first told me he had died, if he only dropped by once to say hello.   Surely, he must have seen me on TV.   Everyone else in the country did.   I never was angry about Pop leaving us.   I figured there must be something between him and Mom that I didn’t know about.   He was always okay with me.   He had a great sense of humor, that I do remember.      If he had just dropped b

Beliefs must rarely be rigid.   There are few “givens” in the world.   Our faith, for example, places life just about higher than anything else.   Life is paramount and even in the last whispers of a person’s life can come redemption.   That is why we never hasten a person’s demise.   And yet. Ambroise Pare is called the father of modern surgery.   In the sixteenth century Pare traveled with the armies of France into battle.   Once entering a barn to stable his horse, he found four dead soldiers and three wounded.   The faces of the living were contorted with pain.   Their clothes still smoldered from when gunpowder had burned them. One solider asked if Pare could cure them of their ailments.   Pare shook his head.   One old solider then rose and cut the throats of those in agony “gently, efficiently, and without ill will.” Pare cried that this man was a demon! “No,” came his response.   “I pray God that if ever I come to be in that condition, someone will do the same for me.”

What is a friend? Not someone who is close because of convenience or rubbing shoulders because it will bring them greater legitimacy.  A friend is a companion who sticks with you no matter what.  Yet, sometimes it seems that the world forgets this idea: Nahum Goldman used to tell the story of a meeting with a prominent German politician.  The politician said to Goldman, “I am a friend of Israel,” he began.    "But do you know that half our oil comes from Libya?” – from The Jewish Paradox , Nahum Goldman

“We do not appreciate what we receive, we appreciate what we share.”   - Harold Kushner

It is good to have a questioning mind.   It is an attribute to allow others their differing opinions and only afterward make our choice about the correctness of their position.   Such thinking has the gift of hearing one another.   Doesn’t this make for a better world? “Certainty doesn’t make you right just certain.”   – Rabbi Leonard Kravitz

“Instant potatoes are goyish, TV dinner are goyish.   Fruit salad is Jewish.   Black cherry soda’s very Jewish.   Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won’ even go near them.   Chicks that iron your shirt for you are goyish…”   – Lenny Bruce. Funny how what was once funny (not so long ago) is meaningless or mostly so today.   Times have changed.   Attitudes have changed. People have grown less separate: we are homogenized. Question: Is this good?

Freedom always has a price-tag.  It requires work to preserve it: “Prosperity will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve that freedom!   I hope you will make good use of it.   If you do not, I shall repeat it in heaven that I even took half the pains to preserve it.”   - John Adams

What we have experienced must make a difference in the way we live our life.   For example, we repeat countless times in our liturgy the freedom gained through God’s intervention.   Redemption from slavery continues to inform our daily decisions too.   Here is what one great philosopher had to say about our past: ”Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.”   -Heinrich Heine There is an obligation that we all have.   It is a legacy from or past.   It must inform our present:

“In the Marine Corps, I was a public-affairs officer assisting the recruiting effort in North Carolina, I asked a young Marine who was re-enlisting why he was returning to the Corps.  “There’s no one in charge on the outside,” he explained.    - Paul Sarokin Reader’s Digest It is vital that we always remember there is a God and there is someOne in charge.

When you are angry with someone, disappointed in their behavior, remember this: Withholding forgiveness affects us far greater than them.     Holding onto past pains diminishes us. “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.”  – Paul Boise

Many times we look for inspiration from obvious or unobvious sources.  We seek indications of truth and meaning in our world.  But where do we look?  How do we find it?  It may depend on where the inner voices tells us to look: "...the hunter is always directed outward toward the animal.  His life depends on the relationship to the animals.  His mythology is outward turned.  But the planting mythology, which has to do with the cultivation of the plant, the planting of the seed, the death of the seed...and the coming of the new plant, is more inward turned.  With the hunters, the animals inspired the mythology. When a man wanted to gain power and knowledge, he would go not the forest and fast and pray, and an animal would come and teach him. With the planters, the plant world is the teacher.  The plant world is identical in its life sequences with the life of man....there's an inward relationship there."   J oseph Campbell The Power of Myth

It is easy to be swayed by negative thoughts.  They seep into us with little or no effort.  Many times, we do not even know it is happening.  Then we suddenly find ourselves thinking and saying things that we would never want to count as a part of us, if we considered the ramifications of those sentiments. To be good, on the other hand, takes effort and patience.  It does not always come naturally or easily. Meir Kahane is credited with saying after an attack on the Knesset many years ago, "The worse it gets for Israel, the better it gets for me." Kahane knew that calling on the negativistic side of humanity is not difficult.  There is much to be learned here.

“If you ask a young woman for a dance and she tells you her feet hurt – then, thirty seconds later, you see her waltzing away with a young man who has more Vaseline on his hair (also more hair), do you ask her for an introduction to her chiropodist, or do you pretend you’re dead?”  - Grouch Marx, Memoirs Embarrassment is a crime in Judaism.   To make someone feel shame is sinful – so sinful in fact – that the Sages of old likened it to murder.

Faith gives power. It provides light in darkness and is the source of endless potential.   All this happens within. One man of faith approached another and said, “As far as I can, I stay in my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts.   What else can I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven.  His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all aflame’.”     - from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Be a fire.