A Soulful Journey

As soon as there is life, there is danger.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson The problem is not with the world.   It is with us.

On a bus in Edinburgh a man climbed on board and spied an attractive woman sitting by the window with a small kitten in her lap. “Ooh, I wish I were that kitten,” he said. “Ooh, I wish you were too,” she replied, “I’m taking him to the veterinarian to be fixed.” Some times we  have to speak up, and not hold our tongue.

“ Silence is the language God speaks and everything else is a bad translation.”   -Father Thomas Keating “Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.”   -Meister Eckhart, 13 th century

One night a disciple of the great Maggid of Mezritch   was returning after a long trip with his master. On the way, he decided to visit the city of Karlin to meet its renowned Rabbi Aharon. He arrived after midnight and headed straight to the Rabbi's house. He saw a light in the window so he knocked on the door. The Hasidim are accustomed to use given names in addressing one another.   The disciple called out, “Aharon, please open the door.”   He heard the knock and the voice and asked, “Who is at the door?”  The disciple answered, “It is I” (Dos bin ich). It was a long pause until the Rabbi words cut through the silence, “Who is it the dares to speak of himself as ‘I’? Only the Lord can say ‘I’!"   - Rabbi S.Y. Zevin

There was this girl in high school I really liked and finally got the nerve to ask out. So we went to the movies, and then I took her home. I thought we'd had a really good time but she jumped out of the car and ran into her house. I didn't understand it until I got home and looked in the mirror. I then realized I had gotten the broccoli from dinner stuck on my teeth. To this day I can’t stand broccoli.   - Kareem Abdul Jabbar Moral: Check yourself before going out.

"To err is human, but it feels divine." -Mae West

"There are many differences between the rich and the poor.  Among Jews, the rich hope for prosperity, health and happiness while the poor Jew prays the there will be a clear moon with no obliteration." - Rabbi Louis Jacobs Simple people have simple requirements.  Complicated lives are inevitably complex.

A tourist went to Vermont.  He travelled around and found that people and did not speak.  Finally, he asked, "Is talking against the law around here?" One of the natives replied, "No, but no one speaks unless he can improve the silence."

When Alice (in the Through the Looking Glass) remarks that it is impossible to believe impossible things, the Queen of Hearts responds: "Fiddlesticks!  I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Maybe the belief in what might be what makes us most human.

Years ago, at Carnegie Hall a piano recital premiere was being presented.  The pianist sat down, raised his hands over the keyboard, sat immobile for three minutes, then lowered his hands and got up to bow and receive his applause. The composer, John Cage, explained to the puzzled reporters, "Music is composed of two elements: notes and rests.  Bach, Mozart and Beethoven have written music made entirely of notes, so I composed one piece entirely of rests." Though no one would want to sit through such  concert, Cage was making an important statement about music: the silences are just as important and the sounds.

To fear punishment is nothing.  What we must do is fear sin." - Menachem Mendl

"When history began there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time." At Sinai, "holiness was proclaimed." It was only after worshipping the golden calf that the Sanctuary became necessary. "The sanctity of time came first, the sanctity of man came second, and the sanctity of space last."

These two snippets are from a powerful book written in the 1980's called, "A Certain People." ITEM: A few weeks after a neighbor’s father moved in with her, members of the block association came to call – not to welcome the elderly gentleman but to protest his habit of sitting on the front lawn quietly reading his Yiddish newspaper while he caught the afternoon sun.  “It’s not nice,” they complained, by which they meant that they were embarrassed by his public display of Jewishness.  Had the eighty-two-year-old man read a French newspaper, the block association members would have been delighted with the touch of class he added to the neighborhood.   – Charles Silberman ITEM: The funeral had been uplifting as well as moving.   The dead woman, who had died in her eightieth year, had been filled with vitality until the end, and in his eulogy the rabbi evoked her presence with warmth and humor.   Reluctant to break the spell, the mourners stood outside

Dear Teacher, I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.   Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human. This letter was  written by Dr. Haim Ginott.  It was a memo to teachers before the first day of school on the critical importance of values based education.  It is well worth reading, re-reading and  then  passing on to all the  people  whom we know.