A Soulful Journey

Rabbi Haskel Lookstein reflected on the 55,000 fans who gathered at Shea Stadium for the seventh game of the World Series. When the game was over and the Mets were victorious, it was expected that the fans might riot, a debacle which had occurred after the seventh game of the Mets-Astros series. Yet after this game the fans stay passively in the stands, with no loss of life, or property. Had the fans of the New York Mets suddenly repented of wanton destruction? Had the great wickedness departed from humankind? Or had their wicked schemes simply been foiled by the mighty show of force of 700 riot police mounted on horseback?  -Rabbi Lionel Moses As the Mishna teaches, Rabbi Hanina said, "Pray for the welfare of the government for without it people who swallow on another up. "  (Avot 3:2)

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, it was a simple and important act of the human spirit.     What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life.” –Vaclav Havel

"There is no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you." - Will Rogers

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”   - Winston Churchill  

"For better or worse I want to maximize people's independence from the state and then look after people who can't make it - rather than maximize dependence on the state for the sake of people who can't make it."  -Thomas Stoppard, playwright Food for thought as we near elections.

“No corporation president would try to run a large company with a table of organization first sketched by the quill pen of some eighteenth-century ancestor whose sole managerial experience consisted of running a farm.” –Alvin Toffler, Third Wave

Mar Shmuel – a third century Babylonian teacher – condoned up to one-sixth of a fighting force (an army) before the government could be accused of misconduct. – Talmud, Shavuot 35 b

"After delivering a guilty man to the Roman authorities Elijah the prophet stopped visiting Rabbi Joshua ben Levi. Much later prophet came to see the Rabbi. The rabbi asked why the prophet had stopped coming. The rabbi continued and said, the man he turned over to the Romans was guilty. What did I do that was wrong? Elijah answered and said, the man was guilty but it wasn't the job of a rabbi to turn him over to the authorities."   - Aaron Kriegel    There are some words and actions a leader should not say or do.  

Time changes all things.   We are not exempt.   Time changes us in profound and sometimes unimaginable ways.   What was once critical becomes irrelevant.   What was meaningless becomes a cause célèbre. “A man who is not a liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a conservative at sixty has no head.”   - Benjamin Disraeli