Bad eating habits, destructive relationships, poor time management – how do we get into these cycles, and more importantly, how can we get out of them? Idioms like “Fool me once . . . ” and “If at first you don’t succeed . . .” are supposed to spur us into action to break these patterns.
Gratitude. Thanksgiving. Deep gratitude and thankfulness expresses itself with a need to return the favor and pay it forward. It also makes us happier with our lives.
To this rabbi, last year’s Starbucks red cup “controversy” (because these days even a few tweets count as a controversy) was completely baffling. The complaint among a small number of customers was that Starbucks had lost the Christmas spirit, since they had replaced the previous festively decorated cup with a solid red design.
It's been a week. A painful, difficult week. An uplifting, marvelous week. I've moved some major projects along, like the curriculum for a course on kashrut that I'll be offering to congregants and those who want to become kosher supervisors for our kehillah (community), beginning in early 2017, and our in-house conversion course that Rabbi Posen and I will facilitate come February.
Some moments in life leave you stuck, standing still, unable to move forward (or in any direction for that matter). I felt a literal version of this when it was time to leave the grave after we buried my father. I was stuck. I just stood there.
In January of this year, TIME magazine published an article about the terrible things that happen to lottery winners. The article quotes a study that found that 70% of people who come into large sums of money lose it only a few years later. The author goes on to cite several examples of worst-case scenarios involving big ticket winners, including bankruptcy and even murder.
Does anyone remember the book "Blue Highways: A Journey into America?" It was written by William Least Heat-Moon. As I recall, he was a divorced Native American English professor who converted an old panel van into a makeshift home, then traveled the small back road "blue highways" of America.
