Last night, we were able to attend Cirque Du Soleil's Toruk. A friend had extra tickets from work that were going unused because of the inclement weather. This particular show was visually stunning, and is based on James Cameron's blockbuster movie, Avatar, an equally stunning visual extravaganza.
Each of our children has a soft fleecy lovey. The three-month-old isn’t quite old enough to fully appreciate its magical comforting powers, but it means quite a bit to his older sister. Her lovey is her regular bedtime companion. In addition, when my daughter is sad or scared, she’ll ask for her lovey.
While there are times we are called to bear arms, normally the best antidote to hatred is compassion. Meeting hate with hate or anger with anger or arrogance with arrogance escalates a bad situation into a worse one. We absorb the other person's anger, convert it and color it with our own values crayons, but in the end, we still just spit out anger.
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.
