What are we really seeing, hearing and feeling ?

Modern Psychology in the Midbar ?

Parshat Chukat from G-dcast.com

More Torah cartoons at www.g-dcast.com

I am a Jew אני יהודי

איך בין א ייד - אני יהודי - Yiddish Translation

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

"The whole purpose of public education throughout the whole world, is to produce university professors"- Ken Robinson

Makes me wonder of how similar it is in many parts of our education system.

Here is the great followup :

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!



His Website

When I was a boy of 14

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in 7 years.”

Mark Twain

there is no mistake too big that we cannot learn from it and thereby improve ourselves

This is a core Jewish principle: there is no mistake too big that we cannot learn from it and thereby improve ourselves

In other words, if you are willing to learn from your mistakes, then no mistake will ever set you back.

There was a blind girl who hated herself because she was blind. She hated everyone, except her loving boyfriend. He was always there for her. She told her boyfriend, 'If I could only see the world, I will marry you.'

One day, someone donated a pair of eyes to her. When the bandages came off, she was able to see everything, including her boyfriend.

He asked her,'Now that you can see the world, will you marry me?'
The girl looked at her boyfriend and saw that he was blind. The sight of his closed eyelids shocked her. She hadn't expected that. The thought of looking at them the rest of her life led her to refuse to marry him.

Her boyfriend left in tears and days later wrote a note to her saying: 'Take good care of your eyes, my dear, for before they were yours, they were mine.'

This is how the human brain often works when our status changes.
Only a very few remember what life was like before, and who was always by their side in the most painful situations.

Life Is a Gift

Today
before you say an unkind word -
Think of someone who can't speak.

Before
you complain about the taste of your food -
Think of someone who has nothing to eat..

Before
you complain about your husband or wife -
Think of someone who's crying out to G-D for a companion.

Today
before you complain about life -
Think of someone who went too early to heaven..

Before
whining about the distance you drive
Think of someone who walks the same distance with their feet.

And when
you are tired and complain about your job -
Think of theunemployed, the disabled, and those who wish they had your job.

And when
depressing thoughts seem to get you down -
Put a smile on your face and think: by GOD's grace, you're alive and still around..

"Finding a Synagogue"

"Finding a Synagogue"

Dave has a job that takes him everywhere and he frequently has problems finding a synagogue in some of the towns, so he figures G~d is everywhere and so he decides to go into a Church to worship.

He takes out the Tallis, puts on his yarmulke and dresses himself and proceeds to pray.

The Priest comes in and wants to start the Services, and having heard the whispers from some of his congregants, he stands up and says, "Will all non- Catholics please leave."

Dave goes right on davening.

Next request, again, "Will all non-Catholics please leave."

Nobody moves. Nobody responds.

Finally, the Priest gets up and says, "Will ALL JEWS please leave!"

At this Dave gets up folds his Tallis and packs it away, takes off his yarmulke and puts it away.

Then he goes to the altar and picks up a statue of the baby Jesus and says the immortal words:

"Come bubbela, they don't want us here anymore."

The Forgotten Rachels

Easily Understood Explanation of Derivative Markets ?

Easily Understood Explanation of Derivative Markets

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.
Heidi keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers' loans). Word gets around about Heidi's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi's gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.
At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets.
Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar. He so informs Heidi. Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community. The suppliers of Heidi's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi's bar.

Rabbi David Orlofsky: Why do Kiruv ?

Rabbi David Orlofsky: Why do Kiruv ?

He tells it like it is.

Retrospective

Chosen, and, yes, Special

Brains, energy, and integrity........... Warren Buffet


Non-Jews can be objective and see the facts.
American Jews and especially secular self-hating Jews can not.

Why ?

more....

“The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience.”

“The strongest of all warriors are these two – Time and Patience.”
(quote)


How many such strong warriors existed and/or exist today ?

Meanings behind some cultural traditions are at risk of becoming ritualistic habits

By ADAM EDEN • June 6, 2010

To many people, following a religion simply means participating in activities like meeting with a congregation at a place of worship or reading the occasional prayer. Maybe this is just me, but isn't religion more than just the routine cycle of attending a church and reading from a book, with the occasional holiday thrown in?

Now, before I offend anyone, maybe I should clarify. Take an example from my personal life as a Jew. I'm sure you're familiar with a holiday called Chanukah in which for eight nights, Jews light candles on a menorah. This holiday is about more than just lighting candles, however, and that's where I begin to question the state of today's religious communities.
The tradition of lighting candles has gone from being a holy tradition to a routine activity that some are beginning to forget the true meaning of. Even eating the flat bread, matzah, on the holiday of Passover is becoming just a routine as opposed to representing the symbolism that this holds in the acquisition of freedom in the Jewish history.

Now, Judaism isn't the only religion this can apply to. Christmas is quite possibly one of the most important holidays in the Christian religion, but the time-honored tradition has gone from a holy tradition of celebrating the birth of Jesus to a routine of lighting up a tree and exchanging gifts with family and friends.

This isn't a rant about religion, but rather a call to action about the importance of knowing one's culture and origins.

Back on the subject of Judaism, one should know that this is more than just a religion, but a way of life. Take, for example, Hasidism, which can be described as a very orthodox lifestyle, tracing back hundreds of years.

In today's world, Hasidic Jews still exist, and although the various separate communities are secluded from one another and contain many differences, they all hold fast to the traditions of their predecessors. What's more, as well as keeping tradition, the
communities of the Hasidic Jews fully understand why they commit every action they make when applied to tradition.

While the situation may seem to be getting out of hand, we can still ask "What can be done about this lack of culture and understanding?" If one were to take a look at a more recent sect of Judaism labeled Humanistic Judaism, an answer can be derived from the observation. Humanistic Judaism is a sect of the religion that focuses less on the theological aspect of the religion, and more on the culture and tradition.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that anyone who follows a religion and wants to understand the culture should forsake the theology of their beliefs, but rather, they should be inspired to take an active step toward understanding their beliefs and backgrounds.
If someone can create a new sect of a prominent religion just so they can gain a deeper knowledge of the culture and traditions, why can't anyone of any religion take the time to do a bit of research on their history?

Surely this would require less time and effort, and is certainly beneficial as well. All I ask is that we take the time to go from following a clockwork routine to understanding why we do what we do.

Adam Eden is a lifelong Muncie resident and a student at Ball State University.

Chosen, but Not Special

Op-Ed Contributor
Chosen, but Not Special
By MICHAEL CHABON
Published: June 4, 2010


“GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity” declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis — and, indeed, for Jews everywhere — this felt like headline news.

Regardless of whether we chose in the end to condemn or to defend the botched raid on the Mavi Marmara, for Jews the first reaction was shock, confusion, as we tried to get our heads around what appeared to be an unprecedented display of blockheadedness. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic cast his startled regard back along the length of Jewish history looking for a parallel example of arrant stupidity and found, instead, what Jews around the world have long been accustomed to find in contemplating ourselves and that history: an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power.

“There is a word in Yiddish, seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance,” Mr. Goldberg wrote. “Jews have always needed seichel to survive in this world; a person in possession of a yiddishe kop, a ‘Jewish head,’ is someone who has seichel, someone who looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way — blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.”

This is nonsense, of course — nonsense to which, I hasten to assure Mr. Goldberg, I have always avidly subscribed. In the aggregate, Jews may or may not be smarter than other groups, but the evidence in favor of granting some kind of inherent or culturally determined supernatural abilities of seichel to the yiddishe kop certainly cannot be found in our history, which is littered as thickly with the individual and collective acts of blockheads as that of any other nation or people or tribe.

An honest assessment of Jewish history must conclude that even the collective act that might seem most tellingly to argue in favor of Jewish intelligence — our survival across millenniums in spite of constant hatred, war, persecution, intolerance and genocide — is ultimately just the same trick performed by our species as a whole (at least so far).

The presence of Jews among the not-yet-extinct peoples of the world can no more be credited to any kind of special trait or behavior than the Tasmanians or the Taino ought to be blamed for their own eradication. In the end human survival is a matter of luck — or destiny, if you prefer — of decisions taken in distant capitals in vanished eras that bore unforeseeable fruit 200 years on, of chaotically intersecting systems of weather, metaphysics and pandemic, of the failures and weaknesses and limitations of our would-be destroyers.

We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes. To imagine a Chelm — the town inhabited, according to Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, entirely by fools — requires a presumption of general wisdom elsewhere, as the proper imagining of Heaven requires an earthly realm of sorrow.

As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over — God love them — any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.

This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before — Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.

It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people — stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel — that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.

This sense of widespread shock at Israel’s blockheadedness in the aftermath of the raid seemed not to be confined, in fact, to Jews. Even Israel’s sternest critics will concede that the Jewish state knows how to go about the business of survival in a hostile world with intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, flexibility and preternatural control over the levers of chance and diplomacy (not to mention the global economic system and the news media). Indeed anti-Semites and the enemies of Israel have often been found among the most devout believers in the myth of seichel, of a special — O.K., a diabolical — Jewish intelligence.

For we Jews are not, it turns out, entirely comfortable living with the consequences of this myth, as becomes clear from the squirming and throat-clearing that take place among us whenever some non-Jew pipes up with his own observations about how clever and smart we are in our yiddishe kops. These include people like the political scientist Charles Murray, author of an influential essay titled “Jewish Genius,” or Kevin B. MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach who argues that Jews essentially undertook a centuries-long program of self-breeding, selecting for traits of intelligence, guile and skill at calculation, as a kind of evolutionary adaptation to the buffetings of history and exile.

Such claims, in mouths of gentiles, are a disturbing echo of the charges of the pogrom-stokers, the genocidalists, the Father Coughlins, who come to sharpen their knives against the same grindstone of generalization on which we Jews have long polished the magnifying lenses of our self-regard. The man who praises you for your history of accomplishment may someday seek therein the grounds for your destruction.

This is, of course, the foundational ambiguity of Judaism and Jewish identity: the idea of chosenness, of exceptionalism, of the treasure that is a curse, the blessing that is a burden, of the setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.

This is the ambiguity that cites the dispensation of God and history, of covenant and Holocaust, to lay claim to a special relationship between Jews and the Land of Israel, then protests when the world — cynically or sincerely — holds Israel to a different, higher standard as beneficiaries of that dispensation.

This is the ambiguity that proudly asserts the will and the obligation of Israel to be a light unto the nations, then points to the utterly evil, utterly bankrupt, utterly degraded, utterly stupid misdeeds of ship-sinking, sailor-massacring North Korea — North Korea! — in an attempt to give context to its own relatively less-evil, bankrupt, degraded and stupid behavior.

Now, with the memory of the Mavi Marmara fresh in our minds, is the time for Jews to confront, at long last, the eternal truth of our stupidity as a people, which I will stack, blunder for blunder, against that of any other nation now or at any time living on this planet of folly, in this world of Chelm. Now is the moment to acknowledge that the 62-year history of Israel, like the history of the Jewish people and of the human race, has been from the beginning a record of glory and fiasco, triumph and error, greatness and meanness, charity and crime.

The past two decades in particular have illustrated to Jews and to the world a painful premise, but one that was implicit in the Zionist idea from the beginning: If, in the words of the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish people have a natural right “to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,” then the inescapable codicil of this natural inheritance is that the Jewish people, “like all other nations,” are every bit as capable of barbarism and stupidity.

IF Israel was, as the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann put it, to “become as Jewish as England is English and America is American,” then, like England and America and every other modern polity, Israel must slog along through history, purblind and panicky, from its founding to its ultimate fate, prey at every moment to — and, God willing, on guard against — its rich, inglorious human heritage of blockheadedness.

After my initial shock at this fresh display of foolery by the Chelmites of Jerusalem had subsided, I felt an abstract pity for the wasted dead with their cargo of lumber and delusions, for the ill-equipped, poorly led soldiers who had killed them and, running true and clear like a subterranean stream, pity for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas the past four years, and his family. But I also felt a kind of grim relief, even resolve.

Let us shed our illusions, starting with ourselves, whoever we are and however august our inheritance of stupidity. Let us not forget the eternal hole in our human pocket. Let us not, henceforward, judge Israel or seek to have it judged for its intelligence, for its prowess, for its righteousness or for its moral authority, by any standard other than the pathetic, debased and rickety one that we apply, so inconsistently and self-servingly, to ourselves and to everybody else. And let us not forgive ourselves — any more than we forgive Israel, or than Israel can forgive itself — for that terrible inconsistency.

Michael Chabon is the author of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”