It has been a few months since I have stopped going to school and I stopped having to wake up early and get into a car first thing in the morning. This is because of something called "Coronavirus" which we don’t want to catch or share with others.
We have Zoom school every day for 30 minutes just like my big brothers and sister and I pray and talk to my friends and listen to my Morah teach us and tell us stories. I have learned how to unmute myself and to mute myself too and I have learned all about Zoom….
I often want to go to a park and just play on the slides and swings, but my parents tell me we can’t because of the Coronavirus, that makes me sad every time I ask and we can’t go.
We often go for… Read More »
What do you need to do or accomplish in life in order to matter?
The other day I had to go into Boston to get some things from the Jewish Day School where I teach and my kids learn, and two of my sons excitedly joined me for the trip. The thrill of this exhilarating road trip was palpable as we drove on the highway for the first time in months and the grinding trip which we normally did in gridlock traffic every single school day, suddenly became the most cool and fun trip. The kids marveled at the empty highways, the construction sites which had changed dramatically over the last few months, and at the city of Boston which seemed almost deserted and sleepy.
While waiting for a Kidney Transplant in the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem in 2007, Avraham Yeshayahu Heber
Lonely, anxious, worried, agitated and fearful, are just some of the many descriptions I am hearing regarding how the loneliness and quarantining has been making people feel. There are many real concerns about health, about loss of income, about not being able to be together with loved ones, and not having the ability to get together with friends and community which are all combining to have a negative effect on people’s feelings and emotions.
"Don't lose sight of the Forest for the Trees" is an age old saying which means that sometimes we get so caught up in the details of life (the trees), that we forget to see the bigger picture (the forest).
Today the sirens went off in Israel as millions of Israelis remembered the Six Million victims of the Shoah (on the anniversary of the conclusion of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising). My Facebook feed is full of pictures and memories of families remembering their loved ones who were murdered or survived the Holocaust and it makes me think about all the special Holocaust survivors that I am blessed to have had or have a relationship with. Each Holocaust survivor is a spiritual giant and hero, as they literally climbed out of the ashes to build a new world, to build new families and to carrying on living and carrying forward the Jewish values and beliefs of generations before them.
Congratulations to Mikhal Shvartzman, a student in our Hebrew School on such an amazing accomplishment and for winning 1st place in this amazing competition with Hebrew Schools from across the country and beyond! All your hard work and study in your free time was an inspiration to all of us!
I have friends in the ICU on ventilators, I have friends who have parents in the ICU and know many dozens of people with the virus. Perhaps it is because we are so connected to the community in NY or perhaps because we live in a very big global community, the news this week has been challenging
Morality through the ages often seems to shift, with ideas and behaviors fluctuating between being considered the norm or being considered immoral. One needn't travel to far back in time to discover social behaviors which were acceptable and commonplace, which are now considered totally unacceptable and immoral. Thousands of years ago, child sacrifice, gladiator fights, and the like, were all a normal part of life in many cultures. Care and compassion on a society level were not the norm in most cultures.
The seeds were sitting in archaeological ruins in Masada & Qumran for close to 2,000 years, buried in rubble, broken shards of pottery or just covered with desert sand. Long since forgotten about, with dozens of generations coming and going, the seeds of these date Palms, a fruit that is one of the seven fruits that Israel is blessed with in the Torah, were just organic matter which hadn’t yet decomposed.
In the last two weeks, I have traveled to New York State no less than three times for various reasons and I have driven many hundreds of miles each time. I also drove locally this week during the bad weather and while I only flew off the rode once and landed in a snow bank after the car lost control on ice, and made it back safely home a short while later, it made me think of how grateful we should all be for all the travel that we do safely each and every day of the year.
I met Gadi from Foshan, a city in China, and he tells me with a smile that he has just opened a Jewish Day School K-12 in his city. I am blown away as it seems like he has only been there for under two years. I then asked him, "how many students do you have?” to which he respond just eight. He then tells me that in his city there are only thirteen Jewish families and about 100 singles from around the world who do business there.