just kiddin'

I like him, but this isn't a Mark Lowry thread.

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2932910/jewish/Challahs-from-Heaven.htm

Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa was so poor that he and his wife often had nothing to cook for Shabbat. Every Friday, before Shabbat, she would throw a burning coal into the oven, so that smoke would drift out of her chimney and the neighbors would assume that she had what to cook.

A nasty neighbor said, “I know that that they don’t have anything. Let me go and see what all that smoke is about.”

When she knocked on their door, Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa’s wife was mortified and went to hide in an inner room. The nosy neighbor entered anyway. A miracle occurred, and she found the oven full of loaves of bread and a mixing bowl full of dough.

She called, “Come! Come! Bring the spatula. Your bread is starting to burn, and you need to get it out quick!”

Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa’s wife said, “That’s what I went into the inner room for.”

Indeed, the sages say, she was telling the truth. She was so accustomed to miracles that she wasn’t surprised that coals had turned into bread.

Later, Rabbi Chanina’s wife asked him, “How long will we have to suffer like this?”

“What should we do?” he replied.

She said, “Pray that we be given something of value.”

He prayed, and a hand-like apparition stretched down from the heavens and gave him a golden table leg.

He later dreamed that he saw all the righteous people in the world to come eating at three-legged tables, while he and his wife were eating at a table with just two legs.

He asked his wife, “Will it be okay with you if all the other righteous people are eating at three-legged tables, while you and I are eating at a table that’s missing one of its legs?”

“What should we do?” she asked. “Pray that it should be taken from you.”

He prayed, and it was taken from him.

The sages remarked that the second miracle was greater than the first, because tradition says that the heavens give but they don’t take back.

Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 24b–25a

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/412249/jewish/Rabbi-Chanina-and-the-Rock.htm

Rabbi Yosai said: All your deeds should be for the sake of Heaven. (Avot 2:12)


"As the men lifted the stone, Rabbi Chanina placed his hand under it too."
Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa watched all the people going up to Jerusalem, taking with them fine gifts and offerings for the Temple.

How he longed to go with them, and bring some wonderful gift for G-d. Alas, Rabbi Chanina was very poor. He had nothing he could offer to G-d.

He wandered sadly till he was all alone in a deserted field. Suddenly he saw an interesting stone on the ground. It was very large and beautiful.

“What a splendid idea!” thought Rabbi Chanina. “I will take this stone to the Holy Temple as my gift to G-d!”

Rabbi Chanina ran home to get his tools. He cut the stone, and polished it till its colors shone beautifully.

At last it was fit to decorate the Holy Temple.

But how would he ever get it there? He looked for someone to help. He would need five strong men to carry it, and they would have to be paid. What was Rabbi Chanina to do? He barely had five gold coins as his whole life’s savings.

Suddenly five men appeared as if out of nowhere. “We will help you carry this stone,” they said. “Can you give us each one gold coin?”

That was exactly how much money Rabbi Chanina could afford.

“Yes,” he agreed at once. “I will give you that much!”

“You must also help us to carry the stone,” the men said.

As the men lifted the stone, Rabbi Chanina placed his hand under it too. It felt miraculously light. Suddenly, he found himself in Jerusalem, standing right there in the Holy Temple. “Here, I’ll pay you,” he said to the men, but they had all vanished!

Rabbi Chanina hurried to speak with the Sages who sat in the Temple. They smiled. “Those men must have been angels sent to help you!” they said. So Rabbi Chanina gave the money to poor Torah students instead, and thanked G-d for helping him.

This story teaches us many interesting lessons.

Nowadays it is in our hands to bring Moshiach. That might seem like an impossibly difficult task. How can we ever do it?

We must take a lesson from Rabbi Chanina. If we really want to do bring Moshiach, we need only try. Even if all we do is "put our hand to the rock," G-d will make it possible for us, and before we know it, we will find ourselves in Jerusalem, together with Moshiach, and all the Jewish people. Now!

Same source .

Man has had an abiding faith in a world beyond the grave. The conviction in a life after death, unprovable but unshakeable, has been cherished since the beginning of thinking man’s life on earth. It makes its appearance in religious literature not as fiat, commanded irrevocably by an absolute G‑d, but rather arises plant-like, growing and developing naturally in the soul. It then sprouts forth through sublime prayer and sacred hymn. Only later does it become extrapolated in complicated metaphysical speculation.

The afterlife has not been “thought up”; it is not a rational construction of a religious philosophy imposed on believing man. It has sprung from within the hearts of masses of men, a sort of consensus gentium, inside out, a hope beyond and above the rational, a longing for the warm sun of eternity. The afterlife is not a theory to be proven logically or demonstrated by rational analysis. It is axiomatic. It is to the soul what oxygen is to the lungs. There is little meaning to life, to G‑d, to man’s constant strivings, to all of his achievements, unless there is a world beyond the grave.

The Bible, so vitally concerned with the actions of man in this world, and agonizing over his day-to-day morals, is relatively silent about the world to come. But precisely this very silence is a tribute to the awesome concept, taken for granted like the oxygen in the atmosphere. No elaborate apologia, no complex abstractions are necessary. The Bible, which records the sacred dialogue between G‑d and man, surely must be founded on the soul’s eternal existence. It was not a matter of debate, as it became later in history when whole movements interpreted scripture with slavish literalism and could not find the afterlife crystallized in letters and words, or later, when philosophers began to apply the yardstick of rationalism to man’s every hope and idea, and sought empirical proof for this conviction of the soul. It was a fundamental creed, always present, though rarely articulated.

If the soul is immortal, then death cannot be considered a final act. If the life of the soul is to be continued, then death, however bitter, is deprived of its treacherous power of casting mourners into a lifetime of agonizing hopelessness over an irretrievable loss. Terrible though it is, death is a threshold to a new world—the “world to come.”

A Parable
An imaginative and telling analogy that conveys the hope and confidence in the afterlife, even though this hope must be refracted through the prism of death, is the tale of twins awaiting birth in the mother’s womb. It was created by a contemporary Israeli rabbi, the late Y. M. Tuckachinsky.

Imagine twins growing peacefully in the warmth of the womb. Their mouths are closed, and they are being fed via the navel. Their lives are serene. The whole world, to these brothers, is the interior of the womb. Who could conceive anything larger, better, more comfortable? They begin to wonder: “We are getting lower and lower. Surely, if it continues, we will exit one day. What will happen after we exit?”

Now the first infant is a believer. He is heir to a religious tradition which tells him that there will be a “new life” after this wet and warm existence of the womb. A strange belief, seemingly without foundation, but one to which he holds fast. The second infant is a thoroughgoing skeptic. Mere stories do not deceive him. He believes only in that which can be demonstrated. He is enlightened, and tolerates no idle conjecture. What is not within one’s experience can have no basis in one’s imagination.

Says the faithful brother: “After our ‘death’ here, there will be a new and great world. We will eat through the mouth! We will see great distances, and we will hear through the ears on the sides of our heads. Why, our feet will be straightened! And our heads will be up and free, rather than down and boxed in!”

Replies the skeptic: “Nonsense. You’re straining your imagination again. There is no foundation for this belief. It is only your survival instinct, an elaborate defense mechanism, a historically conditioned subterfuge. You are looking for something to calm your fear of ‘death.’ There is only this world. There is no world to come!”

“Well, then,” asks the first, “what do you say it will be like?”

The second brother snappily replies with all the assurance of the slightly knowledgeable: “We will go with a bang. Our world will collapse and we will sink into oblivion. No more. Nothing. Black void. An end to consciousness. Forgotten. This may not be a comforting thought, but it is a logical one.”

Suddenly, the water inside the womb bursts. The womb convulses. Upheaval. Turmoil. Writhing. Everything lets loose. Then a mysterious pounding—a crushing, staccato pounding. Faster, faster, lower, lower.

The believing brother exits. Tearing himself from the womb, he falls outward. The second brother shrieks, startled by the “accident” befallen his brother. He bewails and bemoans the tragedy—the death of a perfectly fine fellow. Why? Why? Why didn’t he take better care? Why did he fall into that terrible abyss?

As he thus laments, he hears a head-splitting cry, and a great tumult from the black abyss, and he trembles: “Oh my! What a horrible end! As I predicted!”

Meanwhile as the skeptic brother mourns, his “dead” brother has been born into the “new” world. The head-splitting cry is a sign of health and vigor, and the tumult is really a chorus of mazel tovs sounded by the waiting family thanking G‑d for the birth of a healthy son.

Indeed, in the words of a contemporary thinker, man comes from the darkness of the “not yet,” and proceeds to the darkness of the “no more.” While it is difficult to imagine the “not yet,” it is more difficult to picture the “no more.”

As we separate and “die” from the womb, only to be born to life, so we separate and die from our world, only to be reborn to life eternal. The exit from the womb is the birth of the body. The exit from the body is the birth of the soul. As the womb requires a gestation period of nine months, the world requires a residence of 70 or 80 years. As the womb is a prozdor, an anteroom preparatory to life, so our present existence is a prozdor to the world beyond.

“And do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the being. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both being and body in Gehenna. " ( ISR )
http://www.menfak.no/bibelprog/vines?word=%AFt0001348

"What year did the United States take over Guam?" my daughter asked me while I was contemplating nothing more taxing than whether to give away my prettiest, yet most painful, pair of shoes.

"Guam?" I asked. I knew nothing about Guam, other than it was somewhere out in the Pacific, was considered strategically important, and would be impossible to pronounce if you had peanut butter in your mouth.

As I stalled for time, she said, "Never mind. Found the answer in my book. We got it from Spain in 1898."

"I was just going to say that!" I called after her, but in vain. She was already beginning her essay on the Treaty of Paris (also 1898, if you must know) while I returned to my own cost-benefit analysis of maintaining my inventory of pretty, painful shoes versus the cost of ongoing podiatric care.

This anecdote underscores why I agree with all the educators who have been fuming about piles of homework that kids bring home. They claim that excessive homework robs children of part of their childhood, when they could otherwise be doing fun things, such as hacking into other people's web sites. But they've only got it half-right: What about excessive homework robbing me of my adulthood? Didn't I already do all this homework more than thirty years ago?

Admittedly, I enjoyed helping my kids with schoolwork when they were little. Then, the questions were easy. When a kid asked, "Mommy, what's two quarters plus three pennies plus three nickels add up to?" I could do it! When a child wanted me to help him think up homophones, like "son" and "sun," I was there! These questions were beautiful in their simplicity. Since I could answer them easily, or at least guide my kids toward finding the answers, they boosted my own self-esteem (tragically neglected by teachers in the benighted days of my own elementary education). Best of all, my agility with first and second-grade schoolwork preserved my young children's belief (so sadly short-lived) that my husband and I knew just about everything in the world. Ah, those were the days.

But around middle school, the kids demand much tougher information, such as the difference between a cerebrum and a cerebellum, and what happened during antebellum, and if this wasn't bad enough, they want my help as they craft essays in which they plead guilty to devastating the environment simply because they live, breathe, take the occasional shower and drink from the occasional plastic water bottles. While I scramble to help them find answers in their books or in our encyclopedia, I can't help but wonder, "Why am I not smarter than a fifth grader?"

I secretly agree with my kids when they complain that much of their homework will have little practical application to their lives as grown-ups. There are no budding scientists in the family, so the advanced study of mitochondria and the nervous system seems just an annoying impediment to their reading up on information that really interests them, such as "Why is a frankfurter called a hot dog?" and "Will Kobe Bryant make good on his threat to leave the Lakers?"

But I have to pretend to be on the schools' side, and besides, I'm a Jewish mother. So when one kid recently argued that it was a waste of his time to practice factoring trinomials, I feigned shock. "If it was good enough for Alan Greenspan, it's good enough for you," I answered. "After all, Ben Bernanke won't be around forever. You could be waiting in the wings as next Secretary of the Treasury, ready to dazzle them with quadratic equations and canny speculation about the future of hedge funds." During my short tirade, I caught the same kid sneaking a look at a Snapple cap, where he learned that a goldfish has an attention span of three seconds. Hmmm.

To my shame, I am utterly useless at helping with any math problem from fifth-grade or above. Those questions are met with shouts of, "When's Dad coming home?" I actually feel sorry for my kids, hunkered down over fat math books, open to questions that ask them to simplify equations that have about four dozen strings of numbers, x's, y's, and square roots. I get dizzy just looking at them.

My solution to simplifying the equations would be to take them to an accountant. But once, out of sheer desperation, one kid asked me if I remembered anything about multiplying radical expressions, using the product rule for radicals. I answered honestly that I felt there were already way too many radicals in our society and I refused to be a party to helping to multiply them at all.

Personally, I think that kids need practical math, the kind that will help them make the following calculations later in life. For example, "If the water heater explodes at the same time that the car transmission dies, which gets fixed first?" Or, "If I can't really afford to spend money on new clothes but Nordstrom is having its semi-annual women and children's sale, and the credit card bill won't come till after my next paycheck, do I still charge the clothes or put them on layaway?"

But no. Instead, educators are badgering kids into knowing how to convert Celsius to Farenheit, who started the Peloponnesian War, oh, and, into writing more essays on what we can do to reduce our carbon footprint.

Meanwhile, I have concluded, after arduous study, that it is not worth keeping my pretty-yet-painful shoes. I am keeping my notes on this study for inclusion in the small book I intend to write one day, called "Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in the Nordstrom Shoe Department."

By Judy Gruen

Research Shmesearch.

I mean, usually I'm all for it. I respond pronto when the "baby people" research children's medicines and make necessary recalls. Or when bored mothers spend hours researching, on my behalf, the best new baby gadgets. I enthusiastically concurred when research studies concluded that redheads are more fun (yes, I have a redhead). In all these cases, and hundreds more, research is a mother's best friend. In fact, we love to pull out our affinity for research when a fellow mother makes a claim about a philosophy or product.

When I was pregnant, I didn't even know "baby brain" was a silent understanding amongst soon-to-be and new momsWe're like, "Hmm, I dunno, I have to research that."

But then, every once in a while, a study releases findings that make you think the lab-rats are really the scientists. Such is the case with new research out of Maryland's National Institute of Mental Health, which claims that the brains of new moms are actually larger, and bustling with a ton of new brain cells that make them "smarter." The explanation? That the steep learning curve of dealing with a newborn awakens increased smarts.

I don't care how many cerebral scans they collected or the magnitude of new brain cells they found, no study can counter the overwhelming reports of almost every new mother that "baby brain" - the theory that a new mother's thinking is impaired by pregnancy and raising a newborn - is indisputable. When I was pregnant, I didn't even know "baby brain" was a silent understanding amongst soon-to-be and new moms. I discovered it on my own when I became increasingly incoherent in conversation. Like I was drunk. Smart enough to know that I was intelligent enough not to have been drinking during pregnancy, I searched for answers. I Googled something like "pregnant and brainless" and was introduced to a world of jokes, experiences and, yes, research, that made me feel no less drunk but a bit more validated.

You see, it was more than just the inability to speak as intelligently as I was used to. I was also forgetting things. Like, you know, important things. I couldn't sit and write like I could before. I was tired. I was preoccupied. I was, well...stupid. And it didn't get better after having the baby. Oh contrair! Having a real life in my hands only generated more loss of life in my head. Sure, I was smart enough to feed, bathe and care for my child. I kept a very organized diaper bag and was on my toes with everything baby-related. But when it came to life in general, there was no brain left. I started putting the ice tray in the refrigerator. I started painting my nails, forgetting to do the other hand. Washing the milk dishes with the red sponge. Not exactly Harvard material.

Honestly, to say my brain got smarter is actually an insult. If being clumsy and incoherent is me with a better brain, then I must have been a complete dummy before.

I'm not embarrassed to admit all this because I know I'm not alone. It sounds crazy, but me and all my amazing, capable and even brilliant friends have all had serious encounters with brainlessness once we entered the motherland. And we're smart about it. We run into an old friend without recognizing her, then simply point to our bump and say, "It's the baby brain! How are you?"

Having a real life in my hands only generated more loss of life in my headThe new headlines announcing "Baby Brain is a Myth!" are robbing new moms everywhere of their most legitimate excuse for all the very real blubber-brain. If you're pregnant or a new mom that finds yourself forgetting the oven and turning your chocolate cake to charcoal or removing clothing from the dryer and putting it back in the wash, don't let the new research make you feel insecure about your shrinking brain.

Not that you're stupid enough to fall for it. Women may become a bit more brainless, but our brainlessness is one thing we're pretty smart about. No mother is reading the new findings and saying, "Wow, and all this time I had a sense I've been smarter since the birth!" Not happening. If you're expecting or just joined motherhood and you truly feel like you've become smarter since having a baby, please contact me. I'd love to meet you. Because seriously, all this research seems so bogus to me. Unless there's something I'm not getting. Which wouldn't really make the case for the new mom's smart brain, would it?

By Mimi Hecht (Notik)

While other Jewish mothers may kvetch when their grown children don't keep in touch or share more of their lives, I peek into my daughters' pursuits whenever I please.

Instead of sitting by the phone or waiting for an email to learn what they're up to, I employ technology supposedly too tricky for my Social Security set. I joined the online social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, and am now able to lurk on the sidelines of my kids' lives.

I employ technology supposedly too tricky for my Social Security setThere was my daughter, Faith, uploading videos of my granddaughter Betsy playing drums or sashaying with a hula hoop. I hung around and watched as her Facebook Friends weighed in on the child's talent and adorableness. Then I, too, made an appropriate loving comment. No need for a guilt-edged, "You share these with friends? You couldn't have shown them to me first?"

My other daughter, Jill, was the one who urged me to join Twitter. "It's fun," she said. "Just give it a try." Now I wonder if my youngest regrets her noodge, for after a day of not seeing any of her Tweets, I posted, "Where's Jill?" Within the hour, she returned with this snarky response, "Worst idea in the world: encouraging your Jewish mother to join Twitter."

Therein lies a bit of danger in my trespassing: Jill and I nearly got into a cyber squabble after I publicly shot back, "This from the child I spent 10 hours of labor with." She became worried. I received a private message, "We're only kidding, right Mom?" I let her stew for a bit and then answered, "Of course, I laughed when I read it." She begged me to repost my reply out of our private dialogue so her Twitter followers would know she and her mom were still buddies.

Admittedly, some of my friends think my computer creeping is, well, creepy. "Your daughters should call," one harrumphs, "after all, you're their mother. Why should you have to chase after them?"

Her indignation sent me back to my young adulthood, and conversations with my own mother about my lack of timely reporting in. "Oh, so it's you," she would say when I phoned, as if I were a black sheep who had gone missing for a decade and suddenly turned up.

I knew my cue. "Sorry, Mom," I would say, "I meant to call, but..."

"No, that's okay," she'd interrupt, "as long as you're alive."

I vowed not to employ guilt When I had kids of my own, I vowed not to employ guilt. My daughters would willingly keep in touch, I knew, especially after their moving to states on opposite sides of the country. There'd be no need for me to paint a picture of their pathetic mother sitting by the phone. If I wanted to hear their voices, I would make the calls. I wouldn't stare at the silent apparatus willing it to ring.

Naturally, if more days went by than a mother who provided her children with perfect childhoods should expect to wait to hear from them -- I'd leave a message something like, "I know you're busy, but when you get some time…"

Now, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, I don't have to resort to the phone or my passive-aggressive commentary. All I have to do is sign on to those two sites, hang out a bit and catch up on their whereabouts. So far, it seems to be working. But, I admit to a bit of worry. What if they have found another website, unbeknownst to me, where they reveal their more clandestine thoughts and behaviors? Hah! Give me some time, and this Jewish mother -- clever on the keyboard -- will soon be shadowing.







By Elaine M. Soloway

In most ways I'm a classic Jewish mother. If I'm cold, I tell my kids to put on sweaters. I make chicken soup on Friday nights. (It's good and good for you!) I worry more than I should. But I depart from the stereotypes in one significant way: I really am not interested in hearing from my kids every day when they are away at camp on the other side of the country.

And yet, they call. They call from the bus to tell me they are on the way back from the water park, but the reception is patchy up in the mountains and usually the call breaks up, requiring several more calls to complete the message. They call to say that while the showers are flooding the bunks, they are still having a great time. They call to tell me about the successful outing to Wal-Mart to get fly swatters and candy.

I had thought that going away to camp meant going away Look, I'll match my maternal love for my kids any day with any other mother on the planet. My kids are fabulous, smart, and even good-looking (objectively speaking). I am enormously grateful to be their mom. But I had thought that going away to camp meant going away, i.e., that my urban kids would revel in the freedom of being in the great outdoors, and parent-free, for one month. Meanwhile, we parents could learn to cope (in a small, measured dose) with an empty nest.

And unlike when the kids are home in Los Angeles, where I do worry when they are out too late, I am blissfully worry-free when my kids are at camp — until they call me at midnight from the bus somewhere in the Catskills Mountains. Then I think: They're on a dark and windy mountain road! Is the driver responsible, cautious, and still alert at this hour? When they call to report on the bug problem, I think: West Nile virus! Are they using the bug spray I packed? Ignorance is bliss, and I wish I weren't always so well informed.

Moreover, it turns out I am also expected to email my daughter several times a week. I had thought I was doing something special by writing her a real note card that had to be mailed with a stamp, but this didn't rate. "All the other parents" are busy emailing their campers, and so must I. G-d knows what damage I might do to my child if she doesn't hear from me electronically every 48 hours. Talk about pressure!

The good news is that I absolutely must find something fun to do all by myself, not because I'm bored — just because this way I'll have something worth sharing on the next phone call.



By Judy Gruen

Three Preachers and a Drunk

Three preachers were driving down the road when they missed a turn and went into the ditch. As they pulled themselves together, a drunk pulled up and asked if they were all right.
"Oh, yes, Jesus is with us," one replied.
The drunk thought that over for a minute. "Well, you'd better let him get in with me, you're going to kill him!"