Memory Story

I own just one relic left behind by my Grandpa Wini: the “life story” I made him recite into their Flat-Mic cassette recorder.

I had that tape for ten years. I could never bring myself to listen it.

Until now.

“On my first day of kindergarten,” he began, “I was sent home with a piece of tape across my mouth and a note pinned to my sweater that said, ‘Send him back when he can speak English’ because all I could speak was…Yiddish.”

What I didn’t know was how much I almost never knew. That little piece of tape sealed his true story. Just forty-two words, yet enough to unlock an entirely new understanding of someone I thought I knew.

What’s something you learned from asking your elders?

Hope Story

Last year, I began volunteering at the dog rescue shelter near my home. The backstories of the dogs read like a Debbie Downer routine—elderly, blind, diabetic, etc. But I felt sustained by the very existence of this place—the relentless optimism and abiding hope that I saw in the people who keep it going.

A few months in, I fell for a sassy 12-year-old pug named Midge (picture the personality of Susie Essman, curly-haired opinionated voice of reason on Curb Your Enthusiasm, with the stage presence of Tina Turner), and decided to adopt her. Sharing this news, I was met with a variety of incredulous reactions, from my wife’s genuine concern for my well-being, to a stranger at a holiday party who gasped, “But she’s just going to die!”

Mostly, people asked why? Why would you knowingly enter into an emotional attachment that’s likely to end in sadness so soon? It’s a divisive question, one that forces us to consider the value of love and hope. To me, it’s worth it. As renowned pug enthusiast W.B. Yeats said, “Man is in love, and loves what vanishes; what more is there to say?”
 

When has hope paid off for you?

The Future Story

Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently. I prefer to live as an optimist.

What does living well look like to you?

Decisions

By Benjamin Franklin

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!

How do you engage with, or avoid, political conversations?
 

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Childhood

By Gail Ghezzi

I remember the Halloween costumes I wore in my youth: witches, vampires, clowns, and hobos. There were also costumes based on popular TV characters, like the Flintstones or the Jetsons. One year I went as a younger version of myself. I carried a stuffed animal from door-to-door.

What piece of your childhood do you carry with you now?

Gail Ghezzi is an art director and artist living in Bergen County, NJ.

Soul Music

By David Holzel

Recently, a colleague brought to my attention a rock and roll trivia discovery with an excellent Jewish angle hidden within.

The Guardian extracted the lyrics of each of the Beatles’ 300 or so recorded songs and then ranked the individual words by the number of times the Fab Four sang them.

So here’s the Jewish angle – “Love Me Do,” “All You Need is Love,” “She Loves You,” “Can’t Buy Me Love” – The L Word appears 613 times. That’s the number of mitzvot the Torah is believed to contain. Neat, huh?

What is a new discovery you’ve made, with something you already know well?

Simchat Torah, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the annual cycle of Torah readings, begins at sunset this Monday.


David Holzel is Managing Editor of The Washington Jewish Week.

Inside/Outside

By Adam Pollack

The Outdoors allows me to listen to the world around me. I become a part of it. What’s that sound? Am I safe? Wow, that was beautiful! I realize that I’m a natural being, not invincible nor all that important, like our modern society teaches. My life is put into perspective. When I let my senses and instinct work as designed, I give myself an opportunity to learn, to let new ideas in, and to remember, “for dust you are, and to dust you will return."

How might you incorporate more opportunities into your life where you encounter your primal nature?

Sukkot, a Jewish harvest festival, begins at sunset this Sunday.

Adam Pollack is a social entrepreneur, living in San Francisco with his husband, Nathan, and dog, Stewie.

Atonement

By Robin Becker

I’ve expanded like the swollen door in summer

           to fit my own dimension. Your loneliness

is a letter I read and put away, a daily reminder

           in the cry of the magpie that I am

still capable of inflicting pain

           at this distance.

Like a painting, our talk is dense with description,

           half-truths, landscapes, phrases layered

with a patina over time. When she came into my life

           I didn’t hesitate.

Or is that only how it seems now, looking back?

           Or is that only how you accuse me, looking back?

Long ago, this desert was an inland sea. In the mountains

           you can still find shells.

It’s these strange divagations I’ve come to love: midday sun

           on pink escarpments; dusk on gray sandstone;

toe-and-finger holes along the three hundred and fifty-seven foot

           climb to Acoma Pueblo, where the spirit

of the dead hovers about its earthly home

           four days, before the prayer sticks drive it away.

Today all good Jews collect their crimes like old clothes

           to be washed and given to the poor.

I remember how my father held his father around the shoulders

           as they walked to the old synagogue in Philadelphia.

[“Yom Kippur, Taos, New Mexico” from All-American Girl]

What is one thing I can do to nurture my relationships this year?

Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, begins at sunset this Tuesday.
 

Robin Becker is an American poet, critic, feminist, and professor.

The New Year

By Abraham Joshua Heschel

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

How can you make time for amazement this year?

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins at sunset this Sunday.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Polish-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century.

Reflecting with 10Q

With the Jewish High Holidays rapidly approaching, it’s a good time to take stock of your year, with the help of the questions below. Answer them quickly and honestly, and then take a few minutes to reflect on your answers.

This week's content is brought to you by 10Q, a Reboot project that engages you annually in a series of contemplative questions around the Jewish High Holidays.
 

Describe a significant experience that has happened in the past year. How did it affect you? Are you grateful? Relieved? Resentful? Inspired?

Is there something that you wish you had done differently this past year? Alternatively, is there something you're especially proud of from this past year?

Think about a milestone that happened with your family this past year. How has this affected you?

Describe an event in the world that has impacted you this year. How? Why?

Have you had any particularly spiritual experiences this past year? How has this experience affected you? (“Spiritual” can be broadly defined to include secular spiritual experiences: artistic, cultural, and so forth.)

Love

By Sarah DiLeo

Here is where we are.

A small, weathered boat

rowing  and rowing,

gathering words and days.

Every morning, you’re here

combing tangles from your hair.

A wild hawk glimpsed from the road,

an offhand miracle.

In the house we share

I fold a t-shirt, fold it again

carefully, a precious thing, a mine.

It is hard in this life not to feel small,

to let the ravenous fist of need rise up.

Lao Tzu says:

‘This is it.

no one else has the answer,

no other place will be better,

it has already turned out.’

The hard brown certainty of this.

The searing freedom.

We fell in love on the beach

that old shelf with its jars of despair, of longing.

You danced from the cigar box of my imagination

into the breathing air.

Always around us,

operatic dunes,

watchful moon on water,

the quieting murmur of grass in the wind.

The ache of the possible.

Is there a not-trite way to say you change everything?

Does it matter?

There is the naming of the hawk, and there is the hawk

and its gasping, unbearable beauty.

Where do you find love?

Sarah DiLeo is the integrated content producer for the production company Tool, and co-producer of The Kibitz podcast, a project of Reboot.

Making Change

By Sarra Alpert

This past May, a group of camp counselors and I conducted a virtual "accessibility scavenger hunt.” We listed facets of identity that impact a person’s day-to-day experience -- their gender, race, ability, etc. Then, we mentally explored our camps, identifying what might make those spaces less welcoming or accessible to some. Our list became so long that we had to cut it off.

A month later, at the closing retreat for an Avodah fellowship cohort, the fellows reflected back on their year of building skills towards Jewish community leadership for economic justice. Each shared a text or an image that motivated them. One, Emma, made an art piece with the Hebrew letter ayin at its center. She explained, “There are 16 of us, and ayin is the 16th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I’ve learned that the ayin is silent, only making a sound when combined with another letter or vowel.” She presented this letter as a reminder of why we do this work together: because we each come into our full power when in movement, sustaining and pushing each other forward.

I remembered those camp counselors then, how they’d become even more impassioned as they read their painfully long lists of what we can do better. Work for justice requires both a willingness to look at the worst things we’ve done to each other and an ability to maintain faith in our power to fix it. And as they were learning, and as Emma expressed, the strongest way to do that is to move on to the next item on the list together.

What is one thing you’ve done this week that has shifted your perspective?

Sarra Alpert is national program director at Avodah, the Jewish service corps, and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

This piece was created in partnership with the Foundation for Jewish Camp, whose mission is to help Jewish camps achieve their mission: to create transformative summer experiences – and the Jewish future.

Shabbat

By Adam Pollack

I spent Saturdays attending synagogue in the morning and then working at our family store. When we arrived at the store, we flipped milk crates to sit on and put cardboard on the work table to use as a tablecloth. It wasn’t just my immediate family either, my grandparents worked there, too. We would order shrimp with lobster sauce and pork fried rice. I later realized, this was Shabbat lunch, the Pollack way.

Now, Friday afternoons are for running, to separate my week from the weekend. Friday night dinner spent with my husband and dog. When I light the candles, our dog wags his tail because challah is coming. He embodies our joy at letting the week melt away. I know now, that this is Shabbat dinner, the Pollack way.

How have you brought childhood traditions to your life as an adult?

Adam Pollack is a social entrepreneur living in San Francisco with his husband, Nathan, and dog, Stewie.

Shifting Focus

By Jill Goldstein Smith

From a bird’s eye view, Lake Shalom looks like a version of the State of Israel. There is a wooden swing on the lake, less noticed from above. When it rains enough, it is almost swallowed up by the muddied red clay. The sparkling lake was intentionally dug in its shape, a Jewish summer camp built up surrounding it. But it’s not the body of water in the midst of the North Georgia Mountains, on the edge of the Chattahoochee National Forest, which defines this space.

Sometimes I feel drawn to the lake – but it is rarely the lake that catches my attention once I arrive. I’m drawn to the laughter and cheers of children and their new friends; the splashes of rock skipping, narrowly avoiding the turtles swimming beneath the surface; the rainbow in between the mountains; the sound of acoustic guitars jamming outside the arts & crafts house; the glistening dewdrops evaporating off treetops hiding cabin porches draped in chlorine-soaked towels; the creaking of that wooden swing. I cannot help but focus, not on what is in front of me, but rather on what surrounds me.

Consider the artistic “negative space,” the area surrounding an object in an image. Equally as vital to the object itself, negative space brings balance to a composition. For a moment, consider beyond what is right in front of you.

What would you like to notice more of?

Jill Goldstein Smith is the Assistant Program Manager for the Foundation for Jewish Camp. She spent more than ten summers around Lake Shalom, as a camper and staff member at URJ Camp Coleman in Georgia.

This piece was created in partnership with the Foundation for Jewish Camp, whose mission is to help Jewish camps achieve their mission: to create transformative summer experiences – and the Jewish future.

Food

By David Sax

I want you to repeat the following out loud: Deli is good for me. Corned beef won’t kill me. I was born to eat blintzes.

Why should the above sound so ridiculous?

Because we are told by “nutritional experts” that knishes are empty carbs; chopped liver is a guilty indulgence; and a pastrami sandwich? Nothing less than a death sentence.

I don’t buy it. For two months, I ate an average of three deli meals a day, every day. I drove over 10,000 miles from Toronto west to Los Angeles, then east to Florida and back north again, eating at delis all along the way for breakfast, lunch, and often dinner.

On a typical day I could find myself eating three different servings of chopped liver, two Reubens, four blintzes, one latke, two kishkes, a platter of pastrami, corned beef and turkey, or an entire side of nova, often at one sitting.

My family worried I’d grow tired of the food, while my friends supposedly took bets on when the heart attack would strike. Thankfully, after close to a hundred delis, neither transpired. Far from killing me, deli only made me stronger. Is there a lesson for the rest of us?

[From “Worry Less, Eat More,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 5, Summer 2007]

David Sax is the author of Save the Deli and The Tastemakers.

Compassion

By The Dalai Lama

Genuine compassion is irrespective of others’ attitudes toward you. But, so long as others are also just like myself, and want happiness, do not want suffering, and also have the right to overcome suffering, on that basis, you develop some kind of sense of concern.

That is genuine compassion. Now unbiased, even toward your enemy; so long as that enemy is also a human being, or other form of sentient being.

They also have the right to overcome suffering. So, on that basis, there is your sense of concern.

This is compassion.

What’s one small step you can take to cultivate this feeling?

The Dalai Lama is the supreme head of Tibetan Buddhism and a Nobel Prize winner.

Growing Up

By Maz Jobrani

Growing up, my family didn’t have any coming of age traditions. No bar mitzvahs, no crownings, nothing. There was, however, one incident in college when I became a man.

My dad was very generous to us. A self-made millionaire back in Iran, he was able to bring a lot of money with him to the U.S. and spoil us. Like Vito Corleone from The Godfather, he was a larger than life character, always helping people out.

I became used to this until I went to college and felt it was time to stop accepting money and become a man – except for one last time. In my first week, my father gave me a couple hundred dollars. A few weeks later, I paid him back with a check. He was shocked and asked in a thick Persian accent, “Vhat iz dis?”

“I’m paying you back.”

“Ha! You pay me back? I keep in my vallet, but I no cash it. I keep as souvenir!”

Fast forward a few weeks, I went to the ATM and was told that I had “insufficient funds.”

“How is that possible?” I asked myself. And then it hit me. My dad had cashed the check! He lied to me! How dare he! I was broke.

From that day forward I took responsibility for myself and my finances. I also learned that the next time I borrowed money from my dad, I would pay him back in cash.

How can you thank those who’ve helped you? How can you pay it forward?

Maz Jobrani is an Iranian-American comedian and actor.