Sue Yourself for Theft

I saw a silly teen-oriented movie a few weeks back; but wisdom can be found, I believe, in all places. One great line from the film hit me on the head like an old lady pummeling a mugger with a handbag. The main character in the movie, who was a vivacious, young, American girl, tried to subdue her free-spirit to fit into a starchy, upper-crust conservative milieu to please others. All the things that made her special soon became unrecognizable. It's at that point her boyfriend wisely said to her, "I don't know why you are trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out."

The thing is, we were ALL born to stand out. But, we become afraid. We kowtow to peer pressure and conventional ways of thinking and living because we don't want to look like an idiot and want to be liked and accepted. It takes a lot of guts to be different and sometimes it's a lonely road.

But, you can be sure that if you are not being yourself then you are living a lie. That is not the reason you were born. You were born to shine and to share with the world all that is uniquely you. It is ironic how we boldly fight for liberty while at the same time forsake so easily the "freedom to be ourselves." Does it really matter at the end of the day what is oppressing you?

I even feel that while we all need advice, there is a point of excessive dependence. If you ask for others' opinions too often, you will find yourself living someone else's dreams and fears — and someone else’s mistakes. In that case, they may as well put someone else's name on your cemetery headstone. After all, whose life did you live?

The Biblical commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Steal," does not only pertain to physical items, like money and gold watches. It also has its philosophical, intangible and spiritual correlatives, i.e, you are not permitted to manipulate others, to steal someone's time or rob them of their good name. AND you are not allowed to steal away your own destiny/potential from yourself by giving in to fear-- through which you'd also be guilty of robbing yourself of your own time and talents.

Last week in the Biblical portion we read about the birth of Jacob's twelve sons, the fathers of the twelve tribes. What really was the need for twelve tribes? Wouldn't the Jewish nation be better served if they pitched themselves under one figurative tent? The answer is, no. Each tribe had their talents and strong points and destiny which were vital to the greater survival of the whole. This point is further driven home by the blessings Jacob gave his sons before he died. He does not give one blanket blessing to them all, but rather hones in on their individuality.

My dear friends, do not be afraid to be YOU. Stop empowering others by being oversensitive to their opinions and judgments. Take yourself off of auto-pilot and stop auto-silencing the voice that is uniquely yours. Dare to think and live out of the box for soon enough we will all be in a box permanently. Cookie cutters were made for cookies so don't let anyone shape you; and stop trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out!

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Click to watch: Me, Myself & I: The Age of Narcissism  
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This blog has been sponsored by the Wordsmithy.

Who Are You? Do You Know?

 Click to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPh7mlq7c-4&feature=relmfu
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This blog has been sponsored by the Wordsmithy.

The Problem with Being Too United

Click to watch:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vWlv8OTx1Cg

Not Forgetting Doesn't Mean You Remembered

DO YOU KNOW YOUR HEAD FROM YOUR FEET?

How many of us will say last year sucked and I’m ready to put it behind me and start a New Year?

Well, if we want the year ahead to be better than the year behind, we have to know our head from our feet. Notice, the Jewish holiday is not called the Jewish New Year but rather Rosh Hashana, meaning the HEAD of the year.

What’s the head got to do with it?

The answer: Just as the head is the command center that directs the rest of the body—our arms, our feet, our tongue etc. — so too Rosh Hashana is the command center that creates the energies that will tell the rest of the year what to do.

Basically, Rosh Hashana is like a time release capsule: what you put into will sustain you or poison you in the days ahead. That is why it’s tradition not to sleep the whole day on the holiday because it’s believed that if we do then we will sleep the whole year away. That is why Jews pray feverishly for life on Rosh Hashana not so that we will live only that day, but for the entire year to come. And that is why many people won’t eat nuts on RH, because the numerical value of the word “nut” in Hebrew is equal to the word “sin,” and God forbid we should sin the entire year ahead—unless it’s really worth it!

Another reason we call it Rosh Hashana is because it’s at this time of year where we must use our heads to think and analyze what went wrong in the past. This auspicious time gives us the intellectual opportunity and responsibility to assess ourselves with diligence. You see yesterday is not something to run away from like a mugger trying to take something from you, rather it’s a guru with something great to give.

Before Jacob passed away, he gathered all his sons, the future 12 tribes of Israel, to bless them. However, he knew that in order for his sons to have any chance at a healthy tomorrow, they had to take a reckoning of their past. And so, in his last breath, Jacob tells off those who sinned and points out their faults, their flaws and misbehaviors, sounding much more like a Jewish mother than a father.

It’s our duty too, as mothers and fathers of our own destinies, to go into the new year with our HEADS and not our feet. In fact the Hebrew word for foot, regel, has the same root word as ragil, which means like usual. And the lesson is we can’t let our foot (regel) lead the year (kragil). Remember Einstein said that one can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result.

Every new year most people make resolutions as to how they can improve themselves: This year I want to lose weight; this year I want to learn Spanish; this year I want to make something of myself. These are great goals, but usually by day three our hands are back in the cookie jar and we are back to old habits, letting our feet lead the way instead of our minds and our will. As obedient victims of habit, we again let out habits victimize us and hold us bound to what is small in us and not what is great.

It’s never enough to simply hope the New Year brings you great things. Success or failure lay in what you bring to the new year: yesterday’s habits, yesterday’s wrong friends, yesterday’s shopping cart, or a determined HEAD that will guide you to your own personal greatness.

Shana Tova and may our heads always prevail and tell our feet what to do and not the other way around.

Let My People Know--Obama's Not Good for Israel

There is the old joke that if you have two Jews in a room you will have three opinions. But thanks to President Barack Obama, he has been able to accomplish what even Moses couldn’t do, create a consensus among Jews, well at least Israeli Jews. They have by a strong majority united on one thing: They don’t like president Obama. A recent poll commissioned by the Begin Sadat Center at Bar Ilan University and the Anti-Defamation League revealed that only 32% of Israelis have a positive view of Obama as compared to 2009, when his likeability among them was at 54%.(1)

You see, Israelis tend to be a very action oriented people, hence their ability to turn an arid desert into a high-tech verdant success in quick time. They know talk is cheap, promises have expiration dates, and words make for poor armament when rockets hit their towns and their buses are blowing up. As such, when the current American President says, “I have Israel’s back,” Israelis are not convinced. With aggressive enemies at every bend they have developed heightened survival skills and have eyes behind their backs, and frankly, they don’t like what they see coming out of this White House. This consensus, among a highly opinionated people, should be the paramount indicator that the current president is not conducive to Israel’s well-being.

Israel does not even need to engage in war to be wiped off the map. Just last week the BBC refused to indicate that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital on the Olympics’ section of its website. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office wrote two letters to the broadcasting corporation, to no avail. This wasn’t a shot at Israel’s back but a shot straight through its heart.

So where was the President on this one? At a recent press conference when insistent journalists asked James Carney, Obama’s press secretary, what the White House considered Israel’s capital Carney, adamantly evasive, refused six times to say Jerusalem.(2) Oh, a friend indeed, begrudging Israel what is already theirs even before the onset of peace talks…or a war. Why couldn’t our friends in the White House simply answer that question?

But were this only the first time. In May of 2011, President Obama unilaterally called for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement based on 1967 borders, borders universally acknowledged as indefensible.(3) (Prior to 1967, Israel was 9 miles wide at its narrowest point.) And then there was the whole issue of settlements in 2009 where President Obama set preconditions for Israel even before negotiations with the Palestinians got started and objected to Israel accommodating for natural growth of its own people.(4) This is the same president who whole-heartedly accommodates illegal immigrants into this country but doesn’t want Israelis to house its own citizens in its own country. So thank you Mr. President for Iron Dome, but by your concurrent initiatives you will leave us very little to protect.

Perhaps it is the above that is eating away at the percentage points of the president’s likeability among Israelis. Or maybe it is his mishandling of Iran, the Middle East powder keg nation that has leveled an existential threat at Israel, threatening to erase the Jewish Homeland from the globe.(5) It is a good thing that the president keeps appointing Jews to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council because if Iran has its way, I suspect the council will be evermore busy and understaffed.

Adding to his ill-conceived diplomatic attempts to posit the U.S. as an honest broker in the Middle East, there are many who feel the President threw longtime ally Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak under the bus and by his weak leadership helped install a new enemy on Israel’s borders, the Muslim Brotherhood, which views past peace agreements as merely bad literature(6). Furthermore, as if the Middle East isn’t precarious enough, the President’s lack of leadership on the Syrian crisis now leaves chemical weapon stockpiles in a vulnerable position with potential use against Israel. Obama asked Israel not to intercede with the result that Israelis are now rushing to get government-issue gas masks.(7)

Then there are the “little” things that when sprinkled on the above menu make the case for Obama’s friendship toward Israel ever more unsavory. While some will say President Obama is good for Israel—

• He is also the same president who thinking his mic was off, was caught in November of 2011 saying disparaging remarks about Netanyahu to France’s President Sarkozy.(8)

• He has literally bowed before many a world leader(9) and hosted a state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao(10) but the Prime Minister of Israel wass left waiting for an hour while the President went off to eat dinner with the First Family.(11) The White House also avoided releasing a photo-op with Netanyahu for four days.(12) In addition, it’s reputed but disputed that Netanyahu was let in through a backdoor to the White House.

• He has never gone to Israel as President.(13)

• As President he went to Egypt to address the Muslim world in a speech where he juxtaposed the plight of the Palestinians with Black slavery and equated it with the Jewish Holocaust.(14)

• His first formal TV interview as president was with an Arab newscast, Al Arabiya.(15)

• Prior to his presidency he toasted his friend, pro-Palestinian Rashid Khalidi, at what was said to be an event where Obama allegedly condoned Rashid’s work. The tape of that event is being guarded by the Los Angeles Times with the vigilance of Fort Knox. If there is nothing condemning on that tape, why won’t the Los Angeles Times release it?(16)

• While positing an affinity for the Jewish State, this is still the same president who sat in a church for 20 years wherein anti-Zionism was spewed from the pulpit and where church bulletins featured anti-Israel articles by Hamas’s Mousa Abu Marzook and The Nation of Islam. It is a long time to sit in a pew if you don’t share the view.(17)

• The first time Mr. Obama attended AIPAC prior to his presidency, he said in no uncertain terms that Jerusalem should remain the undivided capital of Israel. The applause was thunderous. The next day, in a pivot Barishnikov would envy, he modified his words.(18)

Dear readers, I’d love to write a smashing ending for this article, but sometimes the facts just speaks for themselves. And I thought it time to let my people know.
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1.http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-07-23/israel-worries-us-ally/56444560/1
2.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGEn1TZtEmQ
3.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/world/middleeast/20speech.html?pagewanted=all
4.http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136437#.UBWN_qPUTKB
5.http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/101999#.UBWPXqPUTKA
6.http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=278769
7.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120725/ml-israel-syria/
8.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl7idMV92MA
9.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WlqW6UCeaY
10.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/world/asia/19dinner.html
11.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/7521220/Obama-snubbed-Netanyahu-for-dinner-with-Michelle-and-the-girls-Israelis-claim.html
12.http://www.haaretz.com/news/four-days-late-u-s-releases-photo-of-netanyahu-obama-meet-1.4200
13. http://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/obama-campaign-president-will-visit-israel-during-second-term/2012/07/24/
14. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html?pagewanted=all
15. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/26/al-arabiya-obama-does-fir_n_161087.html
16. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-video29-2008oct29,0,7568849.story
17.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-EBc2xaz44
18.http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=103640