All About ME by Aliza Davidovit

“ME,” “MYSELF,” and “I” are popular words in this age of narcissism. Where as once pagans killed people to worship gods, today we’ve killed God to worship people--OURSELVES. Consistently, upon the altar of self-deification, we have sacrificed the better part of us: compassion, morality, integrity, courage, charity and family, our history, the present and the future. And it is not the sweet odor of incense that hovers in the air as decency burns, but the stench of corruption, greed and mercilessness. As congressmen and senators serve special interests for self-aggrandizement and political survival, as Wall Street cooks the books while trusting investors risk losing all they have, as the news media panders to power instead of holding it accountable, the building blocks of our civilization are crumbling. Every day it becomes evermore easy to say, “Who cares about anyone else? I have to look out for myself.”

For many years the media and our culture have been nurturing and marketing to narcissism. Every advertisement we see today seduces us with promises of how to glorify the self to find happiness. Use this toothpaste you’ll have the nicest teeth; buy this car and you’ll get all the girls; use this mascara and bat your lashes to success; drink this Red Bull and you’ll have more energy to be a narcissist. But the problem is, it is ALL bull. I don’t remember seeing an ad that said, “If you want to be beautiful, don’t just use Revlon, but be a kinder more charitable person, it will show on your face.”

And today’s new generation is worse than we are. They are growing up with a sense of entitlement and are being nurtured in a cocoon of self-interest that takes nothing and no one else into account. Their apathy is the brazen garb they so fashionably wear.

It is little wonder then that things are falling apart if people think the world revolves around them instead of realizing that the whole world depends upon them.

In this week’s reading of the Old Testament, we read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, societies where people cared only for themselves and were heartless and callous toward others. Their profound egotism and lust for easy gratification led, as it always will, to self-destruction. It is written that they were so corrupt that even the earth cried up to God to step in which is ironic because the earth is the most selfish of creations as it is surrounded by a gravitational field that pulls all things toward itself. Yet even the earth is not so selfish that it begrudges the flower and the tree to grow upward and the seedlings to sprout. In the final analysis, the earth gives much more than it takes. Do we?

In the center of the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah stands the Patriarch Abraham, who asks God to spare the city if even fifty righteous people could be found. God said he would. Abraham slowly tweaks the number down to ten in case fifty could not be found. God consents. But we learn here not only about the failings of Sodom and Gomorrah, but also about Abraham’s, and Noah’s too. When God told Noah he was going to destroy humanity, Noah didn’t say a peep, he just built an Ark. When God told Abraham he would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s best was to suggest that God should spare the righteous. But, when God told Moses that he was going to wipe out Israel because of the sin of the Golden Calf, Moses said, “Please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.” Moses does not separate his fate from those of his people. He didn’t build an “ark” for himself, but was ready to go down with the entire ship—his nation. That is why Moses is regarded as the greatest prophet in Jewish history. His ego was nowhere to be found.

As today’s crises escalate, we too cannot ask “Will it be okay for me?” The only question to ask is, “Will is be okay for US?” If you have checked off “no,” then it is imperative that right now, at this moment, you do something to make a difference. Fax your congressman, protest loudly, cry as loudly as did the earth so that God and everyone in between will hear you.

Commentator Glenn Beck from Fox News is correct in principle. It took 56 great men to found this country, and now he’s looking for another few good men to re-found it before it’s too late. Unfortunately, God won’t speak to us to validate how many are needed. What if we can’t find 56 good men, just as Abraham couldn’t find 50 righteous men? Let us say we can only find 40, or 30 or 10. Or just let’s say it takes more than 56 men and women to save this great land. Will you, my friends, be among them? Or has our narcissism already turned us into pillars of salt as we watch everything we love and lived for destroyed from sea to shining sea?
By Aliza Davidovit


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The Measure of a Man by Aliza Davidovit

Who are you? Do you know? Are you the fancy car you drive? Are you the wealth you amassed? Are you the title on your business card? Are you the designer clothes you wear? The answers may seem simple, but they are not. If one by one all your status symbols are taken away, when do you stop being you? “I can’t live without my Blackberry,” “I can’t live without my laptop,” “I can’t live without my I-Pod,” “I can’t live without my plasma TV,” are all sentences we’ve heard from those we know. Or, get into a conversation with a stranger and within five seconds they ask you what you do for a living. We have all become so impressed by external trappings that we come to mistake those things for who we really are. By our affiliations, titles and possessions, we convince ourselves of our own greatness.

But buried under all these materialistic decorations, titles and idol worship, do we really know who we are without them? Perhaps not! Statistics show that when the economic collapse hit in 2008 therapists couches, as well as the National Suicide Hotline, were busier than ever. The housing crisis hit, the Nasdaq plummeted; Maddoff scammed people out of billions, and landmark financial institutions disappeared or crashed. And so, at the end of 2008, without their jobs and materialistic securities which had come to define them for so long, many found themselves facing an identity crisis. The time had come to ask the hard question, “Who am I?”

In this week’s Biblical reading, God tells the Patriarch Abraham “Lech Lecha” which translates as “Go to yourself.” The Almighty then gives him directions on how to get there: “Go FROM your country, your birthplace and your father’s home.” God’s roadmap to “self” seems odd. Aren’t the familiar backdrops such as country, birthplace, and home the very things that make up a person’s sense of self? Many of us in our own lives return to the place we grew up in order to get in touch with who we used to be. But God is telling Abraham the complete opposite here. If you want to “go to yourself” and to know who you really are, then you need to unbury yourself from all the fake things you’ve allowed to define you. Make no mistake, Abraham’s journey was not one to find God--he was already aware of God’s omnipresence. Abraham had to go find HIMSELF through the trials and tribulations of his journey on foreign terrain. He had to discover whether the pressures he encountered along the way would crush or corrupt him, or fortify him and show the measure of his moral mettle.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said that the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Yes, the economic crisis may have taken away much of what we have, but don’t ever think for one instance that it took away who you are. In the final analysis, we are not what we “collect” in this lifetime but rather what we give away. Our good deeds, our kindness, our charity, our compassion, our integrity, are still the greatest currency we have, and they are “market proof.”

A few days ago I asked my 2000 friends on Facebook if there is anything beneficial about what is currently going on in this country. My personal answer is, “In a way, yes!” For the first time in a very long time we are forced “to go to ourselves’ and rediscover what we stand for, who we are, and what we care about. In the age of plenty we were so busy giving Generation Next what we didn’t have growing up that we forgot to give them what we DID have: decency, appreciation, respect, a work ethic, patriotism and all the things that make a people and nation great, not on the surface but at the core.

Don’t forget, the greatest people in history left us not golden treasures but pearls of wisdom and a legacy of love. Moses, Mother Theresa, Jesus, and Gandhi bequeathed humanity much more than bank accounts. The patriarch Abraham ended up being a very rich man, yet the trust fund for his descendants has long expired but not his moral compass or the light and compassion he introduced to the world. As Abraham went on his journey “unto himself,” he realized it wasn’t about him at all but rather about all the others we encounter along the way. In giving instead of taking, you discover the true meaning of what is valuable and come to evaluate your own worth in much more meaningful terms.

My dear friends, I am not knocking ambition in life, but one’s title and net worth are not the true measure of a man. You have so much more to offer. If times are rough, do not be embarrassed or feel diminished. DO not be ashamed of your status in life, but rather, as Horace Mann once said, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
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This week's blog is dedicated to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the global leader of the fight against breast cancer.


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Did God Have a Home Depot Card? by Aliza Davidovit

by Aliza Davidovit

How fascinating it would be to look through God’s tool belt to see what he used to create the world: a hammer? a screwdriver? a measuring tape? But it turns out that God didn’t have a Home Depot card or a power drill, but rather created this world with the most powerful tool of all, WORDS. “And God SAID ‘let there be light,’ and there was light (Genesis 1:3).” And each consecutive creation He called into existence through words.

The snake too used words—and convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and basically smooth-talked mankind right out of Eden.

So from the very beginning, we see that words have the power to create and to destroy. We therefore have a tremendous responsibility right on the tips of our tongues.

In Judaism, talking bad about people, is regarded as a very serious sin which can ruin lives. It’s rationalized that if you steal someone’s watch (or goat) you can always pay him back but such is not possible for stealing one’s reputation. A Talmudic tale tells it best.

There was a man who regretted gossiping his whole life and went to his rabbi to see how to correct his sin. The rabbi advised him to take a bag of feathers to the top of a mountain and to throw them to the wind. The man did as he was told and then returned to the rabbi with a big smile. Upon greeting the man, the rabbi advised him that in order to fix all the damage he had done with his tongue he now had to go back and recollect all the feathers. “That’s impossible,” the man cried. “The feathers have blown in all directions and can never be collected.” The rabbi turned to him and said, “So, too, with your words.”

Thus half of our duty is to guard our tongues. But,the other half is to do the complete opposite. Talk as much as you can to get the truth out. We live in a world today where the snake has raised its poisonous head once more and is again spewing lies. And we, the children of Adam and Eve, cannot let the lies stick and must fight back word for word.

Thus, when we see wrong doings in our government or confront the likes of Ahmadinejad or rogue leaders and terrorists, know that our silence acts as the cement for their evil house of lies. If only the Israelis better resisted the WORD “occupied territories” maybe the reality on the ground would be different today. But their Palestinian opponents fought harder and won the word war.


We have only to look back to Hitler to see how powerful words really are. Hitler did not begin his war against the Jews by sending them to gas chambers. He began it with hateful talk, and then those words grew legs and the storm troopers went marching on.

We must bite back at every sound bite. The next time someone seduces us with slogans such as “change we need,” we better seek the definition of “change” so that we are the ones who choose the vocabulary which shapes our lives.

With blogs, diggs, twitter, texts, Facebook, and IM’s, we are evermore empowered, thus evermore duty bound to get the truth out there, not by gossiping, besmirching, and slandering, but by informing, educating, and illuminating--and passing the right words along.

God and Partners, Ltd. by Aliza Davidovit

God and Partners, Ltd.

“I hope this new year brings me better luck”; “I hope this new year brings me peace”; “I hope this new year brings me the love of my life,” are all hopes I’ve heard from many close to me as the Jewish New Year is coming upon us. But as JKF once said: “It’s not what the new year can do for you, it’s what you can do for the new year.” Okay, he didn’t say that exactly but you get my point.

To begin with, in Judaism, the year is not referred to as a “new” year but rather the “head” of the year. It’s for a good reason. Just as the head of a person gives directives to the rest of the body, so does the energy, prayer, meditation, and repentance we infuse on the holidays give direction to the year ahead. It is like a time release capsule, and how we fill it will determine what is diffused throughout the rest of the year. That is why we are cautioned against sleeping too much on Rosh Hashana, because we don’t want to sleep away the entire year to come. That is why we eat sweet things as well, so that the year ahead will not be embittered but rather pleasing and savory. That’s why we pray, so that we will be granted mercy and blessings. But the better luck we seek for the New Year will not materialize if we allow our feet to lead the way instead of our HEADS. The Hebrew word for leg is “regel,” which is related to the Hebrew word ragil meaning “like usual.” If we conduct our lives “like usual,” by way of habit, letting our feet lead our heads instead of the other way around, then we can never effectuate the change we want to see.

Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting a different result. Indeed, praying to God and His participation is definitely necessary for any success we are to have. But long before corporate law came along to create legal partnerships, God made us partners in the creation of our own destinies. God named man “Adam,” which means “earth,” for a good reason. Each is replete with potential but needs to be cultivated to bring forth the fruit of their seed. Man is a participant in his own creation. In Genesis it is written that God said, “Let us make man.” Who’s the “us”? Did God need a partner? The answer is yes, and we are that partner. There are some of the more arrogant breed who try and dismiss God completely and say God helps those who help themselves believing their efforts alone bring success—but they, too, are wrong. With all the self-help in the world, if God does not bless your efforts, they will be for naught. Through repentance, prayer and charity we can earn God’s favor and find that He isn’t a silent partner after all.

So as you enter Rosh Hashana, I pray that you enter it with your head first, with clear decisive goals as to how you can change and be better and do better. It’s your future—BE THERE!

I dedicate this week’s blog to the Levlalev Orphanage in Israel. http://www.levlalev.com/index.htm