Goldie "Yawn" & What I Learned From the Oscars

If I would begin this article quoting Matthew McConaughey, who recently won Best Man at the Academy Awards, almost every religious person would get nauseous saying, “I need to learn from him?--a pretty boy who earned a golden idol named Oscar?  "So I won’t start my blog that way. Instead, I’ll start by quoting Ethics of the Fathers:  “Who is wise?” the Talmud asks. Answer: “He who learns from ALL people!” So now that the Talmud has given me dispensation, here I go:

 When McConaughey was asked at age 15 who his hero was, he answered that it was himself 10 years hence. Ten years went by and that same person asked him again at age 25 who his hero was. Again McConaughey replied that his hero was himself 10 years hence, making the point that... click to read more

Time is a Stealer

I once had an editor who suggested that when I write a Torah blog it should be scholarly and highfalutin because the audience is very religious and knows a lot of stuff. Great I thought, so since they were already “brains” it was my job then as a writer to introduce a little heart and common sense; it was my job to take the Torah out of the heavens and bring it into the world of practicality wherein it was meant to turn man into a mensch. 

This week’s biblical reading Ki Tissa teaches us a practical lesson about time, even to those who are “very religious” —perhaps most especially to them. Regardless of our orthodoxy level, it is not beyond human nature to misuse time—sometimes dangerously so. In Ki Tissa we read about the Sin of the Golden Calf and can’t help but wonder what kind of person builds a golden calf? Our own immediate grandstanding reaction is, “I wouldn’t have participated.” Even the most non-religious Jew amongst us today wouldn’t build a golden idol, well except maybe Bernie Madoff. Yet, the rabbis teach us that the Israelites who committed this unfathomable sin were not “derelicts” but were righteous people; not only were they righteous but they had reached the level of Adam prior to sinning. Yet, in an Olympian dive, they plummeted from their highest level to their lowest point in history. How long did it take them? I’ll take God’s word for it: He tells Moses, “They have speedily left the path I commanded them.” 

Many years ago Rabbi Zlig Pliskin came out with a book entitled Guard Your Tongue, but more aptly for our age would be a book called Guard Your Time, for it is the mismanagement of precious moments where sins are born and potential dies. And it is in our age of too much information and distractions that we must be ever more vigilant.

A brilliant young Torah sage was once asked when he had the time to become so smart seeing that he was so young. He replied that everything that he knew he had learned in five minutes.

“But you are so smart,” people said. “How could it be that you learned everything in five minutes?”

To which he replied, “Every time that I had five minutes, I learned something.”

In today’s times, unfortunately, we don’t see the cumulative magic of minutes. We think that the only thing five minutes can produce is minute rice. The fact is if we did indeed appreciate minutes, would Americans spend 34 hours a week watching TV? Would people spend 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube? Are we not all guilty, even the very religious, of taking God’s precious time and wasting it, of building some sort of wasteful “calf” instead of engaging in tikkun olam—fixing the world.

In our minds we justify that we are just killing an hour not realizing that the hour is really killing us. If we don’t want the evil inclination to defeat the years of our lives, then we must defeat the moments of our lives. By allowing just a few moments to go unguarded, never mind hours and days, we give satan—and trouble—the opportunity to seize the helm as we learn from the Sin of the Golden Calf. Remember, as well, that the Angel of Death was only able to take King David’s soul by distracting him from Torah study for a few moments. 

Friends, single moments can make you or break you. It thus becomes a simple case of mathematics: What do you want to add up to? Do you want to fill your days with good deeds, Torah and kindness, or to be sucked into the time-free-yenta-zone of social networks, tweets, TV, too much shopping and other distractions that can propel us to speedily leave the path that God has shown us. The average person lives just over 40 million minutes in a lifetime. What is your mitzvah-to-minute ratio so far?

Upon the death of a great sage people came to question one of his disciples and asked him what was most important to their teacher. The disciple responded, “Whatever he happened to be doing at the moment.” May we, too, all be committed to dedicating our very best to the minutes of our life so that when they add up to hours, days, and years we will have something to show for them. 

Some say time is a healer, but I say time is a stealer; it will take and steal the best of you if you don’t commit to giving it your best. It’s time to put up a sign on our lives which reads “No loitering!” And as Rabbi Hillel wisely asked, “If not now [my friends], then when?

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Is God Ignoring You?

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God, Please Don't Cry!

It is flu season and all the symptoms are setting in. But unfortunately there is one symptom plaguing society that is prevalent all year long: nausea! People have become mean-spirited and jealous and get nauseous every time they see someone doing well. They begrudge people joy and success believing it takes something away from them. They want to be the only star in a one man show. This new generation now takes pictures of their ears, their toes, their eyeballs, etc., in this flourishing trend called “selfies,” i.e., wherein a person takes picture of himself and then tweets it, posts it, Instagrams it as if he has just accomplished some great feat that must be bequeathed upon humanity. And don't tell me to lighten up. It's levity that brought us here to begin with.  Click to read more 

Directions Please!!!

We need directions. We lower the car window and ask, “Excuse me, God, what do I do? I’m trying to reach the Freeway to My Destiny.”  We feel an intensity building as God looks us in the eyes and asks the same question He has once asked Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” 
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Off with Your Head!?: A Rosh Hashanah Message

O ften when parents send their children off into the fracas of life, they dispatch them with the warning: “Be careful and use your head.” But isn’t that advice all rhetoric and trite? What else would we use to engage life? Our toes? Our elbows? It is only as we grow older that we realize what we once deemed as a parental platitude is wisdom that no sophist can equal. For even though the head sits as the crown of the body, for most people it is every other body part that actually rules. Our palates salivate, so we grab for the extra cookie; our eyes desire, so we spend beyond our means; our desires flare, so we reach for the forbidden; our legs grow weary, so we abandon the treadmill; our tongues grow restless, and so we unfurl gossip. Day in and day out we respond to the dictates of the body, but the head, the supposed capitol of our resolve, our will, our better judgment, well, it seems to be a silent partner. But as the New Year approaches that farewell warning our mothers and fathers gave us while standing by the front gate should echo with solemnity: USE YOUR HEAD!   click to read more 

Say it, Pray it, Do it!

It really amazed me when I first learned that God doesn't recognize the Jewish people from one Yom Kippur to the next. No, it's not because Mr. Schwartz lost ten pounds or Mrs. Cohen got a shot of Botox, but rather because the pure soul that left the synagogue after fasting and praying for its life a year earlier has returned in a blemished state one year later. And I can't help but question, "At what point did good intentions go wrong?" It's like looking at my white carpeting and wondering when did it become so spotted, and after which spill did I stop caring?

I'm not sure why God believes us anymore. We pray, we promise, we vow, we repent and sure enough we mess up all over again. Whereas God and His word are ONE, human beings' actions and their words are so often antithetical to each other, disconnected and so double-faced it is no wonder that God doesn't recognize us.

Maybe I'm dreaming of a time that never was. But I do believe that in the past when people said something, whether to God or to each other, it meant a lot more than it does today. One would think that today our words are made in China because we use them in crass abundance and they seem to come very cheap. With texting, emailing, IMing, Facebooking and Tweeting, we've all become schmoozers, wordsmiths, commentators, seducers and revolutionaries who entertain ourselves and our audiences with grand pronouncements (but little service to God or mankind). We live in a time where the "word" seeks to replace the deed. Wouldn't it be great if we could just work our way into heaven by texting God that cute haloed angel emoticon?

And though man has sinned from the beginning, I think in unprecedented fashion we have lost respect for words because the more we say things we don't mean, the easier it is to continue saying them. We have also found the lazy way out by empowering words so much that we think our mere saying them is good enough and action need not follow. And that is why the Torah warns, "Accursed is the one who will not uphold the WORDS of this Torah to PERFORM them."

As we enter the Jewish New Year I just pray that we will each have respect for the things we say to each other, to ourselves and to God—and mean them. My parents used to always say, "To talk and to promise costs no money." In the end, however, I do believe there is a price and that price is the crumbling of our societal, spiritual and moral foundation. Perhaps after Yom Kippur it's easiest not to follow through on everything we promise God because we think He’ll let us get away with it like a forgiving parent. But we should not be so presumptuous. And so, this year, I wish that our words and vows will bug us, not like parents, but like nagging kids on a road trip who want exactly what we promised them at the outset and won't stop grating on us until we reach our destination so that when God greets us in the coming year He'll say, "Yiddelach, you've never looked so good!"