new song

Subscribe Free  Add to my Page

2 postcards

I’ve done a fair amount of travelling during my life. I’ve been to some beautiful cities as well as some downright ugly ones. During one such sojourn to a city suffering from an acute bout of urban blight I made my way over to a postcard stand to see what they have. I was curious to see what kind of marketing genius could repackage this city in a way that was postcard worthy. I noticed that all the pictures were of the city either under a blanket of snow or at night. It was simply brilliant. Snow has this way of covering blight and making everything look peaceful. And in the night you have control over what gets illuminated and what remains in the dark.

Many communities have a hard time facing blight in their midst. They fail to wrap their minds around scandals in their midsts. So rather than face and fight the issues they resort to one of theses two methods.

1. The snow method. Simply cover over the problems with a blanket of white snow and pretend they’re not there.

2. The night method. A common knee jerk reaction one hears when confronted with a serious issue is “but..but look at all the chessed we do..look at Bikur Cholim and Chaverim..etc”.
In other words, illuminate where you want my eye to go.

But..snow tends to melt, come springtime, exposing the corpses hidden beneath.

And the sun always rises in the morning.

There’s no shame in having problems. The shame is when people don’t confront them.




.

Ato Hu

Subscribe Free
Add to my Page

Here's a song by Andrea Bocelli put to Jewish words..

Art, Science and Torah

I was recently reading about a very interesting individual named Allan Lightman. Allen was a rising star in the world of science and a brilliant physicist.
A number of years ago he set out to write a paper on a major discovery of his regarding a cluster of millions of stars and the gravitational pull that was keeping them together. After it was all finished and he was working on the footnotes, he uncovered a paper written by Japanese scientists with the very same equation that he had just toiled on for months. It left him deeply disappointed. He started thinking about science and how all scientists do is uncover laws that already exist. There's nothing new in all the laws of science and anyone with a similar mental capacity delving into the same subject would come up with the same formulas.
Then he thought about how different art is. No one could have written what Shakespeare wrote and the same goes for all artists.
In art a creation is truly a creation.
So he left science and started writing books becoming a best selling novelist in the process.
So we have science which is pure logic and merely uncovers existing laws.
And then we have art which is emotion, where the author/composer/painter truly creates something ex nihilo.

So what happens when someone writes a chiddush in Torah? When someone comes up with a unique Torah thought?
is it like science, uncovering the word of God?
Or is it like art, creating something new?

I think it's a synthesis of the two.
Every new Torah thought is merely uncovering pre-existing divine words yet our souls are so intertwined with the Torah only the person that authored the new thought could have come to that conclusion the way that he did.



.

remove this burden

Dear Lord..
Please..remove this..
this BuRDeN..
this burden called talent..
from my shoulders..
because..while it smolders
there's nothing in sight..
flammable..to light...
just..make me a simple..man..
with no creative plans..
give me a simple hut..
where I need not worry..about
slipping on unread letters..words..
lying strewn about the floorboards..
where I won't be kept awake..
by the shrill sound of my voice..
....unheard
where the unseen panic (fear)..
of wasted years..
are unborn..
and give it to someone
shrewd and resourceful..
(rude) and forceful...
and let...




..let...


umm...and let..


by golly...
Thank You God..!




.