If you ever meet someone named Skip, Chip or Kirk, chances are he’s an airline pilot. Tony, Sal, Vic, Jack or Dom might be a car mechanic or perhaps your barber. What about if you met someone named Mendel? You might assume he was either a tailor or perhaps a Biblical sage.  You would probably never think that he was a world hero.

On March 12th, 99 years ago, a 14 year old boy was murdered in the city of Kiev. He was stabbed 47 times and drained of his blood. His corpse was dumped in a cave near the home of Mendel Beilis. Thus began a 3 year saga of torture and torment for a man who was to spare Russian Jewry from the most grievous pogrom in their 400 year history.

Russian archives have revealed that the Czar himself authorized the public trial of this innocent Jew to showcase the famous blood libel accusation that has been leveled against our nation for centuries. His hope was to cause a widespread pogrom against the 5 million Jews trapped in Mother Russia by the cruel edicts of a corrupt government. Even though local officials knew the identity of the actual murderers for months, Beilis was forced to spend over two years in a Russion prison; humiliated, starved, belittled and tormented. Had he succumbed to the mental anguish and committed suicide, he would have been judged guilty by the Russian masses and death and slaughter would have followed. Despite untold horror and hardship, he survived to stand trial.

Before the eyes of the world, Mendel Beilis declared “I am a Jew.” Through 34 days of testimony, his fate was in the hands of 12 backward, uneducated peasants. Testimony clearly led to the guilty parties, but this was not a typical murder trial. It was a trial of the Jewish people.

It was due to his strength of character, his impeccable reputation and his lifetime of kindness to his Russian neighbors that resulted in the unanimous vote, “Not Guilty.”

Our forefather Jacob fought with the angel and prevailed. His name was changed from Jacob to Israel. We are called by the name, Children of Israel, “Bnei Yisroel”. It was his strength of character that has enabled people like Mendel Beilis to triumph throughout the generations.

So whether you call yourself Mendel, Mordechai, Mark or Marvin, we are all Children of Israel.

Wear your names with pride.

When I was young, I wished for the day I would get my first bicycle. When I got my bicycle, I wished for my first car. Now I’m driving my 17th (and 18th) car. They’re great, but they’re getting to be expensive.

When I was 16, I wished for the day I would go on my first date. After my first date, I wished for the day I would get married. (That first date didn’t work out as well as I hoped). When I got married, I wished for my first child. After my first child, I wished for my first grandchild.  We now have several of both (Gd bless). They’re great, but they’re a big responsibility.

More than 2400 years ago, Esther was the involuntary queen to Achashveirosh (Ahasuerus). (No, that’s not what you say when you sneeze, that was the King’s name). He had a wicked viceroy named Haman (as in hamantaschen) that wanted to destroy the Jewish people. In a long complicated story full of hidden miracles (I won’t give you the whole megilla (story)), the Jews were victorious and their enemies were destroyed.

The King turns to Queen Esther and says, “Darling, dearest, love of my life, I hereby grant you your heart’s desire. What is your wish?”

So what did she wish for?  A new camel? (They didn’t have Model T’s back in those days). An extension on the palace with a pool and a jacuzzi? A divorce? (Although I don’t think that would have gone over so well).

In essence she replied, “You have hung the ten evil sons of Haman on a tall beam. If it pleases the King, please do this again at some time in the future and hang ten equally evil men.”

How could she wish for something like that? Is it possible for a king of flesh and blood to grant such a request? Perhaps she was not addressing him at all but rather she was making a wish from the King of all Kings.

On October 16th, 1946, ten Nazi officers were executed as a result of the Nuremberg Trials. Why only ten and not hundreds? Why were they hanged and not shot? Why on a wooden beam and not a metal gallows? And why were they hanged exactly on the date hinted at in the mysterious, miraculous Scroll of Esther?

It seems that you have to be careful what you wish for.

When Sir Donald Wolfit, the last of the English actor/managers, was lying on his death bed, one of his young actors said to him: “Sir Donald, after a life so filled with success and fame, dying must be hard…”

To which Sir Donald replied:

“Dying is easy ... Comedy is hard.”

They say a coward dies many times; the same must also be true for comedians.

Any actor who has stood in front of an audience and watched a line practiced for weeks clang helplessly to the floor to roars of silence will appreciate Sir Donald’s sentiments.

Comedy is hard because we don’t really understand what makes people laugh. We know what’s funny because we laugh at it. But trying to distill the essence of comedy into a set of principles is not so easy.

One of the basic elements of comedy is that mysterious quality called “timing.” The information that will make the audience laugh has to be revealed in a certain time-frame. Too quickly, and the laugh is stifled before it’s born. Too slowly, and the joke is “telegraphed” - people see it coming and it dies its own death.

Another aspect is incongruity: A bank manager wearing a clown’s red nose is funny. A clown wearing a red nose isn’t. And underlying incongruity is a deeper idea - absurdity. We expect the world to have a certain natural order of events. When these events are suddenly turned upside down, the result is comic.

One of the most notable aspects of the Purim story is hippuch - sudden reversal. Haman has his gallows ready to hang Mordechai. The letters decreeing the “final solution of the Jewish problem” have been sent out in all 127 languages to the far corners of the Persian Empire. Yet in a split second, everything turns upside down.

The only difference between tragedy and comedy is the ending. The Purim story is a comedy in the classic sense. All seems set for disaster, and in an instant everything is turned on its head. This combination of total reversal and perfect timing gives Purim its special flavor of joy.

Jews have always been known for their humor. It’s as if the world recognizes that there is something particularly Jewish about humor and that humor is part of the essence of Judaism. But how can something as serious as religion tolerate something as light as humor?

I remember a Jewish standup comic in LA who used to say, “Comedy is dead. What you’re laughing at is ridicule.”

Ridicule is a lot easier than comedy - and it takes a lot less talent. Comedy takes an appreciation of life, a modicum of wit and a certain amount of love of one’s fellow man. Ridicule is easy and cheap. It’s a blunt instrument that clubs large unmoving targets. Where is the real comedy that fills our mouths with laughter?

The message of ridicule is that life is absurd. Nothing is important. The best job in Southern California is to be a psychiatrist, and the second best job is to be a divorce lawyer - not surprising when life is ridiculous.

The opposite of happiness isn’t unhappiness - it’s apathy. Happiness is the knowledge that things are important and that I have a connection to them. Apathy is the feeling that nothing matters. Why get out of bed? Apathy is the air that ridicule breathes.

Humor doesn’t have to be light. It doesn’t have to lead to scoffing, to derision. Comedy is a serious business.

Recognizing life’s absurdity leads either to nihilism or to faith. Jewish humor is the grease that deflects the darts of nihilism, shielding the soul from despair.

Behind every Jewish joke there’s a Jewish tear. A wry bitter/sweet feeling of two thousand years of exile.

Tears of sadness. Tears of hope.

In the Psalm of Shir Hama’alot that we sing after a festive meal there is a line that yearns for the coming of Mashiach (Messiah): “Then will our mouths be filled with laughter.…” The coming of Mashiach is compared to a birth; the tragedies and natural disasters of our era are his “birth pangs.” In birth, great pain is turned instantly to enormous joy; similarly, when Mashiach comes, all the pain of the Jewish People will be reversed to joy in an instant. Just as in Purim, he will come in crisis, in catastrophic reversal - hippuch. He will come in the darkest hour, just before the dawn.

The bitter/sweet humor of the Jewish People will then lose its elegiac tone. Ridicule will be deposed from its throne of idiocy. Our mouths will be filled with laughter; a laughter of discovery, a laughter of total realization.

Then we will see how all the pieces in this Comedy of the Absurd called life fit into place.

Then we will laugh the last laugh.

click here for the podcast

I marvel how every year the plants in my garden know exactly when spring starts and they begin growing and flowering all on their own.  The bigger wonder to me is, how do they manage to live through the winter?  Some of those days are freezing!  At least I can wear my wool socks, wool suit and wool gloves.  Wool, of course, naturally keeps you warm; but not by generating its own heat (the body does that). Wool is fluffy and airy so it serves as an insulator to prevent the heat of the body from escaping.

What do plants do?

There’s something else that does the same thing as wool.  It’s called snow.  It comes down in flakes, each one individually designed with six points.  They interlock one with the other, but not perfectly. Just like someone who isn’t so good at the game of Tetris,  there are always spaces between the pieces. Much of the snow on the ground after a storm consists of empty space. (That’s why you get that crunching sound when you’re the first one to step on the snow). That empty space prevents the heat of the soil from escaping just like wool prevents body heat from escaping.  By doing that, not only does it protect my flowers from freezing, it also protects all the ants, earthworms, fungi and bacteria that enrich and enliven the soil.

It not only protects plants and animals, snow also prevents the underground water lines from freezing. And it gives us some great winter sports to enjoy and it provides us with incomparable scenery in the mountains and fjords around the world.

And you know, somehow, that sparkling white color adds to the beauty. The color makes sense, too.  Red snow would be too glaring on the eyes, blue would just blend in with the sky, black would attract too much heat and would melt too quickly, and we all know about yellow snow.

Another thing: guys like me aren’t the only ones excited about snow. Farmers rejoice too, because without snow, there would be no winter wheat.  Snow prevents the soil from freezing solid so that water is able to penetrate all winter long, and an entire crop can be saved.  Finally, as the snow gradually melts, it seeps into the ground soaking the soil instead of running off the way rain does.  First it acts like a blanket and then a nutrient – sort of like having your cake and then eating it too.

And while it seems to us city boys that it takes just too darn long for the snow to melt, we will just have to continue sloshing through this magnificent, purposeful gift from our Creator, year after year.

So the next time you’re upset about digging the car out of the snow, just think about my flowers and remember: spring is just around the corner.

About 250 years ago, way before Starbucks reinvented coffee as the drink of the age, my parents bought me a Pavoni espresso machine for my thirtieth birthday.

I have that machine to this day. I love it. It has more chrome on it than a Chevy Impala. The Pavoni is the Harley-Davidson of coffee machines. It’s built to tolerances of about plus or minus half an inch, which makes it incredibly easy to service and repair - just get the parts somewhere near each other and it’ll work.

Many times I have thought about replacing this twenty-nine-year-old tank with one of the modern microprocessor-controlled beauties I’ve seen around. The last time was a couple of months ago, when I de-scaled it. When I’d finished de-scaling it , the coffee tasted dreadful.

It took me a good few days to realize that I’d used the wrong kind of vinegar to clean it out. During the couple of days that its “head was on the block” I went through something that I can only describe as withdrawal symptoms (and not from the coffee - I used instant in the meantime.)

Here was this old warhorse whose guts I knew, which I had managed to repair more than once, about to be replaced by a machine that would be impossible for me to do more than—make coffee. If - and more probably - when it broke down, I would have to take it to a repair center where doubtless they would tell me it would be far cheaper to buy a new one.

Repair is a dying art.

Apart from any nostalgia of which I may be guilty (nostalgia tends to increase in proportion to the number of years over which you have to nostalge), repairing something gives us a sense of achievement that merely producing our credit card fails to do by miles.

But I think there’s a deeper reason here as well.

The world was made to be fixed.

When G-d created the world, He didn’t create it as a complete and finished entity, rather He created a single point - a rock that sits on a small hill about 3/4 of a mile from where I’m writing this called the Temple Mount in Jerusalem - and the rest of the Universe expanded from there. At a certain point He said the Hebrew word, “Dai!”, which means “Enough!”

In other words, the potential for more exists in this world, but G-d intended that the world should be left lacking, incomplete, and that Mankind would have the opportunity - and the obligation - to bring it to its completion.

The world can be - and needs to be - fixed.

One of the ways this latent motivation emerges is in the ecology movement.

Judaism has always recognized that Mankind has the ability to build the world or to destroy it. In fact, ecology has always been a fundamental part of Jewish thought. However, there exists a deeper side to ecology than is generally understood.

Judaism’s concept of ecology is that when we do a mitzvah, one of G-d’s commandments—be it the simplest action, by kindness, by prayer, we elevate not just ourselves but the world’s eco-system as well.

My desire to fix that espresso machine is none other than my aspiration to fix the world - masquerading as a cup of coffee.

L’Chaim!

get the podcast here—> Judaism and The Art of Espresso Machine Maintenance

“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without Jews it might have been a much emptier place.”

- Paul Johnson
(Historian, author of “A History of The Jews”)

No, I’m not talking about business ethics.  I mean the Earth. It’s crooked. Tilted about 23-1/2 degrees. The axis that the Earth revolves about (that imaginary line that goes from the South Pole to the North Pole) doesn’t go straight up and down, it’s tilted to one side. For 3 months it faces the sun, for 3 months it faces away and for 6 months it’s facing somewhere in between.

So what’s so good about that?

Seasons.

If the axis was straight up and down, chances are most of us would either be Eskimos or Bedouins since the Earth would always be frozen at the poles and boiling at the equator. (The tilt of our axis has a far greater effect on the change of seasons than even the elliptical path of the Earth around the Sun).

So why do we need seasons? Aside from the obvious benefit of having “variety”, another reason is because it says so in the Bible.

God tells the Jewish people – “Be sure to observe the holiday of Passover in the Spring”. Spring represents freedom, birth, rejunevation. Hence the need for something called Spring. And while we’re at it, we need a season for planting, for harvesting for hibernating and for enjoying. So God said, “No problem!”

TILT!

But that created another problem:

Did you ever see the Harlem Globetrotters spinning basketballs on their fingertips?  Or perhaps magicians spinning plates on top of poles?  Or maybe something a little closer to home – did you ever spin a dreidel?  Ever try spinning it on a tilt? Doesn’t work. The spin has to be perpendicular to the forces of gravity. Even if it starts off wobbling, once it gets going, it always straightens itself out.

So how come the Earth doesn’t straighten itself out? It’s been rotating everyday at a speed of about 1,000 miles per hour (a lot faster than that dreidel) for thousands of years (perhaps even longer according to some theories).

If all it takes is changing the laws of nature to make My creations enjoy life more, no problem.

See you at the beach, or on the slopes or somewhere in between!

Suppose for a moment you were blindfolded and escorted into an empty room.  When the blindfolds were removed, you sensed that you were wearing a pair of glasses.  When you looked around you, everything appeared to be pink.  How would you know if the walls themselves were pink or only appeared to be pink because you might be wearing a set of pink glasses?  If you couldn’t remove the glasses for whatever reason and you couldn’t cheat by looking out of the sides of the lenses, you would never know the real color of the walls.

This might seem like an unusual experience, yet in a somewhat similar manner, an element of uncertainty enters into all of our knowledge of the world.  In order for us to know something, we first have to perceive it and then pass along the sensations to our brains for understanding.  But this understanding is based on the structure of the human mind and therefore we can’t necessarily assume that what we perceive is a true reflection of the real nature of the world.  (Are the walls pink or do we see them as pink?)

Looking at more walls won’t help because we would be using the same standard of comparison that may not have any basis in fact in the first place.  The problem is that our minds have a natural tendency to assume that all of the phenomenon of the world can be explained rationally.  The laws and principles of science are based on the way scientists perceive the likely effect of a set of causes.  But because these results are being analyzed by a human mind, we can still never be sure why a ball falls to the ground or if, in fact, it will continue to do so 100% of the time.

Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, one of the most brilliant writers and educators of the 19th century wrote,

“Without the belief in the spiritual aspect of the universe, scientists could never be sure that they are not deducing dream from dream and proving dream by dream.”

According to this, the reason we perceive a universe is because everywhere we look, in everything we sense, God fills in the blanks.  He allows us to feel, hear, see and smell only those things that He wants us to experience.

The conception of an orderly and meaningful existence, therefore, can only be based on the view that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator and Ruler of the universe, Who sees true reality.  Scientists only assume that there is a rational world for us to experience, but they can’t prove it because, hey, they’re only human.

I don’t mean to get personal, but when was the last time you thought about your kidneys?  That’s okay, most people don’t.  They filter about 1,000 pounds of blood every day removing all the waste material and eliminate it from the body through the urine.

When was the last time you changed the filter in your kidneys?  In your car you have to change it every 3,000 miles.  How come you don’t have to change anything in your kidneys?

Speaking of cars, when they’re running low on gas, the “Low Fuel” indicator lights up.  When we’re running low on fuel, the sensation or hunger takes over and we know it’s time to refuel.  In a car, when it’s low on water, the engine’s temperature gauge moves to “Hot.”  Humans just realize they’re thirsty and gladly shell out a buck and a half for a cold bottle soda.

And speaking of temperature gauges, did you know that even when the thermometer says you’re body temperature is 98.6, you have organs that are normally hotter and others that are normally colder.  The body automatically self-regulates both the temperature and the blood pressure of every organ individually.

To do this, the body has a system of glands that secrete hormones that have to be perfectly measured, or the organ and the body cease to function.  The thyroid, for example, that regulates blood calcium, heart rate and digestion, produces only one teaspoonful of thyroxine per year and it has to be released in exact measured doses.  And for most people for most of their lives, that is done perfectly.

Ever have to fix your car and you didn’t have the right tool?  You know what substitutes for pliers, hammers and screwdrivers?  Our hands!  And they’re are also capable of writing, sewing, drawing, soothing, scratching and expressing our innermost, animated thoughts (especially if you’re Jewish).  Our hands are more highly developed than those of any other living creature and are the most marvelous and versatile of all our features.

This wondrous machine, our body, has been entrusted to us for 80, 90, or 100 years, to enjoy the pleasures of this world, to help make the world a better place and to use it in the service of God.

And just as it says in that last clause on a typical car lease, we’ve got to return it back to the Original Manufacturer in good condition (except for normal wear and tear).

At first, the scientific world believed that the universe was eternal. Then in 1978, the director of NASA’s Goddard Space Center, Dr. Robert Jastrow, published a piece in the New York Times Magazine outlining the overwhelming evidence that our universe inexplicably burst into existence, and concluded saying:

“This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: In the beginning God created heaven and earth… For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

On the one hand, these constant reversals prevent the scientific community from speaking with any real authority. On the other hand, it is fascinating to note how the reversals in recent years have more often than not bolstered the Torah perspective. The writings of many of today’s top astronomers, chemists, biologists and physicists are entirely consistent with our tradition. And even in the words of those who despise religions and religious values, and who would never consciously offer support for God’s existence, we can often detect inadvertent arguments for our perspective.

click here for more