Countless lines have been written about Hurricane Sandy, the storm that recently battered the eastern coastal states of the U.S. How to prepare, how to repair and how to react has been the subject of articles in newspapers and magazines spanning the nation. There are lessons to be learned by governments, individuals and emergency crews about how to understand what insurance companies called “an act of God”.
 
Here is another.
 
Living on the scenic Jersey coast, we were not unaffected by the damage wrought by the storm. In addition to homes, cars, businesses and sources of recreation being destroyed, hundreds of trees fell in the tornado force winds. A study was recently conducted to determine – what caused some to fall while others, of the same type and age, remained?
 
Certainly those in exposed areas on top of hills or isolated areas were more likely to succumb to the high winds. But there was one glaring difference of the ones that fell in residential areas. Those that fell were primarily near homes that had lawn sprinkler systems as opposed to those without sprinklers.
 
That seems to be counter-intuitive.
 
You would think that a tree that received life giving water twelve months a year would outlast ones subject to seasonal rain and snow.
 
But that’s not what happened. Here’s why.
 
Life strives to be self-sustaining. Animals forage for food instinctively. Plants and vegetation naturally stretch out their roots in search of water and nutrients. When it is supplied daily, like by those homes that have sprinklered lawns, the roots remain short. When it is scarce, the roots stretch out far and wide searching for water and in the process, build a strong, stable foundation.
 
We see the same behavior on a human level. When people are handed sustenance on a silver platter, they become uninspired to reach out and better themselves. When encouraged, or even forced, due to circumstances, to fend for themselves, their natural instincts to survive come to the fore. They grow stronger and more stable.
 
Sprinkled support when needed is a benefit. Long term support might be a short-sighted approach and the root problem of a coming storm.

Sociologists have confirmed that if you speak to enough people about enough people, someone is going to know someone who knows someone who ultimately knows you. No matter where you are in the world, we are only separated by seven levels.

Microsoft actually proved it statistically and came out with 6.6.
(Close enough).

But even though there are seven levels, there are really three degrees.

Number one is physical. Physical objects are separated in time and space. As far away as the table is from the chair, that’s exactly how far away the chair is from the table. When one moves closer or farther away, the level of separation is exactly the same for both objects.

Not necessarily so in the second degree. In relationships, one person can feel very close and connected to another while the other party remains cold and aloof, or perhaps even oblivious. This holds true many times in dating – he/she can’t wait for the other party to call and the other can’t imagine why. Parents generally always feel emotionally connected to their children even though the child may be physically distant across the country somewhere and never calls. (Which reminds me I have to call my mother).

The third degree is spiritual. The Kaballah tells us that similarity of spirits equals closeness. Married people with shared goals, business partners with a common vision or leaders working for the betterment (or detriment) of mankind feel a spiritual kindred that transcends emotion.

When we exhibit Godlike traits such as kindness, caring, giving, nurturing, correcting or forgiving, our spirits become ONE with our Creator.

You can’t get closer than that.

I’m not a betting man but I know something about “The Odds”.
For example, if I had to pick a number between one and ten, the odds against picking the right number is ten to one. One number out of five thousand, the odds are five thousand to one.
 
Two out of five thousand? The odds are exponentially higher.
 
Three out of five thousand? I begin to lose count.
 
Four out of five thousand and the odds are off the chart.
 
In other words, if someone told me that they could guess right four times out of four from a field of five thousand items, I would say they’re either crazy, a genius or very lucky.
 
Three thousand years ago, three-quarters of the globe remained unexplored. Nobody knew what existed in Australia, in South America, in the northernmost regions of Alaska or in the wilds of Africa.
Yet, the bible goes out of its way to state that there is only one specie of mammal, anywhere in the world, that has a split hoof but doesn’t chew its cud. And the Bible names it – it’s called the pig.
 
And lo and behold, the Bible is right.
 
Okay. Easy stuff. One out of five thousand mammals and it “guessed” right.
 
Then it names three other animals and says that these are the only ones in the world that DO chew their cud but DON’T have split hooves.
 
And lo and behold, it gets it right again.
 
Maybe it’s a fix. A setup. Maybe the One who wrote those lines also created all of the animals of the world so there’s nothing special about the prediction. He already knew!
 
Hmmmm.

A revisionist or an outright liar?

That, in essence, was the question brought to one of England’s highest courts regarding the views about the Holocaust by David Irving, author of some 30 history books on World War II.

Professor Deborah Lipstadt, an American Holocaust historian, had written a book about Holocaust denial, and included Irving in her list of deniers. Irving’s reputation as an historian was at stake, he felt, and sued her in a British court for libel.

The trial had ramifications far beyond personal reputations. At stake was history itself. Irving, for instance, claimed, “There were no gas chambers in Auschwitz,” and that the mass murders of Jews in the death factories of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka was a “myth… which in fact never took place.”

His claims buttressed the battle cry of anti-Semites worldwide, from white supremacists in the West to Arab/Islamists in the Middle East, including the President of Iran.

After a long and highly publicized trial the judge issued his ruling on April 11, 2000. His conclusion was unequivocal: “[F]or his own ideological reasons [Irving] persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence…. [He was] an active Holocaust denier… anti-Semitic and racist….”

In other words, Irving was not an historian with an alternate view on the Holocaust, but an outright denier.

How did Irving have the temerity to claim there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz? Two of his points were: not enough evidence for use of Zyklon B poison gas and no holes in the roofs of the gas chambers at Auschwitz to drop in the poison pellets.

The first claim was based on the research of a German-American who went to Auschwitz and scraped some concrete from two different rooms: where Jews were gassed and where clothes were fumigated. (Zyklon B was first used to kill vermin on clothes.) A chemist found that there was a much lower level of Zyklon B in the chamber where people were killed. This indicated, the researcher (and Holocaust deniers) concluded, that Zyklon B wasn’t used against people.

However, they were wrong, because rodents are actually more resistant to the poison. Therefore, it actually took more gas to kill them than people.
Irving’s second claim, that there were no holes in the roofs, was aided by the fact that the Nazis blew up the gas chambers just before abandoning Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, a confluence of evidence proved otherwise.

First, eye-witnesses, including perpetrators (captured Nazis) and victims (e.g. Sonderkommandos), testified seeing the holes and SS soldiers dropping Zyklon B gas pellets inside. Second, architectural documentation emerged of how, for instance, the Nazis changed the Auschwitz morgue into a gas chamber, including putting in new doors that swung out and changing chutes (for sliding in dead bodies) into stairs (so people could walk down).

There is also evidence from a US reconnaissance flight over Auschwitz on August 25, 1944

which shows the Zyklon B introduction chimneys clearly visible on the roof as four dark squares staggered side to side down the length of the room.

In short, historians have a confluence of evidence to prove the existence of the gas chambers (as well as other things about the Holocaust). Of course, hardened anti-Semites are unlikely to change no matter how substantial the proof. But many people are neutral or don’t know any better. They see that David Irving wrote many books, is considered a historian, and might think his view is merely revisionist.

It is not. It is a deliberate falsification.

(Further Reading: History On Trial by Deborah Lipstadt.)

Most people are not even familiar with what the first 7 are, even though we use the expression all the time.
 
Actually, you have a choice.
 
If you prefer the “Ancient” 7 Wonders of the World, you have the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which you should stop by and see next time you’re in Iraq, and of course, the ever popular Mausoleum of Halicanassus.
 
Don’t like the “Ancient” ones? Then you can pick from the not so ancient ones like the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China or the Coliseum (the one in Rome, not Los Angeles).
 
Of course, there’s always the 7 “Natural” Wonders such as the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest or the “Manmade” Wonders such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chunnel or the London Sewage System (you can’t make this stuff up).
 
In total, there are almost 50 different “Wonders” that have made it onto one of several official 7 Wonders lists.
 
But what single item should qualify as the EIGHTH Wonder of the World? Allow me to suggest a few:
 
1. The World - the Universe and all it contains.
2. A Newborn Child - understanding that it developed from two individual half-cells into a functioning body of 10 trillion cells at the time of birth.
3. A Fruit Seed - containing not only the billions of instructions it needs to develop roots, a tree with branches, leaves and fruit but also all of the apparatus to accomplish it.
4. Food - the fact that there are 7 billion people in the world, 90% of whom eat every day and the Earth has not run out of meat, fish, poultry, water, apples, wheat and chocolate.
5. The Human Mind - with its ability to interpolate, extrapolate, innovate, create, remember, forget, reason, control and emote.
6. E=mc2 - the formula that helped unlock one of the secrets of the Universe and changed the course of mankind and history.
7. The Higgs Boson - not because anyone really knows what it is, what it does or what it means but because it hints at the existence of a Super Being Creator Who obviously knew what He was doing all along.
8. My Children. And my Wife. Not necessarily in that order.
 
Wanna vote?

“Cinderella, clean my clothes!”
“Cinderella, where’s my dress?”
“Cinderella, wash the floor. And when you finish, don’t forget to clean the cinders out of the chimney.”
 
Seems like there was no love lost between Cinderella and her step-mother. If she really loved her, she certainly wouldn’t have asked her to do EVERYthing. What about Drizella and Anastasia, her step-sisters? Must be step-mother loved THEM so much, she never asked them to do ANYthing.
 
There’s a very famous verse in Judaism that is repeated over and over again by those engrossed in their learning. It goes like this:
 
“God wants to reward the children of Israel so much, He increased the number of commandments.”
 
Given the story of Cinderella, isn’t that counter-intuitive? If God really loved us, why not just give us one or two commandment to follow? Make it easy for us to succeed? Maybe something like, “Don’t forget to brush your teeth in the morning.”  I could live with that.
 
If that’s all it took to get a piece of candy as a reward (which is why we have to brush our teeth in the first place), life would quickly become meaningless, hum drum, pointless.
 
Instead, God raised the stakes. By creating a commandment for all aspects of life, even those things that we do naturally become worthy of a reward.
 
Eat some food, say a blessing, you get a reward.
Help an old lady cross the street, you get a reward.
Wake up in the morning and say “Thank God I’m alive”, you get a reward.
 
And then there’s the more esoteric things:
 
Don’t eat meat and milk together.
Put those strange black boxes on your arm and head six days a week.
Blow a ram’s horn once a year.
 
Why? I can’t tell you. But we have 613 of those. The Noahide Laws for all the other nations only contain seven commandments.
 
Why? The verse says God loves the Jewish people and wants to give us rewards.
 
As I recall, it was Cinderella who got the Prince, not her sisters.

QUESTION:  Isn’t the death penalty barbaric and wrong? Why then does it exist in the Torah?

ANSWER:  Forty years before the Temple was destroyed, almost 2000 years ago, Jewish courts voluntarily stripped themselves of the ability to judge all cases of possible capital punishment. Even before that time, the circumstances were so narrowly defined that the Talmud tells us that a court that put someone to death once in 70 years was a “bloody court.”

Just to provide a glimpse how difficult it was to put someone to death according to Jewish law: The person about to commit the act had to be verbally warned beforehand by two proper witnesses who say, “Are you aware that the act you are about to do incurs the death penalty?” And then they had to specify the correct death penalty.

Next, the perpetrator had to reply, “Yes, I understand committing this act is deserving of such-and-such death penalty, but I will do it anyway.”

Without that verbal warning and without that verbal acknowledgement there were no grounds for the death penalty.

And if those who did the warning warned the perpetrator with the incorrect type of death penalty the case was thrown out.

In addition, the witnesses could not be related to each other, could not be gamblers, could never have ever even lifted a hand against a fellow Jew. Plus, there were other factors that could have disqualified them as proper witnesses.

Furthermore, these witnesses were interrogated before the trial. If either of them slipped up in or forgot any detail the case would be thrown out.

Some of the greatest Talmudic sages said that if they had been on the court that put someone to death, their interrogating ability would have meant that no person would have ever been put to death. So, execution by a Jewish court was exceedingly rare.

Why have the law to begin with? It’s important to have it on the books, if for no other reason, than to let people know the severity of the act. Society has to protect its citizens, and part of it is a court system that brings the guilty to justice. However, if a human court cannot convict, for whatever reasons, nevertheless let the gravity of the crime be known.

Of course, in Judaism, if a person is guilty of something that a human court does not have the jurisdiction to carry out a punishment against, justice will in the Jewish viewpoint be served via the “heavenly court” in some way, shape or form, sooner or later. And in many ways – spiritually and perhaps even physically—that is worse.

Contrast this with the American system. In 1992, the Innocence Project was established in the wake of a landmark study which found that incorrect identification by eyewitnesses was a factor in over 70% of wrongful convictions! Over the next 20 years, the Innocence Project freed 292 wrongfully convicted felons, including 17 who spent time on death row.

Those statistics would never happen under Jewish law. The Torah would rather have a guilty man walk than punish an innocent one. Of course, Judaism believes that even if someone wrongfully gets off they aren’t really getting off, because there is a God who keeps the records and will even out all the ledgers. Nevertheless, while the human court is empowered to do what it can to insure justice to the best of its ability the limitations put upon it by the Torah added extra layers of protection for the innocent.