Toddlers -from the Guardian

We haven't yet arrived at this stage, but I can certainly see it on the horizon. We're (luckily, I think) still at the stage of I find myself noticing that I must have not paid close enough attention for one minute, because my son clearly is eating something, and the only place he could have gotten it is the floor where it might equally be old food, thread, or a rock, and I have to struggle for ten minutes to get his mouth open so that I can get it out if it's something he'll choke on or is bad for him, by which time, he's swallowed it.

******************************************************
Toddlers, with their flawless skin, soft hair and wide-eyed stares,
are the pinnacle of human beauty, says Maggie O'Farrell. But as the
mother of a 21-month-old, she also realises their behaviour isn't
always quite so pretty
...
Saturday March 26 2005
The Guardian

The other week, I went to a photographic exhibition about
emigration. There were shots of long, snaking queues at Ellis Island,
of half-deserted villages, of families and their baggage on quay
sides, of people living in squalid, crowded rooms.

Among these were pictures taken on the boats to America. The
journey, the captions said, often took more than six weeks. In one, a
young woman sat with her back against the railings of the boat. With
one arm, she held a tiny baby to her breast. The other arm was
extended stiffly, grasping the hem of a coat belonging to a small
child. You could tell she had done this quickly, without looking,
without thinking. Her eyes were glazed, her face quite blank.
Somewhere in her brain a synapse had sent a message straight to
the muscles in her arm: child heading towards danger, possibly mortal,
therefore seize it.

The child was a blur in the corner of the shot, legs and arms
moving like pistons, intent on leaving the frame. I was very struck
by this photograph, not only because I had with me a child of about
the same size. And not only because, while I was looking at it, I was
obliged several times to perform the very same lunge-and-grab
movement to prevent my son from trapping his fingers in a door, from
switching off all the lights, from seizing the tail of a passing dog.

How on earth did this woman cope, with a toddler on a boat journey
to America, I wondered? How did she, and thousands like her, deal
with the demands of a small, ebullient, fractious person for over a
month at sea?

They belong to a strange race, these small people. The
word "toddler" is demeaning and also insufficient. They don't toddle:
they run, they hurtle, they stamp, they jump, they fall, they crash.
They never, ever toddle. But there isn't really another term for what
comes between babyhood and childhood, that distinct, unignorable
phase.

It's possible that they are just difficult to define. At times, they
remind me of nothing so much as the leprechauns in the Irish
folktales I used to have read to me when I was young. Contrary to the
Eiresatz tripe peddled about the globe, leprechauns are not cute wee
men in green. They are the great, indigenous tribes of Ireland,
driven underground by invading Celts. They are tricky, furious,
potent beings. The rest of the living world must respect and appease
them, not ignore or ride roughshod over them. They have huge egos and
can wreak terrible destruction if crossed or handled in the wrong
way. They are like us, yet not.

But there the similarities end. My 21-month-old son is not several
inches high, nor does he live in a hawthorn tree, and he only
sometimes wears green. My life with him is unrecognisable from the
one before he arrived, and inexplicable to most other people.

A friend phoned the other day and asked what I was up to. How could
I tell her I was sitting on a basket of wet laundry (to stop him
ransacking it and hurling it about) with one foot on the phone socket
(to stop him unplugging it), while with my free hand I was assisting
him in chopping up a wooden carrot (to distract him from the idea of
grabbing the receiver)?

They are, I think, the very pinnacle of human beauty. Some babies
are beautiful, and some definitely aren't, but all toddlers are.
Breathtakingly, perfectly, undeniably beautiful. Even ugly adults
were once lovely toddlers. It's the flawless skin, still smooth with
baby fat, the dense limbs, the still-soft hair, the small nose, the
dented knuckles, the wide-eyed stare. Don't plastic surgeons refer to
the angles, planes and dimensions of a toddler's face when creating
new features for people? It's no coincidence that artists have always
represented angels as winged toddlers. They are incarnations of a
fleeting aesthetic ideal. Perhaps this is nature's survival trick.
When the human race is at its most exasperating, it is also
at its most physically appealing.

Toddlers are past the all-encompassing dependency of babyhood, but
pretty much pre-verbal. They have urgent, towering desires, but a
limited range for expressing them. This calls for particularly weird
brands of diplomacy, negotiation, mime. My son understands an awful
lot more than he can say. He can decode quite complex sentences ("If
you go to the door and find your shoes, we'll go to the swings"), but
his vocabulary is limited to a handful of nouns.

His speech, like Cantonese, is largely tonal. "Ah-dah" can,
depending on how he says it, mean "all gone", "again", "at-choo"
or "oh dear". And at times, he will point at something on a crowded
shelf. "Ah!" he says, looking back at me. I offer him the teddy. He
shakes his head. "Ah," he says again, pointing. I try the CD case,
the jack-in-the-box, the book, the cup, the train, the pen. He is
near tears now. "Ah-ah-ah!" he shouts, pointing desperately, and I am
filled with a terrible sympathy. How dreadful to want something so
badly but not be able to communicate it.

Toddlers are a mass, a tangle, of desires and needs. They want
THIS and they want it NOW . Two seconds' time will be too late. They
are operatic,Shakespearean, in their extremes of passion, rage, love,
despair. And the ways in which these emotions are expressed is at
once so all-encompassing and so comically textbook, it can be like
watching a bad acting workshop.

If my son is pleased by something - a passing aeroplane, a song, a
cat on a garden wall - he will raise his hands aloft like an
evangelist at a prayer meeting, and hit top C with a shriek of
unalloyed joy. If enraged or upset, he will buckle at the knees and
cast himself face down on the floor, a puppet with severed strings.
It goes without saying that one state can be replaced by the other
within a matter of seconds.

I often think they represent our elemental natures; they are our
essences, unmoderated by the niceties of manners, behavioural codes,
social mores. Sometimes he is so pleased to see me that he will grip
the skin of my neck and twist it like fabric. It is agony, but the
feeling is entirely mutual. When I am away from him, I often feel
quite deranged by my desire to see him again. The only difference is
that I know that it is wrong to give people Chinese burns, even in
the name of affection.

I take him to a friend's house and, within seconds of our arrival,
he is on his hands and knees, dragging out whatever he can find from
under the sofa. I prise him away from this activity and he is
suddenly enthralled by a pair of shoes left lying in a corner. He
examines them closely, like an archaeologist with a find, gives them
a quick lick, then puts his feet into them and shuffles about. He is
offered a biscuit and he takes five.

My point is not how badly behaved my son is, although maybe he is,
but that he is doing what we'd all like to do. Wouldn't we all like to
know what our friends keep under their sofas? Don't we all want five biscuits
instead of one? Haven't we, at one time or another, felt like hijacking a
pair of someone else's shoes?

Of course, there are many things he does that I find baffling and
downright infuriating. I do not, for example, have much sympathy with
the desire to hurl things into the toilet. These days, I often clean my
teeth balanced on one leg, spread-eagled, as if in an obscure yoga pose.
One hand holds the toothbrush, one hand restrains my son, and one foot is
stretched behind me to clamp the toilet seat shut. If I didn't need the other
foot to stand on, I'm sure I'd be using it for something else. Meanwhile, I'm
trying to say - calmly but firmly, as parenting manuals dictate, but through
a gagging froth of toothpaste - "No, no. You are not to throw my mobile
phone into the toilet."

Their saving grace, when phones do land in the toilet and when you
realise too late that the cheese grater is inside the washing machine with
your most precious clothes, is that they are interested in everything. If
curiosity "weds us to the world", as Graham Swift wrote in Waterland, then
toddlers are engaged in a passionate, uxurious, intimate marriage. Watches,
stairs, lorries, lights, buses, sirens, planes, buttons, zips, latches,
hairclips.
All the things we take for granted are, to a toddler, like
encountering the Virgin Birth. Some things hold their attention for seconds, others
for days. My son entertained himself for an entire weekend with six teaspoons.
He put them into the washing machine, one by one, he took them out again,
one by one. He pushed them around in a box, he threw them on to the floor,
laughing at the tinkling noise, he pushed them into the gaps between the sofa
cushions and took them out again. Over and over again.

For weeks now he has been enamoured to the point of obsession with
bins. In any shape or form, but especially the big council-issue bins
around the streets where we live. He will snap upright in his buggy and point. "
BIN!!! " he will exclaim, like someone encountering a lost sibling.
Yes, I reply, it's a bin. "Bin! Bin! Bin!" he squeals, drumming his heels,
twisting round to see if I, too, am appreciating this vision. Mmm, I agree, a
bin.

We stop to admire. "Binbinbinbinbinbin!" he shouts, hoping to
engage a few passers-by. He has to get out of the buggy and walk around it twice
and I have to follow, stopping him several times from plunging his fingers
into its malodorous depths. Then we move on. "Bye bye bin," he will say,
soulfully, turning around until it is lost from sight. Fifty yards
further on, another green plastic bin will hover into view and the process
repeats itself.

There's a cliche that children make you look anew at flowers and
clouds and bubbles and kittens. Maybe they do, but toddlers also want to
share with you the hidden wonder of bins, drains, carpet fluff and gravel.

With a toddler, your life is a series of daily milestones
(negotiating yourself and the child into clothes, getting through a meal without it
ending up on the floor), of bizarre conversations (him: "Meow! Meow!"
me: "I'm not sure otters say that") and strange activities.

The minutiae of this life can give you an overpowering sense of
insight into the lives of other women, both now and historically. (I do
realise that men look after toddlers, too, and I am more than supportive of that.
But in my experience it is usually the women. In music "classes", I sing The
Wheels On The Bus, with actions, along with 30 other women who used to chair
meetings and draw up contracts and broker deals, while 30 toddlers
mill about, ignoring us and the music. Once in a blue moon, a lone man
turns up, looking nervous and bashful.) When I am admiring a very ordinary bin
for the sixth time in a morning or consoling my son for the loss of a raisin
down a grating or struggling to get him into his coat and hat and shoes
before his patience and mine expires or trying to distract him from a gathering
rage, I find myself thinking: this is what women do, this is what women have
always done.

Babies are more portable, less intrusive. Yes, they, too, take over
your life and, yes, they destroy your sleep and your sanity; but it is
having a toddler that has made me meditate on the private mathematics of female
existence.

I could read any numbers of books, pore over museum displays, watch
100 films and I still wouldn't know what it was really like to be alive
in the Napoleonic wars or to be an Icelandic fishwife. But looking after a
toddler forms a kind of datum within variant lives. They are so elemental
that they can only provoke the same reactions, the same pleasures, the same
frustrations and challenges in us all.

I peel him from the carpet, where he is prostrate with rage because
the satsuma would not stay balanced on the chair arm, sit him on my lap,
and I think about my mother, with three, or both my grandmothers, with
four, or the mother of a friend of mine, who had nine. How did they do it? He
wails and screams because it has been a long time since lunch and I have to
hold him on one hip while hastily assembling baked beans on toast and I
think about those women who couldn't, who can't, open a cupboard and reach
for a tin. How do you explain to a hungry, pre-verbal child that there is
no food?

I stagger from the car, clutching him, a buggy, spare nappies,
wipes, a coat, a hat, some snacks, a drink of milk, his wellies, mittens, a
toy or two, change for the parking meter and I think: what if I had twins?

A few years ago, I went on a tour around a colonial mansion in
Patagonia. We were shown the ballroom, inlaid with marquetry, the surprisingly
short beds, the dressing rooms filled with silks and lace, the
greenhouse with its perspiring plants. In a basement at the back of
the house was a laundry room, complete with mangles and huge tubs for
washing. In the doorway was a pair of brass hooks, worn thin with use.

"What are they for?" I asked the guide.

"A swing," she replied. I must have looked confused because she
added,"For a child."

I often think about those Patagonian laundry maids, folding their
sheets,ironing the silks and lace from upstairs, all the while
swinging a child in the doorway to keep it happy, to pass a long
afternoon. Some things don't change at all.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

...and this one is just right!

Berachot 34a
Our Rabbis taught: If one is asked to pass before the Ark, he ought to refuse, and if he does not refuse he resembles a dish without salt; but if he persists too much in refusing he resembles a dish which is over-salted. How should he act? The first time he should refuse; the second time he should hesitate; the third time he should stretch out his legs and go down.

Our Rabbis taught: There are three things of which one may easily have too much while a little is good, namely, yeast, salt, and refusal.

Our Rabbis taught: Once a certain disciple went down before the Ark in the presence of R. Eliezer, and he span out the prayer to a great length. His disciples said to him: Master, how longwinded this fellow is! He replied to them: Is he drawing it out any more than our Master Moses, of whom it is written: The forty days and the forty nights [that I fell down]?(Deut 9:25) Another time it happened that a certain disciple went down before the Ark in the presence of R. Eliezer, and he cut the prayer very short. His disciples said to him: How concise this fellow is! He replied to them: Is he any more concise than our Master Moses, who prayed, as it is written: Heal her now, O God, I beseech Thee? (Num 12:13) R. Jacob said in the name of R. Hisda: If one prays on behalf of his fellow, he need not mention his name, since it says: Heal her now, O God, I beseech Thee’, and he did not mention the name of Miriam.

Huh?

Angry like a pregnant woman? I don't recall being particularly angry. Tired, maybe. Nauseated occasionally. But, angry?

Berachot 29b:
R. JOSHUA SAYS: HE WHO IS WALKING IN A DANGEROUS PLACE SAYS A SHORT PRAYER. . . IN EVERY TIME OF CRISIS. What is ‘TIME OF CRISIS’ [‘ibbur]? R. Hisda said in the name of Mar ‘Ukba: Even at the time when Thou art filled with wrath [‘ebrah] against them like a pregnant woman, may all their need not be overlooked by Thee.

More sensibly:
Said Elijah to Rab Judah the brother of R. Sala the Pious: Do not become angry and you will not sin (Rashi notes: Don't become angry becasue through anger you will come to sin), do not drink excessively and you will not sin; and when you go forth on a journey, seek counsel of your Maker and go forth.

Rabban Gamliel shows humility, blessings on entering a house of study; the death of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and a discussion of the Amidah

All in all a packed daf.I'll have mercy and not actually require the reading of all of this, but the stroy of rabban gamliel is a must. Most interesting of course is Rabbi Yehoshua's statement "Alas for the generation of which you are the leader, seeing that you know nothing of the troubles of the scholars, their struggles to support and sustain themselves!" It is very suggestive of perhaps how a teacher shuld know his or her students. But also, perhaps, of those who employ rabbis. Just a thought.
First of all, let's get with Rabban Gamliel. Often shown by the gemara to be a less than humble man, he alienates people in several stories in the gemara (not just the ones mentioned in this sugiya, either. In fact, the famous tanur shel achnai incident nearly causes the destruction of the world in part because of him!). Here the gemara shows the rabbis getting a little peeved with this, and having their say about it.

(technically starting at the end of yesterday's daf 27b:
THE EVENING PRAYER HAS NO FIXED LIMIT. What is the meaning of HAS NO FIXED LIMIT? Shall I say it means that if a man wants he can say the Tefillah any time in the night? Then let it state, ‘The time for the evening Tefillah is the ‘whole night’! — But what in fact is the meaning of HAS NO FIXED LIMIT? It is equivalent to saying, The evening Tefillah is optional. For Rab Judah said in the name of Samuel: With regard to the evening Tefillah, Rabban Gamaliel says it is compulsory, whereas R. Joshua says it is optional. Abaye says: The halachah is as stated by the one who says it is compulsory; Raba says the halachah follows the one who says it is optional.

It is related that a certain disciple came before R. Joshua and asked him, Is the evening Tefillah compulsory or optional? He replied: It is optional. He then presented himself before Rabban Gamaliel and asked him: Is the evening Tefillah compulsory or optional? He replied: It is compulsory. But, he said, did not R. Joshua tell me that it is optional? He said: Wait till the champions enter the Beit ha-Midrash. When the champions came in, someone rose and inquired, Is the evening Tefillah compulsory or optional? Rabban Gamaliel replied: It is compulsory. Said Rabban Gamaliel to the Sages: Is there anyone who disputes this? R. Joshua replied to him: No. He said to him: Did they not report you to me as saying that it is optional? He then went on: Joshua, stand up and let them testify against you! R. Joshua stood up and said: Were I alive and he [the witness] dead, the living could contradict the dead. But now that he is alive and I am alive, how can the living contradict the living?(I.e., how can l deny that I said this?)
Rabban Gamaliel remained sitting and expounding and R. Joshua remained standing, until all the people there began to shout and say to Huzpith the turgeman, Stop! and he stopped. They then said: How long is he [Rabban Gamaliel] to go on insulting him [R. Joshua]? On New Year last year he insulted him;(By telling him to appear before him on the Day of Atonement with his staff and wallet. B.R.H. 25a) he insulted him in the matter of the firstborn in the affair of R. Zadok;(Bek. 36a) now he insults him again! Come, let us depose him! Whom shall we appoint instead? We can hardly appoint R. Joshua, because he is one of the parties involved. We can hardly appoint R. Akiba because perhaps Rabban Gamaliel will bring a curse on him because he has no ancestral merit. Let us then appoint R. Eleazar b. Azariah, who is wise and rich and the tenth in descent from Ezra. He is wise, so that if anyone puts a question to him he will be able to answer it. He is rich, so that if occasion arises for paying court to Caesar he will be able to do so. He is tenth in descent from Ezra, so that he has ancestral merit and he [Rabban Gamaliel] cannot bring a curse on him. They went and said to him: Will your honour consent to become head of the Academy? He replied: I will go and consult the members of my family. He went and consulted his wife. She said to him:
Berachot 28a
Perhaps they will depose you later on. He replied to her: [There is a proverb:] Let a man use a cup of honour for one day even if it be broken the next. She said to him: You have no white hair. He was eighteen years old that day, and a miracle was wrought for him and eighteen rows of hair [on his beard] turned white. That is why R. Eleazar b. Azariah said: Behold I am about seventy years old, and he did not say [simply] seventy years old. A Tanna taught: On that day the doorkeeper was removed and permission was given to the disciples to enter. For Rabban Gamaliel had issued a proclamation [saying]. No disciple whose character does not correspond to his exterior may enter the Beth ha-Midrash. On that day many stools were added. R. Johanan said: There is a difference of opinion on this matter between Abba Joseph b. Dosethai and the Rabbis: one [authority] says that four hundred stools were added, and the other says seven hundred. Rabban Gamaliel became alarmed and said: Perhaps, God forbid, I withheld Torah from Israel! He was shown in his dream white casks full of ashes.(Signifying that those he kept out were in fact not genuine) This, however, really meant nothing; he was only shown this to appease him.
A Tanna taught: Eduyyot was formulated on that day — and wherever the expression ‘on that day’ is used, it refers to that day — and there was no halachah about which any doubt existed in the Beit ha-Midrash which was not fully elucidated. Rabban Gamaliel also did not absent himself from the Beit ha-Midrash a single hour, as we have learnt: On that day Judah, an Ammonite proselyte, came before them in the Beth ha-Midrash. He said to them: Am I permitted to enter the assembly?(I.e., marry a Jewess) R. Joshua said to him: You are permitted to enter the congregation. Said Rabban Gamaliel to him: Is it not already laid down, At Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of the Lord?(Deut. 23:4) R. Joshua replied to him: Do Ammon and Moab still reside in their original homes? Sennacherib king of Assyria long ago went up and mixed up all the nations, as it says, I have removed the bounds of the peoples and (Isa. X, 13) and whatever strays [from a group] is assumed to belong to the larger section of the group.(E.g., if there are nine shops in a street selling kasher meat and one selling trefa, and we find a piece of meat in the street, we presume that it came from one of the kasher shops, v. Keth. 15a. So here, we presume that this man came from one of the other nations). Said Rabban Gamaliel to him: But has it not been said: But afterward I will bring back the captivity of the children of Ammon, saith the Lord,(Jer. XLIX, 6) so that they have already returned? To which R. Joshua replied: And has it not been said, And I will turn the captivity of My people Israel,(Amos IX, 24) and they have not yet returned? Forthwith they permitted him to enter the congregation. Rabban Gamaliel thereupon said: This being the case, I will go and apologize to R. Joshua. When he reached his house he saw that the walls were black. He said to him: From the walls of your house it is apparent that you are a charcoal-burner(possibly "smith"). He replied: Alas for the generation of which you are the leader, seeing that you know nothing of the troubles of the scholars, their struggles to support and sustain themselves! He said to him: I apologize. forgive me. He paid no attention to him. Do it, he said, out of respect for my father. He then became reconciled to him. They said: Who will go and tell the Rabbis? A certain fuller said to them: I will go. R. Joshua sent a message to the Beth hamidrash saying: Let him who is accustomed to wear the robe wear it; shall he who is not accustomed to wear the robe say to him who is accustomed to wear it, Take off your robe and I will put it on? Said R. Akiba to the Rabbis: Lock the doors so that the servants of Rabban Gamaliel should not come and upset the Rabbis.(The Rabbis did not want Rabban Gamaliel to be restored, being afraid of his autocratic disposition) Said R. Joshua: I had better get up and go to them. He came and knocked at the door. He said to them: Let the sprinkler son of a sprinkler (I.e., a priest, son of a priest, sprinkle the water of purification. The reference is again to Rabban Gamaliel who had an hereditary claim to the presidency) sprinkle; shall he who is neither a sprinkler nor the son of a sprinkler say to a sprinkler son of a sprinkler, Your water is cave water and your ashes are oven ashes? (I.e. niether suitable for use in purification, because ashes must be from the red heifer, and water must be "living" waters) Said R. Akiba to him: R. Joshua, you have received your apology, have we done anything except out of regard for your honour? Tomorrow morning you and I will wait on him.(I.e., on R. Eleazar b. Azariah. Lit., ‘we will rise early to his door’) They said: How shall we do? Shall we depose him [R. Eleazar b. Azariah]? We have a rule that we may raise an object to a higher grade of sanctity but must not degrade it to a lower. If we let one Master preach on one Sabbath and one on the next, this will cause jealousy. Let therefore Rabban Gamaliel preach three Sabbaths and R. Eleazar b. Azariah one Sabbath. And it is in reference to this that a Master said: ‘Whose Sabbath was it? It was the Sabbath of R. Eleazar b. Azariah’. And that disciple was R. Simeon b. Yohai

Bad Names for Babies

OK, completely non-content, but this is one of the funniest URLs I've come across in ages.


Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing
A sample:
I m thinking of naming my baby Vashara Rashea.
That sounds ominously close to part of the chant to summon the demon Pazuzu!

or

My last name is Tinkletop. For some reason my wife objects to naming our son Timothy, Timmy for short. I think it's a good, memorable name.

You're right.

More etiquette lessons from the rabbis

From Today's daf Berachot 24b:

‘One who says the Tefillah so that it can be heard is of the small of faith (as if God couldn't hear a prayer recited quietly- Rashi, also cf 31a); he who raises his voice in praying is of the false prophets (like the prophets of Ba'al who called out loudly on Mt. Carmel in the showdown with ELijah); he who belches and yawns is of the arrogant; if he sneezes during his prayer it is a bad sign for him — some say, it shows that he is a low fellow (as Rashi explains this is someone who deliberately sneezes - this also applies to belching and yawning, that it's deliberate); one who spits during his prayer is like one who spits before a king’. Now in regard to belching and yawning there is no difficulty; in the one case it was involuntary, in the other case deliberate. But the sneezing in Rabbi's case does seem to contradict the sneezing in the other? — There is no contradiction between sneezing and sneezing either; in the one case it is above (that is, the nose), in the other below (er, from a smellier bit of anatomy...)
For R. Zera said: This dictum was casually imparted to me in the school of R. Hamnuna, and it is worth all the rest of my learning (rashi: because it praises sneezers, and I sneeze a lot): If one sneezes in his prayer it is a good sign for him, that as they give him relief below [on earth](Rashi: sneezes offer nachat ruach - satisfaction or ease- to a person) so they give him relief above [in heaven].
But there is surely a contradiction between the spitting in the one case and the other? — There is no contradiction between the two cases of spitting either, since it can be done as suggested by Rab Judah. For Rab Judah said: If a man is standing saying the Tefillah, and spittle collects in his mouth, he covers it up in his robe, or, if it is a fine robe, in his turban. Rabina was once standing behind R. Ashi and he wanted to spit, so he spat out behind him. Said R. Ashi to him: Does not the Master accept the dictum of Rab Judah, that he covers it up in his turban? He replied: I am rather squeamish.


... R. Abba kept away from Rab Judah because he wanted to go up to Eretz Israel; for Rab Judah said, Whoever goes up from Babylon to Eretz Israel transgresses a positive precept, since it says, They shall be carried to Babylon and there shall they be, until the day that I remember them, saith the Lord. He said: I will go and listen to what he is saying from outside the Academy. So he went and found the Tanna10 reciting in the presence of Rab Judah: If a man was standing saying the Tefillah and he broke wind, he waits until the odour passes off and begins praying again. Some say: If he was standing saying the Tefillah and he wanted to break wind, he steps back four cubits and breaks wind and waits till the wind passes off and resumes his prayer, saying, Sovereign of the Universe, Thou hast formed us with various hollows and various vents. It is revealed and known before You our shame and humiliation in our lives, and that our latter end is worms and maggots!
Then he begins again from the place where he stopped. He said: Had I come only to hear this, it would have been worth my while.

Hermaneutics and other religious tracts

From two great sites:
first: the Slacktivist
A Christian take on hermaneutics, very funny...

Hermeneutics
Our Text:

So this gorilla walks into a bar. The gorilla slaps a $10 bill on the counter and says, "Give me a beer."

Bartender figures what does a gorilla know? So he gives him the beer, but only gives him $1 in change. It's a slow night, though, so the bartender figures he should make some conversation. "We don't get many gorillas in here," he says.

Gorilla says, "Yeah, well at $9 a beer I'm not surprised."

The Fundamentalist Interpretation

(Fundamentalists read the text literally. This means they adhere as closely as possible to the simplest, most obvious reading of its meaning.)

The talking gorilla indicates that the great apes, perhaps all beasts, once were able to speak. This, like the great longevity of the early patriarchs, seems incomprehensible to us. Yet the text says it is so, so therefore it is so.

How is it that gorillas could speak? How is it that Methuselah could live to the ripe old age of 969? Those of you who have been attending our Wednesday night Bible study series, "Six Days; 6,000 Years Ago," already know the answer to these questions.

In Matthew 24:38, Jesus says that, "in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking ..." Our story is set in a bar, a place designated for eating and drinking, so we can conclude that it takes place "in the days that were before the flood."

Please note, however, that this was not what we today understand as the sin of drinking. The "beer" in our text is not the alcoholic beverage we think of today, just as the "wine" the Bible speaks of is not what we think of as wine. (Drinking wine is a sin. Jesus was without sin. Jesus drank "wine." Therefore "wine" is not wine.) The "beer" the story speaks of thus was probably a nonalcoholic drink similar to malta.

In the days that were before the flood, the earth was still protected by the great vapor canopy, or "firmament" (Genesis 1:6-8, KJV only, of course). This canopy shielded the earth, protecting the grandchildren of Adam and Eve and allowing them to live much longer than humans can today without the benefit of its protection. Creation scientists have posited that another consequence of this canopy may have been that, um, gorillas could talk. They lost this ability of speech after God unleashed the canopy, creating the Great Flood.

Public schools refuse to acknowledge that gorillas could ever speak. This is an example of the persecution that we face as believers.

The Premillennial Dispensationalist Interpretation

(Premillennial dispensationalists also consider their interpretation of the text to be literal, but they also believe that we must "rightly divide" the word of truth [see 1 Tim. 2:15]. The dispensational approach provides a key -- a kind of codebreaker -- for interpreting the text, which is explained in simple charts like this one.)

The meaning of this passage is made clear through its use of the number nine: 9 = 3 + 6, or three sixes, or 666. The bartender thus clearly represents the Antichrist, who gives this number to the gorilla, or Beast.

The beer represents the alcoholic wine consumed by the apostate church of Rome. The $10 presented by the gorilla represents the 10 kings of the rebuilt Roman Empire, also represented by the 10 horns of the Beast described in Revelation 13:1. The apostle John, of course, would never have seen a gorilla firsthand and thus could not known what to call this Beast, but consider the description John provides in Revelation 13:2: "The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear [i.e., Soviet Russia] and a mouth like that of a lion." That sounds very much like a gorilla (or, perhaps, a gorilla in a leopard suit).

Thus our text makes it clear that the Antichrist is none other than the Roman Pope and that his servant is Leonid Brezhnev Saddam Hussein.

I have read that in many bars and restaurants in places like New York City it is not uncommon for patrons to be charged $9 for a beer. Such prices were unheard of before the recreation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The signs therefore are clear: We are living in the Last Days. Even now, the Bartender and his servant the Gorilla are preparing for a one-world government and a New World Order that will mark the beginning of the Tribulation.

Also Cthulu mirror Tired of the same old religious tracts? Try this one... Not for the faint of heart!

Schiavo

This has to be one of themor gut-wrenching cases around. It was interesting to discuss this with my 7th graders: from the perspetive of Jewish law, the possibilities are limited, and actually pretty clear: it's murder to starve someone to death. And yet, and yet... 15 years of PVS. NO upper brain function. No hope of recovery. I cannot say anything other than that God values us all, disabled, brain dead, or whole and healthy. The fact that decisions like this are made all the time on the basis of economics -often when the family would like to continue to try to maintain their loved one - and sometimes even when there might really be hope for recovery...
If Terry Schiavo was a 50 year old garage mechanic, or a 70 year old African American woman, no one would ever have heard of her. I wonder if Schiavo's parents came to me and asked me whatto do, what I would say. I could tell them what Jewish law is; but I also feel that I would have to say to them that hope of recovery is pure fantasy, and htat as painful as it is, the need to move on and accept that thir beloved daughter will never return to them in this world.

The modesty of the rabbis

Nothing like stating the facts plainly. Too humble is, after all, as bad as not humble at all.

Berachot 20a:
R. Johanan was accustomed to go and sit at the gates of the bathing place. He said: When the daughters of Israel come up from bathing they look at me and they have children as handsome as I am.

And honoring the living

Today's daf: continuing the theme of having respect for one another:
Berachot 19b:
Come and hear. ‘Great is human dignity, since it overrides a negative precept of the Torah’.(Men. 37b) Why should it? Let us apply the rule, ‘There is no wisdom nor understanding nor counsel against the Lord? — Rab b. Shaba explained the dictum in the presence of R. Kahana to refer to the negative precept of ‘thou shalt not turn aside’.(Deut. 17:11) They laughed at him. The negative precept of ‘thou shalt not turn aside’ is also from the Torah!

Respecting the dead

It seems to me that this piceof gemara is a very important one when we're dealing with the question of whether a man might be permitted to take an aliyah or other honor in a place where women are not counted.

Berachot 18a
it has been taught: A man should not walk in a cemetery with tefillin on his head or a scroll of the Law in his arm, and recite the Shema’, and if he does so, he comes under the heading of ‘He that mocketh the poor blasphemeth his Maker’? — In that case the act is forbidden within four cubits of the dead, but beyond four cubits the obligation [to say Shema’ etc.] devolves. For a Master has said: A dead body affects four cubits in respect of the recital of the Shema’. But in this case he is exempt even beyond four cubits.

The importance of tefilin

I suppose it's no surprise why the mitzvah of tzitzit (that is, wearing a tallit) is one that has been taken up by women, but tefillin, for the most part, hasn't. At least in part, it's because most people only come to shul on shabbat (if they come at all) and so never see tefillin put on - even by men, let alone by women. But in truth, the mitzvah of tefilin is more important: tzitzit one must only wear if one wears a garment with four corners; tefillin must be worn on weekdays, period.
I'd love to see tefillin become a more regarded mitzvah. I have all these great metaphors which I love to use to talk about tefillin: the tefillin as vine: one in which we are the rtellis, but also in which the vine supports the trellis, so to speak. The batim are fruit, with jeweled words, like pomegranates.
Or else tefillin as compass (בשם אמרו My friend Rabbi Scott Slarskey taught me that one).

And the gemara brings support from today's daf (Berachot 14b):
‘Ulla said: If one recites the Shema’ without tefillin it is as if he bore false witness against himself.16 R. Hiyya b. Abba said in the name of R. Johanan: It is as if he offered a burnt-offering without a meal-offering and a sacrifice without drink-offering.

R. Johanan also said: If one desires to accept upon himself the yoke of the kingdom of heaven in the most complete manner (cont. 15a), he should consult nature and wash his hands and put on tefillin and recite the Shema’ and say the tefillah: this is the complete acknowledgment of the kingdom of heaven. R. Hiyya b. Abba said in the name of R. Johanan: If one consults nature and washes his hands and puts on tefillin and recites the Shema’ and says the tefillah, Scripture accounts it to him as if he had built an altar and offered a sacrifice upon it, as it is written, I will wash my hands in innocency and I will compass Thine altar, O Lord. Said Raba to him: Does not your honour think that it is as if he had bathed himself, since it is written, I will wash in purity and it is not written, ‘I will wash my hands’.

A dream

A very odd dream. Most of it has faded by now (the irritating thing about my dreams- they always fade -especially the interesting ones- before I can get them down somewhere), but I do remember one part in which Maiyan had somehow been grabbed by the head by a dog. I got him away from the dog terified that the dog had really hurt him, and in fact the dog had left little teeth imprints on his head, but he had miraculously not been hurt, and only cried for a couple of minutes (very like the non-dream Maiyan, who seems to be rarely fazed by anything for very long, unless he's really tired). But the weird part was someone noticing how quickly he stopped crying and admired his easygoing nature, then some kind of weird segue into a discussion about how when he's grown if I just let him know what I want from him, it will make his life so much easier and a story about some woman whose mother finally told her what she wanted fromher, and the report that this made the daughter 65% happier with the situation. I really dug that my dream actually produced a statistic for me on this...

Friday and Shabbat daffage: Torah blessings, praying for others

So first of all, I've noticed that in some circles it seems to have become de rigeur to substitute for the proper blessing before the Torah an invented one (contrary to halacha, which tells us that that we don't add to the blessings of the rabbis). This is apparently done because of dislike of the notion of chosenness. What I'm curious about is why the made-up blessing is used when the gemara actually offers one:

(from Berachot 11b) What benediction is said [before the study of the Torah]? — Rab Judah said in the name of Samuel: [Blessed art Thou . . . ] who hast sanctified us by Thy commandments, and commanded us to study the Torah. R. Yochanan used to conclude as follows: ‘Make pleasant, therefore, we beseech Thee, O Lord our God, the words of Thy Torah in our mouth and in the mouth of Thy people the house of Israel, so that we with our offspring and the offspring of Thy people the house of Israel may all know Thy name and study Thy Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who teachest Torah to Thy people Israel’. That is: הערב נא ה אלהינו את דברי תורתך בפינו ובפיפיות עמך בית ישראל ונהיה אנחנו וצאצאינו וצאצאי עמך בית ישראל כלנו יודעי שמך ועוםקי תורתך. ברוך אתה ה המלמד תורה לעמו ישראל R. Hamnuna said: ‘[Blessed art Thou . . . ] who hast chosen us from all the nations and given us Thy Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who givest the Torah’. R. Hamnuna said: This is the finest of the benedictions. Therefore let us say all of them.

From 12a: ‘On Sabbath they said an additional blessing on account of the outgoing watch’. What was this benediction? — R. Helbo said: The outgoing watch said to the incoming one, May He who has caused His name to dwell in this house cause to dwell among you love and brotherhood and peace and friendship.

From 12b: Raba b. Hinena the elder said further in the name of Rab: If one is in a position to pray on behalf of his fellow and does not do so, he is called a sinner, as it says, Moreover as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you

The gemara does SAT analogies

But rather beautifully:

Berachot 10a
To whom did David refer in these five verses beginning with ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul’?
He was alluding only to the Holy One, blessed be He, and to the soul.

Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the whole world, so the soul fills the body.
Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, sees, but is not seen, so the soul sees but is not itself seen.
Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, feeds the whole world, so the soul feeds the whole body.
Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, is pure, so the soul is pure.
Just as the Holy One, blessed be He, abides in the innermost precincts, so the soul abides in the innermost precincts.

Let that which has these five qualities come and praise Him who has these five qualities.

From the "Don't they have something better to do" file...

I can vaguely recall D&D being accused of causing devil worship in the US some time ago. Please, folks, get a grip...

From YNET news
Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons

IDF says players are detached from reality and automatically given a low security clearance
By Hanan Greenberg

Does the Israel Defense Forces believe incoming recruits and soldiers who play Dungeons and Dragons are unfit for elite units? Ynet has learned that 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.

“They're detached from reality and suscepitble to influence,” the army says.

Fans of the popular roleplaying game had spoken of rumors of this strange policy by the IDF, but now the army has confirmed that it has a negative image of teens who play the game and labels them as problematic in regard to their draft status.

So if you like fantasy games, go see the military psychologist.

Dungeons and Dragons (also known as D&D) has been a popular roleplaying game for decades and is based on a fantasy world.

One player assumes the role of “Dungeon Master,” which entails directing the game and controlling the labyrinth, while the others select from a large selection of characters that includes warriors, magicians, dwarfs and thieves.

The game focuses on the results of decisions made by the players as determined by the roll of the dice.

In a more "active" version of the game, players leave the table and go out, dressed as the characters they assume for the game, along with the requisite equipment of swords (not real) to play outside, usually in the forest or woods. Most D&D players do not don costumes, and participants in such costume games are called "LARPers" (for live-action role playing).

'Simply detached from reality'

Thousands of youth and teens in Israel play D&D, fighting dragons and demons using their rich imaginations. The game has also increased in popularity due to the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

However the IDF does not approve of this unusual hobby and prevents D&D players from being considered for sensitive army positions by labeling them with low security clearance.

"We have discovered that some of them are simply detached from reality," a security source told Ynet.

Game enthusiasts are aware of their problematic image in the army and prefer to maintain their anonymity. Many of them are from the former Soviet Union, where the game is very popular.

In Israel there are thousands of players, between the ages 16 to 35, and include lawyers, high-tech workers and businessmen. Matan, 22, and Igor, a 21-year-old IDF soldier, organize activities for groups of players. Soon hundreds of fans are expected to meet in a forest in the southern part of Israel for a two-day game of pure fantasy.

"It's not a game of winners and losers," Matan says,
"but rather entry into another world with stories and plot changes."

He is aware of the game's problematic reputation, especially in the IDF. The army is not indifferent to the unique hobby and is trying to locate soldiers who in their free time dress up as witches and play in forests.

'The game indicates a weak personality'

A security official tells Ynet there are specific criteria for deciding the level of a soldier's security clearance.

"One of the tests we do, either by asking soldiers directly or through information provided us, is to ask whether they take part in the game," he says. "If a soldier answers in the affirmative, he is sent to a professional for an evaluation, usually a psychologist."

More than half of the soldiers sent for evaluation receive low security clearances, thus preventing them from serving in sensitive IDF positions, he says.

Igor says exposing soldiers who play the game could result in the soldiers being sent to a military psychologist or even being kicked out of the army.

"Exposing them could also harm their chances at being accepted to other military courses," he says.

Matan says he has personally met soldiers whose military career was harmed due to their connection to the game. Most soldiers who play Dungeons and Dragons simply do not admit to it while they are in the army, he says.

Why does IDF believe game is dangerous?

"These people have a tendency to be influenced by external factors which could cloud their judgment, a military official says. "They may be detached from reality or have a weak personality - elements which lower a person's security clearance, allowing them to serve in the army, but not in sensitive positions."

Unsurprisingly, Igor, Matan and thier friends do not approve of this IDF policy. They say the game is only a colorful, non-violent hobby.

"Many people who play served in the most classified units," David says. "They are intelligent and any attempt to label them as 'weird' is incorrect and unfair."

But in the struggle between the gameplayers and the Defense Minister, the latter wins - or at least this is the case in the real world of the IDF

As they say, "Only in America..."

This pic from Jewschool was too good to pass up...



Follow that car!

Thank You Roberta Flack!

Israeli 'survivor' flower boasts cells in shape of Star of DavidBy Leora Eren Frucht March 06, 2005

Thank you Roberta Flack!


"We have never before seen a structure like this in the cell walls of plants," says Dr. Rina Kamenetsky. "This is a very rare structure - maybe even unique."


It's known as the ultimate survivor. It grows wild in Israel, thriving in the harsh dry conditions that would kill many other plants. And what do the cells of this hardy survivor - a native Israeli Persian buttercup - look like under a microscope? A Star of David. "It really is symbolic," says Dr. Rina Kamenetsky, a researcher at Israel's Volcani Institute, who made the surprising discovery while trying to understand the survival mechanisms of this resilient bulb, known in Hebrew as nurit, and in Latin as Ranunculus asiaticus. The flower from the Holy Land is also known in botanical circles as a type of 'resurrection plant' which, explains Kamenetsky, means that it can live without water, and is 'resurrected' when water becomes available. Kamenetsky brought samples of the native Israeli type of this Mediterranean species to study during a sabbatical leave at the University of Guelph in Canada last year. She and her Canadian colleagues discovered that the storage roots of this particular Persian buttercup have a special mechanism for resisting drought and heat that is found in no other plant to date - a finding they published recently in the journal New Phytologist. But Kamenetsky also found an additional surprise: under a microscope the cells of the root assume the form of interlocking Stars of David. "When my Canadian colleague Professor Larry Peterson saw it, he called me over right away and said: 'Look, Rina: here's something especially for you.' I was truly amazed," she told ISRAEL21c. It was the first time that Kamenetsky, a leading floriculturist, had seen a Star of David pattern on the cells of any plant. It turns out that the cell walls of the storage roots of this particular plant serve as a shield. In winter, when the first rain comes, the cell walls block the sudden influx of water which could cause the cells to burst. At the same time, they protect the cells from dehydration by absorbing water. The cell walls that serve as a year-round shield also happen to look like a shield - the shield of David. "We have never before seen a structure like this in the cell walls of plants," she says. "This is a very rare structure - maybe even unique." Kamenetsky heads the Volcani Institute's Department of Ornamental Horticulture - part of the research arm of the Israel Ministry of Agriculture responsible for planning, organizing and implementing the greater part of Israel's agricultural research effort. She's now planning collaboration with researchers from France, Italy and South Africa to understand the unique survival mechanism of the Israeli varieties of the Persian buttercup. The most common wild type is a red, five-petaled flower with a black center which bears some resemblance to an anemone. In summer, its roots are exposed to the scorching heat - up to 60 degrees centigrade - of the desert earth. The cultivated type - sold commercially as bulbs - has multiple layers of petals and comes in a variety of colors, including white, yellow, pink, red and magenta. Both wild and cultivated types have the same unusual survival mechanism, says Kamenetsky. "The value of this research is that if we can understand these mechanisms, we can endow other plants with these abilities - something that is of growing importance in a world undergoing desertification," she explains. Kamenetsky notes that there are various heat- and drought-resistant plants growing in Africa, all of which have a special mechanism in their leaves. But this is the first time that scientists have ever encountered a drought-resistant mechanism in the roots of a plant. "When I lecture about this research, I call it: 'How to cope with stressful life in Israel.' It could be that when it comes to survival, our own Nurit has something to teach the plants of the world." Kamenetsky, who was born in Kazakhstan, immigrated to Israel in 1990 and has since made an international name for herself in the field of ornamental horticulture - developing native plants into ornamental crops which can be grown commercially and sold as cut flowers or potted plants. Israel is at the cutting edge of this field. Some 20-40 percent of the flowers Israel markets every year are new varieties, notes Kamenetsky, adding that no other country but Holland has such a high percentage of novel varieties. Kamenetsky is also one of the world's leading experts on the Allium (garlic) species which can be grown as ornamental flowers and is being widely studied for its medicinal properties.

Daf of the day: respect the elderly & why we like Persians

Berachot 8b:

Be careful to respect an old man who has forgotten his knowledge through no fault of his own, for it was said: Both the whole tables and the fragments of the tables were placed in the Ark(Baba batra 14b; cf Deut. 10:2).

It has been taught: R. Gamaliel says: For three things do I like the Persians: They are temperate in their eating, modest in the privy, and chaste in another matter (sex).

'Nuff said.

Peculiar Daf of the day #1

Having just started daf yomi (at least, started seriously to attempt to complete it), I'm getting to run up against some of my favorite aggadic passages in the Talmud. BErachot is full of wonderful, but also often incredibly weird sugiyot, so from time to time, I'm thinking of posting some of them. Today's snippet is weird, rather than awe-inspiring. YMMV:

Berachot 6a:
It has been taught: Abba Benjamin says, If the eye had the power to see them, no creature could endure the demons. Abaye says: They are more numerous than we are and they surround us like the ridge round a field. R. Huna says: Every one among us has a thousand on his left hand and ten thousand on his right hand. Raba says: The crushing in the Kallah lectures comes from them. Fatigue in the knees comes from them. The wearing out of the clothes of the scholars is due to their rubbing against them. The bruising of the feet comes from them. If one wants to discover them, let him take sifted ashes and sprinkle around his bed, and in the morning he will see something like the footprints of a cock. If one wishes to see them, let him take the after-birth of a black she-cat, the offspring of a black she-cat, the first-born of a first-born, let him roast it in fire and grind it to powder, and then let him put some into his eye, and he will see them. Let him also pour it into an iron tube and seal it with an iron signet that they should not steal it from him. Let him also close his mouth, lest he come to harm. R. Bibi b. Abaye did so, saw them and came to harm. The scholars, however, prayed for him and he recovered.

Too smart for whose good?

Basically what the article is claiming is that the job is more important than spouses or families, that men and women should ignore the messages that the women's movement has been striving to instill for forty years - and that companies that are expecting to demand ridiculous work hours from their employees are furious that the employees aren't thrilled to death to provide them. Well, I say, "Good for Gen Y!" Ms. Powell is right: after you make so much money, it IS enough!

We still have a long way to go, but refusing to assume that the attitude of articles like this one - that jobs take precedence over everything else- are right or good, is a great first step. Kol hakavod, Gen Y. Live long and prosper - with your families! I hope your "bad" attitude is highly contagious!
*******************************************************************


Law.com
Law Firms Mull the 'Gen Y' EquationWednesday March 2, 3:01 am ET Leigh Jones, The National Law Journal
Some call them slackers. Others are more diplomatic. But whatever the moniker, "Generation Y" associates are getting a bad rap for what some say is a flabby work ethic and an off-putting sense of entitlement.

Attorneys from Generation Y -- those born in 1978 or later -- are plenty smart and generally well educated, say firm leaders and industry experts. But these young attorneys also are lacking in loyalty, initiative and energy, so the criticism goes.
And though some associates sharply dispute the assessment, the perception is forcing managing partners to rethink their motivation strategies and their expectations for their firms' future.
Big money at large firms may be intoxicating for young lawyers with mounds of school debt, but new associates often are not willing to make the sacrifice that those salaries demand, said Bruce McLean, chairman of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
"It entices people to come to big firms who really don't want to do what we do," said McLean, adding that Akin Gump has a "significant number" of hardworking associates.
Generation Y associates often come from the nation's top schools and have other impressive credentials, McLean said, but what many do not have is unbridled ambition. "Just being successful and a partner in a firm is not enough of a motivating tool," he said.
But third-year associate Moe Keshavarzi at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in Los Angeles said that firms with unhappy Generation Y associates are not tapping into their potential.
"I have friends who are fourth-year associates at other firms who are sitting in the library researching," he said.
Studies indicate that young workers are less willing to put in long hours and instead are more focused on pursuing interests outside work than were their predecessors. A report issued by the Families and Work Institute in October, Generation and Gender in the Workplace, found that younger employees are less likely to be "work-centric." The study also found that young men and women are more interested in staying at the same rung on the career ladder in order to preserve their quality of life.
With regard to law firms specifically, a study conducted by Edge International, a professional services consulting firm, found that the 25- to 30-year-old group ranked the following factors as motivators at their jobs: time for personal life; opportunities for advancement; professional growth; achievement; intrinsic nature of work; security; leadership; and being a member of a team.
"This group wants to grow professionally and advance to partnership, but not while compromising their personal lives," said Karen MacKay, a partner with Edge International. The survey, "Motivating the Next Generation," was sent to about 4,000 members of the law firm network Multilaw. About 800 attorneys responded.
It may be that new associates simply are more vocal about what they perceive as meaningless work, even if they are handsomely paid, said Reed Smith fifth-year associate Alicia Powell.
"After you make so much money, it's enough," Powell said.
Part of what is fueling management's perception relates to the dot-com bust, said Morrison & Foerster chairman Keith Wetmore. Older partners may view any grousing by associates who receive assignments from them as a sign of being ungrateful for work that three years ago was scarce, he said.
"It may be more in the eyes of the observer than in the associate," he said.
THE 'PACK MENTALITY'
But other firm leaders are less forgiving. One managing partner at a New York firm cited a "failure to take charge of their career" as a common problem with young associates. "They are more willing to sit back and wait for things to happen to them instead of making them happen for themselves," the attorney said, adding that new associates today are more brazen than those in previous years. "They are willing to turn down work they don't want to do. They don't volunteer for committee or other firm work."
Another managing partner at a national firm said that many new associates, unlike associates before them, no longer "feel lucky" to have their jobs. The attorney also said that associates now operate under a pack mentality.
"[Newer associates] have a very strong connection with each other as opposed to the institution. If someone is treated badly, they all react to it," the attorney said.
"Vigorously" rejecting the Generation Y characterization, however, is Jonathan Cole, immediate past chairman of the American Bar Association's Young Lawyers Division. Associates today work harder, if not more effectively, than in previous generations, said Cole, who made partner in 2003 at the Nashville, Tenn., office of Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz.
He acknowledged, however, that associates, who in the past may have blindly met a firm's demands, now more closely consider the tradeoff to their personal life. "People are looking more 'big picture,'" he said. "It's a good trend."
Generation Y workers may be too smart for their own good, which contributes to management's perceptions, said Carolyn Martin, co-author of "Managing Generation Y" (HRD Press, 2001).
Employees in that generation, especially those in professional positions, place a high value on education, something their parents drilled into them, she said. Consequently, young associates have a low tolerance for less-than-challenging tasks that management often relegates to them, she said.
In addition, the group has a greater degree of cynicism than in generations past, she said, stemming from the dot-com failure and 9/11 terrorist attacks. The result is diminished long-term loyalty to their employers.
"They're saying, 'I've looked at the world and there's no such thing as job security,'" she said.

Ki Tisa

The morning of erev Rosh Hashanah of my second year of rabbinical school, I realized around 11 o’clock that I had no challot. Hoping that I would manage to make it down the mountain into Los Angles in time to buy some before the bakeries closed for the holiday, I decided to go the shorter way, down the canyon roads into LA. It’s actually a much prettier drive, so I was enjoying the ride as I followed the road past a curve, with the mountain going up beside me to my right, and dropping off into the San Fernando Valley past the other lane to my left.
The first moment when my car skidded, I thought I was just going too fast on Mulholland Drive, which is very curvy, although I’m not prone to that, especially not on mountain roads. But then when I started fishtailing on a perfectly dry road, I realized something was wrong with my car. Still, I wasn’t particularly worried until I saw the car oncoming the other way, and realized that I would have to get control of the car very quickly if I was to avoid hitting the other car.
The problem was that my steering wheel had stopped responding. I could turn it, but nothing happened. I felt only a few seconds of relief when I realized the other car had stopped in time to avoid me. Then I realized that I had somehow turned the car enough that it was going to go head first down the mountain. I had only enough time to think, I’m going to die, I hope it doesn’t hurt, as my car went over the side. I watched as I went over the side. I dropped only a hundred yards or so when I hit a tree head on, and this turned the car enough to the side that when it flipped over, it went over around the side, and not head over tail, and so that after a few rolls, it eventually came to a stop halfway down the mountain, caught on some scrub.
I found, to my amazement, that I was still alive, and conscious, and that the car had stopped. The windshield wipers had somehow come on. As I tuned them off, I was glad that I had been wearing my seatbelt. And then I thought, I’d better get out of the car, what if the weight of the car pulls it off the bush and it keeps falling the rest of the way. So I tried to open the door. It wouldn’t open - it turns out that rolling the car had bent the frame so that the front doors had been pushed behind the frame and stuck shut. So I thought for a minute and rolled down the window. I was very glad they were manual windows. I got the window open, and wiggled out, hoping that the car wouldn’t choose that moment to fall further. It didn’t.
Then I realized that I still had to get back up to the road. I looked up the side of the mountain, and thought. Well. I guess I‘d better get started, it’s along walk home. As I pulled myself up tree by scrub to the road, I saw that the woman I had narrowly avoided hitting was sitting by the side of the road with a cell phone. I walked over and asked her if I could use her phone. Yaaaah!!! She yelled. I almost collapsed on the spot. What!!???
She said, I saw your car go over and I thought you were dead. I was calling an ambulance. Apparently she didn’t expect to see me, and I had startled her.
The ambulance never did show up, but a fire truck came with a paramedic, who took my blood pressure and gave me a cursory once over to make sure I didn’t need to be hospitalized. Since I couldn’t reach anyone on erev Rosh Hashanah (by this time it was a good bit later) the firemen gallantly offered to take me home, even though technically they weren’t supposed to, since I was on their way. If I’d been say, five, I would have been more pleased about the ride in the fire truck, but as it was, I was grateful enough.
When I got back to the campus of the seminary (which was where I was living at the time) I went and pretty much collapsed on one of my neighbors. When, later on, people heard about my little escapade there was a lot of “Wow, did you feel like the hand of God was with you?” and I have to admit, I answered rather snappishly that if God had had anything to do with it, at least God could have had the courtesy to prevent my wheel bearing from snapping, rather than sending me careening down a mountain.
But nevertheless, one of the things that I began doing after that day was to start saying the blessing every morning, “asher yatzar et ha’adam b’chochma” traditionally the blessing one says after going to the bathroom, that thanks God for creating our bodies exactly as they are, for if one hole was open where it ought not to be, or one hole closed where it should be open, we wouldn’t be able to survive even a moment.
Now you would think, that an experience like that would make an indelible mark on a person. Maybe change them forever. And that brings me to today’s Torah portion.

It is as astonishing to many of the rabbis as it is to us that so soon after the incredible miracles, and the grandeur of the Sinai revelation, Israel would create a golden calf. The language of many commentators reflects the absolute astonishment that we feel when we read this section of the Torah.
Our portion this week tells us: (Shmot 32:1):

“Arise and make for us elohim that they will go before us, since this man Moshe who brought us out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

But the Torah makes pretty clear that such a thing is imaginable. The great commentator Nehama Leibowitz points out that “If you look in the first book of Kings (chapter 18) where the story of Elijah’s duel with the false prophets on Mt. Carmel is described, we find a parallel to the story of the Golden calf…The Israelites who had seen fire descending from heaven in answer to the prophet’s prayer and who had fervently proclaimed; “The Lord He is God” (the declaration made by the Jewish people at the most solemn moment of the year at the termination of Yom Kippur), those same individuals repudiated [God’s] message [the next day], persecuted the true prophets, broke down their altars and reverted to their previous idolatry. Elijah, the hero of Mt Carmel was forced to flee for his life to Mt. Sinai and hide in the desert.”

Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed refers to the ‘inevitability of gradualness’ which must distinguish any lasting transformation in human character. He says that the reason that the children of Israel had to wander forty years in the desert is for this very reason: He says, “It is not in the nature of humans, reared in slavery, in bricks and straw and the like, to wash their hands of their dirt and suddenly rise up and fight with the giants of Canaan. God in His wisdom contrived that the wander in the wilderness until they had become schooled in courage, since it is well known that physical hardships toughen and the converse produce faintheartedness. A new generation was born which had not been accustomed to slavery and degradation.”

Of course, this explanation begs the question of what slavery was –was not slavery hard labor, as described in the Torah? And if it was hard labor, shouldn’t it have produced the courage that Maimonides claims for physical toughness?
Rather, I want to suggest that it’s not physical toughness and courage that are the problem. In fact, courage is the least of it. The problem is one of miracles. Judaism has never been religion big on miracles, and partly this is the reason why: sudden crisis doesn’t really change people.
There are lots of stories about the deathbed conversion and the sudden change of heart ascribed to miracles in other religions, but Judaism doesn’t really get very interested in miracles. Or at least not in the kind of thing that we usually think of as miracles.
If you look at the blessing that we say in the morning just before we read the Shma, you may notice something a little strange. This blessing, which praises God as adon haniflaot – lord of wonders- doesn’t follow this description with say, the “God who tore the sea apart,” or “the god who caused the burning bush,” but rather, it says, “Lord of wonders, who day after day renews creation.” Judaism doesn’t deny that there are miracles, it does however, want to remind us that miracles are not those things which upend the order of creation: miracles are usually much more prosaic. They happen every day, every moment. The are the miracles of new life, of the earth revolving on its axis, the fact that we’re exactly the right distance from the sun to support life, neither too close and hot to the sun, nor too far and distant.
I want to have a bit of sympathy for the Israelites. As Maimonides reminds us, they had been slaves in Egypt and were unaccustomed to freedom. And the problem with that isn’t that they weren’t brave enough. Rather the problem is a problem of habit. Way back at the beginning of the book of Shmot, Maimonides explains the phrase of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart that “When the Torah recounts the first five plagues, it does not say that G-d hardened Pharaoh’s heart - only that it was hardened, meaning that he did it himself.” Each repetition of Pharaoh's persistent obstinacy made it less likely that he would eventually listen to the word of God. That is, we are creatures of habit. The first time we do something unethical, our conscience bothers us, but each time we repeat it, our conscience grows quieter and fainter, until it ceases to speak. The reverse is true as well. It’s difficult to do the right thing the first time. But each time we repeat it, it becomes easier and easier, until it becomes habit. The Israelites were like pharaoh in that way, as we all are: they were accustomed to behaving a certain way, and a few miracles aren’t enough to change that habit.
That brings me back to the story I began with. I think I mentioned that as a result of the car accident, I was moved to begin saying the asher yatzar blessing every morning. And I did, very regularly, at least for a few months. And then I missed a day. I was late that morning getting up, maybe, and had to hurry to minyan, and catch up to where everyone was. And then maybe another morning, and another. And after a while, I wasn’t really any more regular about it, than I had been beforehand. I mean, it’s a great blessing, and I still said it at the other usual times, but I wasn’t so meditative about it in the morning. It stopped being a moment for me that I stopped to think about how fortunate I was in surviving what could have been a really terrible accident instead of just a totaled car. I didn’t feel lucky to have survived every morning. I stopped having the persistent feeling that I was really dead, and just didn’t realize it yet. The fading of awe is in many ways a blessing. Who wants to have all the worst moments of their lives always fresh in their minds even if it also means that the best moments are, too?
And the rabbis recognized this about human nature. “Miracles, however awe-inspiring cannot change human nature. The can only temporarily shake the human soul out of its every day concepts, but they cannot effect a lasting transformation.” (Nehama Leibowitz). The rabbis realized that we are all embedded in our daily habits, and that those habits create us. That’s why Judaism emphasizes behavior and not so much belief. As Jews, we are obligated to accept the yoke of heaven and the yoke of mitzvot: the rabbis understand that to be what the sh’ma is: (We first accept God’s sovereignty by saying the paragraph that begins Shema yisrael adonai elohainu adonai echad, and then we follow it with the paragraph which begins with v’haya im sh’moa, which the rabbis understand as our accepting the yoke, the obligation of mitzvot). We repeat this every day to remind ourselves of our obligations. Even just getting so far as saying the shma twice a day is a dedication to task that we don’t all make. But it’s the beginning of molding our behavior, it’s a first step. The next step is actually adding mitzvot. We often feel that we ought to feel something when we do mitzvot. We ought to get some kind of feel good reward, or at least draw a salary. But that’s not how it works. You have to develop the habits first. They have to become part of you. It’s when you have added enough pieces that the system as a whole begins to take root in you that there’s a spiritual payoff. Sometimes. As my rav Elliott Dorff says, even professional players don’t hit a home run every time.
The Israelites are only human. Raised in slavery, they are slaves no longer to pharaoh, but they remain enslaved to themselves. They haven’t yet shaken off the habits of their desires, the chains of their minds. To paraphrase George Clinton of Funkadelic, “Free your mind and your tush will follow.” Today, I don’t recite asher yatzar because of the feeling I have at surviving the accident pushes me to do it. It took an assertion of my will to begin again saying this blessing every morning: instead, I say the blessing to remind me that I should feel grateful, whether I do or not. And often in invoking the words that at one point were so full of feelings, I can arouse those feelings again, and experience the awe of the commonplace. Not that God put out Her hand and swept me up in a miracle counter to nature, but the miracle of human safety devices, a one-piece frame, and thanks that olam noheg k’minhago – the world goes according to natural law – the everyday miracles of habit, like putting on a seatbelt.

Mommy Madness and Slacker Mom

These articles from Newsweek don't go quite far enough. We're now living in a world that has rolled back many of the gains tht feminists made in the 70's. Women are now, once again, responsible for being June Cleaver but more so. We no longer have the guts to call our society and government to account for inventing new ways to keep us in the kitchen and the home, and then set those working at home against those working out of the home by confusing us about whom to blame. Why aren't more dads working shorter hours and doing more child care? Why isn't there decent day care; and why do working hourse keep getting longer and longer? Why don't we all have decent health care, so that we don't hve to work insane hours to make sure that our families won't be on the street if one of us gets even a somewhat serious illness? It's not a mystery. And it's not true that women want to go back to the home. Women are returning to the home because our government is chipping away at us, until we realize we really can't do everything. And so we end up blaming ourselves for choices that were made for us.
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Subject: Newsweek: Mommy Madness, part I

Judith Warner, Author of "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety"

Back in the days when I was a Good Mommy, I tried to do everything right. I breast-fed and co-slept, and responded to each and every cry with anxious alacrity. I awoke with my daughter at 6:30 AM and, eschewing TV, curled up on the couch with a stack of books that I could recite in my sleep. I did this, in fact, many times, jerking myself back awake as the clock rounded 6:45 and the words of Curious George started to merge with my dreams. Was I crazy? No—I was a committed mother, eager to do right by my child and well-versed in the child care teachings of the day. I was proud of the fact that I could get in three full hours of high-intensity parenting before I left for work; prouder still that, when I came home in the evening, I could count on at least three more similarly intense hours to follow. It didn't matter that, in my day job as a stringer for this magazine, I was often falling asleep at my desk. Nor that I'd lost the ability to write a coherent sentence. My brain might have been fried, but my baby's was thriving. I'd seen the proof of that everywhere—in the NEWSWEEKlies and the New York Times, on TV, even in the official statements that issued forth from the White House, where First Lady Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed "singing, playing games, reading, storytelling, just talking and listening" as the best ways to enhance a child's development.All around me, the expert advice on baby care, whether it came from the What to Expect booksor the legions of "specialists" hawking videos, computer software, smart baby toys or audiotapes to advance brain development, was unanimous: Read! Talk! Sing! And so I talked and I read and I sang and made up stories and did funny voices and narrated car rides ... until one day, when my daughter was about four, I realized that I had turned into a human television set, so filled with 24-hour children's programming that I had no thoughts left of my own.And when I started listeningto the sounds of the Mommy chatter all around me in the playgrounds and playgroups of Washington, D.C.—the shouts of "Good job!," the interventions and facilitations ("What that lady is saying is, she would really prefer you not empty your bucket of sand over her little boy's head. Is that okay with you, honey?")—I realized that I was hardly alone.Once my daughters began school, I was surrounded, it seemed, by women who had surrendered their better selves—and their sanity—to motherhood. Women who pulled all-nighters hand-painting paper plates for a class party. Who obsessed over the most minute details of playground politics. Who—like myself—appeared to be sleep-walking through life in a state of quiet panic.Some of the mothers appeared to have lost nearly all sense of themselves as adult women. They dressed in kids' clothes—overall shorts and go-anywhere sandals. They ate kids' foods. They were so depleted by the affection and care they lavished upon their small children that they had no energy left, not just for sex, but for feeling like a sexual being. "That part of my life is completely dead," a working mother of two told me. "I don't even miss it. It feels like it belongs to another life. Like I was another person."It all reminded me a lot of Betty Friedan's 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique. The diffuse dissatisfaction. The angst, hidden behind all the obsession with trivia, and the push to be perfect. The way so many women constantly looked over their shoulders to make sure that no one was outdoing them in the performance of good Mommyhood. And the tendency—every bit as pronounced among my peers as it had been for the women Friedan interviewed—to blame themselves for their problems. There was something new, too: the tendency many women had to feel threatened by other women and to judge them harshly—nowhere more evident than on Urbanbaby and other, similarly "supportive" web sites. Can I take my 17-month-old to the Winnie the Pooh movie?, one mom queried recently. "WAY tooooo young," came one response.I read that 70 percent of American moms say they find motherhood today "incredibly stressful." Thirty percent of mothers of young children reportedly suffer from depression. Nine hundred and nine women in Texas recently told researchers they find taking care of their kids about as much fun as cleaning their house, slightly less pleasurable than cooking, and a whole lot less enjoyable than watching TV.And I wondered: Why do so many otherwise competent and self-aware women lose themselves when they become mothers? Why do so many of us feel so out of control? And—the biggest question of all—why has this generation of mothers, arguably the most liberated and privileged group of women America has ever seen, driven themselves crazy in the quest for perfect mommy-dom?I started speaking with women from all over the country, about 150 in all. And I found that the craziness I saw in my own city was nothing less than a nationwide epidemic. Women from Idaho to Oklahoma City to the suburbs of Boston—in middle and upper middle class enclaves where there was time and money to spend—told me of lives spent shuttling back and forth to more and more absurd-seeming, high-pressured, time-demanding, utterly exhausting kids' activities. I heard of whole towns turning out for a spot in the right ballet class; of communities where the competition for the best camps, the best coaches and the best piano teachers rivaled that for admission to the best private schools and colleges. Women told me of their exhaustion and depression, and of their frustrations with the "uselessness" of their husbands. They said they wished their lives could change. But they had no idea of how to make that happen. I began to record their impressions and reflections, and wove them into a book, which I named, in honor of the sentiment that seemed to animate so many of us, Perfect Madness.I think of "us" as the first post-baby boom generation, girls born between 1958 and the early 1970s, who came of age politically in the Carter, Reagan and Bush I years. We are, in many ways, a blessed group. Most of the major battles of the women's movement were fought—and won—in our early childhood. Unlike the baby boomers before us, who protested and marched and shouted their way from college into adulthood, we were a strikingly apolitical group, way more caught up in our own self-perfection as we came of age, than in working to create a more perfect world. Good daughters of the Reagan Revolution, we disdained social activism and cultivated our own gardens with a kind of muscle-bound, tightly wound, über-achieving, all-encompassing, never-failing self-control that passed, in the 1980s, for female empowerment. We saw ourselves as winners. We'd been bred, from the earliest age, for competition. Our schools had given us co-ed gym and wood-working shop, and had told us never to let the boys drown out our voices in class. Often enough, we'd done better than they had in school. Even in science and math. And our passage into adulthood was marked by growing numbers of women in the professions. We believed that we could climb as high as we wanted to go, and would grow into the adults we dreamed we could be. Other outcomes—like the chance that children wouldn't quite fit into this picture—never even entered our minds.Why should they have? Back then, when our sense of our potential as women was being formed, there was a general feeling of optimism. Even the most traditional women's magazines throughout the 1980s taught that the future for up-and-coming mothers was bright: The new generation of fathers would help. Good babysitting could be found. Work and motherhood could be balanced. It was all a question of intelligent "juggling." And of not falling prey to the trap of self-sacrifice and perfectionism that had driven so many mothers crazy in the past.But something happened then, as the 1990s advanced, and the Girls Who Could Have Done Anything grew up into women who found, as the millennium turned, that they couldn't quite ... get it together, or get beyond the stuck feeling that had somehow lodged in their minds.Life happened. We became mothers. and found, when we set out to "balance" our lives—and in particular to balance some semblance of the girls and women we had been against the mothers we'd become—that there was no way to make this most basic of "balancing acts" work. Life was hard. It was stressful. It was expensive. Jobs—and children—were demanding. And the ambitious form of motherhood most of us wanted to practice was utterly incompatible with any kind of outside work, or friendship, or life, generally.One woman I interviewed was literally struck dumb as she tried to articulate the quandary she was in. She wasn't a woman who normally lacked for words. She was a newspaper editor, with a husband whose steady income allowed her many choices. In the hope of finding "balance," she'd chosen to work part-time and at night in order to spend as much time as possible with her nine-year-old daughter. But somehow, nothing had worked out as planned. Working nights meant that she was tired all the time, and cranky, and stressed. And forever annoyed with her husband. And now her daughter was after her to get a day job. It seemed that having Mom around most of the time wasn't all it was cracked up to be, particularly if Mom was forever on the edge.The woman waved her hands in circles, helplessly. "What I'm trying to figure out—" she paused. "What I'm trying to remember ... Is how I ended up raising this princess ... How I got into ... How to get out of ... this, this, this, this mess."Most of us in this generation grew up believing that we had fantastic, unlimited, freedom of choice. Yet as mothers many women face "choices" on the order of: You can continue to pursue your professional dreams at the cost of abandoning your children to long hours of inadequate child care. Or: You can stay at home with your baby and live in a state of virtual, crazy-making isolation because you can't afford a nanny, because there is no such thing as part-time day care, and because your husband doesn't come home until 8:30 at night. These are choices that don't feel like choices at all. They are the harsh realities of family life in a culture that has no structures in place to allow women—and men—to balance work and child-rearing. But most women in our generation don't think to look beyond themselves at the constraints that keep them from being able to make real choices as mothers. It almost never occurs to them that they can use the muscle of their superb education or their collective voice to change or rearrange their social support system. They simply don't have the political reflex—or the vocabulary—to think of things in this way. They've been bred to be independent and self-sufficient. To rely on their own initiative and "personal responsibility." To privatize their problems. And so, they don't get fired up about our country's lack of affordable, top-quality child care. (In many parts of the country, decent child care costs more than state college tuition, and the quality of the care that most families can afford is abysmal.) Nor about the fact that middle class life is now so damn expensive that in most families both parents must work gruelingly long hours just to make ends meet. (With fathers averaging 51 hours per week and mothers clocking in at an average of 41, the U.S. workweek is now the longest in the world.) Nor about the fact that in many districts the public schools are so bad that you can't, if you want your child to be reasonably well-educated, sit back and simply let the teachers do their jobs, and must instead supplement the school day with a panoply of expensive and inconvenient "activities" so that your kid will have some exposure to music, art and sports.Instead of blaming society, moms today tend to blame themselves. They say they've chosen poorly. And so they take on the Herculean task of being absolutely everything to their children, simply because no one else is doing anything at all to help them. Because if they don't perform magical acts of perfect Mommy ministrations, their kids might fall through the cracks and end up as losers in our hard-driving winner-take-all society.This has to change.We now have a situation where well-off women can choose how to live their lives—either outsourcing child care at a sufficiently high level of quality to permit them to work with relative peace of mind or staying at home. But no one else, really, has anything. Many, many women would like to stay home with their children and can't afford to do so. Many, many others would like to be able to work part-time but can't afford or find the way to do so. Many others would like to be able to maintain their full-time careers without either being devoured by their jobs or losing ground, and they can't do that. And there is no hope at all for any of these women on the horizon.Some of us may feel empowered by the challenge of taking it all on, being the best, as Tea Leoni's "Spanglish" character did on her uphill morning run, but really, this perfectionism is not empowerment. It's more like what some psychologists call "learned helplessness"—an instinctive giving-up in the face of difficulty that people do when they think they have no real power. At base, it's a kind of despair. A lack of faith that change can come to the outside world. A lack of belief in our political culture or our institutions.It really needs to change.For while many women can and do manage to accept (or at least adjust to) this situation for themselves, there's a twinge of real sadness that comes out when they talk about their daughters. As a forty-something mother living and working part-time in Washington, D.C. (and spending a disproportionate amount of her time managing the details of her daughter's—and her husband's—life), mused one evening to me, "I look at my daughter and I just want to know: what happened? Because look at us: it's 2002 and nothing's changed. My mother expected my life to be very different from hers, but now it's a lot more like hers than I expected, and from here I don't see where it will be different for my daughter. I don't want her to carry this crushing burden that's in our heads ... [But] what can make things different?"

For real change to happen, we don't need more politicians sounding off about "family values." Neither do we need to pat the backs of working mothers, or "reward" moms who stay at home, or "valorize" motherhood, generally, by acknowledging that it's "the toughest job in the world." We need solutions—politically palatable, economically feasible, home-grown American solutions—that can, collectively, give mothers and families a break.We need incentives like tax subsidies to encourage corporations to adopt family-friendly policies.We need government-mandated child care standards and quality controls that can remove the fear and dread many working mothers feel when they leave their children with others.We need flexible, affordable, locally available, high-quality part-time day care so that stay-at-home moms can get a life of their own. This shouldn't, these days, be such a pipe dream. After all, in his State of the Union message, President Bush reaffirmed his support of (which, one assumes, includes support of funding for) "faith-based and community groups." I lived in France before moving to Washington, and there, my elder daughter attended two wonderful, affordable, top-quality part-time pre-schools, which were essentially meant to give stay-at-home moms a helping hand. One was run by a neighborhood co-op and the other by a Catholic organization. Government subsidies kept tuition rates low. A sliding scale of fees brought some diversity. Government standards meant that the staffers were all trained in the proper care of young children. My then 18-month-old daughter painted and heard stories and ate cookies for the sum total in fees of about $150 a month. (This solution may be French—but do we have to bash it?)We need new initiatives to make it possible for mothers to work part-time (something most mothers say they want to do) by creating vouchers or bigger tax credits to make child care more affordable, by making health insurance available and affordable for part-time workers and by generally making life less expensive and stressful for middle-class families so that mothers (and fathers) could work less without risking their children's financial future. Or even, if they felt the need, could stay home with their children for a while.In general, we need to alleviate the economic pressures that currently make so many families' lives so high-pressured, through progressive tax policies that would transfer our nation's wealth back to the middle class. So that mothers and fathers could stop running like lunatics, and start spending real quality—and quantity—time with their children. And so that motherhood could stop being the awful burden it is for so many women today and instead become something more like a joy.

Message: 2
Subject: Newsweek: Mommy Madness, Part II

Women today mother in the excessive, control-freakish way that they do in part because they are psychologically conditioned to do so. But they also do it because, to a large extent, they have to. Because they are unsupported, because their children are not taken care of, in any meaningful way, by society at large. Because there is right now no widespread feeling of social responsibility—for children, for families, for anyone, really—and so they must take everything onto themselves. And because they can't, humanly, take everything onto themselves, they simply go nuts.I see this all the time. It never seems to stop. So that, as I write this, I have an image fresh in my mind: the face of a friend, the mother of a first-grader, who I ran into one morning right before Christmas.She was in the midst of organizing a class party. This meant shopping. Color-coordinating paper goods. Piecework, pre-gluing of arts-and-crafts projects. Uniformity of felt textures. Of buttons and beads. There were the phone calls, too. From other parents. With criticism and "constructive" comments that had her up at night, playing over conversations in her mind. "I can't take it anymore," she said to me. "I hate everyone and everything. I am going insane."I looked at her face, saw her eyes fill with tears, and in that instant saw the faces of dozens of women I'd met—and, of course, I saw myself.And I was reminded of the words of a French doctor I'd once seen. I'd come to him about headaches. They were violent. They were constant. And they would prove, over the next few years, to be chronic. He wrote me a prescription for a painkiller. But he looked skeptical as to whether it would really do me much good. "If you keep banging your head against the wall," he said, "you're going to have headaches." I have thought of these words so many times since then. I have seen so many mothers banging their heads against a wall. And treating their pain—the chronic headache of their lives—with sleeping pills and antidepressants and anxiety meds and a more and more potent, more and more vicious self-and-other-attacking form of anxious perfectionism. And I hope that somehow we will all find a way to stop. Because we are not doing ourselves any good. We are not doing our children—particularly our daughters—any good. We're not doing our marriages any good. And we're doing nothing at all for our society.We are simply beating ourselves black and blue. So let's take a breather. Throw out the schedules, turn off the cell phone, cancel the tutors (fire the OT!). Let's spend some real quality time with our families, just talking, hanging out, not doing anything for once. And let ourselves be.© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Message: 3 Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 01:40:07 -0000
Subject: Newsweek: Slacker mom
By Peg Tyre
Newsweek Feb. 13 - You won't catch Muffy Mead-Ferro at a toddler fitness class. When it comes to enriching after-school activities, she's not ferrying her kids to traveling soccer or French lessons either. She lets them amuse themselves in a mud puddle in the backyard instead. This Salt Lake City mother of two says she isn't feeling a shard of guilt about her choices. "We've raised the bar too high on parenting," she says, "And squeezed out all the fun. Someone has to say, `Stop the Madness'." Last spring, Mead-Ferro published her manifesto, "Confessions of a Slacker Mom," which called on women everywhere to park the mini-van, bow out of the childrearing sweepstake and lighten up. With Confessions of a Slacker Wife (due out from DaCapo in April) she's trying to bring some downtime to domestic life, too.The problem, as Mead-Ferro sees it, is that too many well-heeled, well-educated and otherwise sensible women are driving themselves and each other crazy. After years of competing in the work force, they're mistakenly bringing the same zeal to child rearing and housekeeping as they did to their jobs. Domestic standards popularized by women's magazines and Madison Avenue, she argues, have gotten too high. It's not enough to keep crumbs off the kitchen counters, these days you have to keep the counters bacteria free. "And you can't just make a lemon pie like June Cleaver," she says. "These days you have to use Meyer lemons."Mead-Ferro began searching for a better way seven years ago when she began her own family and found that her work life (she was a successful advertising copywriter) didn't jibe with the idealized home life she thought she wanted. Instead of recreating herself as Supermom and Domestic Goddess, Mead-Ferro opted to become a woman like her own late mother, who raised three kids while running the haying machine and branding cattle on the family's sprawling cattle ranch in Wyoming. "The floors weren't spotless. Dinner wasn't fancy," she says. "My mother just didn't have the time, the focus or the inclination to put on that kind of show."Mead-Ferro decided to keep her job and, ignoring all conventional wisdom, simply lowered her standards. She chucked out the books on intensive parenting along with the anti-bacterial soap. She hired babysitters and used local day care. She chose her kids' pre-school based on which one was closer to her house. She refused to buy electronic toys—even the ones touted as "educational." As her children Belle, now 7 and Joe, now 5, get older, she isn't offering them a smorgasbord of activities but is letting them discover ways to keep themselves entertained. She whittled down the time she spends on housework and has given her kids chores. She also began reclaiming time for herself—what she calls the ultimate Supermom taboo. "A lot of woman call it selfish unless you're constantly putting your kids' needs first," she says. "But I think that's just bogus." Her children are thriving. Will denying them traveling soccer foreclose on their chances of getting an athletic scholarship to a prestigious college someday? Maybe, she concedes. But she's schooling them for a broader kind of success. She wants her kids to tolerate frustration and setbacks, to be self-reliant and conscious of the needs of others, and above all to grow up to think for themselves. "Maybe they'll initially feel deprived," she says, but it's a risk she's willing to take. If it turns out that she's right, then maybe a slacker mom will be the best kind of mom to have, after all.© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Tetzaveh

The opening verse of this week's portion, tetzaveh, commands:
ë åÀàÇúÌÈä úÌÀöÇåÌÆä àÆúÎáÌÀðÅé éÄùÀÉøÈàÅì åÀéÄ÷ÀçåÌ àÅìÆéêÈ ùÑÆîÆï æÇéÄú æÈêÀ ëÌÈúÄéú ìÇîÌÈàåÉø ìÀäÇÍòÂìÉú ðÅø úÌÈîÄÍéã:
Shmot 27:20
And you shall command the people of Israel, that they bring you pure beaten oil olive for the light, for the lamp to burn always.
The midrash (beresheit rabbah 36:1) connects this opening line of the portion with a verse from Jeremiah (11:16) The Lord named you, A green olive tree, fair, full of beautiful fruit.
æÇéÄú øÇÍòÂðÈï éÀôÅä ôÀøÄéÎúÉàÇø ÷ÈøÈà éÀäÉåÈä ùÑÀîÅêÀ
The Sfat Emet comments, Israel is an olive tree, whose fruit brings forth oil for light, but do you know how difficult it is to get oil from the olive? It must be crushed, with great labor. And for the Temple, only the purest presing will do.
It's not easy to create light. Even just for oil to burn, it must be touched by flame. Proverbs (6:23) states, For the commandment is a candle, and Torah is light, and the way to life is the rebuke that disciplines.
ëÌÄé ðÅø îÄöÀåÈä åÀúåÉøÈä àåÉø åÀãÆøÆêÀ çÇéÌÄéí úÌÍåÉëÀçåÉú îåÌñÈÍø:
The rabbis of the talmud often refer to rabbincal scholars and students as öåøáà îøáðï , öåÉøÅá means "on fire" or "scorched". So when the rabbis refer to their colleagues as öåøáà îøáðï, they are saying that they are on fire from their teachers. living amongst people who make Torah the center of their lives lights the scholars on fire like a flame touching oil.
The talmud says, (ta'anit 4a) If a young scholar boils, it is because the Torah inflames him, as the Torah says, Is not my word like fire? said the Lord.(Jeremiah 23)
äàé öåøáà îøáðï ãøúç Î àåøééúà äåà ã÷à îøúçà ìéä, ùðàîø )éøîéäå ë"â( äìåà ëä ãáøé ëàù ðàí ä'.
öåÉøÅá is when we make of ourselves a candle from our passion for God. The Talmud also adds to this, (Chagigah 27a) that the Scholars, their whole body is fire, for the Torah writes: Is not My word like as fire? says the Lord
úìîéãé çëîéí, ùëì âåôï àù, ãëúéá )éøîéäå ë"â( äìåà ëä ãáøé ëàù ðàí ä' Î
God's word is fire that we take within us to make of ourselves an eternally burning light. The Sufi mystic al-kalabadhi describes the phenomenon of cleaving to God in terms the rabbis understand well, "He is burnt who feels the fire, but who is the fire, how shall he be burnt?"
Like the talmud, the al-kalabadhi reminds us that love, passion, is not a calm emotion. It makes our entire being into a burning flame, a flame that is able to join with the flame of the Great Love. In directing our passion to only the Great Beloved Friend, we fulfil the verse that appears later in our portion:
Shemot 29: 41. You will offer a sweet scent, an offering by fire to the Lord.
42. This shall be a continual burnt offering throughout your generations at the door of the Tent of Meeting before the Lord; where I will meet you, to speak there to you.
úÌÇÍòÂùÆÉäÎìÌÈäÌ ìÀøÅéçÇ ðÄéçÉçÇ àÄùÌÑÆä ìÇÍéäåÉÈÍä: îá òÉìÇú úÌÈîÄéã ìÀãÉøÉúÅéëÆí ôÌÆúÇç àÍÉäÆìÎîåÉòÅã ìÄôÀðÅé éÀäåÉÈä àÂùÑÆø àÄåÌÈòÅã ìÈëÆí ùÑÈîÌÈä ìÀãÇáÌÅø àÅìÆéêÈ ùÑÈÍí
Close your eyes for a moment (I know that's dangerous this time of night, but just for a moment). Imagine in front of you what I'm describing: The oil pressed from the olive tree of Israel, the olives pressed by the weight of passionate love for God, flowing pure and golden, and lit by the candle of commandment and the light of Torah. The flame shines on the golden flow of oil as it burns; we leap up bright, pure and holy, ready to join with the great hot flame of our Beloved Friend.
Who is the fire, how shall he be burnt? Rather, we are not burnt, but become part of the great Light, an offering made by fire, made of fire, to God, an offering of one's deepest passion. It is a continual burnt offering to God... and so God says to us, "I will meet you, to speak to you there."
Open your eyes now. Here before you burns the candle of mitzvah: the candles of shabbat. Shabbat is our love song for God. It is the moment of the week in which we have the opportunity to be öåøá, on fire for God. We start shabbat with a flame, and end it with a torch, a three-wicked candle of havdalah. The rest of the week, it 's often difficult to live as thought God were our great passion, our Beloved Friend. But on shabat, there is nothing else to do. We are obligated to stop everything else, and simply burn, a holy flame, to leap up in joy and join the great pure flame of God's love. And if we are able to do this, then as our portion tells us, we will "be a continual burnt offering throughout [our] generations... where [God} will meet [us] there."
May we all be inspired by the flames of Shabat, to make God our great love. May we live shabbat with passion, purity and holiness.