THE BRAVE NEW LAND

Shavua tov le kulam, It appears (based on popular demand) that I have neglected the blogsite for too long... I guess I will just have to start by filling everyone in on what I have been thinking about as of late. I have been exploring, yeah you guessed it, the meaning of the universe again. I am really getting into Derach Ha’Shem ( The Way of G-D) by the Ramchal. He was an amazing guy that lived a few hundred years ago in Italy that learned just about all there was to know by the time he was 14 and then started to learn Kabala. Did you ever want to know what happens after you die? Or why you were ever born in the first place? There are answers... The hard part is listening when you get them, like the other day: I had just come from davening and learning the Parsha in Shul on Friday morning. I was very exited about what I had learned and decided to do a bike ride and listen to the new Matisiahu CD. You know, it is really weird, I was singing along to it in my sleep the night before and ...

Imagine designing a building, where the plans need to include all the usual things like site-plans, materials-lists, and structural-specifications. Now imagine that the building plans need to include, as well, things like where the building will be, who is building it, and from who and from where are all the materials are being supplied. After this is tucked neatly into your mind, we have a pretty good idea of how to build a building. Next is the hard part. The building we want to build is also going to last for a specific amount of time. We need to plan when construction will be finished, how long people will occupy it during its lifetime, and how and when it will be destroyed when its life is over. We also need to account for any natural disasters that affect it, the socio-economic status of its community during its entire lifespan—from inception to demise, as well as a detailed description of all of its inhabitants and anyone affected by it directly or indirectly, throughout its lif...

When I was young, I learned about G*D and the meaning of life from the, translated to English by who knows who, Christian Bible, I learned about G*D from my Dad, who had a unique and individual perspective, and I also learned from various books that I read on the subject. I explored Eastern philosophies such as Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, Hawaiian cultural perspectives, and ancient African and American Indian animistic beliefs. I even learned a little about Islam’s Pillars of Faith and its history. In the end I decided to look to a faith that, after more than 3,800 years, still exists today, and has become the root religion of about 2/3’s of today’s (secular and religious alike) World population. This faith has existed continuously in the World since a guy born in the cradle of civilization, named Avram, began to tell the World about G*D in the year 1,800 BCE. This was 300 years before the beginning of Hinduism, which is generally accepted, however inaccurately, as be...

The great thing about living for half of a century is that you have lots of experience to draw from. I won’t be 50 for a few years but I figure that I better start preparing now for the inevitable. Come to think of it, having a mid-life crisis seems to play right into recent choices that I have made. Well, I’ll be lucky if it is really mid-life for me based on everything... so I decided to pick up the blog pen again because of a few friends and acquaintances that wondered what I was up to here in the Holy Land. I think I will just give an accounting since my last blog “My Dad and the Beit Din.” After I passed the Beit Din and started my new life as Drew the New Jew, I started a course in technical communication (writing). It was a 6 month course that tested both me and my family to the edge of patience. Numerous times I was ready to walk away from the class, not because of the course material but, because of the quality and abrasiveness of the teaching. Let’s just keep this course as...

Me and Dad On October 26, what seems now like a lifetime ago, my father passed away. Two days before he left us I was sitting on the edge of his bed engaging in a monologue with the nearly empty shell, which his year long fight with brain cancer had left. The cancer was about to win and I knew it. In a sudden inspiration I asked him something from beneath the layers of muck and iron that I had coated myself with. I asked my father something from my heart; he had been unable to speak or communicate in any way for days, and I didn’t expect an answer from him … I just wanted to ask. I asked my father, simply, if he would be there for me when I passed on to the next world. In hindsight, it seems, this may have been a final attempt to connect with him. Over the years we had been very distant with each other, but I knew that he loved me and that I was very important to him. We didn’t know how to communicate, and it appeared that I had waited and waited until I could be almost sure th...

Recently, while in the Old City of Jerusalem for Rosh Hashanah, I entered the twilight zone of the Arab Quarter. I hadn’t been that deep into the bowels of the shopping streets since I was there 3 years ago and tried to navigate to some crazy destination into a current of Arabs that were heading in the opposite direction. We hung to the side of the streets to avoid the onslaught of people galloping to the Temple Mount for some kind of demonstration and at one point, a middle aged woman came up to me and grabbed my arm. She put her face inches from mine as she yelled at me in Arabic for what seemed like a long time, until some other Arab guy grabbed her and they both melded back into the river of kafia and bourkah covered heads. This latest excursion started with a mad dash down the twisting stairs from the clean and festive alleyways of the Jewish Quarter and into the melee of vendors, tourists, and Arab revelers. You see it was a celebration for the end of Ramadan, their High Holy Day...

What is reality anyways? When we think of ‘the thing’ that is real, it is usually just something that is occupying our minds for the time being. Like recently, I have been preoccupied by a series of classes that I am listening to by Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits. I found myself floating through realms of the mind that have really altered the way I not only feel about myself, but (in reality) exist. What is existence anyways? I know we all stop to ask such questions occasionally, however… did anyone ever receive any truly satisfactory answer? My preoccupation all started when I was asked to identify ‘finite’. This is an idea that has been pondered by everyone from Abraham to Aristotle to Albert Einstein (and if you feel small being compared to these names, don’t worry because this is a question that we can all answer with the right level of prodding). Of course, in the podcast, the answer followed swiftly after the question. ‘Finite’ is defined ultimately as having edges or limitations. The ...

Showing up for work a few weeks ago on Yom Rishon (day one or Sunday) was going to be a bad idea… so I didn’t. I called in sick and really, I was sick (mostly sick and tired though). You see, it was hot and muggy, I had had a particularly hard re-entry back to my life here in Israel, and we were slated to start to transfer tons of rat, cat, and scorpion infested exotic lumber that had been stored in the basement workshop, up the hill, around the building, and into a storage loft that was too short to stand up in. My stomach hurt so I called in sick. On Yom Sheni (day two or Monday) I had hoped that they would be almost, if not totally, finished and upon arriving in the morning I found that… they waited for me. So, by the end of that week I was dirty, bruised, bleeding, sore, tired, frustrated, and really quite upset about the whole deal. It was time to get those doggies rolling and move on. I was ready to call it quits that day; however I spoke to a few friends and found that I just ne...

I have no idea what systems theory is but if I was to guess, I would have to say that it has something to do with statistics with regards to the laws of cause and effect. Well, technically I believe that it is no longer a law but an outdated theory. You see, I read something recently relating to just this idea, but I can’t find it now. It had something to do with putting a drop of water on the exact center of a knife edge in order to predict which side it would fall off of, cause and effect would say it would be 50/50. Surprisingly, that was not the case and since I can’t seem to find the article you will just have to take my word for it, or not… Lets just start with this; If you take time and loop it around so that the beginning laps up over the top like a spring and then tie threads from the first coil and loop them up the spring, all the way to the top, you get a model of not only the Jewish Calendar but the entire cosmos. Underneath it all there is a skeletal vibration that connect...

The inspiration for this story came to me today when, as I was working at my bench in the German gas filtration system factory, two older men walked up to me. I hadn’t seen them before and wasn’t sure that they knew Hebrew (as many of the older folks there do not) but after they hovered for just enough time for me to know that they needed something I took off my headset and asked if I could help them. It isn’t important what they wanted and I just sent them up to see my boss on the second floor of the factory but what was important to me were two things. First was that I had been listening to a lesson on Tisha’beAv (see last years blog with the same title at http://bravenewland.blogspot.com/2007/07/tisha-b-av.html ) and it was right in the middle of the second of two stories on the Holocaust when I paused my Ipod to look up, ask if I could help, and then notice the second thing which was that one of the old German men was missing an arm. He stood back a little and acted as though he d...