Given the Holocaust, several of the ironies of the 20th century are the fact that most of world Jewry, 80%, are Ashkenazim, or German Jews. That’s what the Hebrew word means, “Germans.” Another irony is that 85% of the vocabulary of their language, Yiddish, are German cognates. My Ashkenazi parents, for example, would always gossip in Yiddish to keep the juicy tidbits from my sister and me—that is, until I learned enough German to understand. But by then, I was already away at college and Natalie was married and living in Argentina. So it no longer mattered.
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A few years ago I wrote a series of blogs on close encounters with famous people. As with my dad, these unexpected meetings would just keep happening to me. I also wrote about encounters, even if not close or of the third kind, with what used to be called UFOs. But that’s a matter for another day. One of my favorite of the former encounters was with Henry Winkler, AKA The Fonz, during my first-class flying days. Already the head of his own production company, he was busy reading a script and struck me as very serious. When mealtime came, however, he loosened up. So I wished him good appetite. With a gesture right out of Happy Days, he moved his thumb toward me and said, “Back atcha, Feldman!” Then I knew: The Fonz was alive and well!
I think I was close to 80 when I was first asked what my pronoun was. Huh?! How about “I”? No, the asker wanted a third-person pronoun, singular or plural, and possibly a mixture of the two. Okay, so I needed to talk about myself as a third person? How about in the second person? For me, you’re a You, and for you I’m a You too. Cool!
I don’t know how I got into thinking and writing about wisdom. I guess it all began with my desire as a youth to become the best person I could be, and that most likely manifested itself as a lifelong pilgrimage to wisdom. Even as a college literature teacher, I found my favorite job was being a student advisor, which generally meant trying to get to know each student’s talents and inclinations and helping them manifest the former and grow into the latter. In any case, I ended up writing or co-writing five books on the topic of popular wisdom. You can learn about them at my website, www.reynoldruslan.com, and most are still available at amazon.com. So today I plan to do something a bit different, namely, to share a selection of proverbs from the thousand in my first book on the subject, A World Treasury of Folk Wisdom, co-authored with Cynthia Voelke and published by Harper-Collins in 1992. Enjoy!
As I write these words (March 5, 2024), Israel’s war in Gaza is approaching its fifth month. Much of the Strip has been destroyed, an estimated 30,000 Gazans including women, children, and seniors as well as Hamas fighters have been killed, with hunger and disease threatening the mainly displaced population. Israel’s incursion is based of course on the October 7th 2023 commando raid by Hamas into nearby Israeli towns that left some 1,200 Israelis dead after torture and rape, with several hundred more taken hostage into Gaza. Israel’s government claims it is exercising caution to avoid killing or wounding the innocent, but with Hamas tunneled under hospitals and other Gazan buildings, public and private, it is impossible for many civilians to be spared in Israel’s effort to eradicate Hamas...
Most Americans are familiar with the expressions “The Almighty Dollar” and its first cousin, “The Almighty Bottomline.” These two expressions, which use the term otherwise associated with Divinity, ironically suggest that money and its accumulation, the more the better, are the chief values of our country. Calvin Coolidge’s well-known saying comes to mind: “The business of this country is business” or the common expression--“Money makes the world go round.” My mother, who became an adult during the Great Depression, liked to impress on me these twin dicta: “Rich or poor, it’s nice to have money” and “It’s as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor one.” For better or worse, I wasn’t impressed by the first saying and never experienced the second...
Oma, Gertrud Luise (later Ruth) Zimmermann, née Radtke, was born on November 25, 1905, in Allenstein in the former German province of East Prussia (Ostpreußen), divided since 1945 between Russia in the north and Poland in the south. Estelle (Esther) Feldman, née Potashnik, was born on October 31, 1903, in the recently founded Jewish farming community of Woodbine, in the so-called pine barrens of southern New Jersey. Fate would bring them together in a most unusual way, and their cross-cultural, interfaith relationship would have had Hitler spinning, not just turning, in his grave. Here’s how it happened...
Let’s talk UFOs, or rather, UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), the new designation introduced by the U.S. Department of Defense in late 2022. For better or worse, I’ve had four sightings, one with some telepathic communication with the occupants of the craft in question. To my knowledge I’ve never been an actual “experiencer,” someone taken onto a craft, introduced to members of its crew, and given explanations about what they’re up to. So, no, I’m not ready to write my book or go on the road to share my experiences. No worries, though. Plenty of others are already doing that...
We can gain so much from our intimate partners. One important thing I learned from my late wife of 43 years, Simone, was thrifting. Our family, upper-middle-class New Yorkers, would throw away perfectly good food the same day if it hadn’t been cooked or eaten. Simone, a refugee teenager in Munich, Bavaria, from the erstwhile German province of East Prussia in 1945 learned to find ways to survive on very little. So, from a childhood where I only needed to ask for something to get it new, I learned from her to buy everything except underclothes and an occasional pair of shoes from resale shops or the occasional neighborhood garage sale. So yesterday I started my hunt for a new pair of green, brown, or tan corduroy pants at our spiffy new Goodwill. Boulder, Colorado’s old Goodwill, in a less central part of town, had recently moved into the former Bed, Bath, and Beyond facility in an upscale strip mall next to the big REI store on our main shopping street. The new place was well decorated, sections were carefully placed and indicated, and the whole operation felt on a par with the nearby Marshall’s. (To be sure, the well-prepared items were now pricier than they had been, but bargains still abounded.)...
As a 17-year resident of Honolulu, I was always struck by a church in Palolo Valley with a big, black sign above its roof stating, “HE IS COMING SOON.” It doesn’t take a graduate of an elite divinity school to figure out who the “He” in question is. There’s a whole Christian narrative about Christ’s return appearance, the so-called Second Coming, in which Jesus will judge the living and the dead. In this Last Judgment, he’ll promote the worthy to everlasting life in heaven while the unworthy will be condemned to a similar term in hell. The final book of the Christian bible, Revelation, dramatizes the story in lively if mystifying detail...
Wikipedia, that ever-helpful resource, lists 19 major epidemics and pandemics, from the largest to the smallest, in world history. Listings exclude “infectious diseases with high prevalence” like malaria, which are given separately. Items, moreover, must have had at least one million deaths. Number 1 is the Black Death, which killed 17-54% of the global population, mainly in Europe, between 1346 and 1353, or an estimated 75-200 million victims. Second comes the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920, with 17-100 million deaths and a 1-5.4 percentage worldwide. Covid 19 is listed as #5, with an estimated 7-21 million fatalities worldwide as of January 2024, or .1-.46% globally...
Though the world is growing smaller, we humans still seem fairly tribal in our loyalties. In the case of us Jews, this unfortunate fact is especially true. Understandably, in an unfriendly world, we have tended to circle our wagons and look toward each other for mutual aid and support. Yet team loyalty of this kind can keep us from embracing the broader values expressed in the African American sayings that “God don’t make no junk” and “All God’s chillen got wings.” The solidarity of the human family comes hard to most people, but we children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seem to find it especially beyond our reach...
That sounds reasonable enough. But how do we discern which things come first? Okay, in everyday affairs, it’s fairly simply. Take today. When my wife and I awoke this mid-January Saturday in our Boulder, Colorado home, the phone revealed that it was -11 degrees Fahrenheit outside. About three nighttime inches of snow covered the ground, our car, and everything else. We had to go to the hospital lab for Cedar’s fasting blood test. The Tesla was charged but needed remote heating and of course scraping. So first we got dressed, making sure that we had plenty of layers to protect us from the arctic incursion. I took my morning gout pills with a slice of Moroccan-style bread and goat cheese. Then, after clearing the snow from the car, we drove slowly but surely to the Boulder Community Hospital. The weather guaranteed a close-in parking space, plus the lab technician took Cedar right away. By 10 we were at the Walnut Café for a delicious breakfast, and we easily made our 11 a.m. water fitness course at the local YMCA. The order of events was more or less set in stone. First this, then that.
I usually don’t write blogs based on political commentaries I read in the newspaper. But this time is an exception. In the January 8, 2024 edition of our local daily, The Boulder [Colorado] Camera, Fareed Zakaria had an opinion piece called “Americans Are Far Too Pessimistic about the Future of the Country.” Now I’ll admit out front that I’m a Fareed Zakaria fan, and not just because he is a fellow Yalie, although that helps. The truth is, he both thinks and writes like a highly successful graduate of an Ivy League school. Not only that, but he does something less and less the rule in the public writings of our opinion-makers: He cites data. His point is that American is doing really well in the world today, economically and in the opinion of other nations. Some examples: (1) Our economy grew by 5.2% in the third quarter of 2023, and the World Bank expects an overall 2023 growth rate to come in at 2.1%, which Fareed says is “substantially better” than “other advanced Western economies.” (2) Not only that, but real wages are up for American workers, and manufacturing jobs are exploding. (3) Fareed then cites the Financial Times to the effect that the U.S. has been outperforming Britain and the euro zone for 20 years in per-capita income growth. (4) Our technology sector, he continues, “dominates the world in a way that no other country ever has.” (5) According to a Pew Research Center survey, whom he cites, 22 of 24 countries have a (much) more favorable impression of the U.S. versus China in terms of contributing to international peace and stability...
“Which side are you on?” The question in the old ’60 song is repeated. It seems in this binary world, choosing sides is the name of the game. It starts early. Skin or shirt? College or work? Liberal or conservative? Gay or straight? Gender at birth or something different? The list goes on. Not to choose is also a choice, we’re told. You just can’t opt out, it seems...
True-confession time. I’m what’s called in Catholic circles a contemplative. The more generally used term is mystic. In fact, some 30 years ago, when I was still a Lutheran, my Centering prayer teacher, a Franciscan nun named Sister Joan T., hired me to do a four-book adult-ed series at St. Olaf Catholic Church, Minneapolis, where I was introduced on signs as “Dr. Reynold Feldman, Contemplative.” Now for those who know me, this bit of self-disclosure may be surprising since I am such an extreme extrovert, and the general concept of contemplatives is that they are self-contained, non-talkative introverts. Yet Sister Joan was not wrong. And although my contemplative training comes roughly from the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam, a major inspiration for me as a cradle Jew is the Baal Shem Tov and the mystical order he is credited as having founded, the Hasidim...
I first heard about the Quakers from my mother. Born in 1903 to a very large immigrant family in a Jewish farming community in southern New Jersey, Woodbine by name, she remembered how, during economic hard times, the Quakers had supplied her family with food, clothing, and other needed things. Now my mother, like other Jewish immigrant children of her generation, never had much good to say about Christians in general, but when it came to the Religious Society of Friends, that was a different story. As we would say today, they walked their talk. And as far as Mother was concerned, they were okay...
There’s a song by that name written by someone called Cristy Lane. The second half of the lyrics goes—“. . . I believe in angels/Something good in everything I see/I believe in Angels/When I know the time is right for me/I’ll cross the stream, I have a dream.” (I guess Cristy doesn’t believe in periods, but that’s the English teacher in me speaking so I’ll let it go.) The lyrics are not very clear or persuasive to me. Nonetheless, I too believe in angels. Here’s why...
Dr. Witherspoon was a Scottish-American Presbyterian from Kentucky. He was also a direct descendant of John Witherspoon, the first president of Princeton University and a Presbyterian minister. My professor was also related to the actress Reese Witherspoon, possibly a great uncle. Like Jimmy Carter, Dr. W. taught adult Sunday School at the Presbyterian Church on the Green for all the decades he lived in New Haven. He, like Florine, represented for me what real Christianity was all about...
I was born in November 1939 to a secular Jewish family then living in Kew Gardens, New York. All four of my grandparents had immigrated to the United States in the 1890s from various parts of Eastern Europe: one from Romania, another from Ukraine, and the other two from today’s Belarus. Of these four, only my paternal grandmother, Ida Litzky Feldman from Odessa, was a religious Jew. Her father, my great grandfather whom I never knew, had been what we might call a “holy calligrapher” who wrote the Hebrew characters onto the Torah scrolls used in synagogues. Because of his intimate relationship with the Word of God, moreover, he functioned in his community as a kind of advisor, judge, and psychotherapist rolled into one. Like his daughter, my grandma, he was an observant Orthodox Jew. My father, born in New York City in 1905 as the first of his parents’ three sons, had a strict observance of Judaism enforced on him, sometimes physically, by Grandma Ida. Later, when Grandpa Paul went to sea and Dad had to forego a piano scholarship to the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia to support his mother and younger brothers, he told his mother that, while he would do his best for her and the boys financially, he would have nothing to do with “her” religion anymore. And apparently, when my older sister and I came along, he made sure not to inflict that kind of religiosity on us. The result was that we got little-to-no Jewish religious training and didn’t celebrate any of the Jewish Holidays...
Today, November 10, 2023 (the date of this writing), I received a lovely if unexpected birthday card from Hawaii. It was from a member of the Honolulu Lions Club and indeed a past District Governor (PDG) of District 50, which includes all the Lions Clubs and members in the 50th State. My 84th birthday happened four days ago, on November 6th, and it’s the tradition of Hawaii’s “Mother Club” to send birthday cards to all its members. Inside was a neatly folded, new $20 bill. Tears came to my eyes. I had joined this club some 25 years ago and remained a loyal member during my remaining eight years in Honolulu. I remember the White Cane Walks through the City to honor the blind and cleaning donated eyeglasses at Ho’o Pono, a local nonprofit supporting the blind and the sight-impaired. These recycled spectacles were then sent to sister clubs in developing countries for distribution to poor individuals for whom the prescriptions were a close fit. I also remember our periodic service projects, usually involving cleaning up some area of town. We also gave annual cash prizes for the best drawings by school kids...
Are they simply the Judeo-Christian equivalent, en masse, of the classical Mercury, messenger of the gods—a fleet of Mercuries delivering messages from Upstairs to us humans here below? Perhaps. In the Hebrew Scriptures they speak for God. But so do the Prophets. That’s what the word means in Greek, spokesperson. In fact, they sometimes talk as if they were God. An example is the angel in the Genesis story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22, 1-19)...
Have you heard of Elmo, saint or otherwise? I hadn’t until I got to Yale as a freshman in the fall of ’56. There I soon learned of the hoary institution’s fabled senior societies, where each club’s handful of senior-class members were sworn to lifelong secrecy. Word about the doings in these closeted spaces were not to be breathed, even to one’s roommate! The most famous one, of course, was “Bones,” that is Skull and Bones, whose august membership includes John Kerry and both Presidents Bush. St. Elmo’s was one of the less prestigious clubs along with Manuscript, where my Hungarian friend the late Dr. Pista Scher was a member as was the late Pennsylvania Senator Jack Heinz of the 57-varieties family...
As I write these words, it’s Hallowe’en 2023. In the trick-or-treat category, the world is being treated to two major wars: the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the recent Israeli incursion into Palestinian Gaza. Ironically, Israel and Ukraine rank one and two in the world, respectively, in their percentage of Jewish-to-non-Jewish citizens. As a Jewish-Christian—I consider myself an Abrahamic since I’m technically also a Muslim—I am aghast at what Hamas did on October 7th over its border in Israel. I am equally aghast at what Israel is now doing in and to Gaza. But I also remember that the world’s most populous religion, originated in the name of the Prince of Peace, is no stranger to war. Think of the Crusades or of armed conflicts between brother Christians who happened to be Protestants versus Catholics. The term “holy war” has to be one of the world’s foremost oxymorons, right up there with “military intelligence.”...
As I write, it’s October 31st. My 84th birthday is scheduled to arrive in six days, on November 6th. Inshallah, if God wills, as our Arab-speaking siblings say! Which brings me to the fact that I’m feeling, in the words of this retired English professor, pretty elegiac. Every fall, when the first cold weather arrives, as happened here last week, the top number of my blood pressure tends to rise significantly. (My 17 years in Hawai`i have obviously taken their toll.) Often, I also get sick around this time—not badly but always enough to get my attention. This year it was several days of pain in my lower abdomen plus chronic fatigue. Sounds like covid, right? My test, however, proved negative. Fortunately, both symptoms are now gone...
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