The great Israeli author, Shai Agnon, related a fable about a little boy and his old father, who together tended a goat. Each day the goat wandered off and returned at evening, its udders filled with the sweetest of milk. The boy wished to know where the goat went, and on what grass it grazed to give such extraordinarily sweet milk. So he tied a string to the goat\’s tail and followed.
Surfing the TV one night, two powerful images caught my eye: On one station were Afghan women draped from head to toe in the traditional black burka. On another, Britney Spears, very much undraped, projected live across the world in a televised concert.
There once was a man who could provide only potatoes for his family\’s subsistence. As the monotony and the poverty wore on, he prayed, and his prayers were answered. There fell into his hands a mysterious map to a magical Island of Diamonds.
What we seek for our young Bar Mitzvah boy is a new paradigm of Jewish masculinity.
God created the animals and brought them, one by one, before man to see what he would name them. Man examined the essence of each creature and assigned its name. So teaches Genesis.
We believe in a God who dreams. The Torah is the story of the transaction between God\’s dreams and human reality. God dreams of a world of goodness. God creates humanity – fashioned in the divine image – to share the dream. But human beings betrayed God\’s dreams. We filled the world with violence and murder. God despaired of having created humanity and decided to wash the world clean. But one human being caught God\’s eye – one good man. So God saved Noah and his family, together with a set of earth\’s animals to begin the world again.
Sixteen strangers are left on a wilderness island to fend for themselves. They endure starvation, infestation, exposure to the elements. Each night they gather in council to vote one of their company off the island. Finally, only two are left. The castoffs are brought back as jury to choose the sole survivor. Conniving, manipulation, betrayal, deceit – that\’s entertainment! And 48 million Americans stopped to watch. A media sensation, \”Survivor\” made the covers of Newsweek and Time and the headlines in every newspaper.
Stuck in endless urban traffic, the radio news ticks off the day\’s toll of rape, murder and mayhem, governmental ineptitude and unfathomable moral lunacy. Welcome to the wasteland. Welcome to Bamidbar.
For many years, the Allen School was the worst in the Dayton, Ohio, system. Located in the dilapidated inner city, the dropout rate was astronomical.
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