"And You Started a Blog Because....?"

Some people I know become a bit put off when I talk about my weblog. They sort of roll their eyes and either in what they say or in their body language, they communicate that they really don’t see the point of it. These people have far better things to do with their time and, in their mind, I must be a person who has far too much time on my hands.

Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. Like most people, I have far too many things to do and not enough time to get everything done. But unlike them, I do see value in putting my ideas out there into the world in my blog.

In reality, every one of us is struggling everyday to understand our world. Mankind is usually not all that kind. War, rather than peace, is more often the rule than not. There is more sadness in the world than there is joy and happiness. The period of childhood is increasingly truncated as war, hunger, deprivation and inequality intrude themselves into the lives of children in developed and underdeveloped countries alike. Much of what we come to know and understand make very little sense, even though we eventually accept these disturbing bits of reality as being true.

Sometimes we have to see the world through the eyes of another person to decipher what we see and hear and read. The characters in movie or the plotline of the story can help us to understand something in our own lives. The life experiences of another person may resonate with us so that we can begin to understand something that happened to us. To just know that someone else has gone through what we are going through right now in our own lives is liberating. We begin to understand that what we are having to endure, others have also endured and survived and they have been able to rise above the situation and move on with their lives.

People from all walks of life in every country in the world today are creating blogs and posting to them every day. Every person who has taken the time to create their own weblog presents us with a vision of the world from a very different perspective than our own. They touch our lives. They help us to see beauty and truth, to understand great joy and infinite sadness, to experience piercing pain and exhilarating joy, through their revelations. They affect us and they do not even know when they do.

No matter what we do in our lives, we are going to touch the lives of other people, anyway, whether we are consciously trying to do so or not.. We all need a diversion to help us forget our problems. We all need to be reminded about important events occurring in our world or in our lives. We all need to laugh a lot more than we allow ourselves to do. Ultimately, one can never know how much one has impacted another person's life by an act of kindness or consideration, so it is enough just to do what one can do to help someone else. If someone is simply entertained or amused by what they read or if someone is made to consider an important idea I have presented, I have accomplished something positive.

Teaching An Understanding of the Meaning of Prayer

From September to May each year, I teach religious ideas and values as a Sunday School teacher. Every week, I introduce the sometimes very complex ideas and values embodied in Judaism to kids who are between six to twelve years old. That can very often be a very daunting challenge.

This year, I will be teaching about the concept of prayer in our lives. I will be exploring a lot of aspects of the very idea of Prayer. What is a prayer? Why do we pray? How do we put ourselves into the right frame of mind to pray? What do we get out of praying... what is the payback for the time and effort we invest? How are we supposed to feel while we are praying and after we pray to G'd? These are questions that most people don't even take much time to think about. And when people do, as adults, they find that working out the answers to these questions demands their exploring an aspect of their own existence that they have not had to deal with, except in the most difficult moments of their lives.

So here I am, assigned the task of introducing to kids a subject that most adults understand only poorly at best. As a teacher, I have learned a few things after a lot of years. First, the best that I will ever be able to do as a Sunday school teacher is to light the fire of curiousity in the children I have the privilege of teaching. Secondly, having only an hour a week to present a topic is not a limitation. Rather, the constraints of time only serve to help me to focus the message on the most important things which need to be said. It is often said that it is more difficult to write a ten page paper in college than it is to write a 100 page paper. The same principle applies here. Consider that constraint, when I am being asked to talk about what may well be one of the most important things these kids will need to know during their lives. So I do my best to fire up their interest and hope that I will be able to motivate them to pursue the ideas we will be talking about, long after our class has concluded in the spring.

If anything, in this setting, teaching is an art. I have to say to myself on going into the classroom, "It's showtime." So this year, I am trying to help the kids to see the wonder in our world and the amazing power of prayer. Goodness knows, with all the dark things they see on television and in the media, they are going to need that capacity to see something good in themselves and in this often sad world. If I can enable them to see even a few good things amidst all the sadness and darkness, all my hard work will have made every moment I will have spent as their teacher worth the effort.

Blowin' In The Wind: Bits and Pieces from the News of the Day

The First Refugees from the Global Warming Phenomena?

Last week, I caught an article in the newspaper that reported that the United States may be witnessing the first wave of refugees from the effects of global warming. According to the stats, about 20% of the those who fled the states along the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina have chosen not to return to their old homes. Apparently, the conditions to which they would return would be almost as bad as the conditions from which they fled and now they would prefer to remain in their newly adopted cities of residence. Additonally, the journalist who wrote the piece also suggested that those who are not returning view what happened during Hurricane Katrina as a portent of even more devastating things to come for the Gulf Coast in the years to come.

It is hard to tell if this is not just a bit of journalistic hype to grab the very fickle attention of the reading public. However, what if it isn't? What if this particular journalist has seen this situation exactly for what it is? Sometimes there are visionary people who have the capacity to see seemingly random events as something that represents the beginnings of major developments in our world. Is this writer correct in his conclusions? Maybe yes. Maybe no. But we will certainly find out if he is, as time goes on.

Monopoly Evolves in the 21st Century

The British company which produces the popular board game, Monopoly, recently announced that it no longer made sense to use play money as the currency for the game. Since so many people use cash cards these days, they will replace the play money with electronic devices that will keep track of how much money each player has. Now that development is a sign of our times.

It wasn't so very long ago that the op-ed pages carried speculative stories about how banks in the northeast United States were looking at ways to promote cashless transactions. The cash card was something very experimental at that time and no one was very sure about how well the American public would take to this new concept. Now, cash cards are about as ubiquitous as cell phones or computers. Certainly, it won't be very long before the American version of the game will be similarly equipped.

My grandaughter is three years old now. When she grows up and she is playing Monopoly with her own children, I fully expect her children to ask her quite incredulously, "Mommy, you mean that people actually had to use pieces of paper to buy things a long time ago?" That sort of of response should not be of any surprise to us. Hey, you and I now look back in time and we find it incredible that people in the past could live without air conditioning, cell phones or television. Time is always marching on and transforming the latest technology into the antiquated relics of the past. Ah well, as always, the times, they are a'changing.