The-Word-Well: Freshly Drawn Observations and Copy

Serenity Prayer for a Hunter

Dec 27th, 2012

Some spaces wiser not to fill; Hunger is more useful than the kill.

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How to Say “Happy Hanukkah” in Greek

Dec 8th, 2012

On Wednesday, we helped children in a Jewish elementary school in Greece prepare decorations for Hanukkah, the upcoming winter holiday which celebrates the victory of light over darkness, of the miraculous over the commonplace, of Maccabees over ….Greeks . (In Greece, the children learn that the victory was won over the Assyrians. What I would call a nice save. And true-ish.) I cut out shapes of menorahs and sivivonim (dreidels) from colorful paper, and glued them onto large poster paper with a girl named Alexandra and a boy named Niko, who both understood rudimentary Hebrew. How am I supposed to wrap my head around that?

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What Would You Hand Down the Mountain? (WWYHDTM)

May 25th, 2012

top-10 I have always been a fan of the top ten list. I suppose it started with Casey Kasem's American Top 40. (Doing the math? Yeah. Old.) Of course, the top ten format is as old as the hills...actually, one specific hill called Sinai, where, tradition has it, God's Top Ten was revealed amidst much noisy weather, on this, the Shavuot festival. Whether He intended it as marketing or humor will depend, I suppose, on your general outlook.

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World Enough and Time

Apr 6th, 2012

Minutes before we begin Passover, I can think of nothing better to do with some surprising free time than to revive my blog.

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In Memoriam: Esther Klein (1918-2011)

Nov 21st, 2011

If funerals were given to creative staging, I would invite you to my kitchen for a fitting tribute to this great lady.

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Daughters of Light

Sep 5th, 2011

The experience of protesting alongside you has been super, since, really – where else would we have met? Unfortunately, I don't really have that many friends from other religions, so it has been nice to expand my horizons. It is amazing that in your religion, all of the Torah that matters really *can* be learned on one foot, as long as that foot is covered by a stocking.

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Taurus Babies Named Justice

Aug 16th, 2011

I predict a baby boom in Israel this Spring. That's more mouths to feed and larger apartments to rent, but the passion of protest and the warm mid-summer night air…It's all pretty intense, in tents. It's an amazing amount of unity, kind of out of the ordinary for here, and, I guess, for Jews in general. Also, Joe Average, and his wife, Lily White-Citizen, seem to have awoken from some type of cable-TV-induced coma. It's kind of cool. Still...I am cautious. Here's why...

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Summer Prayer of a Hebrew Redneck Wannabe

Jul 10th, 2011

This post is about 95% recycled from 2009. But it's still true, so I figured, what the heck: Every summer, right in the hot, soft belly of July/August, especially on thick, soupy nights like this one, I'm hit with it in the head, like the skillet of an angry housewife: the urge to play Alan Jackson loud with the windows of my station wagon rolled down, hang back on my porch at sundown, and go out drinking with the girls. You guessed that right, son - Redneck Fever.

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On Memory

May 8th, 2011

photo by: Susan NYC .......Is a memory something you have or something you've lost? – Woody Allen Today we think of who we do not have and why, and then what that lack demands of us. Tomorrow, about how we celebrate being alive to meet those demands. Today is Memorial Day in Israel, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terror, observed here a day before Independence Day. The connection is essential since it is widely recognized that without the former, celebrating the latter would be impossible, while always hoping that one day, this will not be the case. That there will be no more names on next year's list of the fallen. It is, in other words, a sacred day we wish with all our hearts we didn’t need to observe, and in fact grapple with its necessity all the time.