"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx
It is fast and furious here at the Shack. Here is a quick roundup of recent posts:
Moses. Keywords. Music and More
Honorary Citizenship for Anne Frank
The Origin of Garden Gnomes
You Never Comment on My Blog
And a couple of old posts.
The Story of Two Souls
The Car Salesman
Death- My Son Asked Me Not to Die
Over at Rabbi Without A Cause there is a post called Musings on Moshe Rabbeinu’s Yahrtzeit. Here is my profound and insightful comment, it was interesting. No really, I mean that sincerely. I very much enjoyed it.
Moshe Rabbeinu is quite the character. From time to time I have wondered just how much of a character he was. It is hard not to be skeptical. It is hard not to wonder about the validity of the stories. Sure there are times when it is easy for me to just accept, to go on faith. Ultimately I believe in God. I am Jewish because I choose to be Jewish, not just because I was born a Jew.
But I know a little something about people. Sometimes we see things that aren’t really there. Sometimes we see things that we want to see. About once a month I read about people going to visit some odd or obscure object that supposedly looks like the Virgin Mary. That is a whole topic in itself.
I remember one moment I had at the Kotel. I was pressed up against it, literally face to the wall, body trying to become one with the stone. I was trying so very hard to get to a spiritual place that I find so very hard to hit. It was a very personal moment, incredibly hard. What I said, what I wanted doesn’t matter. What matters is that I felt like I was part of two worlds. One was a rational place in which my wants and desires were not tied into any sort of higher power. The second was something different. I don’t quite know how to describe it other than I truly felt like I was in the presence of something greater than myself.
Davening is hard for me. It often feels like a chore. Someone once tried to tell me that it is because I am not open to God. Personally I think that it is bullshit. I can’t buy into it. My davening is a mix of Hebrew, English and some sort of silent meditation. It is a melange that makes sense to me. I figure that an omniscient/omnipotent being can make sense of it all.
Don’t know if this makes sense to anyone else at all. I just know that I go with my gut. It makes the most sense. Some of my greatest experiences have come from loud, raucous and spirited moments in various minyanim. I smile when I think of Shabbos Mincha in BKR.
Back to my comment about the post at RWAC. The Moshe he describes is interesting because he is a contradiction. I like that. It seems far more real to me. He is not a saint who does no wrong. His temper gets him in trouble. Even he who had direct contact questions God. It just makes him more real to me.
More on this at a later time. Now for a sampling of keywords that led some people to my blog.
random thoughts
alligator vs bullfrog sounds
dennis wolfberg
when i was 17 i was very young man song lyrics
orthomom’s blog
how do you make a hard boiled egg ask your mom
milfs
we are all made of stars song meaning
numbers that have meaning
morality and religion, socrates
frum sex and spanking
love my besheret
johnny and june forever in love
origin of gnomes
Here is a list of some of the songs I listened to this evening.
Kicking Bird’s Gift
John Barry- Dancing With Wolves
King Without A Crown
Matisyahu
Part Man, Part Monkey
Bruce Springsteen
Raise Your Hand
Bruce Springsteen
I Feel Free
Cream
Layla
Derek and The Dominoes
Space Oddity
David Bowie
What Is and What Should Not Be
Led Zeppelin
Friends In Low Places
Garth Brooks
I Can’t Quit You Baby
Led Zeppelin
Galbi
Ofra Haza
Tainted Love
Soft Cell
Jackson
Johnny Cash
I’m The Grumpy Old Troll
Dora The Explorer
And now for one more comment. How many times can Rulon Gardner cheat death. Oy vey.
Too little, too late. I just don’t see a reason for it. There are other ways to honor her memory and the other victims too.
“He first enlisted a friend, Representative Steve Israel of Long Island, a Democrat, in efforts to have a commemorative stamp issued in her honor by the United States Postal Service. The Postal Service, however, informed them that it issued stamps only in honor of deceased American citizens or “American-related subjects,†a permitted category that has allowed stamps produced in honor of Mickey Mouse, Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk.
Representative Israel proposed honorary citizenship in 2004, but the bill died. Then a few days ago — prompted in part by the release of documents earlier this month showing that Anne Frank’s father tried desperately in 1941 to obtain a United States visa to leave Nazi-occupied Holland — he introduced it again.
“The best way we can honor Anne Frank in death is to give her what her father sought for her in life,†the congressman said.
Seventeen House members from both parties have signed on as co-sponsors. It would make Anne Frank only the seventh person to be granted honorary citizenship in the history of the country.
The others are Winston S. Churchill; the Marquis de Lafayette; Mother Teresa; the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who worked to save Jews in World War II; William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania; and his wife Hannah Callowhill Penn.
Relatives of Anne, who died at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, said they were not so certain that this would have been the family’s wish.
“I cannot see the point,†said Bernd Elias, a first cousin and president of the Anne Frank Foundation, a charitable organization based in Basel, Switzerland. “She saw herself as Dutch. That is the country she wanted to be a citizen of.â€
Mr. Elias said his cousin would no more have wanted to become an American citizen “than she would have wanted to become a Cuban citizen.â€
This old post still receives a hundred or so hits each month.
Here is a little excerpt about the Garden Gnome. And Might I add that I am not a fan of placing them in my yard, but it takes all kinds of people to make the world go round.
“GRAEFENRODA, Germany (AFP) – With his jolly face and little paunch, Reinhard the potter resembles the garden gnomes he produces by the dozen in this little village in Germany where, they say, the phenomenon began.
Reinhard Griebel grew up surrounded by gnomes in Graefenroda, tucked in the forests of the eastern German state of Thuringia.
This village of 3,500 people claims to be the birthplace of “nanus hortorum vulgaris”, or the common garden gnome, which local folklore says was dreamed up by a local potter in 1880.
The craftsmen of the village, including Reinhard’s great-grandfather, wasted no time in capitalising on the idea and, in the land where the Brothers Grimm created Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the popularity of gnomes spread fast.
“With his red hat, his lantern, his wheelbarrow and his basket on his back, he is the very image of the miners who used to work in this region,” Reinhard said.
“He’s small enough to worm through the mineshafts and always full of the joys of life.”
Germany was in the throes of the industrial revolution and workers on their Sunday off found they liked having a decorative touch to add to the garden where they would sit and relax before returning to the daily grind.
Before long, garden gnomes had conquered all four corners of the world.
For Reinhard, the reign of the gnomes reached a low point in the days when the communist regime in East Germany banned them because they were considered a capitalist symbol, although they were happy to export them to the West in return for hard cash.
Since the mines shut down in this region, gnome manufacture has become the lifeblood of the village. And there is no shortage of work — Reinhard estimates there are more than 18 million garden gnomes in Germany alone.”
Want to read more? Click here because the old Yahoo! link is now dead.
I decided to run this old post again.
It was a simple email. You never comment on my blog. I was a little nonplussed by this. I wasn’t exactly sure how I wanted to respond. I have blogged about comments and written about how many blogs I visit. I came up with a goofy word for what you need to retain and expand your readership.
I have also blogged about how responding to comments is among the most time consuming parts of blogging.
When you write to say that I never comment on your blog I have to ask why are you blogging. Perhaps the problem is that your blog is not user friendly. Perhaps it is just bad blogging. Maybe you should read my list of ways to build traffic to your blog.
Or maybe you just have blog envy.
The thing is this. Begging for comments is not a good strategy. It doesn’t play well and it tends to be uneffective. You probably have a fair number of lurkers. Some people just don’t like to post comments. There are endless reasons why and if I were you I wouldn’t spend any time trying to figure out what they are.
What you really need more than anything else is passion. If you don’t blog with passion you are going to have a tough time gathering readers. Readers flock to passionate posts and passionate bloggers.
It doesn’t have to be a particular topic, just blog passionately and you’ll see things change. At least I think that you will.
In any case, the real point of this is emailing me to complain that I never post on your blog isn’t going to make me do it. It might even chase me away, or maybe not.
Here are some links to some old posts that caught my eye:
The Search For Answers About Our Ourselves
Building The Blog
Blog Questions We Ask Ourselves
Bad Blogging- Also Known As This Stuff Sucks