Yehuda Lave, Spiritual Advisor and Counselor
|
|
|
|
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement
|
|
|
One time I returned from a meeting to find a Meter Maid (does anyone still use that name?) writing a parking ticket for my car.
When she looked up, I smiled and said, "This is my car. When you finish writing the ticket, you may give it to me."
She looked completely puzzled ... and then asked in disbelief, "You're not going to yell at me for writing the ticket?" "No," I replied, "I thought I had enough money in the meter. I was wrong. I'm late. I deserve the ticket." She stood in disbelief ... and then she tore up the ticket saying, "All day long people yell and scream at me not to write a ticket; I can't write a ticket to the one person who treats me like a human being."
Life is like a mirror. The people you see reflect back to you the way you present yourself. If you look happy, they will respond buoyantly. If you look upset, they will be cautious or concerned. If you want a joyous life try to be happy around others. It will make it easier on them and more enjoyable for you. (Remember, everyone causes happiness ... some when they come, some when they leave. )
The Torah teaches us, "Love your fellow human being as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). It is often translated as "Love your neighbor as yourself." However, Rabbi Mordechai Gifter taught that while the words "neighbor" and "fellow human being" are often used synonymously, in everyday speech the word "neighbor" is used to denote someone living or located nearby, while the obligation of this commandment includes a complete stranger who lives far away.
The general rule for this commandment is that anything you would want others to do for you, you should do for others (Rambam, Hilchos Aivel 14:1). The great Hillel once taught a convert, "That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others. That is the basis of the Torah. (Shabbos 31a). The Baal Shem Tov used to say, "Love your fellow man as yourself - though you have many faults, nevertheless, you still love yourself. That is how you should feel toward your friend. Despite his faults, love him."
Love Yehuda Lave
|
|
10 famous Jewish jokes
The 10 Best, Most Classic Jewish Jokes
Dare to search “Jewish Jokes” on the ole’ internet search engine and you’ll find a whole lot of extremely cool, very original jokes about the Holocaust, and money-grubbing, and overbearing mothers. Ah yes, thousands of years of culture and tradition, distilled! Ah, our peals of laughter!
Scroll far away from that hateful racket and join us here at the scene of the classics — jokes told by Jews, about Jews, that gently mock, rather than discriminate against, Jews. These are jokes that have been told and told again in the Borscht Belt and at the bridge table.
1. The waiter joke
A group of five Jewish women are eating lunch in a busy cafe. Nervously, their waiter approaches the table. “Ladies,” he says. “Is anything okay?”
2. The desert island joke
A Jewish man is shipwrecked on a desert island. He’s stuck for years! Using materials from around the island, he builds a house, a store, and a synagogue. Eventually, he’s made a whole neighborhood.
One day, he’s rescued by a passing ship. The sailors help him collect his few possessions and get ready to leave the island forever. Just before they leave, one of the sailors says, “Hey! Why’d you build two synagogues?”
The man rolls his eyes. “This,” he says, pointing at one building, “Is my synagogue.”
“And that,” he says, pointing at the other, “Is the one I would never set foot in!”
3. The (loving) Jewish mothers joke
Three Jewish mothers are sitting on a bench, arguing over which one’s son loves her the most. The first one says, “You know, my son sends me flowers every Shabbos.”
“You call that love?” says the second mother. “My son calls me every day!”
“That’s nothing,” says the third woman. “My son is in therapy five days a week. And the whole time, he talks about me!”
4. The rabbi joke
A synagogue has a mice problem. The custodian tries traps, bait, mice, everything. Nothing works. Finally, he goes to the rabbi and explains the problem. “I have the solution,” the rabbi says. “Well, what is it?” says the custodian. “It’s a foolproof plan,” the rabbi says, smiling. “I’ll give them all Bar Mitzvahs — we’ll never see them again!”
5. The Israeli joke
A group of people standing on a subway platform — an American, a Russian, and an Israeli. A reporter approaches and says, “Excuse me, can I get your opinion about the meat shortage?”
“What’s a shortage?” says the American.
“What’s meat?” says the Russian.
“What’s excuse me?” says the Israeli.
6. The other rabbi joke
A rabbi is harboring a secret — she has always wanted to try pork. One night she drives across town to the furthest restaurant from her shul and orders an entire suckling pig. Just as the waiter sets down the full roast pig with an apple in its mouth, she sees a group of her congregants has walked in and is watching her, mouths open. The rabbi widens her eyes, “So nu, what kind of place is this?” she says. “You order an apple and look how it’s served!”
7. The hospital joke
An elderly Jewish man faints and is rushed to the nearest hospital. A nurse tucks him into bed and says, “Mr. Schwartzman, are you comfortable?” Schwartzman replies, “I make a living…!”
8. The grandparent joke
A Jewish grandfather takes his grandchildren to the beach. They’re playing in the sand when suddenly, a massive wave comes and pulls the smallest grandson out into the water. Panicked, the grandfather prays to God. “Oh God, please bring him back! Please let him live!” Suddenly, an even bigger wave bursts out of the ocean, setting the little boy down right at his grandfather’s feet. He scoops him up into a hug. Then he stares up at the sky and says, “He had a hat.”
9. Yes, another rabbi joke
A celebrated Orthodox rabbi gets to heaven and an angel takes him to a banquet that has been prepared in his honor. “We will serve you the most tender meat, the juiciest fish, and fragrant wine,” the angel tells him. “But who was the Mashgiach for this meal?” the rabbi asks. “Ah,” says the angel. “In your honor, God was the Mashgiach.”
“Thanks,” says the rabbi. “But I’ll just stick with the fish.”
10. The sports joke
A yeshiva decides to start a crew team. But no matter how much they practice, they lose every single race. Eventually they decide to send one boy down to the nearby prep school as a spy, to watch their winning crew team and find out what their secret is. After a day of reconnaissance, the boy comes back. “Listen!” he tells his teammates. “I learned how they do it — they have eight guys rowing, and only one guy screaming!”
|
|
THE NEW ANT and the Grasshopper, Two Versions
The ANT AND THE
GRASSHOPPER
This one is a little different ...
Two Different Versions ...
Two Different Morals
OLD VERSION
The ant works
hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper
thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm
and well fed.
The grasshopper has
no food or shelter, so he
dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE OLD STORY:
Be responsible for yourself!
MODERN
VERSION
The ant works hard
in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house
and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant
is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper
calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be
allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving..
CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN,
and ABC show up to
provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper
next to a video of the ant
in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.
America is stunned by the sharp contrast.
How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper
is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears
on Oprah
with the grasshopper
and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green'
Occupy the Anthill stages
a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the
Black Lives Matter group singing, We shall overcome.
Then Reverend Al Sharpton
has the group kneel down to pray for the grasshopper
while he damns the ants. He later appears on MSNBC to complain that rich people do not care.
Former President Obama condemns the ant
and blames
Donald Trump, President Bush 43, President Bush 41, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the
Pope
for the grasshopper's
plight.
Nancy Pelosi & Chuck Schumer
exclaim in an interview on The View
that the ant has
gotten rich off the back of the
grasshopper,
and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.
Finally, the EEOC drafts
the Economic Equity &
Anti-Grasshopper Act
retroactive to the beginning of
the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number
of green bugs and,
having; nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the
Government Green Czar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and given to the grasshopper.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper
and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in,
which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house,
crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it.
The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.
The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken
over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful, neighborhood.
The entire Nation collapses
bringing the rest
of the free world with it.
MORAL OF THE STORY:
Be careful how you vote in 2020.
|
|
A Hot Drink on a Hot Day Can Cool You Down Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-hot-drink-on-a-hot-day-can-cool-you-down-
A rigorous experiment revealed that on a hot, dry day, drinking a hot beverage can help your body stay cool
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-hot-drink-on-a-hot-day-can-cool-you-down-
By Joseph Stromberg smithsonian.com
Here in Washington, we finally got a slight break from what is shaping up to be one of the hottest summers in recent memory for pretty much the whole country. As we pondered the fact that this sort of weather could well become the norm in future decades due to climate change, we also remembered a counterintuitive cooling technique that many of us had heard of but doubted. In many countries around the world, conventional wisdom says that you can cool down on a hot day by drinking a hot beverage.
We got in touch with Ollie Jay, a researcher at University of Ottawa’s School of Human Kinetics—and an expert in all things sweat-related—to ask a pressing question: is this claim for real? His Thermal Ergonomics Lab, it turned out, had published a study on this topic just a few months ago.
Their answer, in short: Yes, a hot drink can cool you down, but only in specific circumstances. “If you drink a hot drink, it does result in a lower amount of heat stored inside your body, provided the additional sweat that’s produced when you drink the hot drink can evaporate,” Jay says.
How does this work? “What we found is that when you ingest a hot drink, you actually have a disproportionate increase in the amount that you sweat,” Jay says. “Yes, the hot drink is hotter than your body temperature, so you are adding heat to the body, but the amount that you increase your sweating by—if that can all evaporate—more than compensates for the the added heat to the body from the fluid.”
The increased rate of perspiration is the key. Although sweat may seem like a nuisance, the body perspires for a very good reason. When sweat evaporates from the skin, energy is absorbed into the air as part of the reaction, thereby cooling the body. A larger amount of sweat means more cooling, which more than counteracts the small amount of heat contained in a hot beverage relative to the entire body.
The caveat, though, is that all that extra sweat produced as a result of the hot drink actually has to evaporate for it to have a cooling effect. “On a very hot and humid day, if you’re wearing a lot of clothing, or if you’re having so much sweat that it starts to drip on the ground and doesn’t evaporate from the skin’s surface, then drinking a hot drink is a bad thing,” Jay says. “The hot drink still does add a little heat to the body, so if the sweat’s not going to assist in evaporation, go for a cold drink.”
Jay’s team got to the bottom of the “hot drink” tip by rigorously testing the idea on cyclists in a lab. Each cyclist was equipped with skin temperature sensors and a mouthpiece measuring the amount of oxygen consumed and carbon dioxide produced, which indicated the amount of heat produced by the body’s metabolism. The researchers also carefully tracked the air temperature and humidity, among other factors. The data yielded an overall picture of how much heat each cyclist produced and how much each released to the environment, and those drinking hot water (roughly 122 degrees F) stored less heat in their bodies than the others.
The researchers are still unsure why hot drinks lead the body to produce more sweat, but they have an idea. “It’s commonly thought that the hot drinks raise your core temperature, but we found that that isn’t the case,” Jay says. “What we think is that it’s the thermosensors that line the throat and mouth that elicit the additional sweating response.” He notes that additional research is needed to pinpoint the exact location of these sensors.
To be clear, the tip only works in very specific circumstances: a hot, dry day, where you’re not wearing so much clothing that your sweat is prevented from easily evaporating. In other words, if you’re in a humid locale—for example, anywhere on the East Coast—don’t try drinking hot water. But on a hot day in the desert, a cup of hot tea might actually be the trick to help cool you down.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-hot-drink-on-a-hot-day-can-cool-you-down-1338875/#Em4yMe0LkwHFUCds.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
|
|
A Letter From the Rebbe: Moon Landing and Torah By Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, The Lubavitcher Rebbe
By the Grace of G‑d
22nd of Iyar, 5721
[May 8, 1961]
Brooklyn, NY
Greetings and Blessings:
I received your letter of April 24th, in which you write about the apparent contradiction between the latest scientific attempts to penetrate outer space, especially reaching the moon, which seems to you to contradict the statement in the Torah, “The Heavens belong to G‑d, and the earth He gave to the children of man.”
Actually there is no contradiction at all, if you consider the term “earth” not in the narrow sense referring only to our globe, but in its proper sense, as meant in this verse, which includes also the atmosphere and the whole physical universe, with which mankind is concerned and directly affected by. We must not confuse the terms Heaven and the planets. The stars, planets, moon, etc. are not called Heaven, since Heaven is something spiritual, whereas those planets are physical and belong in the physical universe.
The fact that G‑d created the so-called heavenly bodies to serve our world, and to give light, warmth, and energy to it, and placed them in the firmament of the sky at a certain distance from our earth, does not preclude man’s attempt to learn all about them. Similarly, when the Torah states that G‑d placed the moon in the sky so to give light on earth, this does not exclude the possibility of man’s landing on it at some future time. The meaning of the verse “the Heavens belong to G‑d, etc.,” is in the sense that while G‑d is everywhere, including the Heavens, man was placed in the physical universe, and is part of it, and, therefore, must make the most of it, as long as there is life on this earth. There is nothing in actual scientific experiments and accomplishments that contradict the Torah, nor is there such a possibility since the Torah is Truth.
Judging by your writing and background, I firmly hope that you are conducting your daily life in strict accordance with the Torah, which is called Toras Chaim, the Law of Life, and the Mitzvahs whereby Jews live, and that you attempt to make steady advancement along this road, in compliance with the principle that “all things of holiness should be on the upgrade.”
With blessing,
By Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, The Lubavitcher Rebbe Letter of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory.
This is a transcribed copy of the original letter (we do not have the original). As such, we cannot be certain that the text is free of errors.
|
|
See you tomorrow
Love Yehuda Lave
|
|
|
|
