Ripple in Still Water

          We are up early this morning helping to prepare for the last days of Pesach. No there is no seder, no Hagadah. No special foods. Yet the two mantras that constitute the observance of a Jewish holiday remain poignant: 1) Eat, Sleep, Pray, Eat, Sleep, Pray. and 2) They tried to kill us, We won. Let's Eat.  However, there is always another aspect to the final days of any Chag including Pesach: Remember -Zachor. The idea of Zachor has been something we have been invoking as we have said Yaaleh V'Yavoh every morning in in the Shacharit Mincha, Maariv Amidah as well as in the Birkat Hamazon. We have been asking God to remember us. as a people and a nation.  We have been asking God to remember his covenant with us.           My wife showed me something on youtube called " Saturday Night Seder ". It is a fundraiser for the CDC- The Center for Disease Control. Certainly, there were parts I did not particularly find tasteful,...

          Normally, I don't enjoy the Chol HaMoed, the intermediate days of a holiday, Pesach and Sukkot.  Usually, my wife will usually want us to go out on a family outing, to participate in a "family activity", to "explore" another neighborhood in Toronto. I usually want to do nothing, take care of whatever food shopping that we need to do as we head in towards the final days of the Chag. When our children were younger,  I had few allies since they welcomed my wife's idea and request with great enthusiasm. As our children grew older, I had more allies in my desire to do nothing. Our kids greeted their mother's request with an eye roll and a desire to hang out with friends. Well, this year is different.  Our family activity was to watch a movie. The other family activity was encouraging our teenagers to get some fresh air.  The other family activity has been to watch our children stand 6 feet apart on our driveway and sidewalk with their fr...

           I attended a wedding yesterday. Actually, I watched a wedding.  I have been watching Amazon's The Hunters . It is a 10 episode story about a group of Holocaust survivors living in 1977 New York teamed up with several other younger  Americans with certain special skills. They hunt Nazis that were brought to the U.S. during Operation Paperclip. Operation Paper Clip occurred after WWII when the U.S. secretly brought Nazi Scientists to the U.S. to help in its cold war and arms race with the Soviet Union. The Hunters are after those Nazis who are secretly trying to create a 4th Reich in the U.S. During one episode, two of the hunters are a couple who lost a son in the Shoah, who were later blessed with a daughter born in the U.S. In this particular episode, with concern that this might not be the best time for the wedding, the leader of the Hunters, also a survivor, explains to the youngest member of the team ( a 17-year-old Jewish kid from ...

          With Pesach preparations in full gear, we are very aware that Pesach this year will be very different. We will be missing our eldest daughter who remains in Boston in her own "shelter in place". This year will be different since there will be no grandparents at the Seder. I have always experienced a certain kind of Joy, as I sat a seder table that was multigenerational, a table where grandparents and sometimes great grandparents would be able to transmit to grandchildren and great-grandchildren their wisdom and their experiences. With its focus on telling a story, with its focus upon those four sons (children); the Seder is geared toward children and the transmission of wisdom, experience, and information to children. The message is clear. Children symbolize the future, they symbolize hope, they symbolize the purity and innocence of the previous generations who have had to compromise, who have, perhaps, grown cynical, or just a little less optimistic a...

           I heard the most re-assuring sound this morning. We sleep with our bedroom window slightly opened. Well, around the time when I normally wake up along with the sunrise, I heard the sounds of birds chirping. It took me a second to realize that birds were chirping, but as I opened my eyes and saw the clear blue sky and the first rays of sunlight, the sweet sounds of birds chirping re-assured me. It sounded like spring outside, it looked like spring outside and when I went downstairs and stepped outside for a moment to breathe; it started to smell like spring. It used to be, that after the smell, sounds, sights and inhaling the fresh spring air occurred, I would check the baseball scores and see how my team did the night before. Well, with no baseball due to COVID-19, there was no baseball.  Still, I felt a sense of reassurance, a sense of normalcy, a sense that something out there was working correctly. Yes, spring technically began two weeks ...

          With communities and society now virtually a remote society, the word "emergency" has taken on a new meaning. My wife teaches Gan (kindergarten). She teaches two zoom session. She has zoom meetings with her fellow Pre-Schook staff. She has zoom meetings with the entire faculty. Our children have all their High School and University classes through zoom. They connect with their friends through WhatsApp or Zoom. They meet with teachers administrators or student council through Zoom.  We see our daughter in Boston,  and grandparents in San Francisco and Rochester via internet-based platforms such as WhatsApp and Zoom. So if the wireless internet becomes spotty, if the service is not even throughout the house, or if our wireless printer which is connected in the basement cannot pick up the modem's signal then we are unable to print. First of all, I have become the designated IT person and yet I know nothing about IT. Second of all, what had been ...

          Like any High School-age children, ours take math and are studying Trigonometry, you remember sine (SIN) and cosine (COS), cotangent (COT) and triangles, lots of triangles. By the way, that is about all that I remember about trigonometry except for the Trigonometry matchbook that had all four-digit numerical values for these various sins because the Math Textbooks were written before scientific calculators. In any case, as I was looking over our son's math homework and vaguely recalling all these terms and images.  The images of Sine and Cosine became most evident when projections of the COVID -19 modeling was shown at the President's press conference from the day before. On a graph,  the Sine curve  "0" it slopes upward reaches an apex and then slopes downward back to "0" and then begins to curve upward again. Those are like the "waves' we see in radio waves etc. The Cosine curve does not begin at "0" on the graph but rather on ...