Omer 2017 Day 11: Rocky Theme

Omer Introduction | Day 10 | Day 12

Day 11: Netzach in Gevurah, Endurance in Strength

Gonna Fly Now (Rocky Theme) by Bill Conti

When I lived in Philadelphia, I lived down the street from the Italian Market and worked just a few blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On my lunch break, if I was willing to brave the traffic on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, I could eat lunch on the steps of the museum. Inevitably, a group of tourists would arrive, snap a photo with the Rocky statue, and then race up the steps humming the Rocky Theme. I never saw anyone make it all the way up the 72 steps to the top; usually they would stop short, raise their arms above their heads, and do the little Rocky dance on whatever step they had managed to reach, but it never failed to entertain.

The lesson? You need both endurance and strength to run up all those steps and to face your toughest challenges in life.

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Count the Omer 2015: Day 47

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Day 47: Hod within Malchut, Humility within Leadership

We have already discussed how becoming a leader endows one with power, but today is about humility. As Uncle Ben would say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Being trusted with power as a leader should be humbling. Leaders have a responsibility to serve their people, protect their people, and to set a good example.

Count the Omer 2015: Day 22

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Day 22: Chesed within Netzach, Loving-kindness within Eternity

You've Got Mail

Ah, You've Got Mail. This is a great movie. It's got everything you miss about the late 1990s: young Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, independently-owned bookstores (ok, even giant bookstores), dial-up internet, and that familiar cheerful AOL voice saying, "you've got mail!" Now, the movie looks dated; I mean, look at Tom Hanks' computer in this scene. Even the concept of receiving an emailed letter from a stranger (or a friend) is outdated. All I ever get is junk mail, spam, and occasionally a friend sends me a link to an interesting article. Needless to say, this movie would be very different today.

Why am I going on about You've Got Mail? Because of this scene, of course. If you haven't seen the movie, you really should, but let me give you some context for this scene. Tom Hanks, the owner of Fox Books (basically, Borders or Barnes & Noble), is building a branch of his giant bookstore down the street from Meg Ryan's independently-owned, family-operated bookstore. Since he is putting her out of business, she dislikes him. At the same time, the two become anonymous email acquaintances and find that they have a lot in common. After some back-and-forth, they agree to meet at a coffee house, but when Tom Hanks arrives and realizes that he has been emailing with Meg Ryan, he backs out of the meeting, choosing instead to confront her as the jerk who is putting her out of business instead of the pen pal she has come to know and trust. Embarrassed at being stood up and hurt by the appearance of her professional enemy, Meg Ryan lashes out at him. We see her regret her harsh words in this scene.

Hindsight is 20/20 and with some distance from a problem, we can look back on it in context. It is easy to be kind in hindsight, but today should remind us that it is equally important, if not more so, to be kind in the here and now.

Count the Omer 2015: Day 4

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Day 4: Netzach within Chesed, Endurance within Loving-kindness

Today's Omer lesson comes from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride! It is a tale of "fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...," the story of Buttercup and Westley, torn apart, reunited, torn apart, and reunited again.

After Westley's apparent death at sea, Buttercup was chosen to wed Prince Humperdinck. When Westley returned alive (see their reunion below), Prince Humperdinck threatened to kill him and Buttercup tried to save him by returning with Humperdinck to the castle, trusting him to give Westley safe passage out of the country. Instead, Humperdinck secretly imprisoned Westley and when Buttercup discovered that he had been lying to her, she delivered some harsh news to him: "You can't hurt me. Westley and I are joined by the bonds of love and you cannot track that, not with a thousand bloodhounds, and you cannot break it, not with a thousand swords."

So, true love allowed her to endure the pain of separation. True love also allowed Westley to come back from being "mostly dead" to be reunited with Buttercup in the end.

"Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while."

Count the Omer 2015: Day 2

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Day 2: Gevurah within Chesed, Strength or Power within Loving-kindness
I often have trouble thinking of power within loving-kindness as something different from loving-kindness within power, which we will get to next week. The best way I can think of it is that the sephirah (emotion) of the week (this week, it's chesed) should be the main focus and we should think of how each day's sephirot are impacted. With that in mind, how is power impacted by kindness?

Last night, after reciting the blessing for the second day of the Omer, I turned on the TV to find The Ten Commandments playing. As I was lying in bed later thinking about power within loving-kindness and Charleton Heston, I thought of how beloved Moses was in the movie by everyone - Egyptians, Hebrews, Ethiopians, and Midianites. He attained great power by showing kindness to everyone, whether they were royalty or slaves, a nation he was sent to conquer or migratory desert-dwellers. Because of his kindness, Moses was almost named Pharaoh, was welcomed into Midian, and was successful in leading his people to freedom. Ramses, on the other hand, was greedy, jealous, and cruel and, while he received temporary power by these means, these traits ultimately led to his downfall.

Power within loving-kindness - one can attain power through kindness and that will be a greater power than that achieved through greed and deceit.

Quote of the Week: Rain

"God is in the rain." -V for Vendetta

Warding off evil in The Exorcist

I saw The Exorcist (1973) for the first time on Halloween. I hate scary movies and this one is consistently voted onto "Top Horror Films" lists across the film community, but it was the price I paid for wanting to be social on Halloween.

It is scary. And gross. I could have gone my whole life without seeing it, but the rest of the night was fun, so I guess it was worth it. I tried to keep my mind off the scary parts of the movie by focusing on little things and came across a piece of Judaism almost right away.

In the movie the little girl, Regan, gets possessed. Sorry if I just ruined the movie for you, but I promise that will be the last spoiler and the movie is so ingrained in popular culture that you really should have known that part already. In several scenes at the beginning of the movie, Chris, the mother, is seen wearing a particular necklace.

Regan (before possession) and Chris. Image courtesy of imdb.com

Image courtesy of judaica-mall.com

You can't see Chris' necklace that well in this picture (though it's clearly visible if you're looking for it in the movie), but it is a hamsa hand necklace. The second photo should give you an idea of what her necklace looks like. The hamsa hand is a symbol found in many ancient and modern religions (including Judaism) and it is thought to ward off evil. I'm not generally a superstitious person, but there was this one week where a bunch of little things kept going slightly wrong and I seriously considered getting a hamsa hand necklace, in part because of the superstition and in part because I wanted an everyday Jewish necklace and hamsas come in millions of designs. In the end, I went with a Mogen David/Chai combination that I posted a few months ago. Probably a good idea, since the hamsa didn't seem to work for Chris and Regan in this movie.

Here is a better picture of my new necklace than I originally posted. The Mogen David (or Star of David) is a typical symbol of Jewish identity. The symbol in the middle is a chai, which is Hebrew for life. The chai is an important part of Jewish life; we shout "L'chaim!" ("to life!") at weddings, b'nai mitzvot, conversions, holidays, and any occasion that celebrates and affirms life. If you've ever received a monetary gift from a Jewish friend and noticed that it was a multiple of 18 instead of a multiple of 5 ($72 instead of $75, for example), you can attribute it to the chai as well. The practice of giving in multiples of 18 is based on a Kabbalah (a mystical part of Judaism) number system, which assigns numerical values to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  The word chai is made up of the letters chet (8) and yud (10), making 18. Thus, the number 18 and its multiples stand for life and giving in those amounts means you are giving a wish for life. I hunted for a Jewish necklace for a very long time trying to find one that I would want to wear every day and that would outwardly symbolize the profound meaning that I find in Judaism. This necklace has worked out perfectly.