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Shavuot, Ruth and Me
Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back, and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge, your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you. –Ruth, 1:16
When I became ill with cancer a couple of years ago, my close Jewish friends asked me if I had a Hebrew name, which
would have been given to me when I was a newborn. I seemed to remember learning that I had a Hebrew name, but I don’t remember what it was. My Jewish friends felt that their prayers for me to G-d would be more powerful if they prayed using my Hebrew name, so I asked my friend @iwe if anything could be done regarding my lack of a Hebrew name, and he consulted his rabbi. It turns out that if a person doesn’t have a Hebrew name, he or she may choose one. On hearing this information, I knew immediately that I wanted to take the name of Ruth.
Gordon Ramsay may be a master chef, but he greatly overrates his own expertise in helping struggling businesses recover. The tragedy is that no one wins in these encounters, and he demonstrates the delusions that emerge from his arrogance.
This story
“He has told you, O man, what is good,
On the heels of a recent 
One day, some 50 years later, his wife, Grete, found a notebook in the attic containing the names and pictures of all the children that her husband had saved. Grete gave the notebook to a journalist and Winton was invited to appear on a television program. He didn’t know the audience was comprised of all the people whose lives he had saved. Now adults, they came to express their profound thankfulness. When counting the 669 children that he saved, along with their offspring of children and grandchildren, Nicholas Winton saved the lives of over 15,000 people.
I’m still unhappy about what happened in church Sunday. We were following the sermon–an encouraging and faith building teaching session on how God uses the seemingly small and mundane incidents in our lives to further His own ends. Then someone’s phone dinged once. I felt irritated, but it was once. Then it dinged again. And then again. Not really loud, but enough to be a distraction.
