Wednesday July 11, 2007

Former First Lady, “Lady Bird” Johnson has passed away.

Chassidus teaches everything we encounter in life is meant to be a lesson to us.

Why do we pay so much attention when famous people die? What is it about the former first lady that draws so much attention?

Mark called in and suggested that Lady Bird’s greatness (besides putting up with President Johnson for so many years) was that she was a compassionate, beautiful person who exuded such kindness. But what catches our attention when she dies is that it makes you ask, “Where was I when she was First Lady”?

In torah and in Jewish tradition a lot of attention is paid to the passing of great people because it is at the end of life when we realize that all of life eventually boils down to what’s left of us after we’re gone.

Every time someone great passes away we should take to heart that what’s going to be left of us is only the impact we’ve had on the world, the good that we’ve done. Because it doesn’t matter how much money we’ve made, after all you can’t take it with you. All that’s left is your legacy.

Lady Bird’s legacy is, as Mark told us, was kindness. We must all get in on the performance of kindness because when our time comes that’s all that will be left of us.

We went on to discuss the Torah’s opinion of the pet- spay neuter bill.

Judaism is notorious for not proselytizing at all. The reason is that we have a profound respect for every creation. Jewish tradition maintains that every creation was created by G-d exactly the way He wants it to be, in exactly the right country, family and religion. We don’t like to tamper with that.

But besides the fact that spaying or neutering an animal is tampering with G-d’s creation there is also a G-d given universal law against being cruel to animals. Whether that includes spaying in any situation is debatable but certainly we cannot spay or neuter animals just on whim! This was our conclusion on the show.

We had some special guests, the counselors of our Gan Israel Day Camp.

Benny presented “My G-d, My G-d” by Yossele Rosenblatt. Wow! To sample or purchase Yossele Rosenblatt music click here.

Well, we’ll see ya’ next week,
Till then, Shalom!