Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good
His kindness is eternal
It is a tradition within Judaism to make a public declaration of thanks when experiencing a miracle. My miracle happened when my wife returned yesterday after 16 days, visiting her parents in China.
(It seems that I lost one of my Jewish readers when I mentioned my wife’s trip a few weeks ago in passing. It is sad that we still have members of the Jewish community who are not familiar with the concept of conversion, or of the Torah commandment to love the convert. Too many.)
I give thanks with Psalm 100, and rejoice with Psalm 117. Psalm 128 expresses the centrality of the wife in creating a home. Without her here, I have a house with a person living it, doing chores and surviving. With her here, there is warmth and love and happiness; there is reason to go on.
I have undergone a gradual transformation in the last few years with respect to the sexes. Obviously I recognized the difference between men and women since I was a child. Still, we have been programmed to believe that there is just one type of human being in two different types of bodies. Only the anatomy is different, we were told.
Now I understand at a deep level how false that is. There is a fundamental difference between masculinity and femininity. I define the first as controlled power, and the second as graceful nurturing. Many people have expressed aggravation at my generalization, but that doesn’t invalidate the opinion.
Here is my mental picture of the relation between men and women.
There is a lot of variability within each population, and a lot of overlap as well, but there are clear tendencies towards average difference too. That drives human society in a positive fashion. One group takes risks; one group plays it safe - on average! One group aggressively defends the community; one group builds families - on average!
We need both to survive and to flourish. Vive la difference!
G-d is good. G-d is forgiving (or we would not practice Yom Kippur). G-d is slow to anger when his children misbehave, but, as they say, G-d help us, when you push Him too far. I have this uneasy feeling that we may be pushing G-d a bit too far. There is much evil in the world and too many fall to the temptations of evil. G-d wants us to stand up to evil and we have been shirking our duty to G-d. Yes, G-d is good, and having been created in His image, his children should also be good. We should all be mensch. Religion is to teach and guide us towards being more faithful to G-d. In the Torah, we see many people communicating with G-d on a personal level. Judaism, while recognizing the community (minyan) and the schul, also is a religion for one on one with G-d. My wife, raised as a Roman Catholic, remains more "religious" than me, and was even more so while the children were growing up.
My wife converted and helped bring me back to Jewish traditions. She's very active in our synagogue and Jewish organizations. We're not Orthodox, and my brother is a Chabadnik, yet every Chabad rabbi has treated her (and me) with complete respect. When I asked my brother about that, he said that it's only up to Hashem to judge others about religious matters.