A good friend of mine from the US who is not Jewish wished me
“A Happy Yom Kippur” a few days back.

Happy is not what Yom Kippur is all about.

It’s the ultimate Jewish guilt fest.

A day of atonement.

Jewish holiday theology can be summed up basically like this:
“They tried to kill us, God clobbered them, let’s eat”

Yom Kippur just doesn’t fit the mold.
IT’S A FAST for Chrissakes!!!

Not that I observed it, but Yom Kippur is a weird day in Israel since everything is required by law to shut down.
Including traffic.
You could walk down any freeway in Israel on Yom Kippur as if it were a promenade.

I told you - Weird…

I’ll be sending the above portrait of Keith, commissioned from me through the good efforts of Chuck, to my printer hopefully on Sunday. We still have one more week of holidays (Sukkot - “The Feast of Booths” - don’t ask… : ), so I’m not sure whether he’ll be working Sunday. After Sukkot everything usually settles down and the country resumes to the best of its ability whatever work cycle it can muster.

Apropos the sobriety of Yom Kippur and the soul searching it involves:
I’m kinda pleased that my fee for the work on this portrait is giving me an opportunity to make a donation to Chuck’s drive to raise money for a Children’s ward in Arkansas. It makes the portrait a gift that keeps on giving…

The way I see it Israel, and Jews around the world, owe a huge debt of gratitude to the good Christian souls from the “Bible Belt” that are so generously donating their hard earned wages for Israel’s well being. I feel that donating to a Children’s ward in Arkansas is my way of at least showing the smallest bit of gratitude.

Jews are encouraged to give charity always and this holds doubly true of the days leading up to the Day of Atonement. In the book of Proverbs there are two instances of the sentence “Charity redeems from death” Proverbs, 10 & 11

This is poorly translated into the English in the Revised Standard Version as: “righteousness delivers from death” which means something entirely different…

Anyway, what does this teach us?
Why does the sentence appear twice in the same book?
The book of Proverbs is ascribed to King Solomon, of whom the bible testifies that he was the wisest of men:

“…For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ez’rahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol; and his fame was in all the nations round about.He also uttered three thousand proverbs; and his songs were a thousand and five. He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall; he spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish..” Kings 1, 5

Why would “The wisest of men” scribe the same sentence twice?

Over the centuries Jewish sages have philosophized that by scribing the sentence twice Solomon alluded to the dual nature of charity’s redemption. On the recipient’s side the meaning is quite obvious. For the needy charity may often be the difference between life and death, be it through starvation, exposure or just plain disregard. On the giver’s side, besides granting “browny-points” with the powers-that-be, the charity reinforces the soul against spiritual death.

On a personal level I have always felt that giving charity gave me a felling of well being and joy. I’m not sure if it was simply because I felt good about giving, or because it helped alleviate the guilt I feel for my sins, but the end result was always the same…

All the best,
Mike
: )