Violence Is Not an Option
When we fail in life, the solution is not to turn to guns
November 16, 2019
We all fail in life. The question is: How do we respond to our failures?
And the answer is that we must respond peacefully, with character, by recognizing that we may be doing some things wrong and that we may need to reconfigure our lives.
The Voice of Light and Truth
A tribute to Professor George Fayen
June 21, 2023
Yale’s George Fayen had a love for teaching and Chaucer
“Speak the speech trippingly on the tongue,” says Hamlet.
Few have ever done so as well as Professor George Fayen, who taught English 125 at Yale for the better part of a half-century and who passed away on June 9 at the age of 91.
The Gospel of Charlotte Bruney
Praising my math teacher from 9th grade
September 10, 2021
It doesn’t take much courage to join a popular cause.
Courage is shown when a person stands up for what is right, even when it is not popular to do so.
Charlotte Bruney, my math teacher in 9th grade, demonstrated true courage, even though she would never have deemed it as such.
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Shalom, Salaam and Respect
The sacred kinship of the letters of the alphabet can lead us to peace
August 10, 2021
One does not necessarily associate the world of diplomacy with creativity or the language arts, let alone the Kabbalah.
But the holy land is the land of God, our Creator. And, as I have written before, there are Kabbalists, who believe that the Torah existed 1,000 years before the world.
God, of course, created the heavens and the earth in six days, and He may very well have done so with the very pictographs that open the Bible.
Punching Above His Weight
A true mensch, my dad, Bob Jaffee, 86, loved sports, if not always Hamlet
May 15, 2020
My dad, Bob Jaffee, did not like hearing or using the word, “love.”
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That is okay. I still told him that I loved him.
And we all have our flaws.
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Even Moses did not get to enter the Promised Land, though he did get to view it from a distance. And King David conceived of building God a temple, even if he did not get to see it completed.
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My dad, a mensch of mensches, who passed away on May 15, was not per se a religious man. And he might have been surprised at any comparisons to Old Testament figures.
