Good morning, my friends! Happy, Healthy New Year and Seasons Greetings to all those celebrating the holiday today!

Blessed art Thou, O L-rd our G-d, King of the Universe, who gave us the ability and wherewithal to distinguish between day and night.

Last night I received a very disturbing text message. The writer said that those running Jerusalem are liars and the people of Jerusalem will pay a big price. I did not recognize the writer's name. It does not make any difference as to whether it was a crank message: the message interrupted my evening prayer--that was the point.

Jerusalem is my home now for four years. And yet, it does not officially "belong" to Israel according to international law; moreover, it is not the capital of Israel according to most countries and nations in this world. Even my fatherland, the United States of America, does not recognize it as the capital of the State of Israel! Alas!

After the evening prayer last night, I read a poignant article in an edition of the ETAI (English Teachers' Association of Israel) Forum concerning thr role art may play in teaching reading in the classroom. All in all, it was asuccessfully informative article; and yet, two critical errors loomed in the read: Animal Farm is a novel and Night is a novel. Neither George Orwell nor Elie Wiesel intended to write a novel when they sat down to write their magnum opus. An "allegory," the correct designation for genre regarding the marvelous study named Animal Farm, is not accurately a novel at all: it is a literary work in which the characters act out their symbolic attributes throughout their purposive actions. More significantly to my life and the life of the Jewish people in the last eighty years, Elie Wiesel's profoundly insightful, graphically truthful, factual memoir is not a novel, a ficititious literary work. Even an English teacher writing an intellectual article for a teachers' journal contains grave errors in nomenclature! Alas!

Mistakes are human. We all share the common feature that pervades the human condition: foible. And yet, my mentor Elie' Wiesel's favorites expression, mistakes can save a life--they di in my case when I was a nineteen-year-old youg man. At that time some forty-nine years ago, I elected to join the Medical Corps.of the US Army. A major war was happening in those days on the other side of the world, and my father,a veteran of The Battle of the Bulge, had that very thought on his mind as he drove me to the induction center in downtown Chicago. Crying very visibly, he kissed me "goodby"; and then I crossed the street to enter the building. After passing the physical with flying colors, I walked up to the desk of a visibly saddened sergeant. When I asked him why he looked so dreary, he responded, "You failed the mechancial section fot eh examination by two points! I . . . was. . . flabbergasted! And then . . . he told me to go home. I do not have any idea which interjection to place here.

Thank goodness, life is a complex, complicated state of affairs. Anyone who can truly understand even the significance of a moment in his or her life has received a blessing. And yet, every moment in every life is a blessing of incredible meaning and proportions! According to my mentor, "We live in moments, according to moments, and through moments--these are what comprise the seeds of our memory."

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