Volume 6 Number 21 • 21 Sivan 5783• June 10, 2023
NHBZ Book Club News!
We thank Myra Radinsky for hosting the Book Club on November 13 and for leading the discussion of The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty, by Leonard Lauder, relating the fascinating, personal account of his mother Estée Lauder, and the company she built.
The Book Club meets on the fourth Monday of odd-numbered months at 7:15-8:45 PM. The first meeting of 2024 will be January 22 when the Book Club will discuss People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn
For more info call Fran Alper at 314-993-4024 or
fran.alper@outlook.com or sisterhood@nhbz.org
“There is one spiritual discipline which religion once gave us and which we still need. It is the simplest act of saying ‘thank you’ to G-d.
There are prayers in which we ask G-d for the things we do not have, but there are others in which we simply thank G-d for the things we do have: family, friends, life itself with its counterpoint of pleasure and pain, the sheer exaltation of knowing that we are here when we might not have been.
Gratitude, the acknowledgment that what we have is a gift, is one of the most profound religious emotions. Making a blessing over life is the best way of turning life into a blessing.”
-Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Z”L
from “Celebrating Life”
TOLDOS: Choose Your Strategy
How do you fix a place, a problem, a person—anything at all? By rejecting the bad and embracing the good.
If so, you have two possible strategies:
You could focus on all that is bad, ugly, and diseased, scraping it away and chasing it out, so that eventually all that’s
left is pure and healthy. Or you could focus on whatever is still healthy and functional, embracing it, fortifying it, and using it for its true purpose, so that eventually the dark crust in which it was imprisoned simply falls away.
Certainly, both strategies are necessary, and both have their time and place. But where do you begin?
It depends. When the human soul shines bright and strong, with just a few details out of place—then you can focus on
what is wrongs, discarding whatever bad remains.
But when everything is a mess, when the soul lies in a deep coma, when darkness rules in every cell—then to focus on
the negative and attack the disease head-on could prove fatal.
Then you have no choice but to seek out the precious sparks of life that have survived.
In truth, those are the most potent cells, like precious stones hidden at the bottom of a dark mine.
Rescue those sparks of life, and with their power everything can be healed.
– Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, www.chabad.org
For information or to join Sisterhood, call the NHBZ office at 314-991-2100, ext. 3, or email: sisterhood@nhbz.org
