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The State of Israel was 64 years old this week which makes it about middle aged as nations go.

Happy Birthday Israel

To add a little more historic perspective:

• Israel was founded before the fax machine and outlived it.
• Israel was founded before the cassette tape and has outlived it.
• The same for the floppy disc, the princess phone and the pager.
• Looking at some companies Israel has out lived WT Grant, Polaroid, Wang and Lehman Brothers
• It looks like Israel will outlive Kodak and Sears.  Although both of them were founded when Zionism was only a dream.
• My favorite: Israel was founded before the Boeing 707 flew and it still exists.  Boeing 707′s are not flying much anymore.
• Israel outlasted the United Arab Republic, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the USSR and Tibet.
• Since Israel was admitted to the UN somewhere near a hundred other countries have been admitted.

Did I miss any?

Our Israel trip with Dennis Prager was one of the highlights of this year.

Here are links to:

• the flickr album of photos I posted about the trip.
• My other blog posts related to the trip
• Dennis Prager’s web site where you can learn about his future trip

“I don’t care about inequality. 

I care about how well the people at the bottom live.”

Dennis Prager

Author and Scholar

New Book Still the Last Best Hope

One of the Passover rituals is to dip parsley in salt water.  I’m not sure why.

At every Seder I have ever been to the salt water was made at the home.  It is easy to do but sometimes it is done wrong.  Usually not enough salt.  My suggestion is to sell premixed salt water in a beautiful bottle with a connection to Israel.  It could be purified Red Sea or Dead Sea water.

A test market could be done by having a youth group like United Synagogue Youth try to sell it in one area.  The unique selling proposition is: Convenience, Purity, Connection to Israel and Tradition.

The Honey for Rosh Hashanah promotion from Temple Or Hadesh in Memphis shows how a small company could get this started by private labeling for Temple gift shops.

In Israel so many of the caregivers are from the Philippines that the Hebrew word for caregiver has become “philippina.”  So that it is possible (and we overheard this) to say:  “My philippina is from Turkey.”  The photo above was taken in one of the malls in Tel Aviv.  It is a group of caregivers playing card while their charges sit around them in their wheelchairs.

Globalization? Good or bad?

“Whether women are better than men I cannot say – but they are certainly no worse.”

Golda Meir

Israeli Prime Minister

“Experiences are better than things.”

Dennis Prager

Author and Scholar

New Book: Still the Last Best Hope

“A mother can take care of three or four children but three or four children can’t take care of a mother.”

Christine Leventhal

A very wise woman on the Prager Israel Trip during a conversation about taking care of elderly parents.

Happy New Year!

Jewish New Year that is.

“love” in Hebrew

 5772 to be exact.  It starts tonight at sundown with, of course, a festive meal followed by services.

L’Shanah Tovah means “for a good year.”

L’Shanah Tovah is a shortening of “L’shanah tovah tikatev v’taihatem” and it means “May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.”

pronunciation guide: shanah tovah, like hanna with a sh and tovah with a soft t rhymes with shanah.

And finally a link to a very Happy New Year greeting sent to me by one of my friends from the Prager Israel trip Gil C.

Forwarding positive messages about Judaism is the way of our people.

We had a great trip to Israel and I finally got the album posted on Flickr.
For those of you who aren’t interested enough to see all 100 pictures here are three of my favorites:

The Roman Aqueduct at Caesarea.

The Bahai Temple in Haifa

Nurit and I near the old city of Jerusalem wall at sunset.

What a lucky man I am.