Planting seeds for growth and love in your life

WITH THE SPRING SEASON on its way, I’ve been thinking about how the seeds we have planted start to bear fruit. And this includes something we often don’t think about –the seeds we plant in our lives every day. Some seeds don’t grow much, while some show tremendous growth. We don’t know which seeds will grow, so we keep planting.

Examples of “planting seeds” in our lives are:

• The smiles and encouragement we give to make someone’s day.

• The daily prayers we say to strengthen our beliefs.

• Learning daily, which grows into big knowledge.

• Forgiveness of others in small prayers, and expanding on that forgiveness to help us let go and love again.

• Creative efforts, which plant nourishment and grace.

I FOUND a beautiful story at Atiqmakers.org, which, according to the website, is the Jewish Maker Institute, “an applied arts yeshiva which nourishes an embodied spirit of belonging and creative confidence in Jewish tradition.” The title of the article is, “A Seed is a Prayer: Blessings for Things that Grow.” In the article, writer Heather Vidmar-McEwen adapts a story from Talmud Bavli, Taanit 23a.

Words Matter: Found, Created or Imagined a Call for Entries

She writes, “Rabbi Yochanan tells the story of a righteous man, Choni, who was walking along a path and saw a person planting a carob tree. Choni asked them, ‘How many years will it be until this tree bears fruit?’ They replied that it would take seventy years to harvest carob pods from the tree.

“Choni was surprised, because the person planting was old.

“He said to them, ‘Do you expect to live seventy more years so that you will benefit from the fruit produced by this tree?’ And the person said, “As a child I found the world filled with beautiful trees, bearing delicious fruit, all planted for me by my ancestors. Just as my ancestors planted for me, I too am planting for my descendants.”

Let’s keep planting those positive seeds. Happy spring!

PATRICIA RASKIN , owner of Raskin Resources Productions, is an awardwinning radio producer, business owner and leader. She is on the board of directors of Temple Emanu-El, in Providence, and is a recipient of the Providence Business News 2020 Leaders and Achievers award.

Her “Positive Aging with Patricia Raskin” podcast is broadcast on the Rhode Island PBS website, ripbs.org/ positiveaging.

Registration Deadline April 1st

Aim your smart phone camera at the QR Code for entry details

Explore how words alter how we interpret a photograph or how we view the world. Open to Street Photography, Conceptual work and everything in between.

Entry is open for a call to explore how words alter how we interpret a photograph or how we view the world. Open to all photography exploring the power of words, the power to alter opinions, the power to alter how you view yourself. Text need not be a part of the image itself but images should address how words alter the human experience and may include titles, captions or short statements to express, explain or alter a narrative.

Words Matter will open on June 15th in tandem with Sticks & Stones by Gershon Stark We are accepting entries now through April 1st, entry for Words Matter can be found on https://www.riphotocenter.org/words-matter-found-created-or-imaginedl-a-call-for-entries or scan the QR code above.

Awards: First Place: $150, Second Place: $100, Third Place: $50 Exhibition: Thursday, June 15th through Friday, July14th 2022 riphotocenter.org phone: (401) 400-2542 email: gallery@riphotocenter.org

Monday, June

A few thoughts

THANK YOU for publishing the review of “Bad Jews” (see page 16)

The play title “Bad Jews” bothers me deeply. After I read the review of the play in The Forward, I learned other reasons to criticize this play. The review's main focus is on how the play treats women, namely badly.

Equally serious for me is the demeaning way the play treats decency – it makes the main characters look like fools. It tries to get cheap laughs at the expense of making Jews look petty and ridiculous.

In the past three decades, many playwrights and film and TV script writers have gone into the gutter of cheap, crass humor – often at the expense of some defenseless person or group. Saturday Night Live does that most egregiously. Evidently, it is a fast and easy way to make money.

Maybe Joshua Harmon rationalizes his writing as parody. But in my opinion, by his doing this at the expense of an ethnic group, at the expense of his own mishpocha, he is feeding bad stereotypes in the minds of play viewers and newspaper readers. Some critics would say his real purpose is not parody, but fame and money

At the very least, Gamm should inform the audience that the play contains words and themes that demean well-intentioned human beings and that might nourish antisemitic attitudes. And ask the audience to question the playwright's intentions.

More effective would be to have a brief discussion during intermission or before the play starts about the dangers and costs of not tolerating differences. The inability to handle cognitive dissonance might have helped mankind survive in cave dwelling times. But in modern times that inability has been deadly, be it lynchings and shootings of Blacks, the killings of Asians, Jews and other ethnic peoples, or wars by fundamentalists, or the failure to address global warming.

Tony Estrella, the Gamm’s artistic director, wrote in his program notes. “There is little agreement in any culture about who or what constitutes the ‘good’ or the ‘bad.’ There is no consensus on either the nature of our debt to the past or our aspirations for the future.”

Every major religion and sensible ethicist disagrees strongly with that statement. Every rational society believes in the arc of progress and in tikkun olam or its translation. Otherwise, why have children. In my opinion, that statement revels one more serious defect with the play.

Know that my mother and father witnessed the worst antisemitic behavior in Germany pre-WW2. In the last months of 1944, my mother and I were hidden by a farmer in Belgium – he and family risked their lives. My mother lost 5 siblings in Auschwitz. She and I would have been among them, but for the grace of God and some decent people, who knew the difference between good and bad.

Gary Leib Tiverton, RI

This letter has been excerpted due to space limitations. The original letter is available online.