Daniel Lubetzky

This weekend we were able to enjoy the crops from our garden, picking the vegetables and turning them into a delicious meal.

One of my team members shared this – and I curse and thank her for making me cry so much.  It is so important to remember every day how blessed we are and to cherish life – and live it to the fullest, with purpose and kindness.  If the previous line seems cheesy and hollow to you, watch this video and then read it again.

One Voice‘s Senior Development Officer, Mike Littenberg-Brown, and his fellow Save a Child’s Heart Young Leadership volunteers brought supplies, aid and companionship to elderly individuals stuck in their homes without power or resources in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. This inspiring and touching video captures the powerful effect of their efforts.

SACH Young Leadership- Hurricane Sandy relief effort from Ruth Berdah-Canet on Vimeo.

Spotted by Daniel Lubetzky, by Julianna Storch

A friend shared this touching and enlightening expression of the experience of raising a child with a disability by Emily Perl Kingsley. She captures the experience in a way that enables others to understand and empathize with parents like her.

Spotted by Daniel Lubetzky, by Julianna Storch

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this…

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!” you say. “What do you mean, Holland?” I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy. But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills,Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” The pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

Written by Emily Perl Kingsley

My father, Roman Lubetzky, was a rarity among survivors of concentration camps. Most of his fellow survivors either were immersed in the horror of the Holocaust and sadly embittered by it, or were determined to shut it out of their lives and never again talk about it.   My Dad would talk about it to anyone who would listen, and would reignite suffering as he recounted his experiences as a little kid from 9 when the war started to 15 when he was rescued from Dachau. 

And yet he always talked about it with humanistic positive hope for the future, emphasizing the importance of building bridges and preventing the suffering of any human being.  He taught me compassion for the Palestinian cause, just as he was a fervent believer in Israel as the one homeland of the Jewish people.

Ziad Asali, whose latest article is here, is among the very few people I have ever met who reminds me of the moral courage that my Dad had – to proudly wear his historic pain on his shoulders, not to recriminate and as a way to guilt others, but as a responsibility to forge a better way for his people and for humanity.

Most Palestinians and Israelis would want to move on with their lives and would accept a two state solution.  But not enough people take it upon themselves to bring it about.

In the meantime, passionate minorities with far more extremist perspectives – that would deny the right of the other side to freedom, dignity, respect, security, and a State of their own – take it upon themselves to speak loudly – as often evidenced by those who take the time to express mean comments on these boards, from either extreme side.

Only if people like Ziad Asali lead the way will this conflict and the suffering that comes with it come to an end.  Anything other than a two state SOLUTION is just an illusion that will condemn those who live there with continued hatred and war.

Take a look at this well redacted info-graphic on how lack of sleep undermines your health in very real ways.

NextStepU is a website that helps students navigate their way along the educational path that’s best for each individual.  Daniel’s insights in the interview below are undoubtedly helpful for these students as they explore their dreams and opportunities.

by Adeena Schlussel

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So much of our challenges in life has to do with balancing short term and long term priorities. Do we accept some pain up front in order to be stronger in the future, or do we defer the necessary but painful steps, only to make the problem increasingly bigger? 

A human being may face that tension in terms of a health matter that needs to be addressed (a painful treatment may be deferred, with potentially devastating repercussions if the disease ends up spreading), or in terms of a personal financial or business decision (ie, starting a business may take much longer to pay off than taking a job, but could in the long term be more rewarding). 

In the international fora, much of what we are facing today can be framed in terms of those choices.  Egypt, for example, presents enormous challenges. The repressive military regime is perceived to support the peace treaty with Israel, so both the Israeli and American Administrations support a strong alliance therewith.  The perceived (and in some ways real) threat of an alternative is accentuated by the rise of Islamic parties and their dominance in the first open elections in Egypt.  But those who rather promote the safety of the status quo ignore that military rulers are then incentivized to manipulate extremist parties and turn them into a bigger threat, as they help the military junta justify its existence and rally support for their continued control of the levers of power. 

Representative democracy has a way of building accountability into the system, thereby moderating those doing the representation in the longer term.  But that does not come overnight.  It requires enormous patience and will most likely involve a lot of pain and a lot of wrong turns along the way. 

Most worrisome, representative democracy can be used by authoritarian leaders to achieve power, only for them to cut the cord of representative government and cling on to power – as the Iranian Ayatollahs did after their revolution, as Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela and as many others tempted by absolute power often seek to do. 

The beauty of the US Government system is not representative democracy on its own– but the checks and balances of the system – guaranteeing relatively fair transitions of power.

Below is an interesting article that discusses the challenges the US Administration is facing in balancing its support of Egyptian democracy with its desire for stability.

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Thinking Fast and Slow, a book about the dual system in our brain that informs human thinking, received a great review from the WSJ.  Check out this article to learn about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s fascinating work.

Spotted by Daniel Lubetzky, by Adeena Schlussel

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This clip from Sesame Street brings back childhood memories.