13/40 Us, Them, Love

77% Weekly Newsletter
Logo for 77% Weekly


The 77% Weekly
The 40/52-weeks-a-year, quick-reading, thought-lingering, spiritual-religious newsletter.

Religion-Outside-The-Box (oldrotb.wpengine.com) is a donation supported not-for-profit empowering adults to find and be with (the) God (of their understanding).  

13/40
From the desk of Rabbi Brian

The late Trappist monk, Thomas Merton wrote in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

The basic falsehood is the lie…that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary for the moment has the monopoly of all error.

The Baal Shem Tov, similarly said,

We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves and from this the Talmud commands us to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. You always find excuses for your own misdeeds, so make excuses also for your neighbor.

It is spiritual-religious immaturity to say that we are good and they are not. We are no different from them except for the fact that we are we and they are they.

Spiritual-religious advice for the week: try bring compassionate to all and making excuses for others.

With love,

Rabbi Brian

The 77% Weekly


The 77% Weekly: The Religion-Outside-The-Box Newsletter
helps people find and be with (the) God (of their understanding) 40 out of 52 weeks a year.


Why 77%?
Two reasons:
1) 40/52 = 0.76923. The newsletter is sent every Monday except the last of each month.
2) In school 77% was a passing grade and ROTB wants to remind you that life isn’t graded, it’s pass/fail.


Religion-Outside-The-Box is a donation-supported,
non-denominational, internet-based, 501c3-tax exempt religious congregation.

Flash Bang

✧✧✧ My buddy Marc meets me near my house at 3:30 on Saturday afternoon so we can bike to the small park named for Elizabeth Caruthers. I looked her up as I started to write this article. Elizabeth Caruthers was an early pioneer woman whose Supreme Court case led to the 1850 Donation Act—ruling that a woman, married or not,

Read More »

Hiawatha Johnson, JR.

January 2026 — Portland, ORE Hiawatha Johnson, Jr., a mentor and friend died. Summer 1985 — Magic Camp Oakdale, Long Island I’m 15. He’s 30. He wears a dashiki. He uses a walking stick. I’m prepubescent. I listen to comedy cassettes on a Walkman. I’m in awe. ✧✧✧ I perform a rather banal magic act that year — me narrating

Read More »

The Delay

2026 issue #03 — The Delay I’m in my buddy David’s car. He’s driving me from my mom’s apartment in NYC to Newark, NJ, where I’m going to catch a plane back home to Portland. David and I have been friends for fifty years. Amazing. My phone dings. I look at it. Nothing important. Just an alert from United. *

Read More »
77% Weekly Newsletter
77% Weekly Newsletter