3/40

77% Weekly Newsletter





The 77% Weekly



The Religion-Outside-The-Box Newsletter






January 2007 – Issue 3/40



In This Issue

 






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Greetings!

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.


Religion-Outside-The-Box
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(As announced in issue 1/40, until Mid-February, Larry Keene’s Simple Prayers will be
gracing the The 77% Weekly.)










Simple Prayer: Silence of Friends
 

Laurence C. Keene

Dear God, it isn’t what our enemies say about us that hurts
us as deeply as what our friends do not say on our behalf. It
is the silence of our friends, not the sound and fury of our
enemies, that overwhelms us with the greatest feelings of
sadness and aloneness. There have been moments in my life,
dear Lord, when all I wanted to hear was a friend’s voice
speaking up on my behalf A soft, even inarticulate word of
friendly support would have been enough to sustain my
shaky feelings of self-confidence. In those moments of self-
doubt I have not needed great oratory on my behalf. Just a
word. A simple, supportive word would have been enough to
quiet the opposing voices and revive my own shaken resolve.
How bitterly barren I have felt when that voice has not been
heard. I have felt silenced by their silence. Help me, dear
God, to speak up for my friends. Don’t allow my friends to
feel defeated by my lack of a timely response on their
behalf. Help me to speak that supportive word on behalf of
my friends, even as inarticulate as it might be, that will
neutralize all the sounds of the universe that might rise
against them. Help my one word of support to restore the
courage and resolve of a friend to face down the demons that
can only win when friends are silent.

















Rabbi Brian Doesn’t Understand

In the 18th century, in Hannipol, a small district of Khmelnytskyi Oblast, in present-day western Ukraine, there was a rabbi known as Reb Zusya. Zusya, a pious man, taught about humility and had a strange habit of referring to himself in the third person. Instead of saying, “I am hungry,” or “I don’t understand,” he would say, “Zusya is hungry,”

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Travesty

I rewind the etymology podcast 15 seconds because I missed the details about the origin of the word travesty. I want to listen again—more closely—so I learn it, so I can recall it later in conversation… because if I tell you how travesty—from “traverse” and “clothing”—came to mean “shockingly unfair,” you’ll think I’m smart. Lost in that thought, I suddenly

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The Soup We Are In

Most of the time, even when we don’t really need to be rushing (and sometimes without realizing we are rushing) a really large percentage of us rush anyhow. Seems we are angled forward, always striving to get ahead. I get it. It’s the soup we are in. Our society conflates productivity, hurriedness, and worth. We take on the flavors around

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77% Weekly Newsletter
77% Weekly Newsletter