Four Stars Great

77% Weekly Newsletter

Four Stars Great

Hello.

I’m Rabbi Brian.

This is a new year, and this is the new, first 2025 issue of The 77% Weekly Newsletter.

History!!!
Where did the name come from? Well, every Monday, except the last Monday of the month, I send you a spiritualigious article. The ratio of messages I send per year (40) to the number of weeks in a year (52) is 0.77, or 77%.

Moral
And, therein is a lesson I’m trying to both learn and teach—aiming for 100% is a little more striving than necessary.

What would happen if we allowed ourselves and others the grace to be good enough with a 4-star review?

77% is good enough.

It’s OK to not be perfect.

Let’s find freedom and peace—77%—being good enough, imperfect, and human.

Is this article great? Nope. And, that’s ok.

Let’s shoot for 4 out of 5 stars
💙rB

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