Ben is Lysander, Jewish Wisdom / Lloyd

BEN IS LYSANDER

I really enjoyed watching Ben in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Saturday night. During the intermission I overheard a young woman say, “I really like Lysander. I’ve only seen him do small parts up to now. He’s really good.”  Many have told me that Ben is so natural, even doing Shakespeare.  After watching the production I believe that means he becomes his character without the “acting look” or “theatrical façade.”  

This talent Ben has allows him greater flexibility in the part and develops opportunities for what many call his “natural comedic timing.” The play continues through March 1. For times & tickets & promotional shots go to www.pcpa.org.

JEWISH WISDOM

I attended Yeshiva University and greatly value that experience and the Jewish world it bade me enter. Consider this clear-eyed, pragmatic perspective of today’s events that benefits from almost 5770 years of Jewish survival:

. . . “the possibilities in America” are being subjected to a time of testing due to a series of financial shock waves whose reverberations are being felt worldwide. But the breathless tendency to imagine that we are on the verge of civilizational collapse, that we have it worse than anyone has had it in 75 years, and that democratic capitalism itself has been invalidated, is an example of the self-same ahistorical narcissism that leads so many today to believe they are possessors of a wisdom inaccessible to their forbears.

Booms are followed by busts. Bubbles burst. Crooks go to jail. A period of laxity is followed by a period of excessive control, the irritations of which help produce the conditions for the loosening that will, in turn allow bust to turn to boom once again. It stands to reason that the higher the altitude the bubble achieves, the more vertiginous and disorienting will be its fall to ground. Thus it is with us at this moment, and thus has it ever been. This is the way of a free society, which will, by definition, exhibit all the virtues and flaws of the hundreds of millions of free people who constitute it—the creative energy that must, in some sense, be coupled with at least a measure of foolhardiness.  (John Podhoretz, Editor, Commentary, “A Magazine and Its Mission,” February 2009)