The mensches* over at Simple to Remember (http://www.simpletoremember.com) have given the rest of us Goyim* a real gift with a beautiful, straightforward, easy-to-understand site that explains Judaism without patronizing, pandering or proselytizing (which is bupkis*, anyway… Jews don’t go out of their way to convert non-Jews. Never have, never will.)  It’s just straightforward saykhel,* with nisht gefonfit.* Just  richtiker chaifetz.*

The tone is gentle, respectful koved*, gut gezugt*, and glick* to the rest of us for the mitzvah* of Simple to Remember for their willingness to share this with us.

To the mensches* over at Simple to Remember, a leben ahf dir!* And to you, my fiends, thank you for approaching this with an open mind, curiosity, and wonder. We can learn more about ourselves and who we are by learning about our friends. To you, Gai gezunterhait! – Go in good health!

A Shikseh’s Yiddish to English translation guide. (I’m from New York. You expected ancient Hebrew?)

*Mensch (Yiddish: מענטש mentsh; German: Mensch, for “human being”) means “a person of integrity and honor”
*Goy (Hebrew: גוי‎, regular plural goyim גוים or גויים) is a Hebrew biblical term for “nation”. By Roman times it had also acquired the meaning of “non-Jew”.
*Bupkis (also spelled “bubkes”): emphatically nothing, as in He isn’t worth bubkes (literally ‘goat droppings’, possibly of Slavic origin; cf. Polish bobki ‘animal droppings’)
*Saykhel – Common sense
*Nisht gefonfit – Don’t hedge. Don’t fool around. Don’t double-talk
*Richtiker chaifetz – The real article!  The real McCoy!
*Koved – Respect, honour, reverence, esteem
*Gut gezugt – Well said
*Glick – Luck, piece of luck
*Mitzvah – Good deed
*A leben ahf dir! – You should live! And be well!
*Gai gezunterhait! – Go in good health

My deepest gratitude to Michael Hanna-Fein and the Gantseh-megillah Yiddish Glossary for providing an invaluable resource with accurate Yiddish spellings. For more on the Yiddish language, Michael can be contacted by e-mail. Be sure to put “Yiddishkeit” in the subject line.

When you’re sitting looking at life from the everyday perspective of things to do, not enough time to do them all, worrying about disappointing people who are depending on you – every once in a while the Universe throws you a curve. You open the door to go out and work in the garden because you ‘have’ to plant those seeds right now today, and the sky opens up with a downpour to nearly drown you. So you can’t plant the seeds right now today, and you have to think farther along your list for something to do inside until the rain stops and the ground dries out a bit. You go to sew a dress you’ve promised someone, and there isn’t thread. There’s really lots of thread, it’s just the wrong color, or not enough for what you need, and nothing you can really fake it with. Dinner requires creativity because you haven’t gone shopping yet. The people you need to talk to aren’t there today. And just as you’re about to explode with stress and frustration, a little dog looks up at you, and smiles, and wags her tail saying “you’re the most important person in the world right now, and I love you”. So you sit down, and she asks to jump in your lap, and when you say OK, she is so happy and enthusiastic just to be close to you, you forget to be stressed and frustrated because someone you could easily kill trusts you, and loves you for no reason except for joy, and is happy to be close and feel safe in your arms. And you remember you are a Child of God in that moment.

(Originally written April 19, 2007)

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.”
-Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” from Leaves of Grass.

“Long ago in southern Germany, in Bavaria, during the late middle ages there was a custom in many of the Catholic churches of that region that was quite unusual. At the end of the Easter church service, the Easter Mass, the priest would leave the altar and come down among the people and lead the congregation in what was called the “Risus Paschalis” which means “the Easter laughter.” The priest would tell funny stories and sing comical songs, and the church would ring with laughter. Of course the point was obvious, the laughter echoing through the church was a tangible testimony to the merriment born out of the tidings of this great day, Jesus Christ alive and loose among us. All the forces that conspired to lay him in his tomb, the fury, the lovelessness, the violence, the vaunted powers of kings and empires, they are made a laughing stock.”
Preached by Dr. John M. McCoy at Highland Park Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas, USA, on 04/23/2000. Scripture Reference(s): Psalm 126:1-6; Mark 16:1-8

This, to me, is the Divine Mystery of Christianity: The Power Greater than Death that moves through all living beings.

Christ is born, a mortal man, who shows that living by his example is a true path to God, and proves that death is only an illusion and the soul lives on. Even after he suffers through the worst of what humanity can dish out, including human, cowardice, anger, power-corruption, viciousness, and petty politics, he still forgives his tormentors. He dies, true, but that is only an illusion. It is a tiny piece of the much greater Mystery of Divine Grace.

Good Friday is about the suffering of Christ at the hands of men. Calling it “the Passion” stems from the late Latin passionem (nom. passio) “suffering, enduring.” (This means to “feel passion” for somebody literally means that you are “suffering” for them, but that’s another essay.) This is the universal, “Mean People Suck,” that anybody who has ever been falsely accused, tormented and put on trial for the twisted way human minds will filter genuine acts of love and compassion. It’s a timeless story because everyone who has ever felt wrongly persecuted can relate to these feelings.

However, Easter itself is a message of hope. It’s spring returning after the winter’s cold, and the rains coming after the drought. It’s the Resurrection, the triumph over human weakness and iniquity. It’s loudly proclaiming to the world, “You can not defeat me. You can try, but I will persevere, and in the end, I will win.”

According to legend, it was a humble monk who first invented “Bright Monday,” or “Laughing Monday,” finding it the best way to celebrate Easter Monday. After all, it is the other side of Good Friday. It is the defeat of death, the victory at the end of the trial. It is Walt Whitman’s “Barbaric Yawp” sounded over the rooftops of the world. It is the final thumbing the nose at Satan: “I am still here, and you have not defeated me.”

The challenge, of course, comes in the forgiveness. To truly follow Christ’s example, we need to truly forgive those tormentors. Is this possible? After all, we are, “only human,” and, over time, our hate begins to calcify, to harden into armor. It becomes comfortable, and we cling to it with the superstitious belief that if we hold tight enough to this thing, this armor of hate, that we will never be blindsided again. If we hate those who have done evil to us, and we hate them long enough and hard enough, we will, somehow, either visit that same evil upon them or miraculously shield ourselves from ever being hurt again. However, the inability to forgive does not render us invulnerable. In the end, all it does is sap our strength and drain our energies until eventually we are weakened, shriveled, hateful, ugly creatures who are no better than those who caused all the trouble in the first place.

The disappointing truth is that whether we can forgive or not often doesn’t amount to a hill of beans to those who hurt us. If they cared that much and knew how much pain they were inflicting they wouldn’t have done such things in the first place. Chances are, they will continue to move through the world, being their ugly, warped, hateful selves, until some greater force causes them to re-evaluate why they are choosing to be this way. Holding onto our hate only causes us further pain: by making us re-live that moment over and over again.

However, letting it go is not only a gift we can give ourselves, it is the greatest gift we can give ourselves. It removes those boundaries and allows us to touch our own truth, our joy, our vital life force. Through this, we touch the eternal. We defeat the forces that are killing us slowly and re-unite with the Divine. This, then, is the message of Easter, and of Laughing Monday: “There is a Truth that is Greater Than Us All, and it is Very, Very Good.”

Gained and Lost

I have been going through some of the older things in my filing system. One needs to do that every now and then. I have realized my intellectual life has been very confined for a while now. I used to do research on things that interested me – both on-line and hard copy. I took notes, printed things out, tried reproducing the results from experiments others had done, did my own experimentation and took notes on the results – even drafting suck – er- friends to help. And then I just…stopped.

I have a thousand and one excuses – time, money, other things to do – but I have a hard time admitting and recognizing the real reason. Somehow it seems a betrayal of Shawn to say she’s a major part of what happened. She was ill. She needed a lot of care. She needed a lot of my time – time just sitting with her, watching TV with her because her eyes were getting too bad to read, cooking for her, cleaning up the kitchen, doing laundry, time just being with her while she slept so she could sleep (around the corner at the computer was too far away, reading a book wasn’t ‘being with her’, reading to her wasn’t what she wanted either). She wanted me to be her shadow. Even cooking was difficult. She would keep calling me in to ask what I was doing, if things were ready, could I bring her (something). If I needed to go shopping, she wanted to know why, what I would be getting, where I would be going, when I would be back – preferably to within 5 minutes – and while I was gone she would call me every 15 minutes or so to ask what I was doing, where I was, how long before I’d be home. It wasn’t a huge flaw on her part. She wasn’t trying to stifle me and my creativity. She wasn’t suspicious I was ‘cheating’ on her somehow. She was, plain and simply, scared.

It’s easy to get scared when you’re sick. And there are degrees. There’s being scared it’s going to hurt if you cough, and then there’s being scared you’re going to die imminently. Chronic illness runs the gamut from one to the other, sometimes several times in a single day. It just gets worse as more things go wrong and more diagnoses are added to the mix. Shawn was braver than most people, in my opinion. She toughed it out, going and doing as long as she could, ignoring discomfort and pain to do the things she wanted to do. But that willpower isn’t a cure-all. She was still sick, and getting worse. And one day, about a year after we were ‘civilized’, she couldn’t push any more. She still did what she could – midnight trips to the 24 hour Wal-Mart with the electric carts so she could get around, without having to dodge people who looked at her as ‘just a fatso who needed to loose weight’, carts that let her spend all night out, looking at stuff, talking to employees who saw her enough to recognize her and ask how she was. She stopped doing even that after she had a seizure from low blood sugar in the store and the ambulance was called. She went once after that, but was so uncomfortable feeling she was being watched in case she had a problem again, she decided it wasn’t worth it. And somewhere in there, she started getting scared. It was just a little thing at first. Not wanting to walk outside, even with a cane or walker, without me there to help her. Wanting places to sit everywhere in the house so she was never more than a step away from one. As her illnesses progressed, her fear progressed, until she wanted me with her every minute of every day. She would let me leave her side long enough to do necessary things, but no more than that. She was afraid she was going to die, and it would be very uncomfortable – that she’d fall while I was out for some reason and die before I got home of something painful and preventable, for example. She wasn’t afraid of death, per se, she was afraid of the mechanics of dying, and she didn’t want me to go through any more than was necessary if she did die. She didn’t want me to blame myself for not ‘being there’ to help. We both knew she was dying. It was just a question of how fast, and which thing would actually be fatal. When she wanted me to spend all my time with her, it was what I wanted too. When you know time is finite, even if you’re not sure how finite, being with the person you love more than anything is all that is important. You squeeze every moment you can into your experience of them so when they go, they are still there in your heart and memory. You loose their body, not them.

As I was realizing I had paused for a long, drawn out death, I also realized it is time to be the person Shawn fell in love with again. The person who is curious about all aspects of the world, who tests theories, who proposes hypotheses, who uses knowledge, insight, and experimentation to try to make the world a better place for everyone. I may not have Shawn for a sounding-board close at hand, but I am surrounded by people who have similar interests to mine, and who are willing to help me learn and to learn from me.

It’s time to break out the notes, and get going.

The latest installment of “the Depression Workgroup” has been posted. This group, through the Church of the Ancient Paths, is intended as a way to educate and support the population living with Depression and Manic-depression. The classes themselves are based on Mary Ellen Copeland’s the DEPRESSION WORKBOOK, liberally interlaced with other experiences. I make no claims to be a mental health professional: simply a fellow traveler on a similar road. My opinions are not necessarily those of the Church of the Ancient paths. However, if you or somebody you know is experiencing either of these two organic brain disorders, maybe they can find help and healing in our work.

11/6/2009
by Bennett Gordon, The Nation

The nation’s unemployment topped 10 percent in last month, but for young people, that number is much higher. The unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds is almost double the national average, according to The Nation, up near 18.1 percent for September. Since December of 2007, those young people have lost some 2.5 million jobs, the most of any age group. And even though the stock market seems to be looking up, the employment picture for young people still looks bleak.

“I hope people are really clear that this is not an equal-opportunity recession, that it’s hurting the weakest,” Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good told The Nation. Low-income and people of color have been the hardest hit, according to Muhammad’s research. For unemployment white people in their early 20s is less than half (13.1 percent) of African Americans (27.1 percent). At the same time, college tuition and health care costs have been steadily rising.

The bright spot midst the crisis is the political engagement that young people continually display. According to The Nation, “many young people have already begun coming together, in protest and coalition-style advocacy.” They’re fighting for better health care, education, jobs, and to make sure this kind of recession doesn’t happen again.

Source: The Nation

11/5/2009 4:04:38 PM

Before the identity of the shooter at Fort Hood was revealed, press reports were already talking about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the stresses of an army fighting two wars.

What about the journalists who cover those wars? Over at In These Times, Kari Lyderson reports on a conference organized by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies:

CNN and former Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter Moni Basu described the effects of a career including seven stints in Iraq and covering executions by electric chair in Florida.

“You’re watching a man take 18 minutes to die…and then you’re supposed to just go file your story and move on,” she said.

…CNN cameraman Mark Biello was suffering nightmares and other signs of PTSD, that boiled over in a road rage incident where he accosted a cab driver.

“Every time you see things your cup gets fuller, and there’s only so long before it overflows,” he said.

…Reporters say it is harder than ever to persuade employers to make resources or even time available to address job-related mental health. But the need is greater than ever, as staff-cutting and belt-tightening often means heavier workloads that only add to stress. The issue is even harder to address for freelancers, who often don’t have health insurance or one steady employer.

Source: In These Times

Image by Kyle May, licensed under Creative Commons .

Deep brain stimulation, already established as a treatment for stubborn Parkinson’s disease, may also be useful as a therapy for drug-resistant clinical depression.

Probing into Depression
Research Blogging by Dave Munger, November 11, 2009

What would it take for you to allow a surgeon to probe deep into your brain to implant permanent electrodes that would administer behavior-altering electric shocks? Anyone undergoing brain surgery risks stroke and possibly death, and even if the surgery is successful there is the potential for infection, which would require even more surgery with all its attendant risks.

Tens of thousands already have electrostimulation devices implanted in their brains, and millions more may join them if the technique, called “deep brain stimulation” (DBS), gains wider acceptance. DBS was originally developed as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, and it has been remarkably effective. The primary symptom of Parkinson’s is uncontrollable body tremors that can make it nearly impossible to perform basic daily functions like eating and drinking, writing, and even walking. An acquaintance of mine who has Parkinson’s opted for the DBS procedure and now functions perfectly normally—it’s impossible for the casual observer to notice anything unusual about how he moves. He went from being nearly incapacitated to being renewed as a healthy, fully functional person. Perhaps it’s no wonder that he was willing to submit to such an invasive procedure.

In DBS therapy, one or more electrodes the size of a spaghetti strand are precisely positioned in the patient’s brain, then connected by wire around the skull and through the neck to a pacemaker-like device, a neurostimulator, just below the collarbone. The neurostimulator is activated and deactivated by a magnet that the patient carries, so if a tremor is beginning to become disruptive, DBS can be self-administered in an instant, with near-instantaneous results. A video provided by the manufacturer of a DBS device shows how it works in ideal cases.

Now new uses for the treatment are being tested. One observed side effect of DBS for Parkinson’s is excessive happiness, to the point of uncontrollable elation—the sort of unhealthy, personality-changing reaction that everyone fears when they think of electrodes being implanted in their brain. Tuning the device can minimize this side effect, but its very existence suggests that DBS might be a useful therapy for clinical depression.

The problem has been that, while researchers understand how DBS prevents tremors, they don’t really know why it might work as an antidepressant. That, too, is beginning to change. The pseudonymous UK-based neuroscientist Neuroskeptic points to a study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry in October. “Depression” was induced in rats by forcing them to swim in a cylinder of water from which they couldn’t escape. The amount of time the rats spent immobile, not trying to swim, is seen as a measure of depression. DBS was applied, and, as expected, the rats spent more time swimming and less time contemplating the futility of their situation. What was interesting about the study is that rats swam more even when the brain cells in the area where DBS was applied had been killed. The only way the researchers managed to block the effects of DBS was to deplete the rats’ brains of serotonin. Not coincidentally, many antidepressants work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.

“Joseph j7uy5” is the pseudonym of a psychiatrist at a US community hospital, who notes that DBS has been tested on a small scale for clinically depressed patients who are resistant to drug treatments. The success rates have been remarkable: Up to 60 percent of patients indicate a positive response, with 35 percent in remission after a full year. Joseph calls these results “astonishingly good”—remember, these are people who are apparently resistant to standard drug-based forms of treatment.

One huge benefit of DBS compared to other types of brain surgery is that it is fully reversible. The electrodes can simply be turned off or even removed if they don’t work or have adverse side effects. But still, the idea of brain surgery is a frightening prospect. Walter van den Broek is a Dutch psychiatrist specializing in treating depression, and two weeks ago he pointed to a new brain stimulation technique that doesn’t require invasive surgery. Instead of implanting electrodes deep in the brain, they are placed just inside the skull—a much safer procedure than full-on brain surgery. Three of five patients responded to the treatment—a similar success rate to the more-invasive DBS.

So if deep brain stimulation isn’t necessary to treat depression, is it possible that even less-invasive procedures might work? Another therapy that is garnering attention is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TCM), which uses an electromagnet to temporarily activate or deactivate regions of the brain without any direct contact. In 2008, the FDA approved the procedure for treatment-resistant depression.

But the pseudonymous blogger at the Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry blog is skeptical, pointing out that the study purporting to show TCM’s effectiveness may have been flawed. A large number of the study participants were excluded from the analysis and results, and there were key differences between the sham TCM and real TCM procedures that may mean the study didn’t have true placebo control.

Nonetheless, the tremendous success DBS has shown as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease and its early promise against treatment-resistant depression suggests that we’ll be hearing much more about electrostimulation of the brain in the future. As scientists learn more about these treatments, look for discussion and analysis of the results on ResearchBlogging.org.

Dave Munger

Forwarded to the Church for the benefit of the local community in the Rochester, NY Area:

Date: 2009-11-05, 12:59PM

Hello, I would like to start a support group for individuals that are dealing specifically with Borderline Personality Disorder or Depression. I would be interested in meeting at least once a week or more depending on what is needed or desired by other group members. At the moment, I am interested in this type of group and I am feeling out if there is anyone else out there that would like to give it a try. If interested, please respond and I will tell you more about myself and find out how we can make this work for anyone invovled. Thank you.

• Location: Unknown
• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Original URL: http://rochester.craigslist.org/grp/1452740337.html

The quote that begins this chapter sounds very much like the way I explained the feelings of being suicidal. An unknown voice is quoted with the following: “I feel like I am in a grave and someone is continually throwing dirt in to cover me – there is a small bit of light, but I am smothering.”

(For the rest of this week’s chapter in “the Depression Workgroup,” please click here)