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Post by peachymom1 on Jul 17, 2023 23:52:15 GMT -5
What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.
Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:
Frieda
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy
And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!
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Post by peachymom1 on Jul 17, 2023 23:53:26 GMT -5
Good morning! I think I’ve shared before that I didn’t grow up watching the original “Star Trek,” but that DH converted me into a Trekkie in 1986, the summer after I graduated from college. We lived at his mother’s house that summer and watched reruns of it on the TV in our bedroom, which to me was much preferable to hanging out with MIL in the living room.
My favorite episode is “A Taste of Armageddon,” where Captain Kirk forces two planets to end their 500-year war and try to make peace. At the end, Mr. Spock says to him, “Captain, you almost make me believe in luck,” to which Kirk replies, “Why Mr. Spock, you almost make me believe in miracles!” This prompted a discussion with DH about luck, miracles, “bashert,” etc., and we’ve talked about those things many times over the years.
Do you believe in luck? Do you think some things are just random and have no explanation, or do you think God (or the universe, or whatever) controls events and outcomes? I read an interesting article recently by someone who feels that we make our own luck, good or bad, and that we can change our luck if we change our behavior. What do you think?
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Post by louise on Jul 18, 2023 7:16:16 GMT -5
A tricky place. I often hear that there is no such thing as a coincidence - this it would seem is akin to making your own luck or believing in some kind of bashert world order. Sometimes I say that I am very lucky to be so healthy; other times - and I guess depending who I'm speaking to - I will say that I am very blessed to be so healthy. I have been blessed with that and many other thing as well. I can understand the "making our own luck" aspect in that how we prepare for things, see/sieze opportunities, or open ourselves to them can impact the outcome. But when you come right down to it people who take very good care of themselves can still have a heart attack. People who work very hard at their jobs can still lose them. We do not have control over these events. Maybe it's like on YK that we can, at least sometimes, impact the severity of what happens to us.
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lee058
This space for rent
Posts: 23,299 
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Post by lee058 on Jul 18, 2023 8:32:53 GMT -5
Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well and SAFE!
Re today's topic: I am going to be wishy-washy and say that luck and destiny can be hard to distinguish between.
Have a peaceful day, Lee
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Post by hollygail on Jul 18, 2023 8:41:59 GMT -5
From "light" yesterday to "heavy" today... Yesterday's jokes made me giggle, BTW.
I believe we create some of our own destiny. As for "luck" itself, I don't have a hard and fast position. If something shows up, whether it's by luck or circumstance rarely matters to me; I take it that it just plain "shows up." I deal with or I don't; it's my choice. I do remember the Armageddon episode, but am not sure what Spoke and Kirk meant in that "luck / miracle" moment, so I can't comment on it.
My step-son and his wife and two little ones vacation for about a week on the island of Coronado (part of the great city of San Diego) each year. We usually have breakfast with the four of them. Last year, for the first time, the six of us met at a restaurant not far from our house (previously we drove to where they were staying, maybe a half hour away from us compared with about five minutes away) and on Thursday (yes, in two days) we'll meet them at the same restaurant as we did last year. (One year, they rented a two-bedroom condo and unbeknownst to us in advance brought his mom and step-dad along; as DH and I were walking from the elevator to their door, another couple around our age was walking toward the elevator. You guessed it: DH's ex and her hubby. But the clincher is I recognized them before DH did! I'm the one who told him his ex was walking toward us!)
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Post by gazelle18 on Jul 18, 2023 12:20:09 GMT -5
I just don’t know. Do I really believe in luck? Well, I’m going to relate the following true story:
Years ago I practiced law with a woman who became a close friend. Our office was in a large multi story building, and on the ground floor was a nice little restaurant. We’d go there to lunch, perhaps once or twice a week. We always sat at the same table in the corner of the restaurant. I had the chair looking out at the street, and my friend sat in the actual corner, looking out at the restaurant, under a mounted TV which they must have turned on at night for sports events. One day, we went to sit at that table, but someone has just left it and it was still dirty, so we were seated at the next table. This had NEVER happened before; somehow we had always been able to sit at “our” table. During lunch, we heard a loud “crack, crash, boom!” The wall-mounted TV had come crashing down, in the exact spot where my friend’s head WOULD have been had we sat where we usually sat! Lucky?
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Post by peachymom1 on Jul 18, 2023 15:52:34 GMT -5
In Lynne's story, I would say it was not only lucky for her and her friend to have been seated at a different table, but also lucky that the people who had sat at the ill-fated table had left as soon as they did, thereby also avoiding calamity.
In general, I wonder if it's a combination of opportunity and effort. I could say that it's lucky that I met DH because we both took summer school geography in 1977 and got put in the same class, even though he was two grades ahead of me. I consider our meeting to be a blessing from God, not just a lucky coincidence. But either way, we wouldn't be where we are today, 46 years later, if we had not both put a lot of time and effort into getting to know each other and then committing ourselves to each other.
Holly, BTW, the two warring planets in the Star Trek episode had turned the horrors of war into a nice, neat, painless affair - instead of attacking and destroying each other, they simply chose names at random, and those victims simply reported to "disintegration chambers" on their own planet, where they were vaporized. So Kirk destroyed all the disintegration chambers, making it impossible for the people declared as war casualties to report to be disintegrated. He also destroyed the computers that calculated the war casualties. This left the two warring planets with two choices: go back to the horrors of real war, or stop the mishegas and make peace. Kirk tells Spock that he'd had a feeling that after 500 years of war, the leaders of the two planets would do anything to avoid the real thing. Spock says, "A feeling is not much to go on," to which Kirk replies, "Sometimes a feeling, Mr. Spock, is all we humans have to go on." Then Spock says, “Captain, you almost make me believe in luck,” to which Kirk replies, “Why Mr. Spock, you almost make me believe in miracles!”
Spock meant that Kirk had taken an awfully risky chance, which could very well have ended up in the destruction of both planets and everyone on the Enterprise as well, since the Enterprise had been deemed a casualty of war, and everyone was supposed to report to a disintegration chamber. And Kirk meant that it was miraculous that Spock would be open-minded enough to even consider the possibility of luck, as opposed to logic and reason.
I think I'll watch that episode again tonight.
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