It often happens that a by-product of a manufacturing process proves worthier than the original product of that process. For example, many people know the name of the most famous product of the Bayer Chemical Corporation of Germany. But few are aware that it was discovered by an accident. Namely, while manufacturing other chemical products, … Read more
A True Story Without a Moral In Oriental Mythology, the second volume of his comparative study The Masks of God, the famous American mythologist and lecturer Joseph Campbell retells an amusing story. It concerns a Shinto priest and a Western sociologist who met at a conference in Japan in the late 1950s. The Japanese … Read more
Hara Tanzan was a Soto Buddhist monk who lived for most of the nineteenth century. He was well revered in life and even before his death, there were many stories retold about him. It’s hard to distinguish which of them are true and which are not. This, nevertheless, is the most famous one. Tanzan was … Read more
Some years ago, Elizabeth Taylor experienced a big loss – thieves had broken into her safety deposit box and stole lots of valuables. Later she was asked – “Did you cry?”, to which she responded, – “I don’t cry for things that won’t cry for me!” What a profound lesson. We spend most of our … Read more
There is a story of a prisoner in a Russian labor camp whose job it was to turn a heavy wheel attached to a wall. For twenty-five years the prisoner worked at his backbreaking labor. He assumed that this wheel must be attached to a mill on the other side of the wall; perhaps he … Read more
A group of students once came to Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra (a distinguished Jewish scholar, 1089 – 1164) with complaints against G-d and His seeming injustice for the way He was allowing them to suffer at the hands of their oppressors. The Ibn Ezra responded by asking them the following riddle: Two men who had been travelling together … Read more