[PLUG-TALK] most common language spoken at home other than English or Spanish

[Rich Shepard]

On Sun, 17 Oct 2021, David Mandel wrote:

> I have been invited to Shabbat in Jewish homes a few times. I treasure
> those events. Very meaningful. I did a pilgrimage to the Holy Land a few
> years ago. One of the things that impressed me was just how Jewish Jesus
> was. That doesn't always come through in our Christian teachings. It
> should. That is also something I love about Islam. I'm not wording this
> well, but they have preserved a lot more of what I might call early Jewish
> Christian traditions than we Western Christians have. I have only been to
> Friday prayer service in a Mosque once, but it too was quite memorable.

David,

Good for you! When I was in junior/senior high school in NYC I used to go to
Christmas midnight mass with my Catholic friends. In return, they stayed
home on the Jewish holidays. At Stuyvesant H.S. we used to joke that half
the student body was Jewish, half Catholic, and the rest all other religions
in the city.

When I lived in Beer Sheva (and got past the cultural shock of living in a
third-world country) I was impressed by how the folks I knew at the
University, where I was living, and in the city at large how well Jews,
Arabs, Persians, and others got along. And this was during the war of 1984
with annual inflation at 800% and my grad students periodically not showing
up for class as they were called up for military duty at the Lebonese
border.

When we set mosquito traps (or emptied them) along the Dead Sea the roads
surrouning the kibutim or moshavim where raked daily. We had to walk to our
traps single-file and use the same footprints on the way out. They were
marked specially so patrolling troops knew we made those footprints and not
someone crossing from Jordan.

It's a different world there and pretty much remains the same 35 years
later.

Stay well,

Rich