BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

It is therefore the universal Jewish custom – some time before Yom Kippur -- to apologize and seek forgiveness from any friends, relative, or acquaintances whom we may have harmed or insulted over the past year. REPENTANCE Repentance is predicated on wanting to stop the transgression. To achieve this, we must first analyze the dynamics of transgression. How does it happen? There are four stages in the process of transgression: Dormant Active Situation Transgression To illustrate, let's use the example of someone trying to stop smoking. The scene is a man sitting by his desk at the office doing work. He has a history of addiction to cigarettes and has been trying to stop smoking, unsuccessfully, for three months. Let's observe him and see what happens... DORMANT At first the urge for a cigarette is DORMANT. It can be activated at any time but at this point the craving for a cigarette is nothing more than potential energy. ACTIVE The door to our smoker's...

I was raised by my father, of blessed memory - to be truthful. Being scrupulously truthful has caused me a lot of problems. People either don't want to hear it or are frightened by it coming out (and often attack you for telling it.) But I am raising my own children to cling to truth. It will set you free. By Berel Wein The Torah extols the value of truth as an absolute virtue. It teaches us to stand firmly away from falsehood. Even though the technical application of this value in Halacha is apparently limited to legal and evidentiary matters, the value of truth in Judaism as a general axiom is unquestioned. Yet the Torah itself allows for the situations when ultimate truth can be harmful and counterproductive to family harmony and social amity. The Lord Himself, so to speak, does not tell Abraham the entire statement of disbelief of his wife Sarah when the angel informs her of the coming birth of her son Isaac. She wonders aloud how she will become youthfully rejuvenate...

2002 saw me deeply depressed, physically more ill than ever and exhausted. 2002 also saw me get sucked into something horrible by someone I had mistakenly trusted for years. That trust was a hideous mistake. In the two years that followed this person who led me to believe they were my lifeline of sanity in an environment of oppression and abuse - twisted my mind, shattered my heart and lead me down the road to perdition. To a place where I didn't know myself, I was saying and doing things I would never have done under normal circumstances and where my emotions and trust were raped repeatedly. In the months that followed, with a lot of help - I forced myself back on track. The track of doing the right thing. This person had suggested Mussar to me. This person followed a lot of marketing/ mind control tactics and had a great way of giving me something with one hand - while lying and coercing me to do the polar opposite with the other. But I did look into Mussar - and I am stil...

(remember October is DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AWARENESS MONTH . Abuse can be verbal, emotional, online, mental or financial, too!) by Kathy Krajco ... A suggestion for how to keep narcissists and other psychological manipulators from controlling you. Never think to outsmart them or out-manipulate them. You might as well think to beat Roger Federer at tennis. But straight thinking can help immensely. Keep clear on this point: Your feelings are not under your control. Your conduct is. Do not let your emotions control your conduct. If you don't, you won't be manipulated. Like a novelist, a manipulator manipulates your feelings. A novelist knows how to make you happy, sad. He knows how to put you on tenterhooks. He knows how to make you side with a certain character, even a villain. He knows how to make you desperate to see the hero get what she wants. There are literary formulas for achieving all these things in the mind of the reader. So, con artists, narcissists, and psychopaths aren...

As we approach Yom Kippur in this New Year, we need to think about forgiveness. There's an awful lot of New Age psychobabble out there about forgiving & releasing guilt. But I don't believe in forgiving when the offender hasn't asked for forgiveness, made amends to you and you and the offender have worked things out. That's restorative justice. There were some people I knew since I was a little girl that I now haven't spoken with in almost 25 years. Why? Because they expect me to forgive & forget without them saying "I'm sorry" or admitting what they'd done. I can't be a phony. I was a good actor when I was working but that was work. I never practiced acting as a type of deception. In fact what I felt was that it was either portraying reality or some truth in a way that your audience could understand. Even in comedy I relished taking truth and blowing it up so big you couldn't miss it. Truth and honesty always resonate with...

Smear campaigns . As ridiculous as they are ugly. I've been the target of a couple in my lifetime; including one that's continued for a couple years now. What is really scary is how the smearer isolates his audience from the target so that they don't think for themselves. The smearer uses plausible lies and revisionist history and selective facts. (In my case I hear I have supposedly done things that would require me to defy my permanent physical limitations, bend the time-space continuum and be invisible at will!) They never ever tell the truth nor do they tell everything. And usually the smearer (somewhat pathological to begin with) is charming, glib, a good talker and tends believe the lies after they tell them enough. Kind of like Harold Hill of the Music Man. Good smearers concentrate their vitriol on an audience that doesn't know the target well or at all. People with a blank slate. Because anyone who knows their target should say "hey, wait a mi...

THE IMPORTANCE OF AUTHENTICITY I hate lying and I dislike liars. Despite being a working actor I am really bad at lying. I can't be bothered. My father, of blessed memory, often joked that he & I had the 'family curse' of being really bad liars and not liking dishonesty. It got me in trouble all the time when I was younger. Now when someone asks me a deep question I ask "do you REALLY want to hear my answer?" I will never understand why people decieve others. Predators do it all the time. And we're talking about people who blend right in . These people most often feign religious observancy, moral astuteness and care & concern. But like a 16 year old boy high on hormones - they just want to get into your pants or your wallet... or worse, gain your trust to abuse & use for their own selfish, narcissistic needs. Being authentic is important. Vitally important. And in today's social & political climate - it seems all but dead. by Anth...

SAFER? WITH BUSH? NAAH! In the Name of Objectivity, Media Clouds the Reality of Terror Report by Arianna Huffington Here we go again. Another devastating report being spun as a mixed bag -- with the spin dutifully echoed by the media. Another administration brain tumor being "offset" by shiny hair. This time it's the new National Intelligence Estimate report on the threat of terrorist violence against America that is being given the utterly ludicrous "on the one hand... and on the other hand" treatment. A prime example of this came on AC 360, where Anderson Cooper reported that "both sides in the Iraq debate are spinning [the NIE] to support their case." To prove his point, he rolled a video clip of Bush making the case for staying the course in Iraq. Back on camera, he said, "The Democrats, of course, see it differently." "Of course" they do. Not because there are always two sides to every issue, but because the facts are different...