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Nov. 24, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran : The Atheists' unintended gift
JWisdom.com: You are a Philanthropist with Aliza Bulow (5 minutes)
Nov. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com: Actually, it really is all about you with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff
Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review July 1, 2005 / 25 Sivan, 5765

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Berries

By Garrison Keillor


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | These summer days when strawberries are in their prime seem to bring out the kindness in people. You bring home a little carton of hand-selected berries and wash the best one and pop it in your wife's mouth and this is a statement of tenderness. Tenderness and stubbornness make for a good marriage and marriage is the true test of character -- to make a good life with your best critic. You have many critics but your spouse is by far the best-informed of all of them.


I favor marriage between people whose body parts are not similar. I'm sorry, but same-sex marriage seems timid, an attempt to save on wardrobe and accessories. Marrying somebody from your team. Still, it's probably good for them to have to fight for the right to marry. My parents eloped against strong opposition from both families and they were in love for the rest of their lives and held hands and were tender on into their eighties. Of course they always had fresh strawberries.


The honeybees are enjoying their six weeks of life until their wings wear out and they drop dead, and we humans feel the transitory nature of life, too. Summer is brief up here in St. Paul. Fresh sweet corn has a short season. You boil up a few ears and you say, "G-d is great and G-d is good. And we thank him for this food. Let this meal to us be blest. And now I think I'll skip the rest. Let's eat. Amen." And you slather the corn with butter and salt it and eat it blissfully, row by row, left to right, hit carriage return, next line. And you think that this is the first of many corn feasts.


But it isn't. You're busy. Events press on you. The weeks pass and suddenly it's September and corn is over for the year and those ears are all you'll get. This happens again and again in life. Your friends sit in your back yard one night drinking beer and singing old songs, and you say, "Let's do this again sometime." And you never do. You promise yourself you're going to return to that great stretch of river in Montana and it doesn't happen.


On the Fourth, the adoption of Mr. Jefferson's little peroration against the King, you sit in the shade and think of America at its best, a generous and redemptive land, an amiable people. A nation of optimistic sentimental humorists. Europeans can be shocked at how instantly friendly we can be with people we don't know. We meet strangers over a cup of coffee and suddenly we're telling about the crazy uncle who ran off with the church secretary. We rally to help people we never met. Amiability is the basis of civil politics: You don't cheat people you like, you don't abuse people who might become your friends.

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That's the America I know, the nation of Rotarians and Methodists and generous teachers and parents, and then there's the other one, the angry freeways and the inhuman office parks and the angry radio and the greasy TV, the media America that seems to be gaining on us, but the old amiable America lives on. You can find it this summer at the state fair where people come to view pigs the size of Volkswagens and eat deep-fried broccoli and ride inside something like a salad spinner and look at a threshing machine and see a two-headed calf. There are blue-ribbon pies and bushels of apples and you can walk around and look at your fellow Americans perspiring in their shorts and t-shirts.


Meeting people, it seems that more and more when you ask them, "What do you do?" they don't have a simple answer. There are fewer farmers and machinists and welders and many more people in various forms of information technology and manipulation. Fewer ministers and more executive assistant vice presidents in charge of organizational resource imaging. This is troubling. But somebody must have grown these strawberries, and they are at their prime now, and we should enjoy them fully. The ones in September aren't nearly so good.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Garrison Keillor’s "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country. Comment by clicking here.

© 2005 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, INC.

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