Pro Commerce

In honor of the late Rabbi Alan Lew

If you want to read in detail about Alan’s life, there are many references on the Internet.   He wrote five books on his practice. I knew Alan for several decades and loved him.  He practiced Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center, where I knew him. He later became a rabbi and served at a San Francisco conservative congregation where I spent time with him.

I only wanted to pass on one thing I learned from him that may or may not be in his books.

Alan had a way of reading the most significant hebrew prayer, the Shema, that is a fascinating connection to Zen.

To understand what this reading of hebrew is about, one needs to know that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, working with a radio telescope at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1964, detected a microwave radiation at a wavelength slightly less than 3 degrees above absolute zero. This microwave radiation pervades the universe.  This radiation is believed to be the current sound of the big bang creation of our cosmos.

Penzias is related directly to Judaism. His grandfather was a rabbi and his daughter is a rabbi in Safed.

This is the Shema: read the Hebrew  from right to left

 

Sh'ma Yisra'eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.

The hebrew ‘Shema’ translates as breath, the origin of the word. Also hear, discern, obey, understand.

The hebrew Eloheinu translates as ‘our god’, ‘what we call god’.

The hebrew echad is ‘one’ but also ‘everything’, ‘the now’.

The two quote marks are the name of God that is never said, but is substituted for with the word Adonai.

Rabbi Alan suggests that the Shema should be understood:  that the Adonai we are to listen to is the sound of the universe, the background microwave radiation. The ‘now’ of the universe. The universe is to be heard when we listen to our breath.

So it can be read as: ‘Listen Israel, god is the sound that pervades the universe, it is the great now.’

That works for Zen and Judaism.  If it is of interest to you.

The happiest era

I was eight years old at the end of World War II.  I have lived in the happiest era in human history. My life has been bountiful.  I’ve travelled the world for seven decades in the modern world of global airlines and lived many years abroad. The whole planetary adventure was at a cost of one or two earlier transAtlantic steamship trips.

I’ve owned homes, raised successful and happy children who have raised spectacular children of their own.  We have all had medical confrontations that would have maimed or killed us in the era before I was born. Our health has thrived.

I’ve lived fully in the era and enjoyed telecommunications, computers, private airplanes, a wide range of technologies, the abundance of food and the most exquisite culinary joys ever known to mankind.

I have created many new businesses, including creating Mastercard the basis for the first global currency. Which I used to travel from the old villages of Indian untouchables to open markets with European goods in the most remote inner towns of Cameroon.

I lived in San Francisco, the capital of the hippie world, as a healthy male, during the twenty year sexual freedom experiment.

I uniquely enjoyed the prosperous world around me.  I got to wallow in the abundance. I earned my own living from age 17.   My only financial inheritance was under $40,000 when I was 37 years old. I supported my parents in their old age.  For most of my life I was self employed and did what I wanted everyday and every hour. I had many hundreds of beloved friends (and still have many) and an abundance of fascinating lovers.

Nothing I did has been secret.  I’ve written more than a dozen books based on my experiences and over five thousand blogs.

This has been possible for only one reason: I have lived in America during the most successful commercial period in world history.  The Cold War kept the Marxist anti-American Left out of power in America during those decades.

I believe anyone, with an adventurous nature, born during my lifetime could have enjoyed what I have. My last book was an homage to the sources of America’s commercial triumph. The Most Important Book in Human History.  It explains for all who are willing to listen; the sources of American innovation and greatness. Our meritocracy.

Blessed is he who appreciates what we have, understands it’s exceptional nature, its fragility and fights to protect it for our children.

All that wealth and envy

Interesting that most of the great new wealth of the past three decades is concentrated in the San Francisco and peninsula area.

Since nearly all of these nuevo riche made their money in tech they are doing something not surprising.

The new techie wealth is investing in new technology.  Investing in start-ups and start-up funds. Billions of this new money is going into technical  innovation.  Much of it the area where they live.

That means the new wealth is feeding back into new products, new technology, new pharmacology and the innovative future of America.

This is not a unique situation.  New money in the 1890’s, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould, Vanderbilt and Mellon went into new industries that gave us electricity, phones, radio, autos, airplanes and the innovative explosion at the beginning of the 20th Century.

The great Texas oil money, Mecom, Murchison and Hunt went into more oil and the technology that is still the pride of the world.

This new 21st Century tech money is going right back into technology and a bountiful future.

Don’t let the envious Marxists and other Lefties put a damper on everyone’s future health and bountiful lives.