A name came to me recently – I couldn’t tell you precisely why – a rather poetic name, as it happens. Chances are good you never heard of him. Earl Nightingale was one of the few survivors of the battleship Argonia, bombed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Nightingale later became a nationally-renowned speaker and author. His stock-in-trade was relationships, that is, getting along better with others. One of his most widely-quoted bits of wisdom was “Getting along with other people remains the world’s most needed skill. With it, there is no limit to what a person can do. We need people, but above all we need the cooperation of others. There is little we can accomplish alone.” (Shades of Dale Carnegie and his making-friends-and-influencing-people mantra!)

Art Buchwald, the renowned writer/humorist, once remarked, “Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.”

How true. Time rolls over us like a runaway train, and here we are again: another Rosh Hashanah, another Yom Kippur – and (lehavdil) another end of the Major League baseball season.

While certainly not in the same category as our High Holy Days, the World Series is an event with universal implications of its own. One year, they intersected in a meaningful way. I can’t help but recall Sandy Koufax and what he meant to American Jews as the baseball player who never forgot his faith. During Game One of the classic 1965 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers, Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, spent his scheduled turn on the mound not on a baseball diamond but in a synagogue seat. 

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rimanov was an important chasidic leader in Poland known for his asceticism, his wisdom, and, parenthetically, his mystical support of Napoleon. He said, “I was never in need of anything until I already had it.”

Here’s an anecdote worth preserving in anyone’s album of memories. It has a similar message: I was driving through upstate New York to visit my children and grandchildren, when I pulled into a rustic gas station for a refill. I noticed a sign announcing free coffee at a department store five miles up the road. I went on my way and soon approached this store, upon which was spread an elephantine banner that read, “If we don’t have it, you probably don’t need it.”

The store was a one-of-a-kind type of place, large and rural and unlike the big box stores in the urban areas where we live. It was a charming place, fully vested in serving a well-defined countrified demographic. Nothing there attracted me as a purchase for my grandchildren, but I did take something away from that store – something much more valuable.

“He doesn’t even know us, but wrote it seems like he knows all of us.”

That was the remarkably insightful response from one of the young adults with severe learning disabilities whom I taught in the late 1960s. We had decided we would write to Brooks Robinson, the great Baltimore Orioles third baseman, as a class project. In the letter, we asked if he would write a letter back wishing all of us good luck in the future. Almost immediately, we received a response to our correspondence.

Brooks will be 81 on May 18, and I wish him every happiness. When we wrote to him, Brooks was a human “Hall of Fame” stat line. Wrapping up his career after 23 years, from 1955 to 1977, the numbers (and Brooks was far more than mere numbers) leaped out at you: 16 All-Star games, 17 Golden Gloves, MVP in 1964, 2,896 games played, 286 home runs, and 1,357 runs batted in.

President Trump has made a superb choice in selecting South Caroline Governor Nikki Haley to serve as our ambassador to the United Nations. Ambassador Haley is a bright, savvy, and right-thinking public servant who will make us proud in her new and difficult role as this is arguably one of the most difficult and impossible jobs anyone could imagine. Soon enough, it is likely that Ambassador Haley will feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, when she begins to recognize that “We’re not in South Caroline any more, Toto.”

Ambassador Haley has made it perfectly clear in carrying out her task that “The days of Israel-bashing are over in the United Nations.” Representatives from nations whose agenda seemingly is as a single issue: Hate Israel, blame Israel, destroy Israel.