Drake has an African-American father and Jewish mother. He attended a Jewish day school in Toronto and parodied his bar mitzva while hosting Saturday Night Live in 2014.
31, in case you didn’t realize, is the reverse of 13, the age in which boys become men according to Jewish law.
Jewish pride, I love to see connection and expression, so cool! Another big part of Judaism is gratitude, which keeps us centered, peaceful, and happy.
Shabbat Shalom,
Coach Yulia
Truly, gratitude is the key to contentment.
One of the underlying themes in the Torah is the importance of
developing a sense of gratitude. Even the most spiritual person is
liable to fall into the trap of ungratefulness. As Abraham is…
approaching Egypt, a place of danger, after many years of marriage, he
says to his wife Sarah, “Now I realize how beautiful you are.” It
seems that when he realized that he might lose her, he became aware of
how much she really meant to him. One of the battles in life is to
avoid this danger of becoming accustomed to people and things, and
allowing this familiarity to deprive us of our sense of gratitude.
Unfortunately, we so often neglect to realize what we have until it is
too late. The Talmud tells us that, in order to avoid this pitfall, we
should spend a few moments before partaking of any pleasure in the
world to say thank you to the Divine, and to do so even for those
things which we take for granted. There is a Mitzvah to make a
blessing before partaking of the pleasures of the world to protect us
from becoming insensitive to the beauty and blessings inherent in
them. By doing this, we can take the most mundane acts and the most
simple moments of our lives and elevate them into a sublime
experience, revealing within them the beauty of the Divine. King David
says it all when he says “with every breath I take, I will praise the
Divine.”
—
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Jawary
