Biography
Rabbi Herbert Bronstein has been a frequent speaker on 30 Good Minutes since his first appearance in 1985. For twenty-five years, he was Senior Rabbi of North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois, where he is now Senior Scholar. Rabbi Bronstein is active in the interfaith community and serves on the board of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions. With the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, he created the first official Catholic/Jewish Dialogue and has also been active in working with the African-American and Muslim communities. Rabbi Bronstein is a scholar, a writer, and a frequent lecturer on the Jewish liturgy. He's also a well-known authority on the works of William Shakespeare and has lectured at the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival and Chicago's Shakespeare Repertory Theater. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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"Curse or Blessing?" 
There is an instructive story, friends, about a cattleman in old China who woke up one morning to find that his best horse had somehow gotten loose and run away. He needed that horse to work with the cattle.

"What a curse," said his wife.

"What seems like a curse might be a blessing," said her husband. Sure enough the very next day the horse returned followed by a fine new horse. Two beautiful horses instead of one. What a blessing!

"It is surely a blessing," said his wife.

"What seems like a blessing might be a curse," said her husband. Well, they turned the new horse over to the fine sturdy son of the cattleman for training. He was soon after thrown from the horse and broke his leg.

"What a curse," said the wife.

"What seems like a curse might be a blessing," said her husband. A week or two later an officer from the king's army came to draft all able-bodied young men into service for twenty years, but since he had a broken leg, the young man was exempt. The curse had indeed turned into a blessing.

As there is some wisdom in the old American proverb, "Be careful what you want because you might get it," so we might say we ought to be careful about what we pray for. We don't always know what might be good for us and what may not be good for us. In fact, in this respect, throughout my life I have seen blessings transformed into curses and curses into blessings and it most often depends on us.

Some of you will remember the musical Fiddler on the Roof, about the life of poor, peasant village Jews in old Czarist Russia at the beginning of the century. People songs like Sunrise, Sunset. But every time I saw the production I had one unpleasant moment. It was the time that Tevye is having one of his homey, intimate conversations with the Almighty. He says to God, "If money is a curse, blast me with it!" Now there was nothing wrong with the original author's intent, but with the audience reaction provoked by the manner in which those lines were played. The audience always laughed in a self-satisfied, knowing manner. Now it seemed to me something was a little wrong with this reaction. There's nothing wrong with being well-off but the life-style of the audience was very different from the life of the poverty-stricken Tevye in that poor village of mud, with the always leaking roofs and the scarcity of bare necessities of life.

Tevye was always worried about where the family's next meal was coming from, so we can understand someone in Tevye's situation saying, "If money is a curse, blast me with it!" It is something like saying to God, "Give me a break!" But Tevye's outburst provoked a laughter which meant, "I have plenty of money. I sure like it and I would sure like a lot more," a kind of knowing and self-satisfied laughter. It's like the saying, supposed to be the epitome of sophisticated know-how, "You can never be too rich or too thin."

Isn't money always a blessing? Well, is it always a blessing? In scripture there is a passage that seems strange at the beginning. When the children of Israel were wandering, starving in the wilderness, we are told God fed them manna from heaven. Now in our parlance, manna from heaven has come to mean something like winning the lottery or a wonderful business deal that comes our way and blesses us. But then scripture said, "I fed you manna in order to test you, to afflict you."

Well, we can understand how money is a test of one's character. Those who waste money on frivolous expenditures we call fools. Those for whom money is the be all and end all of life, the goal of life, we call pagans or idolaters. Those who use it for productive purposes and for charitable purposes we call good and wise. But I've also seen that wealth, just as scripture advises us, can be a curse. I have seen young people from wealthy families retired before the age of 40, who spend the rest of their lives seeking every new possible entertainment or self-indulgence. What kind of life is that? I have seen how families have been broken up over the estates of parents, this one thinking he didn't get enough and so forth, so that such hostility arises that members of the family meet only at the burials of relatives and depart without saying a word to one another. I've seen character destroyed by too much money transformed from a blessing into a curse.

Many years ago I knew a fine, elderly gentleman who was a pioneer in the chain discount marketing enterprise and he was extremely religious. He was a very generous man in the community particularly, as I recall, for the elderly poor. I know personally that he unobtrusively and quietly helped many individuals who had trouble in business to get back on their feet and become productive again.

He had a son who was fed manna from heaven on a silver platter, if you know what I mean. He never had to work for anything. He never had to achieve anything on his own. Perhaps the parents mistakenly were trying to protect him from the hardships of their immigrant background, but he never learned to cope with any obstacles in his life in an honest way. As a result, the business went into wrack and ruin. Perhaps he tried to recover it in this way but he got himself involved in corrupt practices and dirty politics. The name of that man, which had been a blessing was turned into a shame, a kind of curse.

I have also known people who knew how to change a curse into a blessing, not only for themselves but for many others. When I was a young child, one day my mother said to me, "There is someone I want you to meet." Now many would have considered my mother wrong to have taken a young child into that kind of situation, but I remember it six decades later as a positive, affirmative, happy experience. I also remember that woman's name, Mrs. Phillips, which testifies to my mother's wisdom. The woman was totally paralyzed. She lay on a bed facing a fairly busy street, overlooking the street. The telephone company had fixed up a gadget so that she could talk as into a voice box. People called her all day long because, despite her terribly infirmity--unable to move except for the beautifully animated smile and laughter in her face, the sparkle in her eyes--she was able to help a lot of people simply by her affirmative spirit, giving advice, consolation, cheerfulness, a joke here or there. She turned what many would consider a curse, being so disabled as to be cast into a self-pitying melancholy all of one's life into a great blessing for herself and for many others. I bless my mother to this day for giving me the blessing of a memory that has inspired me very often in the hard times that sometimes I have had to face.

All of us fall into times in which we think our own personal situation is so blighted with an imperfection or by a mistake we might have made that we can never repair it. This is the point of a wonderful story by a famous Polish-Jewish teacher called the Dubna Maggid, or the preacher from the town of Dubna. This is the story. A king had a large beautiful jewel, a ruby, especially precious to him because it was a gift from his deceased queen mother. Through some careless accident, the jewel was ruined by a deep scratch and the king was in despair about this. He called many experts to repair it. Some tried polishing. Some tried chemical solutions. Nothing worked.

A proclamation went out that if someone could remove that scratch the king would be indebted to him for a lifetime. Many tried and failed. One day a craftsman of humble demeanor came saying that he would like to try and the king, nearly giving up hope, turned it over to him. Some weeks later the craftsman returned. No, the scratch was not removed but the king was delighted because through his artistry the craftsman had turned the jewel into something far more precious than ever before. You see, on the surface of the jewel at the end of the scratch, he engraved a beautiful rose. The scratch had become the stem of the rose through that craftman's skill. A curse turned into a blessing beyond price.

In each of our lives a precious jewel is given to us by God, more precious than any jewel. In any one of our lives there can be a scratch, an imperfection that we think sometimes can never be repaired. But through the artistry of our own souls, which is the image of God within us, we can turn those imperfections into works of art which make of our lives blessings, priceless blessings, not only for ourselves but for many others as well. I think this is what God meant when he blessed Abraham with the words, "Be thou a blessing." We can be sure that we may be a blessing We all can do it.

Interview with Herbert Bronstein
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Rabbi Bronstein, a compelling message on curses that turn into blessings and the reverse. I must ask you about your own personal experience with that phenomenon. Any moments that stand out?

Herbert Bronstein: Oh, sure. There have been so many moments, I think, in everyone's life. I read, for example, of the great artists like Mahler who went to his teacher with that great First Symphony and the teacher said, "This is the worst piece of music I've ever seen in my life!" To be able to overcome that, to keep on working, to come back. That was a scratch for him, quite a scratch. It was his own teacher. To be able to come back from rejection, to be able to turn a bad experience into something good, I remember someone saying, and it has worked for me. When I don't get what I want or when something bad happens to me, the first thing to do is to say, "What did I do wrong?" or "What can I learn from this?" You can learn from negative experience and how to be a blessing.

Talbot: I would love to have known your mother. What was her name?

Bronstein: Her name is Lillian.

Talbot: And she used to say, "Don't be resentful."

Bronstein: She had certain Yiddish phrases for don't be resentful, don't feel sorry for yourself. She talks to me, of course, still.

Talbot: A wise, wise woman. I wonder if she could have seen the amazing leadership qualities in her young boy when you were only in eighth grade. Weren't you mayor for a day in school in Cincinnati and City Councilman? Those leadership qualities, Rabbi, have resulted in major, major work through interfaith dialogue through the years in Chicago. Back to the metaphor of a jewel. We were speaking earlier of the spiritual seeker, Thich Nhat Hanh, who says "With mindfulness every moment of our lives is a precious jewel."

Bronstein: There was a great Prussian historian, Leopold Ranke, who said, "Every period of history is equal distance from God." I would say every moment in our lives we are always equally present to God and that God can be in every moment no matter what that moment is. So every moment is important. With that Buddhist right-mindfulness you don't say, "Oh, that was a great moment in the past." Instead, 
"I am looking forward to the great moment, or it's now." And how you behave now, that is important.

Talbot: The wider community of course, Rabbi, knows you as a distinguished scholar.

Bronstein: I like to study and teach.

Talbot: Leadership in so many areas, but how did you connect so passionately with Shakespeare?

Bronstein: I'll give you the briefest possible answer. You remember the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare some years ago?. I think it was 1969, somewhere around there. The editor of a rabbi's journal who knew of my interest in literature said, "Would you do an article on Shakespeare?" I knew very little about Shakespeare then—it's a long time ago—but I said I would. I liked the challenge and I wrote an essay which the Shakespeare Quarterly, which is quite a distinguished journal, picked up and printed as the lead article for that year for that event. At the same time Stratford was putting on The Merchant of Venice. The artistic director saw the article and asked me to speak on it and I got hooked. From that time, this is my main avocation. I go to sleep at night reading Shakespeare.

Talbot: And we're hooked on that connection between religious sensibility and literature. You do so well and that's another program sometime. It's wonderful to have you here.