eSefarad Noticias del Mundo Sefaradi
- Sepharadism is an attitude towards life marked by its curiosity, openness, optimism and compelling desire to make life enjoyable
For over a millennia, Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, and western Europe, developed a distinctive culture. The «Sepharadim,» the Jews of Spain, encountered there modernity in the form of Rome first and Islam.
While those two powerhouses of human progress, eventually lost their drive, Iberian Jews kept brewing that powerful mix of need to survival with visions of the future.
Sephardim are seen in almost any new drive to overcome stumbling blocks to human development. Medicine, economy, literature, politics, discovery, and exploration of new geographical territories, you name it. There you hear for centuries the distinctively Spanish rooted, not the Germanic or Slavic names.
Sepharadism is very much a culture if not an attitude towards life marked by its curiosity, openness, optimism, and its compelling desire to make life enjoyable.
«Choose Life,» is one of the main injunctions in the Torah, Israel’s foundational and Sacred literature, which uses not less than 10 different words to express the shades and nuances of a contented life.
Compelling Talmudic expressions such as: «He who has seen something pleasant and not enjoyed it will be held responsible’ and «Every human being will be held accountable before God for all the permitted things he beheld in life and did not enjoy,» Sephardism is a thriving force in today’s world.
Certainly, and mindful of the Sephardic character, the governments of Spain and Portugal recently enacted laws offering speedy naturalization to the descendants of those that, due to a «historic mistake», were «unjustly,» expelled from the peninsula back in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Though it has always been fashionable to delve into the shortcomings and deficiencies of the modern world, very little is said regarding the immense challenge of trying to keep 7.7 billion people around the world fed, healthy and without killing each other.
There is not a single area of human well-being, where, some of the 3 million Sephardim living around the globe, are not at work playing a significant part, with the rest of the world.
The Meriane Albagli Geni Cassorla Institute for Sephardic Development in the 21st century is organizing a Young Sephardic Entrepreneurs Forum in South Florida to explore that participation.
Next January, hundreds of Sephardic women and men will converge in South Florida to learn, network and present their achievements and visions for the future.
The series of workshops, panels, and conferences are inspired by one of the Jewish people’s greatest rabbis: «No one’s joy is complete unless he can share it with others.»
For more information and to participate in these events: https://www.21stcenturyjudaism.com/
Moshe Pitchon
