It is called the Arena because its floor was covered with harena, the Latin word for sand. Back in the day, the morning show would be men, often prisoners, fighting wild animals—you know, lions and tigers and bears, which were captured and shipped to Verona to entertain the crowd. I don’t know which contestant had the greater odds of seeing the afternoon, but I would bet the animals had the advantage.

Aunt Phyllis told us a funny story about her cousin Roberta, who travelled to Europe by ocean liner shortly after World War II for a summer adventure in Europe. As was the custom back then, the family went down to the pier to bid Roberta bon voyage. Now, some eighty years later travel seems so ordinary and everyone is too busy to venture down to the docks to wave at passing ships. Forty years before Roberta set sail, their grandmother came to America as a young bride. She shook her head quizzically and declared, “I cannot imagine why on earth anyone would want to travel back to Europe.” 

My friend asked me, “What’s a Jew to do?” 

I wrote back. “It’s a little complicated.” 

To my five-year-old self, the old Temple Emanu-El in Wichita was the largest building that I remember. Light yellow brick lined the outside and its big square skylight was propped up by framed glass windows. The sanctuary, as seemingly ancient and musty as the Torah scrolls evoked no sense of awe or holiness to me. I didn’t choose to go to Temple, and the thought of not going never crossed my mind.

I decided to do an experiment. I wanted to see what the common wisdom would say to loss and mourning. So this morning, I asked the artificial intelligence ChatGPT to write a generic eulogy to offer at a funeral for “loss of a loving wife.”

Bulls, cows and dogs roam the streets in Varanasi, India, on the bend in the Ganges where the river flows northward towards it source in the Himalayas before it turns east again crawling toward the Bay of Bengal. Animals lie where they want and consume some small portion of Varanasi’s prolific garbage. Some people might adopt a particular cow. They might give her some hay. Then she will come to them to be milked. Besides the water from the Ganges River, milk is the holiest liquid. Garbage in, milk out. What a miraculous world!