Word Prompt – LESSONS – Eli Lebowicz

The word “lesson” gets a bad rep. We associate it with a formal classroom setting, automatically giving many PTSD of homework and school. That goes doubly for the Hebrew equivalent of the word “lesson,” which is shiur.

But there are informal lessons we can glean from different life experiences. Some lessons are small but still important, like make your kids’ lunches the night before so your morning self doesn’t hate your evening self. Other lessons are bigger, like don’t just major in psychology, with no intention to go into the field, requiring you to turn the jokes you thought of during Shemoneh Esrei into a “career.”

When my kids watch a movie, afterward I’ll sometimes ask them what one lesson of the movie was. I asked my 8-year-old this about “Aladdin,” and he said, “Don’t pretend to be something you’re not.” So maybe he was teaching me a lesson that even if I majored in accounting and pretended to do that for a while, it would’ve been inauthentic to who I was, and that being a comedian was my intended calling. And some of you are reading this thinking, “Yeah, you should’ve gone for accounting.”