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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | FEBRUARY 2025 21 By Steve Beno Craigslist, to quote Google, "formerly Craig's list, private corporation operating over the internet to provide classified advertisements, community information services, and community forums. Most of these listings are restricted to specific locations, which include some 500 cities in 50 countries." Craig's list in its original form was just about impenetrable for me. Poorly organized, even worsely presented, and crazily successful. The new Craigslist is much better and easy to use and is available as an app. But the app is not what prompted me to write about Craigslist. As I've mentioned before, I was treasurer and newsletter editor of a small Jewish congregation for 11 years. I say "was," alas, because we ran out of enough members and money to keep operating and, thus, closed our doors on June 30, 2023. (Funny, I'm now a board member and treasurer of Temple Sinai of Palm Desert.) But back in our salad day – wait "salad days?" Back to Google. "The term the salad days refers to the periods of a person's youth when life was without worry. The phrase originated from the play Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare, which includes the line 'They were my salad days, when I was green in judgment.'" ("Salad", "green" – I love Shakespeare. You know I was a drama major at UCR from 1960 to '64.) Anyway, back when Martha and I joined the congregation over 15 years ago, our leader was a man with a fabulous voice who acted as our cantor even without the formal training. Most mainline Jewish congregations are led by a rabbi, the intellectual leader who reads from the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), and a cantor who sings and chants religious music and leads the congregation in prayer. Small congregations are lucky to have either one of them. After a few years, our "cantor" moved away and was replaced by a woman, a trained cantor with an operatic voice. Unfortunately, because of family issues, she was with us for only a year. (Which was just as well, for if we had continued to pay her at her high rate, we would have run out of money years before our inevitable end.) She was followed by a married couple who were both rabbis. Despite assuring us they could sing, it turned out they were tone deaf. Can you imagine that our small bare-bones congregation so disliked the pair that we paid them while excusing them from actually leading us towards the end of their contract. So, here we were without a leader and fresh out of ideas for finding a new one until our president (and Four Seasons resident) came up with the idea of consulting Craig's list. Frankly, I thought that was a silly idea. Silly, that is, until she found two listings. We contacted one who never followed up. The other one was the answer to our prayers. When the president and I met with him, a real rabbi with many years of experience who could sing and play the guitar, we couldn't believe he was interested in leading us twice a month and on the High Holy Days. But he was enthusiastic and led us for nine years. Who'd have thought you could find a rabbi on Craigslist. As I mentioned, there's a Craigslist app. In fact, a smartphone app is a perfect application for Craigslist. You must select a category and then enter your search term. Just for fun, I downloaded the app and entered "rabbi" in the search bar. Lo and behold, I came up with nothing. Well, not exactly. I didn't find anyone looking for a job as a rabbi. But I did find two paintings of rabbis and one sculpture. I also found a "real rabbi fur coat" complete with picture. Just a guess, but I'm pretty sure they meant real rabbit. At least I could figure that one out. The other search result I can't make any sense of – "soft warm plush indoor home winter slippers boots women cute red rabbi." Side note: Sadly, Ukraine has been in the news for the last three years. So, I found a piece on the Business Today website interesting. The following apps have Ukrainian roots – WhatsApp, PayPal, CleanMyMac, Snapchat, Grammarly, Crypto, and GitLab. If you use an app you'd like to share with others, let me know at steve.benoff@verizon.net. THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT! Craigslist Did A Mitzvah

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