Someone trash is priceless and Foreskin's lament

1. Painting found in trash could fetch up to $1 mln
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By Jennifer Ablan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The treasure that a New York City woman saved from the trash -- a stolen masterpiece by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo -- is expected to go for as much as $1 million at auction next month.
Elizabeth Gibson will get a $15,000 reward for returning "Tres Personajes" ("Three People") to its rightful owners, as well as an undisclosed percentage of the auction price.
Nearly four years ago Gibson was on her way to coffee when she spotted the painting among garbage bags set out for morning collection in her Upper West Side neighborhood.
She walked by it at first but said she "immediately knew I had to go back. I knew I had to take it!"
sermon point-others people's garbage are other's treasures. So many chuck Jewish practice in the garbage-its priceless. What follows is a guy who is kind of chucking much in the garbage. Maybe because his family were overboard

2. From Sundays NYT Book Review-Abraham being comforted about his mila vs this book

Now Shalom Auslander has entered the ring, flying off the ropes, pro-wrestling style, with his memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament,” a no-holds-barred affront to the G-d whose name is never uttered by the faithful under Jewish law. Auslander, a contributor to “This American Life” and the author of a book of stories called “Beware of God” (2005), grew up in a strict Orthodox community about 30 miles north of Manhattan — “By the time I was 8 years old,” he recalls, “I had already learned 12 different names for God” — and his funny, fierce and subversively heartfelt book is a record of his coming-of-age in captivity and an ode to “the evil inclination” that would set him free from bondage, but not entirely.
“My relationship with God,” Auslander writes in a typically bracing passage, “has been an endless cycle not of the celebrated ‘faith followed by doubt,’ but of appeasement followed by revolt; placation followed by indifference; please, please, please followed by” — well, a series of rebukes that can’t be printed here.
“Foreskin’s Lament” is divided into self-contained episodes that hew neatly to the David Sedaris model (and that all but come with commentary by Ira Glass) while revealing a world and mining a moral outrage that is Auslander’s own. There is the annual Yeshiva of Spring Valley Blessing Bee, when students compete to call out the correct blessing for foods based on the six major categories and the infinite number of combinations outlined in “The Guide to Blessings.” Auslander’s quest to be a talmid chuchum, or wise student, is handicapped by trouble at home: his father gets violent when he hits the kosher wine, leading to bloody noses and compensating gestures from his beleaguered mother (“Who wants the last matzo ball?” my mother asked. “I made extra”). He’s also thwarted by Rabbi Kahn, who fixes the questions to favor Avrumi Gruenembaum, a classmate who has just lost his father. There is the holy ark to house the Torah that Auslander’s father, an accomplished carpenter, builds at the request of Rabbi Blonsky for their synagogue; the honored task brings only public humiliation and more tension to the family dinner table when the doors won’t open during services.
“Rabbi Blonsky was 40 years old,” Auslander remembers, “and he worried a lot about the Jewish people. I was 9 years old, and it was the Jewish people in my house I was worried about. A holy ark wasn’t going to help any of us.”
To Auslander, who is no longer observant but is still, as he phrases it, “painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious,” the God of the Jews is a great divider, tearing apart families over questions of ritual — some of the book’s most moving material concerns the decision by Auslander and his wife, Orli, made at great personal cost, not to have their son circumcised by a mohel — and turning life into a chessboard ruled by commandments and laws no human being could ever fulfill. Living in New Jersey with Orli (also the product of a religious upbringing) and desperate to see the New York Rangers play in the Stanley Cup finals on Sabbath, the two dress up in their Saturday finest and walk all the way to Madison Square Garden, dodging traffic on the George Washington Bridge and fighting blisters to watch Game 6, being played in Canada, on the Jumbotron. “It felt like synagogue — another place where people cheered for someone who wasn’t there — but with hockey,” Auslander writes. After discovering as a rebellious teenager that a yarmulke and zizits are a license to shoplift, Auslander is shipped off by his parents to a yeshiva for wayward teenagers in Israel, where he meets a girl and even reconnects with God for a time. But first there were more practical lessons: “Israelis sold pot, I was told, and Arabs sold hashish; I didn’t know what hope there could possibly be for the Middle East if they couldn’t even agree on how to get high.” As for his Baba’s failing health back home and the note to God that Auslander writes to shove inside the Wailing Wall, I will leave that for readers to enjoy on their own.
Framing these episodes of faith reprimanded, traif scarfed down in fast-food parking lots and the evil inclination let loose to run wild is the story of Auslander’s excitement and dread as he and Orli prepare to have their first child, a son. Why the dread? Well, for starters, there is the knife. And after that, the Covenant with God that Auslander has spent a lifetime trying to nullify by finding an escape clause. In naming their son Paix — “peace,” a nonreligious play on Shalom — and by having him circumcised in a hospital instead of by a mohel in a religious ceremony, Auslander and his wife take the difficult and undeniably hopeful step of striking out on their own.
“Thousands of years ago,” Auslander writes of the Prophet Jeremiah, “a terrified, half-mad old man genitally mutilated his son, hoping it would buy him some points with the Being he hoped was running the show. ... Six thousand years later, a father will not look his grandson in the face, and a mother and sister will defend such behavior, because the child wasn’t mutilated in precisely the right fashion.”
Writing with humor and bitter irony about the most personal subjects, with deep, real-world consequences, is no task for an acolyte, although many have tried. With his middle finger pointed at the heavens and a hand held over his heart, Auslander gives us “Foreskin’s Lament.” Mazel tov to him. And God? Well, he’ll survive.
Benjamin Anastas, the author of “An Underachiever’s Diary” and “The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance,” is at work on his next novel.
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