At Friday night Shabbat services last week, the Cantor (who was filling in for the rabbi) read a sermon prepared by Rabbi Ben Spratt. While the sermon eventually focused on the torah portion for the week, it started off discussing silence or more specifically, the extreme lack of it. Everywhere [Read More]
This past Monday--March 20- marked the ten-year anniversary of the International Day of Happiness. Evidently, it was created by a United Nations Resolution passed at its 118th plenary meeting on June 28, 2012, declaring March 20th of each year to be the holiday. As one might guess, the resolution was [Read More]
LiveScience posted an article entitled “Deductive reasoning vs Inductive Reasoning” on January 30, 2023 by Alina Bradford and Mindy Weisberger. It got me thinking about how do we reason in resolving a dispute. Deductively? Inductively? Or a little of both? Let’s start with the basics. As the post explains, Deductive [Read More]
Quite a few times in the life of this blog, I have visited the notion of preparation. I usually address it as a result of someone attending mediation not being prepared. Well... as you might guess, it happened again. I had a mediation last week where it was obvious that [Read More]
Having mediated several thousand disputes over close to 20 years, I sometimes forget that for one or more of the parties appearing at mediation, he/she has never been in a mediation (It is quite new and foreign to him/her.) and so may be quite anxious about it all. Thus, my [Read More]
In 1978, Kenny Rogers wrote a song entitled “The Gambler”. Part of the lyrics include the memorable lines, You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away And know when to run You never count your money When you're sittin' at [Read More]
As I have previously mentioned, I am in a book club which reads and discusses books about conflict resolution. The latest is Holding the Calm: The Secret to Resolving Conflict and Defusing Tension by Hesha Abrams (Berrett-Kochler Publishers, Inc., Oakland, Ca. 2022.) The first question one asks is what is [Read More]
Mediation is Hard! Each week, The Economist prints an opinion article in its business section entitled “Bartleby”. Its January 19, 2023 piece is entitled “Why pointing fingers is unhelpful”. Its thesis is that while it is easy and quite tempting to point fingers and blame someone, it is not really [Read More]
