Shalom and welcome!

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom
Sandstone, Minnesota

Updated August 21, 2005

This is my personal page, about our little homestead in Sandstone -- if you are looking specifically for my three books on reincarnation, including my latest 1999 release, Jewish Tales of Reincarnation, go to my homepage, RabbiGershom.com or my online bookstore. If you want my other Jewish resource links, go to my Jewish link launcher.

You can also visit my new site, TrekJews.com, where you can read about my latest work-in-progress, Jewish Themes in Star Trek, as well as a lot of other info about Jews in the Star Trek universe, such as The Jewish Origin of the Vulcan Salute.

But I do hope you'll stick around and read this page, too. Find out more about my current projects, activities and personal interests, etc.

Out-standing in my field...

In 1988, my wife Caryl (pronounced Carol) and I moved from Minneapolis to the small town of Sandstone, Minnesota because of her severe allergies to the air pollution in the city. (There are no photos of her on the website because she hates being photographed and told me not to post any pics.) The flower and vegetable gardens I planted in the yard were the talk of the town until, in the winter of 1996-97, the heavy snow partly collapsed the roof on our house. It was not fixable. Time to move again -- this time to a 15-acre hobby farm about three miles outside of town, where we now have 20 chickens, 10 cats, two dogs, two rabbits, seven geese, one hamster and one tarantula. (No pear trees or partridges yet, although a few grouse do come by now and then...)

This place was an old homestead that was all overgrown and full of junk, and there was no garden space or flowers. But we took cuttings of everything from the old house before they bulldozed it down (that was a sad day, to say the least). It's taken a while, but the new gardens are shaping up fine now.

Along with the house and the land, we acquired a few cats who moved in on us. Or were dumped here. People think that house cats can survive on their own, but cats raised as pets really can't. They just end up on somebody's doorstep -- or worse. The cat pictured here is named Sapphire, because of his beautiful blue eyes. Our old sheepdog, Grett, led me to him on a very cold winter's day in January a few years ago. The poor cat was cold, hungry, thirsty, and half-starved. Also too scared to come into the house with our other cats, but we fed him in the garage, and gradually I won his confidence. He now sleeps on my bed every night. He's a gently, loving animal, and I can't understand how anybody could have just abandoned him like that. He's got a good home with us now.

So nu, Maybe you are reading this and wondering --
A Hasid living on a farm?

Yep -- not all Jews live in the city, you know. Some of us got tired of the human rat race and decided to trade it in for some real rats in the barn (hah-hah.) The original reason we moved to the country back in 1988 was because of Caryl Rachel's (my wife's) health. She is so severely allergic to smog and other pollutants that we had no choice but to leave the city. Admittedly, the adjustment was very difficult for us, with no local community to worship with, etc. But we have also had the benefit of getting back in touch with the ecological side of Judaism that has been sadly neglected among urban Jews. Now, after more than a decade in the country, we have both come to love it. Be sure to check out my book recommendations on Judaism and ecology, animals, Jewish vegetarianism, etc. And be sure to read my review of Ecology and the Jewwish Spirit on Amazon.

We get to do a lot of mitzvahs that other Jews miss out on -- such as feeding our animals before we feed ourselves, and donating the naturally-moulted wing feathers from our geese to a sofer (scribe) for writing mezzuzahs and such. The white goose is Prince, our gander, whom we found as a lost gosling wandering down the road. (Photo courtesy of the Duluth News Tribune.)

The grey goose was his mate, Tipsy. but she died in November 2002. And therein lies a tale of loyalty and heroism:

When I first went into the coop that morning, I saw Tipsy dead on the floor and Prince was all bloody. Obviously, something had gotten into the coop. I grabbed the live goose and headed for the house. Caryl and I took him into the bathroom to clean him up. He was wounded under his wing, but he would survive. Since it was winter already and the pond was frozen, we filled the bathtub with water and let him swim around to clean himself up -- which he did.

When I went back down to the coop to get Tipsy's body, I saw that, although it was chewed up in one area, there was no blood on her feathers, nor was there any sign of blood on the floor around her. It didn't take a forensics expert to tell me that she was dead before whatever chewed on her body had arrived. There was a hole under the wall that my cats used to go in and out looking for rodents, and I assumed that the intruder had come in that way. I plugged up the hole and shut the door securely. (At night I always close the little doors that the chickens use.)

The next day, I found out what that intruder was. A big oppossum was crouching in a corner. It had apparently been sleeping under something and I had shut it in! I almost felt sorry for the poor thing, because if Prince had gone after it with his four-inch serrated beak, that critter was no doubt hurting bad. It was certainly in no mood to come out of the corner. I let the goose out and left the door open for the oppossum to escape, which it did -- never to come back.

An oppossum is basically a scavenger, not a hunter. They will eat carrion, so, as near as I can figure, the critter had been coming into the coop at night to steal some eggs or feed, and decided to have a meal of dead goose instead. The gander had defended his mate's body and gotten himself bitten in the struggle, but he won. Geese are monogamous, they mate for life, and are loyal to the death. We humans could learn lot from geese!

Prince healed completely and is again lord of the barnyard. For a while there, he was our only goose, and took to hanging out with the chickens to avoid being alone. In the spring of 2003 we got four goslings that he immediately adopted as his own (the male goose helps raise the young.) Plus, we took in a friend's pair of geese when she had hip surgery (the friend, not the goose!) and could not carry water to the barn that winter. These two were not named, but we soon dubbed them "Lewis and Clark," because they took to exploring the area and leading expeditions down to a nearby pond (where the owner enjoys seeing them there, thank heavens!)

When the four goslings grew up, two mated with each other, Prince chose a third as his mate, and the fourth is an extra female who hangs out with Prince, too. So everybody is happy now.

Are you a rural-frum Jew?

If you are an observant Jew also living in a rural situation, you might like to check out my Rural Frum e-mail community on Yahoo. We screen applicants to keep the missionaries out, so membership is not automatic, but someone will get back to you. Please be patient, though -- rural-frum folks live according to the seasons, not necessarily 9-5 like urban people. sometimes we are busy from sunrise to sunset with planting, harvesting, canning... so we are not always online every day.

You can learn more about Jews here in Minnesota at the Jewish Minnesota homepage.

Plus, I'm an avid birdwatcher

This winter (2004-05) we have had an amazing number of Great Grey Owls here in Minnesota -- literally thousands of these birds have been counted. This is a rare treat for birdwatchers here -- normally these owls stay farther north in Canada, but during January there was extremely cold weather (-25F on our farm, as low as -50F farther north). The owls apparently moved south in search of better hunting. And that let me add a new bird to my Life List! Read more about the owl "invasion..."

And there you have it...

That's all for now -- be well, be happy -- and walk in beauty!

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov said:

How good it is to pray to God and meditate in the meadows amidst the grass and trees. When a person prays, every blade of grass, every plant and every flower enter his prayers and help him, putting strength and force into his words.

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