Raizy and I were driving along the Van Wyck in NYC when we saw this green lettering on the back panel of a white box truck. “Mom’s Choice is Optimistic”. It took some driving closer up to the side of the truck to learn it a truck from “Optimistic Transport” and the mom message is a slogan of theirs.
The first thing that struck me is that the mom in our family does BH choose optimism. We’re blessed that Raizy chooses to focus on the positive, to have an optimistic approach.
And the lettering on this truck reminds us that optimism is indeed a choice. It’s not genetic and it’s not based on life circumstances. You have people with huge problems and issues who are optimistic and others with much smaller challenges who are not. Bottom line, optimism is a choice. We create that for ourselves.
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It so happens that this Shabbos after seeing this on the boxtruck was our Cholent Cookoff 2o26. Cholent and stews, like all things of subjective taste, are a matter of choice. You can’t yuck someone else’s yum, we each have our own choices, and hence our own vote.
And cholent is an optimistic endeavor. Unlike an weekday stew, once you put up a Cholent you can’t do much about it. You have to be optimistic about how it would turn out. You give it your best shot when preparing it and once its starts cooking – it is what it is, it’s out of your control, and it takes optimism to believe in it!