How often have you heard people say, “I must have missed it. I looked but didn’t see it”. During my Kabbalah class last night I provided each class member with the famous illusion in which the brain switches between seeing a young girl and an old woman (or "wife" and "mother in law"). This figure had been adapted from an original concept that was popular throughout the world on trading and puzzle cards of the long past.

When I tallied what my class members saw it was weighted 3:1 in favour of the ‘old hag’. Does this mean that my less than scientific survey demonstrates that about ¾ of the world population always see the cup half-empty rather than half-full.

Like many, I love books. I particularly love old books. I get excited when I see a faded thirties dust jacket, and even more so when it is an older leather-bound. I love holding an early edition of John Harvey Kellogg’s medical text I own and noting the yellowing pages that bear the nutrition wisdom of another generation. And to hold a rare pre-war single volume edition of the Talmud (which normally sports twenty oversized tomes) with its microscopic Hebrew text of wisdom two thousand years old, is sheer ecstasy.