I think the purpose of life is to be useful, responsible, honorable, compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to… - Leo Rosten

The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.

The braggadocio aspect is important: a successful but modest man is ordinarily not called a k’nocker. A k’nocker is someone who works crossword puzzles — with a pen (especially if someone is watching).

SCENE: Classroom, Lower East Side, 1926. Teacher: “Who can tell us where the Romanian border is?” Student: “In the park with my aunt, and my mother doesn’t trust him!

The Hebrew alphabet, incidentally, came from the inhabitants of Canaan, which was that part of Palestine the Greeks called Phoenicia. Hebrew was most probably the language spoken by the Phoenicians/Canaanites (Isaiah spoke of the “language of Canaan”), who almost surely created those letters that formed a Semitic alphabet and from which all the alphabets in Europe descended. Hebrew was one of a cluster of related languages (Aramaic, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Arabic, etc.) known as “Semitic.