Roland has tagged me in this sentence game doohickey, and who am I to break the chain?

Here’s how it goes:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

It seems like a party game without the headache in the morning. It’s the kind of thing you do if you are having trouble getting to sleep, I guess. Which I hardly ever do.

But what do you know. Your lucky night!

Here come my three sentences, based on my closest-to-hand English language book right this minute, a little old number called The Torah Profile (Mesorah Publications 1988), edited actually by my old friend Rabbi Nisson Wolpin, that I am not quite sure what it’s doing here. I mean, I do have a lot of this stuff, but why it is in the bookshelf in my home office seems to be a Passover cleaning artifact that I am powerless to explain. I mean, it has my wife’s maiden name written in it! Anyway, the book is an anthology of biographical sketches of Torah scholars from different eras originally published in Agudath Israel‘s Jewish Observer magazine. This selection happens to be about the Tunisian sage Hakham Yitzhak Hai Tayeb who lived from 1743 to 1837, if you don’t mind! (To those of you who know Har Nof in Israel, I believe it is he after whom the street called Rechov Chai Taib is named.)

Okay, here goes:

The Phoenicians had two city-states, Tyre and Sidon (cities by those names still exist today), each with its own king. The Phoenicians were known as the world’s best businessmen and shippers; indeed, there is archaeological evidence that they reached North America. It goes without saying that they had branches of their export-import trade in every port of the Mediterranean, Tunis — or Carthage, as it was known in antiquity — among them.

Hope you’re satisfied, Roland.

Sprite that I am, I hereby playfully tag Nieporent, Irina, Mary, Soccer Dad and Ara.