Arlene Goldbard

Passover ends on Sunday night, and I want to write one last time about the thinking it provokes. In the exodus story, Pharaoh’s power-mad distortion is such that he persists in refusing to free the slaves, even after his own advisors warn him that his policies are resulting in Egypt’s destruction. My friend Arthur Waskow […]

It is said that the Passover seder is based on the type of Greek banquet-symposium described in Plato’s writing: dining at leisure, dinner companions explore ideas, rhyming philosophical and physical appetites and satisfactions. Each conversation is different, owing to the participants, yet all focus on the same epic of slavery and liberation.
At our second […]

In my last blog, I wrote about spiritual preparation for the Passover holiday, how the deep metaphor of purging our diets of chametz — leavening — also relates to locating and clearing out whatever puffs up our egos or clogs our ability to remain present and compassionate. The other wonderful metaphor of the holiday has […]

Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) starts Saturday night. I love it that the central metaphor of Jewish spirituality is liberation from slavery, and that the holiday that commemorates the Exodus from Egypt turns on symbolic re-enactment of that liberation. For me, the greatest opportunity for growth lies in the elimination of chametz from one’s life during […]

Years ago, I read an extremely woo-woo book whose author, the late ethno-botanist and psychopharmacologist Terence McKenna, posited time as a spiral descending toward a point of convergence in December of 2012, when the nature of reality would be radically transformed in some way impossible to predict. His theories were based on the Mayan calendar, […]

On Tuesday night I watched Daniel Anker’s new documentary on the cable channel AMC, Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and The Holocaust. It’s not scheduled to rerun at this point, but look for repeats in months to come. It depicts the way self-censorship takes hold, borne along by commercial considerations (e.g., reluctance to offend German movie […]

A week ago, I posted an essay about feeling deeply discouraged. My purpose was to whistle in the dark: I thought if I said out loud that I intended to persevere despite discouragement (or as I put it, to “proceed without the insulation of hope, the armor of faith in my own judgment”), I’d […]