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What do Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U. S. president George W. Bush have in common? Thrusting ego, overwhelming confidence in their own rightness (whether they believe themselves to be anointed by God or History) and belligerent readiness to get up in their opponents’ faces and give them what for. Last …

Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, begins Friday night. As readers know, I’ve been working on my cheshbon hanefesh—soul accounting—in preparation for the deep rituals of t’shuvah—reorientation—that mark the period of the High Holy Days. One part of that work requires searching my heart and mind for knots of unfinished business: do I need to …

Monday’s New York Times carried a story of epochal significance: the town pool of Stonewall, Mississippi, which had been filled with dirt to avoid integrating it in the 1970s, is being excavated and reopened for the benefit of the entire community, black and white. More than 20 years ago, my partner and I were hired …

Last month I quoted Gandhi on inner guidance. “For me, he wrote, “the Voice of God, of Conscience, of Truth or the Inner Voice or the still small Voice mean one and the same thing.” The Torah reading for the week just ending underscores the same truth, exhorting the people to follow what they know …

“The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.” Critic and novelist John Berger wrote those words more than three decades ago for a groundbreaking BBC series on art. I have quoted them ever since, never surfacing them in my awareness without the …

Commemorations bring out my ambivalence. In the public sphere, most holidays and anniversaries make one of two statements: “We won and we’ll never let you forget it”; or “We lost and we’ll never forgive you.” Neither message describes a state of mind that seems worth cultivating: between triumphal belligerence and wounded bellicosity, my choice is …

A friend sent me the link to a story on NPR about Juan Williams’ new book condemning what Williams perceives as the stuck irrelevance of entrenched African American leadership and calling for a new leadership paradigm. “Have you thought about blogging on” this book? “It would be good,” she wrote, “to see what you have …

At this time of year, when I am doing my cheshbon hanefesh (soul accounting) in preparation for the High Holy Days that herald the New Year, I become especially attuned to reminders and signs. My everyday world is cluttered with ordinary reminders. I would not say I am particularly forgetful–in fact, I’m still pretty good …