This is the text of a talk I gave on September 12th, the first night of Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year, at the Aquarian Minyan in Berkeley. When Rabbi Diane Elliot asked me to speak on the Minyan’s High Holy Days theme of love and community, I felt so challenged I knew I had …
We’re entering that time of the Jewish new year, the High Holy Days, when each person makes a cheshbon hanefesh—a “soul inventory”—in preparation for a new cycle of the calendar. Sometimes I feel that people are influenced by this period of reflection even if they aren’t aware of it. For instance, this fall, like the …
This has been a week of collecting horror stories of behavior by people who seem to utterly lack a moral compass. As a friend of mine said, “Sometimes the world offends me.” But is it true? Are some people entirely lacking, without moral conscience in the way that someone might be born without wisdom teeth, …
I’m in the midst of a long-term research project on the topic of love. It started months ago, when my use of the word in the context of culture and politics evoked discomfort on the part of some academic and philanthropic readers. In the contexts where these questions arose, the word “love” isn’t much used, …
No, it isn’t an exotic bean curd dish at a very special Japanese restaurant. It’s Hebrew for “without form” and “void,” or “formless” and “empty,” as most English versions of Genesis 1:2 translate the Hebrew description of the chaotic state that preceded creation: “And the earth was without form, and void (tohu v’bohu); and darkness …
What do you suppose the most compassionate person in Iraq thought when the killings at Virginia Tech made headlines last week? Here’s how I imagine it: “What a terrible thing! May their souls rest in peace. Forgive me for saying so, but perhaps the Americans will now begin to understand how we feel when our …
Can anyone give me the Talmudic citation for the teaching “Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”? (Just kidding. It’s Groucho Marx.) We Americans have this silly addiction to top 10 (40, 50) lists. I suppose it began as a marketing artifact (and …
On the Gregorian calendar, today is the yahrtzeit (the anniversary) of the passing in 1976 of Rene Cassin, a French human rights activist and an author of the UN’s masterpiece, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That noble document contains a single line articulating the right to culture:
Words are my treasure and my pleasure, so it is surprising to find myself newly amazed at the power which can be packed into a single word. Case in point: “Apartheid.” Supporters of Israel’s current policies are up in arms over Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. They find it too critical of …
This week I dug out the light box I bought when we lived in Seattle, where darkness falls before 4 pm each day and persists till nearly 9 in the morning. The box generates an intense light that helps overcome the malaise some people experience in the season of darkness. For some reason, even though …