This is my third and final essay about the rich learning I was privileged to share at the ALEPH Kallah, a spiritual retreat at the end of July. In the afternoons, I took a class entitled “Melitz Yosher: On Becoming An Intercessor,” offered by Rabbi Ruth Gan Kagan, she of generous heart and deep learning. …
As I wrote in my last essay, at the end of July I attended a large spiritual retreat, the ALEPH Kallah, where I studied with two wonderful teachers. Today, my hope is convey a few of the insights I gained from Rabbi David A. Cooper, whose class in “Kabbalah, Zen and Dzogchen: Interweaving Contemplative Paths” …
During the last week of July, I never read a newspaper, never heard the radio, never turned on the TV. I recommend an annual respite from our 24/7 broadcast of whatever the editors and pundits think is worth noting, if only to experience the useful instruction that comes when we tune back in and find …
When I read about your predicament as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presiding over hearings on the Bush administration’s next Supreme Court nominee, I think of Queen Esther. The biblical Book of Esther tells the story of a young Jewish woman who wins a beauty contest to become a queen of Persia. As time …
I’m one of those people who has a pithy little quote appended to my email signature. Whether I do this to share what touches me or in the impudent hope of instructing the world, I leave it to you to decide. But for the longest time, this epigram from the filmmaker Jean Renoir appeared at …
Some of us have it in our nature to sound the alarm, and some to say that this, too, shall pass. Both are right, of course. Panic generates fight or flight, and we’ve seen the limitations of those tools for problem-solving. (Have we ever!) But an impenetrable conviction that all will be well without our …
Tonight, the Hebrew calendar marks the beginning of Shavuot, a holiday that has its roots in ancient offerings from the barley harvest, and has come to mark the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai: the holiday of revelation. Like every milestone in the liturgical calendar, Shavuot invites us to examine our own lives and …
In the past few weeks I’ve had a remarkable number of experiences that lead me to reconsider some principles that once seemed rock solid. The through-line I want to write about today has to do with a particular dialectic: for now, let’s call it “inside/outside” or “exclusion/entitlement,” but it will take more than two words …
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 …