The only thing as annoying as mindless religious fundamentalism is mindless atheistic fundamentalism. The current specimen comes from an essay by Sam Harris featured at Arianna Huffington’s site, The Huffington Post. “Science Must Destroy Religion” probably takes the cake as the most arrogant title ever (although to be fair, some other blogger—Harris’s anti-matter equivalent—probably posted …
One of my greatest challenges is balancing the big world of beings and events with the little world in my own head and heart. Mostly, life consists of toggling back and forth between them, like someone switching between two TV channels. Reading this morning’s headlines about the president’s domestic spying and the prevalence of sexual …
I saw my first lit-up house on Wednesday, rather lovely with swathes and swags of white light draped like crystals on a chandelier and the shape of a sleigh picked out in white and red on the front lawn. I saw my first lit-up house and my heart sank as I thought, “Oh, no, it’s going to be bad this year.”
So this is a cathartic essay, written in hopes of purging my expectation of seasonal despair. You see, I’m not a Scrooge. I’m a disappointed product of twentieth century American culture, and Christmas is for me the supreme symbol and expression of my alienation from that culture. Some years, it really pinches.
I grew up in an optimistic fifties suburb populated with the white ethnic veterans of World War II and their young families. The school I attended was one of those California Bauhaus bastards, thrown up without niceties to accommodate the fast-multiplying products of the Baby Boom. There were just a few other Jewish kids whose parents, like mine, were recent immigrants from the east coast, who’d taken advantage of the GI Bill to muster out in California and become proud owners of a tract home with its own little scrap of lawn, its scrawny sapling, its picture window looking out on more of the same. I could identify each and every one of those kids because we met up every December in the library, where we were sent while the rest of the class practiced Christmas carols.
Two stories in the “Science Times” section of today’s \New York Times\ have set me to thinking. One concerns the brouhaha over teaching evolution, focusing on scientists’ distress at the subtle ways in which the Kansas Board of Education redefined science in its new science standards, adopted last week. Dalai Lama wrote of his own …
The High Holy Days are an exciting time for me. As I consider the year gone by and the year to come, I feel a rising sense of possibility. In our tradition, on Rosh HaShanah, the first day of the new year, names are inscribed in the book of life; on Yom Kippur, one’s \t’shuvah\, …
It’s official: Friday’s \New York Times\ lead editorial said President Bush’s Thursday anti-terrorism speech to the National Endowment for Democracy “suggested an avoidance of today’s reality that seemed downright frightening.” There is irony here, of course: Bush’s speech was an act of rhetorical terrorism, designed to scare all of us deeply enough to place our …
For the past few days, these lines from Deuteronomy 22:8 have been resounding in my head with the regularity of a heartbeat: “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet on your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it.” A statement’s appearance …
A story is told about a town that suffered from drought (I heard a version of it from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, but if you want to transpose it to a priest or a minister or imam, it will work just as well; if you Google the key words, you’ll see others have done likewise). People …
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” …