“Don’t scare yourself. Stop terrorizing yourself with your thoughts. It’s a dreadful way to live. Find a mental image that gives you pleasure (mine is yellow roses), and immediately switch your scary thought to a pleasant thought.” Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank, Meta-Siddur According to the secular calendar, this coming Monday is the yahrzeit–the anniversary of the …
It appears that we are in a time of spiritual convergence. The rapid expansion of communications technologies has propelled the writings of countless spiritual traditions through cyberspace, making it clearer than ever that beneath their differences, they speak of the same profound truths. As Gandhi said, “Even as a tree has a single trunk, but …
Do you hear a faint crackling sound? Don’t be alarmed, it’s just a paradigm shifting. And about time too. Today’s New York Times carries a report on policies proposed by the Association of Art Museum Directors; AAMD says museums should take care in exhibiting sacred objects. A particular focus is on indigenous objects, such as …
When I was first learning to drive, every movement of the steering wheel caused the car to veer too far in one direction, and when I attempted to correct by steering the other way, I often went too far back. Until I’d practiced a few times, I drove like a drunken skater. And so we …
I’m part of an online listserv for Jewish progressives that’s in an uproar these days over a rabbinic sex scandal. A spiritual leader repeatedly crossed the line, engaging in secret relationships with women students, whose status in relation to his own should have put them at arm’s length. He lost his post, then announced that …
You know what I think of predictions, right? If you need a little reminder of the perils of prognostication, consider that we’re coming up on the 40th anniversary of the late Timothy Leary’s 1967 prediction that “Deer will be grazing in Times Square in forty years.” Actually, this morning I was thinking of a line …
Next week is Passover, celebrating the liberation from slavery in Egypt described in the biblical book of Exodus. Like all Jewish holidays, it is a reminder. As we remove the chametz (leavened bread and similar foods not eaten during the holiday season) from our homes, we also search our souls, digging out whatever is puffed-up …
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.