We know what we are celebrating this week, through the weekend, and into next week – that perennially less-important-yet-most-highly-vaunted festival on the Jewish calendar, the Festival of Lights. No matter how it is spelled in English, Hanukkah always falls on the 25th of the Jewish month of Kislev, and therefore near to and sometimes overlapping […]
These days, it is hard to know where to start, or what to focus on, when I write to you. Perhaps it is because my focus is constantly being pulled towards the prevailing Israel/Gaza crisis and its impact. Yet even in writing these words I know and understand that just the phrase “prevailing crisis,” without […]
Words. They are usually my friend. They bless me with their familiarity and function. Now, they are elusive. I rely on words to carry not just thoughts, but insight. I feel bereft of insight, and so am leery of words. And yet. We need still to gather them up, to fill our baskets of bereavement, […]
As far as I know, Robin never said this on an episode of the delightfully campy television series of my childhood. Their masks were decidedly prosaic and chunky, the effects and the “dramatic action” hilarious. Nothing sacred about them! In any version of the Batman artistic oeuvre, how or why they ever unmasked wouldn’t be […]
In our Kol Haneshamah Shabbat and Festival prayerbook, the prayer for peace comes from Ukraine. In a way, this declaration somewhat condenses the geo-history of the place, specifically the Jewish peoples’ place in that place. Yet there is no doubt that the figure we call Rebbe Nahman of Breslav practiced his form of Hasidism from a place now […]
Looking back on some previous reflections on Tu Bishvat, I found this message, one that feels keenly relevant to this year: We find ourselves, deep in winter, in the month of the Jewish New Year of the Trees, Tu Bishvat. At this time of the year the trees seem to the eye to be life-less. Where do […]
Is this you? You have a “Christmas Family.” They are your in-laws, your grandparents, or your cousins. It could be the beautiful kinship network that is your family-of-choice, or your partner. May your children celebrate with their half-siblings. Maybe, in those years when you go home for the Holidays, your childhood home is festooned with […]
How is human rights a Jewish concept? Is it even possible or appropriate to shoehorn an apparently secular construct into a specific religious or cultural context? Two thoughts arise first: The concept of an internationally-recognized corpus of human rights, and its attendant institutions, arose immediately following the Second World War, and the recognition of the horrors […]
Our household is enjoying a second season of pandemic gardening. Last summer, like many others with the blessing of a yard, we dug up a modest rectangle and planted a vegetable garden. This summer’s crop is almost at an end, but the bounty of tomatoes is dotting my diet with red, orange and green deliciousness. […]
When the Torah begins, it seems as if there was nothing, and then there was something. At the start, when elohim created the celestial and earthly realms, on earth was utter nothingness, with blank darkness hovering over the depths… and then, everything emerges from it. It’s a strange, haunting vision, provoking many ways of understanding it – scientific, […]
