It was easy and heroic to maintain this seclusion for a while, when it was new, when we were constantly problem-solving. When our confinement was itself movement into the unknown. But at this point, I have depleted my internal resources.
Can I let go of my need for every moment of this terrible time to be productive or meaningful or insight-giving? What will it be like to let this time be: let it be its frustrating, tedious, anxious and sad self, without the pressure of having to be the source of global transformation or personal enlightenment?
Read moreWhere is God in all of this? The answer is, maybe, everywhere. And why isn’t God intervening? Of course God is intervening. In fact we are doing so every day.
Read moreThere are pieces of this isolation I want to remember and bring with me when we are finally able to move freely about the cabin. But I also know that this isolation, no matter how pleasant parts of it may be, is something we will all need to reckon with over time. Because there is injury in going so long not touching and not being touched! Noticing and having to ignore the skin’s desire to feel skin, our bones’ desire to be pressed in an embrace.
Read moreThe doe sauntered away, leaving me wondering how we got here. Our glorious, sorry species. How did we end up living this way? So far removed from the rest of Creation that is just outside our door? How did we end up seeing this Earth so imperfectly, as if through carnival glass?
Read moreTalmud says a dream uninterpreted is like a letter left unread. What does this if-only-it-were-a-dream time have to say to us?
Read moreAnxiety is of no use. It takes up space and disrupts work and relationships. But what if it’s squatting in your house, refusing to leave?
Read moreTorah tells us that we are meant to be a nation of priests. It is our calling and our destiny. And now the call is even broader. Because right now we are being called to be a Planet of Priests. Each of us tending the altar of our relationships with God and Earth and each other. Offering up our guilt over the profit-driven, Earth-consuming culture we have allowed to take root. And offering up like fragrant incense our gratitude for the simple and intimate gifts of connection and food and shelter.
Read moreIn this moment of unfolding epidemic, I am called to honor the complexity of the Creation we live in. This Creation in which uncountable species compete for space and survival, including the tiniest ones, who can sometimes, without malice, take down the mightiest among us.
Read moreA song drawn from Jacob’s farewell blessing of his grandchildren.
Read moreLying on the floor of an airport, unable to move, one learns lessons about prayer, angelic protection, and being one with the Universe. Not always the lessons one would have wanted to learn.
Read moreIn the Beginning there was Nothing – and Everything.
A new cosmology for 5780.
Read moreI am not loyal to walls or cages.
I am not loyal to taunts or tweets.
Read moreWhen I'm done with some of the prayers for specifics, I try to broaden out and pray for love. Always love. That it should enfold this world. That there should be a field of love so thick, so viscous, that it slows bullets and catches falling people.
When I pray, at some point, it is no longer me lofting prayers into the world; it is the world drawing prayers out of me…
Read moreWhen Shabbat falls in the darkest part of the month, the Jewish world reads Torah's queerest story. What is the medicine?
Read moreWhether or not we agree with the laws in Leviticus, there is something important about Torah's understanding that the physical body produces spiritual states. Our bodies affect the spiritual fabric of the community. So how do we include our bodies in our spiritual lives? They deserve it.
Read moreAnd indeed as you stand in the Scola Tedesca and look up at the women's gallery, you see what looks like a theater loge. There are low upright pillars to about knee level, and then a gilded latticework screen up to perhaps the neck of a seated woman, and above that it is open. This gallery is not meant to hide the women, but to foster flirtation.
Read moreIf Torah were a musical, what sort would it be? For Shabbat Shirah, a diversion into the Broadway version of Torah, for which the Parting of the Sea ends Act I.
Read moreWe are now in the annual 4-week saga of Joseph, and I find myself eyeing him across the ages. I see him young, middle aged and, at long last, at the end of his life, settling in to be a grandmother, the matriarch of his line. (Audio version.)
Read moreWe don't always say yes to what Shabbat offers. Maybe we say no more often than we say yes. But she never gets the hint. And she never gives up on us. She keeps showing up at the door in all her beauty, the Shechinah robed in time, with the fierceness of lions and the voice of songbirds. And so it is also after a week like this one. A horrible, unthinkable week, here she is again. Despite it all.
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