The constant striving to make ourselves, to make our lives better, to make the world better, is exhausting. And when our hopes for our lives or for the world don't come about, or don't come about as desired, we can only understand it as failure.
Read moreYom Kippur 5774: Three Longings
ut what I'm suggesting is this. We all openly aspire to be good people; but maybe that's not quite enough. Wanting to be a good person is easy; it's a popular want. But owning the Jewish part of that is harder. The Jewish part that says "repair the world" or "feed the hungry" or "stop gossiping" or "have compassion" or "learn learn learn." That is what we've abandoned, the understanding that those ideas, clearly of universal application, originate - for us at least - in our own Yiddishkeit, in our own Jewyness.
Read moreRosh Hashanah 5774: Burning and Longing
My experience at Burning Man, like all human experiences, was not without its blemishes. But still, on the whole, it had a flavor of Olam Haba, of the world to come, as was pointed out by the rabbi leading Kabbalat Shabbat services over at the Jewish camp at Burning Man. And in fact the whole week was more shabbos than I've had on any Saturday in memory. And the burning of the effigy of The Man - this year perched on a wooden space ship and done up to recall the robot Klaatu in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" - the burning of The Man, preceded by fire dancers and accompanied by fireworks was declared by my family to be: Best. Havdalah. Ever.
Read moreNachamu: Fly Thought, on Golden Wings
The exiles in Verdi, unlike the exiles in Psalm 137, don't refuse to sing. They actively engage their thoughts of Jerusalem. They imagine it in its beauty; they send their thoughts there with love. Their comfort, if there is to be comfort, does not come from silence but from song. They even protest to the very harps that the Psalm portrays as hanging, untouched.
Read moreZecher Litziat Mitzrayim: Shabbat and the Remembrance of Things Passover
The rabbis would undoubtedly say that God brought us out of Egypt in order to keep Shabbat. They would say that Shabbat, though ancient, couldn't be practiced until there was a people who agreed to practice it, that people being us, in the desert, free at last, beginning our long wanderings. But there's more to say here, because Shabbat is not just a day on the calendar, but is in itself the breath of freedom.
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