Standing on that hilltop in Waibstadt, Germany, I have to say that I indeed felt like I was returning, even though I had never been there. This great-great-grandfather whose grave I stood at shared his name with me – as I discovered he did with his own grandfather, and with his grandson, my Grandpa Irwin, whose birthday is tomorrow. This succession of Yitzchak Kellers made me feel a little bit like a cat with if not nine lives then at least four. Yes, his life was a blank slate to me but, oddly, chillingly, a slate with my name on it.
Read moreShechinah, at the Art Institute
I ran into the Shechinah in an art museum. It was the Art Institute of Chicago. Maybe not the way it is now, but the way it was when I was a kid. She was in one of the Impressionist rooms. In front of Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of la Grande Jatte.
Read moreResistance, Transformation, Hope and Words
The angel's suggestion that behind transformation lies language – that should mean something to us. If we want to mend the field, we start with language; we start with our words. Our words conjure a world. And we want it to be a world that we want to live in.
Read moreCreation Soufflé
But if we allow this part of our Sacred Myth, this part about all of it being God, all God, all the time; if we allow that to be "the greater story that is always happening," imagine how our relationship to this planet and to each other would shift.
Read moreThe Queen is in the Field
There is so much protocol to our traditional prayer, that it is nearly impossible for those not steeped in it to attempt it. We approach the Divine with the same complexity as we would having an audience with Queen Elizabeth: having to be scheduled and presenting ourselves at the right time and place, having to be announced, and then bowing properly and remembering to say "Your Majesty" the first time and "ma'am" every time after. And by the time we have made it through this trial, we can no longer remember what it is we had wanted to say, or we are too tongue-tied to say it.
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