Together we can be a refugium – protectors of life. We can bring all our distinctiveness – our skills, our smarts, our songs – whatever the Tree of Life planted in us. Bring all of that to this community and to the other communities in which we are rooted around the world. We can share this vision, this consciousness, this love and longing at the root level, the way trees speak over distance through the mycelial network. We will be the protectors of people, places and creatures in need through the hard times, and the restorers and renewers of the landscape on the other side of it.
Read moreAd Anah – The Heavens Weep and Are Not Answered
Years have worn on. When will You hear us – and
Zodiac's prayers, and angels on high?
The Persistence of Shabbat (After Pittsburgh)
We 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.
Read moreThe Journey of Return
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.
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