"Invite me in," God seems to say. "Make a fuss over me. Do it up nice. Invite me to dinner. Make your best dish. Do it fancy. Use the good silverware. And the gold and the silver and the crimson cloth and the acacia wood. And in return v'shachanti b'tocham - I'll live among and in you.
Read moreParashat Vayechi: The End of Myth
n fact, Joseph is the turning point. While his ancestors' names had obvious mythic resonance, his own name, Yosef, means "add-on." He's the annex, the bridge to the next thing. And while Jacob dies at the fantastically old age of 147, his son Joseph dies this week at 110 - a rare but not mythical age, as was proven by our friend Elsie Rich, who also died this week, also at 110. Jacob belongs to the world of myth. Joseph, like Elsie, belongs to us.
Read moreChayei Sarah - The (3) Lives of Sarah
I remember taking out sheets of ledger paper and beginning to draw a tree as she dictated the names of her many aunts and uncles and her scores of American cousins, all of whom she knew, all of whose children and grandchildren she knew, all of whom she talked to regularly on the phone. I loved making the tree and recording the names, but mostly I loved this act of transmission. My willingness gave her pleasure, and we two were conspirators in a secret plot for posterity.
Read moreParashat Lech Lecha: On Greatness, Blessing & Owning Wall Street
Milton Friedman's suggestion that a modern, largely secular Jew cannot take these values to heart - that in the absence of a shtreimel and a kosher lunch there is no reason to think that Jewish values play any significant role in one's world view - is absurd and smug. For many of us it is in fact what is at the core of our Judaism. "Justice, justice shall you pursue." It is when we are protesting and rabble-rousing; when we're standing up or sitting in or shouting back or acting up or being carted off that we feel most Jewish. For how many secular Jews, for how many atheist Jews, has "justice, justice" replaced shema Yisrael as our central creed?
Read moreSimchat Torah: Back to Zero
God inhales Moshe's soul with a kiss, and the next thing we know, there is God exhaling ripples onto the surface of the deep. But there is a moment in between. A moment of returning to zero, like a movie actor between takes, like a cross-fade through black. Moshe returns to that Oneness, that same emptiness, that preceded everything. And we go with him. And then bang - Big Bang - we're off and running again. B'reishit...
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