We have had magnificent moments in the hospital room. An Erev Shabbat in the ICU more intense and magical than any I could hope to achieve here. And then this week: moments of recovery. The first half-smile. An attempt to form a word. The squeeze of a hand. A reaction to a song or story or voice or face. A soft moaning that shifts in pitch until it matches a niggun being sung around the bedside. Each of these is a treasure.
Read moreParashat Vayishlach: The Slo-Mo Kiss
As Jacob approaches his brother, we see the Jewish people addressing the gentile world, aware that they are despised, that the gentile world sees their shunning of violence as a weakness, as an ugliness, as a failure of manhood. And yet it is Esau, the hunter, surrounded by a military detail, who falls on his brother's neck and kisses him and weeps. And Bar Yochai says, despite the abiding fact of Esau's hatred of Jacob, Esau kisses him with a whole heart.
Read moreBar Mitzvah+40, and God and Abraham Are Still At It
God has a qualm. Seemingly not a qualm about the blow he will deliver in Sodom, but an uncertainty about the effect of that act on others in whom he is invested. God is uncertain whether honesty is the best policy or whether he should just keep working in mysterious ways. Somehow Abraham, I think, correctly perceives God's hesitation. God here is not only invisible, but transparent also. And Abraham generously launches the discussion without God ever having to decide whether to tell him or not.
Read moreSix Degrees of Inspiration (An Introduction to Shoftim)
And who can be a prophet? It does not need to be a monarch or a celestial being or a Messiah or an extra-terrestrial. But instead Shoftim says it will be someone mikerev acheyhem – someone of the people, of the community. Someone kamocha – like you. Yes, you. Really. You. Meaning, I think, that prophecy will come to us, if it does, each in our own language and our own medium.
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.
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