Maybe I come from a long line of non-swimming, land-locked Keller men, flagrantly violating this rabbinic injunction, generation after generation, or generation before generation, all the way back to the Exodus from Egypt, where some proto-Keller would have stood gaping at the Sea in abject terror.
Read moreKi Tisa: The Scent of Shechinah
But this was another time.
When scents were devised with sensibility.
Mortar and pestle. Delights olfactory
Made with industry but no factory.
A time when the word "natural"
Was not needed before the word "fragrance"
Because what else would it be?
Kingdom of Priests
Mesopotamian and Canaanite cultures also had a priesthood function for people like me, for the girlymen who served the gods and goddesses dressed as women, called kulu'u in Babylonian and k'deshim in Hebrew, which again means "holy ones," but which was translated into the Latin Vulgate by St. Jerome in the 4th Century as effeminati (a term which I must immediately begin using to describe my own tribe).
Read moreBetween Hail and Locusts: Time to Show Up
As I got older, I went to many seders at many houses. There, the plagues were never skipped. Instead they were rattled off in the same disinterested way one might render up the names of Santa's reindeer or the Seven Dwarfs. Blood. Frogs. Lice. Comet. Cupid. Sleepy, Dopey. Doc.
Read moreLong Night of Dreams
Dreams brought me to Germany, and ultimately to a graveyard in Waibstadt, to meet the ancestors. My first reflection on the experience.
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