Bring The Sacred Down To Earth

The Stars in the Past Give Us a Powerful Present
Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Inspiring Story, Science & Technology, Spirituality & Faith, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized, Weekly Parsha |
July 14, 2022

The Stars in the Past Give Us a Powerful Present

Late Monday night and Tuesday morning, the James Webb Telescope showed its first images after its launch six months ago. And while the images from the Hubble telescope were incredible, these blow away even astronomers. As these images inspire everyone from NASA astrophysicists to ordinary laypeople, they remind us that seeing the size and scope of the universe never gets old. Stars have captured the human imagination for millennia, and we’ve often linked the workings of the heavens with the actions here on earth. In antiquity, the movement of the stars were often used......

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Geoff Mitelman
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Facing Our Past 
Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Inspiring Story, Uncategorized |
February 25, 2022

Facing Our Past 

In this week’s Torah portion, Vayakheil, the master artisan Bezalel is putting together all the items for Mishkan, the dwelling-place for God. There are a whole host of materials listed – poles and pails, gratings and basins, fire pans, and fleshhooks, and most of them are presented simply as a list. But only one item has a backstory: “He made the laver of copper and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who performed tasks at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.” (Ex. 38:8) Unlike everything else that......

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Geoff Mitelman
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We Have Returned...
Another Way Of Looking At Things, Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Building New Identities, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Soul Writings, Uncategorized |
February 08, 2022

We Have Returned…

 …even though we never physically left our homes. As in my other post, I want to offer in the same-immediacy-writing commitment a glimpse of where I am now sitting, how I am now sitting, and the hope I feel while being here in this fragmented and polarizing era we find ourselves in, in reconsidering citizenship. I honor that it will be, at some level, incomprehensible or easy-to-dismiss from outside the experience. I honor that only a percentage of the 24 students who engaged in this trip will share in what I have......

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Lisa Hess
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Freedom to Give
Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Longform, Mundane Into Sacred |
February 04, 2022

Freedom to Give

“A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. A contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.“ In these terse words of enduring wisdom, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks draws our attention to the covenants we might long have overlooked and the contracts that we mistook for something more (see Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times for additional wisdom). Such was certainly the case for the Israelites, as becomes evident in this week’s Torah portion, T’rumah (Exodus 25:1 – 27:19). It......

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Joshua Stanton
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Seeing the Unseen
Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Compassion and Empathy, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized, Uncategorized, Weekly Parsha |
January 28, 2022

Seeing the Unseen

Over the last few weeks, the astronomy world watched each step of the James Webb Space Telescope unfold. Aside from all the usual nervousness surrounding a rocket launch, there were 344 single-point failures as it tried to help us see farther, deeper, and more clearly into the reaches of deep space. Miraculously, each step worked exactly as planned – NASA was hoping things would go smoothly, but with rocket science, a lot can go wrong even if the mission is well-planned and designed. There was a palpable sense of relief as the......

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Geoff Mitelman
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