Grief & Coping / 24 Nov 2021

Coping With The Loss Of A Grandparent 

The death of a grandparent can be traumatic to children of any age, especially during the pandemic.

Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Compassion and Empathy, Hold Dualities Together, Longform, Longform, Mundane Into Sacred, There's More To You Than You Realize, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized, Wisdom Daily News / 24 Nov 2021

What does it mean to have enough?

Do you really have nothing?

Relationships & Family / 23 Nov 2021

Three Last Minute Recipes For A Happier Thanksgiving

Beyond cooking, some new “recipes” to add to your repertoire

Book Club, Historic Profiles, Interviews With Wise People Of Today, Longform, Longform, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized / 23 Nov 2021

Inviting Kids To Make History By Reading About Hanukkah: A conversation with Emily Singer, author of Gilgul

Emily Singer is the author of a new book — one receiving good attention in many quarters, including a warm review in a recent edition of the Jerusalem Post. The book is called Gilgul, and while it’s intended for middle-school-age readers, and would make a great Hanukkah gift for same, it carries a message we could all use — one combining great pride in ethnic/national/religious identity and genuinely embracing the idea that each particularity must connect with something larger than itself. I had the opportunity to “sit down” with Emily, despite the thousands of miles that separate us — she is in Israel and I am in NYC — and this is what emerged. Enjoy! Rabbi Brad Hirschfield (BH): Let’s start with the title of your book, Gilgul. Please explain that word, and why you chose to title your book accordingly. Emily Singer (ES): Gilgul is loosely based on the Kabbalistic concept of Gilgul Neshamot, in which souls of the deceased return in future generations in order to “fix” flawed character traits that need perfecting. I love the idea that we are all a work in progress, always striving to improve, and that change happens slowly over time because it does. In the book, the emphasis is not on the individual, but on society. The main characters are “returned” to pivotal times in Jewish history in order to save the Jewish people and to move the world towards peace. BH: From the very beginning, this is a book about kids and their parents/family, a book about identity in general and Jewish identity in particular, and a book about a pretty remarkable time in history. How are those three related for you, and how would you like your readers to understand the connections between those three things? ES: I think we…

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Compassion and Empathy, Grief & Coping, Longform, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized / 19 Nov 2021

The Great Forgiving

This week’s Torah portion always gets me in the gut. It’s the story of Jacob returning to his long-estranged brother Esau, from whom he fled 20 years beforehand after betraying Esau by stealing his birthright and blessing. Now, so much time has passed, Jacob doesn’t even know Esau anymore. We can tell this because Jacob takes great pains to send gifts ahead, to prepare for Esau’s wrath but hope for his forgiveness, to plan for any eventual outcome. Jacob can’t anticipate Esau’s reaction. Despite Jacob’s worry that Esau’s still violently mad about the betrayal when the brothers meet, they embrace, and Esau kisses Jacob on the neck. It’s a powerful story of asking for and granting forgiveness after a long absence. Returning to make something right, knowing that part of what went wrong was the absence itself. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since Rosh Hashanah when in Canada, it started to feel like we could take a breath on the pandemic. What is needed to be able to reconstitute our relationships, our social networks, our communities? Over this time, my world of relationships has shrunk, and with it, the number of opportunities to interact, let alone wrong someone, has also shrunk. But maybe the biggest thing we in common need to ask forgiveness for and to forgive is the simplest: Absence. The yawning blankness where we weren’t. We’ve all had to shrink down to the relationships at the core of our lives and let the others fall away, for now, just to make it through all this. As vaccinations for children aged 5-11 have become available in the U.S. and soon in Canada, more and more households are now able to safely interact with one another. We hope and pray that we are seeing the long denouement of…

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