Hold Dualities Together / 21 Jan 2022

Are Jewish Values The Same As American Values?

How are Jewish values different than American values?

Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Compassion and Empathy, Hold Dualities Together, Longform, Spirituality & Faith, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized / 20 Jan 2022

Like a Hibernating Frog…

Waiting for the thaw

Another Way Of Looking At Things, Breaking False Dichotomies, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Soul Writings, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized / 14 Jan 2022

When Faith Preempts Facts

Our Torah is filled with stories of remarkable courage, leaps of faith, and ventures into the unknown. From Abraham leaving his homeland at God’s behest to his near-sacrifice of his son, we learn from our very first patriarch the ways that faith – often of the “blind” variety – is central to our collective story. But for all the dramatic leaps taken by our ancestors in scripture, one of them stands out among the rest. One of them, in fact, that isn’t even explicitly mentioned in Torah! After a treacherous race out of Egypt under cover of night, their captors nipping at their heels, the Israelites finally make it to freedom on the other side of a miracle: God parted the seas to provide them safe passage. But despite ten plagues worth of evidence to the contrary, the Israelites never actually believed in God’s power until after they found safety on the other side of the parted sea. “And when Israel saw the wondrous power which God had wielded against the Egyptians, the people…had faith in God…” (Exodus 14:31) And who can blame them? Born into hopelessness, beaten into complacency, they never had any faith to lose in the first place. Even their supposed leader, Moses, struggled mightily to maintain any kind of belief in God’s providence. But lack of faith wasn’t universal among the Israelites, as there was at least one notable exception. Upon touching the dry ground and singing the Song of the Sea alongside Moses, his sister Miriam “took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her to dance with timbrels.” (Exodus 15:20). And while the text doesn’t delve any deeper, it invites the question: how in the world did Miriam have the foresight to pack a tambourine, when the rest of…

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Grief & Coping / 12 Jan 2022

Using Viktor Frankl’s Wisdom To Ease Suffering

Logotherapy is a process based on Frankl’s theories that is used to help patients find their greater sense of meaning.

Another Way Of Looking At Things, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Longform, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized / 07 Jan 2022

The Plague of Uncertainty

Throughout Moses’ showdown with Pharaoh, there is one overarching, emotional plague that God wreaks upon the Egyptians: uncertainty. They do not know when the litany of discomforts, outrages, upsets, frustrations, pains, and fears will end. We gain insight into the Egyptian mindset just after Moses pronounces that God will bring locusts to eat whatever remains of the crops after the hail. Moses departs Pharaoh’s court and then we read (Exodus 10:7): “Pharaoh’s courtiers said to him, ‘How long shall this one be a snare to us? Let the people go to worship their God! Are you not yet aware that Egypt is lost?’” The Tur, a keen medieval commentator from Spain, suggests that there is much to unpack, even from this brief vignette. First, the courtiers only speak after Moses has departed, lest they give him the satisfaction of knowing that he is winning the psychological fight against Pharaoh and Egypt. Second, they speak of Moses as the snare – not all the Israelites. He as an individual is overwhelming them. By contrast, the courtiers speak of letting all the Israelites depart to live as they choose in freedom. Moses is the problem, while the Israelites and Egyptians alike are caught in this showdown between Moses and Pharaoh. If The Tur is correct in his interpretation, we can deduce that Moses is not engaging with unsophisticated scoundrels in the Egyptian court, but self-aware and nuanced people who understand that the war is lost and that it is a question of how prolonged the retreat will be before they waive the white flag and sue for peace. Yet the two most important words in the text, upon which both of the Tur’s deductions rely, are “how long?” The uncertainty is the plague that undergirds the rest. Moses announces plague after plague….

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