Compassion and Empathy

Making Our Laws Holy
Compassion and Empathy, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized, Weekly Parsha |
May 26, 2022

Making Our Laws Holy

When an 18-year-old (may his name be blotted out) walked into a gun shop and bought a pair of assault rifles and enough ammunition to create a war zone at an elementary school, he violated no laws. The gun laws in Texas and across many parts of the United States have been so debased as to make the unholy legal. The law walked hand in hand with the gunman up to the point in which he trespassed and then unleashed carnage, taking the lives of 19 small children and two teachers in what should have been......

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Joshua Stanton
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Who you are in the field...
Compassion and Empathy, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized, Uncategorized, Weekly Parsha |
April 27, 2022

Who you are in the field…

Several weeks ago I was teaching Torah to a group of students from around the country that has met weekly for several months. As the sessions meet in the evening time, it usually means that I’m occupied with bedtime routines for our three children right up until 6:59 PM, at which point I make a mad dash into the bedroom to start the class, and wish my wife godspeed for the remaining half hour (on a good night) of the various rituals, routines, and meltdowns that accompany bedtime. About 10 minutes into......

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Rabbi Elan Babchuck
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Don't Try To Be the Hero of Your Story 
Breaking False Dichotomies, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Mundane Into Sacred, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized |
March 10, 2022

Don’t Try To Be the Hero of Your Story 

With two elementary-school-aged kids, we hear a fair amount of sibling fighting, with only some of it unprovoked. When one of them is getting a little too wild, and, say, someone’s limbs smack into someone else’s body, their first reaction is to say, “I didn’t mean to do it!” And while my wife and I do draw a distinction between purposeful versus accidental actions, we try to focus more on the consequences and how to make it right afterward. That’s what’s so striking about this week’s Torah portion, Vayikra. It outlines the......

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Geoff Mitelman
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Moral Leadership
Compassion and Empathy, Longform, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized, Weekly Parsha |
February 18, 2022

Moral Leadership

The last few weeks have been strange in Canada. A convoy of angry citizens has taken their tractors, semi-trucks, and construction vehicles and established illegal blockades of border crossings in Ontario and other provinces and occupations of the entire neighborhood outside Parliament in Ottawa, as well as protests in other major Canadian cities. This development is anathema to much of what Canadians think of themselves – nice, friendly, reasonable people governed by prudence and shared responsibility. It seems like a sudden shock to many. Where did this come from? In this week’s......

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Rabbi Julia Appel
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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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