Grief & Coping / 11 Jun 2021

Mourning a Difficult Person

Not everyone leaves this world with a golden halo.

Another Way Of Looking At Things, Daily Life, Historic Profiles, Longform, Spirituality & Faith, Uncategorized, Wisdom Daily News / 10 Jun 2021

Rebellion for the Greater Good

I’ve always had a soft spot for Korach

Another Way Of Looking At Things, Inspiring Story, Longform, Longform, Uncategorized / 08 Jun 2021

Hope Valley

Hope is a much-needed, often used, and often little understood concept.

Historic Profiles, Longform, Uncategorized / 02 Jun 2021

Premonitions: Parshat Sh’lach (Numbers 13:1 – 15:41)

Sometimes we can feel in our bones that something is going to go wrong. We can’t explain why or how, but we can sense the impending trouble. Some call it intuition. Behavioral Economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky might term it “thinking fast,” with our subconscious outpacing the centers of rational reasoning; bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell might call it “thinking without thinking.” One of my mentors, Hedy Peyser, LCSW, would often reiterate, “sometimes you just know.” Moses knew. It would be easy to presume that God had foreshadowed the rebellion of all but two of the spies that he sent to survey the Promised Land. But perhaps he had become such a seasoned leader, well-versed in the realities of social unrest and chronic uncertainty, that he could sense that something was not right. Perhaps he knew the character of the twelve chieftains, representing one of the Israelite tribes, whom he charged with gathering information about the population, its settlements, their agricultural produce, and the land itself. Perhaps there was just something in the way that they carried themselves. Perhaps the work carried with it too much power and the temptation to venture from the sacred pursuit of knowledge to the personal pursuit of glory or power. So much could go wrong in the nature of their report – or in their very nature. Rather than preemptively disciplining or threatening the spies, Moses chooses a path of moderation: elevating the righteous among them and accepting with an openness that much lay beyond his control. In Numbers 13:16, we read that “Moses changed the name of Hosea son of Nun to Joshua.” The additional Hebrew letter yud in his name makes it into a prayer: “May God save you” – or, as understood in Tractate Sotah of the Babylonian Talmud, “God will…

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Grief & Coping / 02 Jun 2021

What To Do In Response To The Current Levels Of Antisemitism

How to strengthen ourselves in the face of hate.