Building New Identities, Historic Profiles, Inspiring Story, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized |
April 13, 2022
Pesach 2022
This week, we welcome the holiday of Passover, the holiday of freedom. During the Passover seder, we act out the story of our ancestors being redeemed from Egypt. In the Talmud, there’s also the idea that we are supposed to understand ourselves to have been redeemed from slavery, too. And there are those who take it one step further. Our ancestors were redeemed in ancient Egypt, we too were redeemed, and not only that: The 19th-century Chassidic Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (commonly known by the name of his influential book, The Sefat......
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Book Club, Historic Profiles, Interviews With Wise People Of Today, Longform, Longform, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized |
November 23, 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......
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Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Historic Profiles, Inspiring Story, Longform, Longform, Spirituality & Faith, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized |
June 30, 2021
Tears on the Digital Road to Jerusalem
“If a picture paints a thousand words, then an experience paints 10,000.” “Stand where He stood. Walk where He walked. Discover it for yourself.” When we bring rising Christian leaders on pilgrimage to Israel, we emphasize that there is nothing like seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling the complicated, beautiful, Holy Land that birthed their tradition and ours. Born out of necessity amid the pandemic, we began to experiment with digital pilgrimages to see if they could feel every bit as real as those that happened in person. We knew from the......
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Historic Profiles, Inspiring Story, Longform, Uncategorized |
June 25, 2021
When Do We See The Blessings?
Missing what is right in front of us......
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Another Way Of Looking At Things, Daily Life, Historic Profiles, Longform, Spirituality & Faith, Uncategorized, Wisdom Daily News |
June 10, 2021
Rebellion for the Greater Good
I’ve always had a soft spot for Korach...
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Historic Profiles, Longform, Uncategorized |
June 02, 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......
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Historic Profiles, Inspiring Story, Longform, Longform, Relationships & Family, Uncategorized |
May 04, 2021
Looking Evil In the Face, Boldly and Beautifully
“If there is only one book you are going to read….” is not something I say often, and something I don’t think should ever be said about a topic as important and as complicated as the Holocaust. I will say though, that anyone who cares about the topic, or any questions of evil and how we respond to it, really must read Faris Cassell’s new, and already award-winning book, The Unanswered Letter. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Faris about her work, which had already been awarded first place in......
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Breaking False Dichotomies, Compassion and Empathy, Grief & Coping, Historic Profiles, Hold Dualities Together, Longform, Longform, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized, Wisdom Daily News |
January 22, 2021
Night Words, A Midrash For The Holocaust
The Meaning of this Day, January 27, 2021 In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27–the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau–as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges the world community to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism. The theme guiding Holocaust remembrance in 2021 is Facing the Aftermath: Recovery and Reconstitution After The Holocaust. The never-ending process of recovery and reconstitution of individuals, communities, and systems of justice includes: accurately recording the......
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