Roses, Thorns, and Buds
One of the many glues that binds our family together is our love of storytelling. We rarely miss opportunities to replay our highlights (and lowlights), reveling in the snowball effect as the stories gain meaning, matter, and momentum with each retelling. And because of a reflection ritual that we’ve shared at our dining room table, dinner time has become a sort of writer’s room for new stories to enter the canon.
Our family isn’t great about planning things in advance. There have been years when, say, Pesach would be coming in about a week, and we realized we hadn’t ordered all the food we’d need for the seders, leading to a few rather frantic trips to the kosher supermarket.
So while we had been hearing about the upcoming eclipse, we had sort of figured that a 90% partial eclipse (the path along which we live) would be a decent enough experience, and didn’t spend a whole lot of time mapping out a plan – we’d go outside, say, “Cool!” a few times like we did for the 2017 eclipse, and then go back inside.
Our willingness to be surprised in positive ways is especially critical when we may feel at least as surprised in negative ways.
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In my first job out of rabbinical school, I served as an assistant rabbi of a congregation of over 1000 … Continue Reading
