Kissing Contest (Korach 5786)
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from a high school girlfriend. Like many hormone-filled teenagers (which is to say, teenagers), I was trying to figure out in my mind how she and I might eventually kiss. And, like many teenagers, I was having an awkward go of it. I had probably learned too many unrealistic lessons from watching fake romance in the movies. I was waiting for the dramatic scene where we would look at each other, the camera would zoom in and, as we inched closer, the magic would happen as the music swelled in the background. Needless to say, that’s not generally how it works in real life. Luckily for me, this young woman a) felt similarly about kissing, but...
Practice for Tammuz: How to Bear a Broken Heart
As we reach the end of the month of Sivan, which includes Shavuot and revelation at Sinai, we prepare to enter the month of Tammuz and the period of the Jewish calendar known as the "Three Weeks." This stretch begins on the 17th of Tammuz, commemorating the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the Romans, and culminates on Tisha B’Av (the Ninth of the month of Av), marking the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Spiritually, this is a season for noticing and working with our grief and heartbreak. Over the Three Weeks, we allow our own hearts to crack open, creating the condition for moving, over the subsequent seven weeks after Tisha B’Av, towards healing and wholeness on Rosh...
Shalom Meditation: Welcoming Peace Into Your Body, Heart, and Mind
Join Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg for this meditation on shalom/peace. Shalom is vast and open, receptive, spacious, it does not grab; it holds everything.Transcript of meditation: Every day is a good day to pray for Shalom. Our most important prayers are sealed with the prayer for Shalom. Birkat Hamazon. After each meal. The Amidah recited three times a day. The priestly blessing. May peace be...
Full House (Shelach 5786)
The Feigelson-Blitt house is a bit of a physical mess right now. Our eldest graduated from college and brought all his stuff home. Our middle child finished his first year of college and brought a lot of his stuff home. And both of them have had a lot of laundry to do. The effulgence of stuff—sheets, blankets, towels, winter coats, phone charging cables, electronic devices, assorted college...
Letting It Out (Beha’alotcha 5786)
My wife Natalie is a woman of many talents, and she always has a craft project of one variety or another that she’s working on. At one point she made beautiful cloth banners with Hebrew letters that still adorn our home at Jewish holidays. For the last few years, she’s been working on a special kind of embroidery in which she overlays black and white photos with splotches of color. About a...
Being a Blessing (Naso 5786)
While the Priestly Blessing is a central ritual at my family’s Shabbat table, that hasn’t always been the case. For whatever reason, it wasn’t part of my parents’ repertoire when I was growing up. That changed when, at age 12, I attended the bat mitzvah of a family friend and saw her parents place their hands on her head and recite the words. I told my folks, “I’d like us to do that.” Soon...
Book Talk with Rabbi Caryn Aviv
We are grateful to Rabbi Caryn Aviv for speaking to us about her new book, Unlearning Jewish Anxiety: How to Live with More Joy and Less Suffering. Please enjoy the conversation recording below.Rabbi Caryn Aviv (she/her/hers) serves as Rabbinic and Program Director at Judaism Your Way, as well as Director of Studies at ALEPH. Caryn loves to create and facilitate transformative Jewish experiences...
Roots & Shoots (Bamidbar 5786)
Like many other people, the Covid pandemic brought my extended family a bit closer. Like many Jewish families, that happened as a result of “Zoom kiddush,” a Friday afternoon gathering of first cousins, aunts and uncles, that included some catching up, some reminiscing, and a performance of a few Shabbat rituals. Six years later, our family’s Zoom kiddush is still going. Every Friday afternoon I...
Beyond Burnout: What Clergy Need to Lead and Last
On Tuesday, May 14, Rabbis Benjamin Ross, Josh Feigelson, Jenny Solomon, and Cantor Julia Cadrain, held a candid and timely conversation about the burnout crisis. Josh and Benjamin's recent joint report, Holy Work, Human Limits, Communal Potential, captures the gravity of this issue, and together they shared the findings and open a dialogue about where we go from here.
The Concept of “Ani” and the Separating Partition
Session Opening and Thematic Context Rabbi Nancy Flam: Let’s just rest in ourselves for a minute or two. Allow everything else to just be what it is. And just just I invite you to rest in yourself. Sitting for a minute or two. So, we're in a progression in our meditation instructions and practice over this retreat preparing ourselves to experience what revelation might be. So in a way the...
Torah from the Mountain, Torah from the Well: Attuning to the Kol Demamah Dakah (The Subtle, Silent Murmur)
In this video teaching, we begin by contrasting the earth-shaking revelation at Sinai in Exodus 19 and 20 with the subtle, silent murmur of I Kings 19. This distinction serves as a map for our meditation, guiding us past the noise of the ego toward a sanctuary of inner quietude. Here, we connect with the source of divine wisdom to receive a fresh transmission of inner Torah—revealing that the...
A Fateful Talk With a Doctor: Practicing Sh’mirat haDibbur, Mindful Speech
We are heading into the seventh and final week of the Omer period, associated with the sephirah (Divine emanation) of Malkut (Sovereignty), which in Jewish mystical tradition is connected with holy speech. The focus of our practice this week is sh'mirat hadibbur, mindful speech. How might we channel all the middot, the sacred traits we have cultivated over the Omer period, so they inform how we...
Turning 50 (Behar-Bechukotai 5786)
Happy birthday to me! I’m in the midst of turning 50. My birthday on the Jewish calendar was last week, my birthday on the Gregorian calendar is next week. As my teacher Rabbi Dov Linzer remarked when I saw him the other day, “Some people refer to that as chol hamoed,” the intermediate days of the festival. Thank you in advance for all your good wishes. Having a birthday in mid-May has long...
I Have Some Feedback (Emor 5786)
One of the challenges of writing a weekly essay on the Torah portion along with a weekly podcast script while also serving as the CEO of a growing organization is that there’s not much time for other writing. My first—and to date, only—book came about entirely because I wrote each chapter for IJS’s annual Text Study program in 2020-21 (and I wasn’t yet writing these weekly reflections). In...
Home & Interdependence (Acharei Mot-Kedoshim 5786)
If you haven’t yet listened to the recent two-part debate between Rabbis Sharon Brous and David Ingber on the podcast “Being Jewish with Jonah Platt,” I want to suggest that you do. In addition to being a model of civil disagreement, their dialogue also expresses a debate taking place within much of the American Jewish community, particularly about our individual and collective relationships...
Practicing Netzach: Despite It All, We Persist
We are moving into the fourth week of the Omer, the seven-week period between Passover and Shavuot, traditionally a time for spiritual reflection and growth as we move from freedom towards revelation.¹ This fourth week of the Omer is associated with the kabbalistic sephirah (Divine emanation) of Netzach (“victory” or “endurance”). A middah (spiritual/ethical trait) associated with Netzach is...
Noticing the Transitional Nature of All Things
Practice originially written as part of the Shevet Reset, a Jewish meditation challenge for younger adults.When I first learned to meditate on retreat, the instructions sounded simple: sit still, follow the breath, and when discomfort arises, notice it before reacting. Easy, right? It was not. My body immediately rebelled—aching knees, itchy skin, endless shifting. I felt terrible at meditating....
Carpe Diem—or Not (Tazria-Metzora 5786)
One of the most enduring Torah lessons I ever learned came from a 19-year-old college student named Joey. He was interviewing for a campus "engagement" (i.e. outreach) internship when I was the Hillel rabbi at Northwestern. As part of the interview, we asked the applicants to read Hillel's famous three questions (in English) and comment on them: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? When...
Home (In)Security (Shemini 5786)
In a normal week, I typically send these reflections to Andrew, our wonderful senior operations associate here at IJS, on Wednesdays. Andrew formats them and gets them all set to arrive in your inbox Friday morning (hence the name, “Josh’s Friday Reflections”). Natalie, one of our other wonderful team members, puts them on our blog. And then our communications & marketing team puts them out...
Gametime (Shabbat Hagadol 5786)
My youngest child recently celebrated his bar mitzvah and thereby became an adult in the eyes of Jewish tradition. And, right on cue, he has also hit his developmental stride as a teenager: he is much more interested in hanging out with his friends than with his parents. (As a dear family friend once put it, the essence of parenting at this stage might be described as being around so your child...