The Price of Chicken (Vaera 5786)
There's a classic Yogi Berra-style Jewish joke that goes something like this: A woman walks into her local butcher shop and sees a sign for chicken at $1.50 a pound. (Note: You can tell just how old this joke is by the prices mentioned here.) She looks at the butcher indignantly and says, "A dollar-fifty? The butcher across the street is selling chicken for only 30 cents a pound!" The butcher shrugs and says, "Nu? Go buy it from him." "I can't," the woman replies. "He’s out of stock." The butcher smiles and says, "Lady, when I'm out of chicken, I sell it for 10 cents a pound!" One of the things that makes the joke work is the brutal honesty (perhaps it's chutzpah) of the butcher. But...
Homes of our Heroes (Shemot 5786)
In the last few months, my wife Natalie has launched a new business called The Story Archivist. (This is not meant as a promotional email, I promise--you get plenty of those from me for IJS courses already!) Natalie is a journalist by training, a published author by experience (five young adult novels), and an educator by career. Her work today brings that all together by helping families preserve and tell their family stories: interviewing elders, doing archival research, and writing it up in a way that will allow future generations to know who they are and where they come from. Natalie has wanted to do this for a long time. All of her grandparents were survivors of the Shoah and/or...
A Tribute to Reb Zalman
by Rabbi Arthur Green Zalman, like Heschel and a few others (I am so incredibly blessed to have had them both as teachers!), understood that Judaism is all about the devotional life. יידישקייט איז א דרך אין עבודת השם, he would say in clearly understood Yiddish, "Judaism is a pathway for the service of God." We are here to serve, and a teaching takes on real meaning only if it inspires you to...
A Prayer for Peace
Start with Compassion
By Rabbi Nancy Flam “It’s hard to be a person.” That’s what my best friend from college says sometimes to console me when I’m having a tough time. I can’t hear those words without my heart softening. It is hard to be a person. And if the truth of that isn’t piercingly clear for you or me personally in this very moment, odds are it will be. Today my friend Amy and I studied a couple of small...
Revitalizing Prayer
An interview with Rabbi Nancy Flam on the power of meaningful prayer is the featured story of the Fall 2014 issue of Reform Judaism magazine, and can be found at www.reformjudaism.org/revitalizing-prayer. A new movement is emerging to transform prayer into a more powerful and compelling practice, building upon our ancestors’ recognition that we truly can effect change through prayer. You have...
A Mikveh of Learning
Rabbi Aryeh Ben David Founder and Director of Ayeka: Center for Soulful Education I felt like a shattered piece of glass. Intact, but splintered into thousands of pieces. It was the moment of emerging from my first mikveh experience. Over 30 years ago, and still etched into my memory. Broken and intact. Reconfiguring, changed. Putting myself back together into a new permutation. Renewed....
Kedushat Levi Shavuot
Rabbi Jonathan Slater It is a delight and an honor to be able to bring these translations of some of R. Levi Yitzhak’s teachings out into the world, and to connect them to our own lived lives. I have tried to be concrete in suggesting how these teachings can be practiced daily, how they can be brought into our day-to-day experience. Here is an example for Shavuot: We are taught in the Talmud...
Counting the Intelligence of Each Thing
When I was a little girl, my mother taught my brothers and me to make chains of colored construction paper, one loop for each day before a longed-for event. Each evening before going to bed, we would ceremonially tear one loop off the chain and know how many days were left. In the spring we counted down to summer vacation; in the fall I counted down to my birthday. As a people, we are similarly...
Reflections on the Omer and Life
By Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater My kids are getting older, and with their aging, they are starting to ask questions about time, length of life and death. They understand the concept of being born, as they have cousins who have been born recently, and they understand that life ends, both from their obsession with Harry Potter, which has main characters dying, and from the fact that their dad is...
Hametz Meditation
By Rabbi Toba Spitzer Passover is ultimately about freedom and new beginnings. The exodus from Egypt is a birth story - the birth of the Israelite people, and of a new kind of society, covenanted in love and justice. Passover is also a spring holiday, celebrating the first harvest and the new birth of the flocks. So part of the practice of clearing out hametz is linked to this sense of...
Running Commentary
By Lisa Zbar Up until recently, my runs haven’t been mindful, although they have been full of my mind. They’ve taken one of two forms. Either I have been filled with innumerable, maybe even hundreds, of thoughts and feelings, in a full-body experience, without any observation or even curiosity—one might call it a running commentary. Or, I’ve gone into a vortex of near obsession about a situation...
Musings of an Amateur Gardener
By Rabbi Nathan Martin Over the last few years I have turned my attention to growing summer vegetables. This project often starts in April with my attempts to cultivate early sprouts in the seed trays in our dining room (with dirt spills and all), and continues until the cool November frosts lay to bed the last of my tomato plants. I take great pleasure in announcing, with fanfare, the elements...
Practice Off the Mat
Last month I was called for jury duty and I was surprised how much the experience of sitting for three days in the jury room was similar to being on a silent retreat. Don’t get me wrong: It was not because the jury room was a still container that facilitated deep truth telling and inner exploration. Rather, in the enforced quiet of the jury room, I had a fresh opportunity to notice the...
A Complex Position
One morning in early January I left my Upper West Side apartment to go to work. The thermometer read 4 degrees Fahrenheit. I was all bundled up; I finally figured out how to keep my scarf over my nose and mouth without having to hold it there with a mittened hand. But I hadn’t calculated on the wind. When I emerged from the subway in Midtown and walked head-on into the gusting wind, my eye...
Waxing and Waning
There is something about waning that draws the attention to change in ways that waxing does not. It is in the evening liturgy, not the morning prayers, that we remind ourselves about the ordered orbits of the constellations and the way that light rolls away from darkness and darkness from light. When the day is new and light is abundant, we prefer to speak about renewal. But in the gathering...
Transitions – Haibun
By Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg This transition in my life from full time to part time work and toward retirement and old age is reflected in the season. It is a dappled time. It is a golden time. Golden sunshine Bright golden leaves Nearly blinding I move toward acceptance and wisdom, deeply wanting to give myself away, but in a different way. I want to enjoy life, feel nurtured, and truly...
Yom Iyyun: Engaging in Prayer as Practice
Yom Iyyun is currently SOLD OUT! Click here to join the waiting list
To Become a Living Shofar
So much of our spiritual life is about remembering to remember, trying to really wake up and live our precious lives. It is so easy to be lulled into sleepiness: the sleepiness of busyness, of mindless technology, of the closed heart and the superficial. We know those things are hevel, meaningless, but we keep falling asleep anyway. Nachman points out that “hevel” also means “quickly...
Avodah Meditation
Larry Yermack 5773 I am privileged to lead two meditations during the High Holidays this year at my synagogue. One will be during the Shofarot section of Mussaf on Rosh Hashanah and the other during the Avodah Service on Yom Kippur. This is largely a result of my participation in Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training II, and the good work of my teachers Jeff Roth and Sheila Weinberg in...