Safe at Home (Huqat-Balak 5786)
There is a serious debate among knowledgeable people about a very important question: What is the best baseball movie of all time? In my experience the choices often come down to Field of Dreams (starring Kevin Costner and featuring an immortal monologue by James Earl Jones that is guaranteed to bring the hardest-edged person to tears) and Bull Durham (also starring Kevin Costner—I know, I know—and featuring an immortal dialogue with Tim Robbins about the effective use of platitudes in press conferences). In my own humble opinion, both of these views are misguided. The best baseball movie of all time, hands down, is The Natural, a 1984 adaptation (well, a transformation) of Bernard...
The Book and the Sword (Huqat 5786)
The other night I had dinner with a dear old friend and colleague. After catching up about our families and personal lives, the conversation moved, inevitably, to the state of the Jewish people. My friend, an astute observer of history, offered that our generation experienced a unique set of circumstances in the life of the Jews: We were born in America the wake of World War II. Having vanquished Germany and Japan, the United States made them and much of the rest of the world into markets and trading partners, leading to an unprecedently long economic boom. And, in the shadow of the Shoah, antisemitism was banished from polite society. American Jews flooded into universities and rapidly...
Avinu Malkeinu: An Extraordinary Combination of Boundless Compassion and Absolute Power
It seems to me that this year more people are going public with their discomfort with Avinu Malkeinu, the prayer of supplication that is one of the hallmarks of the High Holy Day liturgy. I suspect that much of the discomfort is due to the difficult metaphors that form the refrain of the prayer, addressing God as our Father and our King. Many of us avoid using male language in reference to God...
Not About the Breath
One of the great challenges of spiritual practice is not to confuse the form with the purpose. For example, when first learning to meditate, it is easy to assume that the practice is about noticing breath (or whatever the object of focus is) and that to be “successful” in meditation, you have to be able to sustain long, undistracted attention to the breath. But as we deepen the practice, it...
Hot Off the Press!
As a child, I was always the kid who loved hanging out with the older kids. I was the oldest child in my family but usually among the youngest in my grade and I liked the company of kids who were capable of so much more. In rabbinical school, I was the one right out of college who preferred my second career classmates. They had so much more life experience and were so much more interesting than...
Between Yearning and Desire
It is true that I recently got engaged, but it is also true that I had been contemplating love for some time before I met my beloved. In fact, one of the great benefits of having been single for such a long time was the experience of many kinds of love from all kinds of expected and unexpected sources: from family and friends, students and teachers. And also from sunshine and boulders and from...
Tikkun Middot: Kvetchitude
By Rabbi Marc Margolius The Institute's Tikkun Middot Project integrates mindfulness practice with attention to a series of middot (spiritual/ethical qualities). This month, we are focusing on another essential Jewish spiritual trait as our middah of the month. Below you will find wonderful resources for meditation, embodied practice, and text study of the middah of kvetchitude. Meditation of...
The Spiritual Mirror
For the third time in a row, I got to spend Yom Kippur and the first part of Sukkot in Israel. For Yom Kippur, I went to one of my favorite synagogues in Jerusalem where the liturgy is traditional and the singing is joyful and powerful. For me Yom Kippur is such a day of supplication. It felt particularly fitting this year to spend it praying and singing and weeping in Jerusalem. This year I...
What You Hear Might Surprise You
In some ways, it is a pity that Rosh Hashanah doesn’t fall on Shabbat this year. We are going to have to listen to the shofar. Of course, listening to the shofar blasts is one of those visceral experiences that tell us, yes, the High Holy Days have arrived. It is like hearing Avinu Malkeinu with that familiar melody or tasting apples in honey: those quintessential Rosh Hashanah experiences in...
But It Could Be Different
The other day I had coffee with a friend after work. We both were in a state of anguish about the violence in Israel and Palestine. She confessed that she was feeling despair; how could things ever get better? What could possibly be the catalyst for real change? I thought about all the postings I see on social media. Ever since we learned of the murder of Naftali, Gilad and Eyal, and then the...
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...