The war in Ukraine is hitting many of us harder than other global conflicts; the Pale is deep in the Jewish psyche. As I look at pictures of my relatives, I’m compelled to imagine how challenging their lives must have been: people were poor, life often interrupted by anti-Semitic violence. But this region also became known as the birthplace of some of the greatest Jewish creativity of all time.
Read MoreYesterday I spoke about Rosh Hashanah’s invitation to us, b’charta b’chayyim – to renew our commitment to life, even in the face of the world’s brokenness and our own limitations. But how can ordinary people like you and me make a life-giving choice — when it means doing something out of character for us, something we might never have done or imagined doing before?
Read MoreOn Simchat Torah, we read the end and the beginning of the Torah in one breath, so to speak – as one unbroken story. This leads scholar and poet Esther Schor to argue that “the creation of the world is God’s shiva for Moses.” For seven days, God holds God’s breath – carries inside of Godself Moses’ life force, until finally God forms the first human from earth, blows into this its nostrils the breath of life God took from Moses: the last breath Moses breathes out thus becomes Adam’s first.
Read MoreThe first person to toast my sister and her fiancé at their rehearsal dinner was a descendent of Mrs. Hamilton. She recalled her grandmother, a “righteous gentile” who had sponsored our grandfather and his family to immigrate to America in 1938. She described how delighted our grandparents would be to see our families gathered together for this celebratory moment. I wasn’t the only one moved to tears by the way she brought their memories into this rite of passage in our family.
Read MoreOn the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, a group in Japan launched a project in which storytellers are training to retell the experiences of survivors. My grandfather participated in a similar project 20 years ago, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which sought to collect testimony from survivors before the experience of the Holocaust was lost to the world. My family’s participation in this project instilled in me the belief that these stories, though painful, should be actively remembered and repeated.
Read MoreTwo Israelis were stabbed last week, Israeli military and police response has continued, and leaders within Fatah have begun talking about a third intifada. There’s no rational response to the heartbreak and fear the Jewish people are feeling right now toward circumstances that threaten our connection to a place we call home. Indeed, we are a people who has historically been forced, in a state of fear, to flee from land to land, deprived of the luxury to think of any place as home.
Read More
