Archive
“When you pray the Lakota way, do you feel like you’re praying to the same God?”
“To my surprise, Shabbat dinners became a predictable and grounding occurrence every week. My mom cooked, I set the table, and my dad and brother cleaned up after the meal. Sometimes it was twenty minutes of near silence then everyone scurried off to their bedrooms again. Sometimes it ended in explosive arguments and someone finishing their plate an hour or two later in the kitchen. But sometimes it worked.”
“The Torah of OCD is simple: it is an important and very serious mitzvah to manage my OCD as skillfully as I am able on any given day, seeking out the support and resources I need to live well and in good health. And it is deeply complicated: I am no longer comfortable theologizing pain.”
Best-practices gleaned from a new generation of Jewish Educators, making the Zoom makom meaningful.
I wondered what part of his tour-guide history taught him to step to the back of the group he’s guiding, as he bowed to a religious sight. Was it just a part of getting out of the way— a matter of priorities in which his holy experience need not interrupt our photograph opportunity? Or was there something deeper there— a mutual shame on both our ends.
After a year of pandemic, one Pesach later, four Jewish students and thinkers have assembled a Passover Seder companion, filled with reflections on a year of plague and visions of redemption.
Can an escape room be a spiritual endeavor? Can play help us feel connected to the people around us? Can games be holy work? Can puzzles help us engage with the challenging social justice themes of the Passover story?
Are the kids alright? How the parenting styles of Holocaust survivors transmitted trauma to the next generation and beyond.
Rilke’s translated response to an age-old discourse: “What is to be done with the Jews?”
“I’ll never forget seeing the kids light up as they are given the chance to work with me. I’ll never forget hearing them repeat new words under their breaths in order to memorize them. And I’ll never forget having to say ‘hello’ to twenty kids between the time I walked into school, and the moment I reached my classroom.”