Keeping Fire with Fire
It’s not too late To say goodbye To the darkness of hate So tonight We light eight To keep our Hope and vision straight Let us add more light So our love can burn bright On this last Chanukah night Give a loved one a sweet hug And hold them close and tight No matter […]
Danny Pando:
A story of personal liberation
I was raised Catholic, meaning I was baptized but we were never forced to go to church or into any sort of practice. As an adult, I started looking at myself. I explored Buddhism and looked at other Eastern religions. I didn’t know much about the Jewish culture or traditions. Then I heard a podcast […]
Melanie Gruenwald:
A story of grief transformed
Having been raised in a mainstream, somewhat secular, Conservative Jewish home, living life across the religious spectrum in college, eventually becoming more observant, serving as a Jewish professional and marrying a man who would later become a Conservative rabbi… I was always in pursuit of greater ownership and depth of my Jewish learning and Jewish […]
Persona non gratitude
Credit: Shadow Sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster Many years ago I met a Mom from Colorado Springs who donated the heart of her young son as a life-saving transplant . Typically, the donor family does not know who receives the organ, but in this case, the recipient of her son’s heart was a […]
They Came For
Where do we want society to move towards? Mayor of Pittsburgh Bill Peduto provided this answer following the mass murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue this past Saturday morning: “It is not about finding ways to divide us, it is about finding ways that unite us through our commonalities as humans. […]
Welcoming Melanie
Dear KE Community: I can think of no better way than to introduce our newest teacher than presenting her in her own words. I have had the pleasure of studying with and mentoring her and learning from her courage and openness. with admiration, David In Kabbalah this semester, we are studying “Masks”. What masks do […]
Dear Dr. Ford
Dear Dr. Ford: I would like to recommend to you a recently published book, The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eger. Dr. Eger, a psychologist who has worked with victims of trauma, details her own process of healing from the brutal, dehumanizing experience she suffered as a young adolescent in Auschwitz and in two Nazi labor […]
You Killed My Father: Prepare to Learn
Yesterday, a student sent her class a story she read about a young man, a football star who was adopted as an infant and his search for his biologic family. It turned out that his biologic father, who had not known that he had a son (the mother did not inform him she was pregnant) […]
No-thingness is Something Else
I search and I scan for the perfect metaphor Abhorring imprecision or worse selling out To the exigencies of a concocted cocktail A ballerina poising on a sharpened pinkie The tone of skin, voice or deafness. What can one say of no-thingness Without being led into a perjury trap Ayin or Ayn (in Hebrew) mean […]
The Postman Rings Twice
What does the electrician who is now a spiritual teacher and the postal worker who now interprets dreams share in common? Typically, we see metaphor as beyond the concrete and literal—traversing imaginative realms of our symbolic experience. The Kabbalah takes a hybrid position. If we were using a metaphor to explain the Kabbalah’s take on […]