The Depth of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is really nothing more than an act of self-healing and self-empowerment. I call it a miracle medicine. It is free, it works and has no side effects. The day I forgave the Nazis, privately I forgave my parents whom I hated all my life for not having saved me from Auschwitz. Children expect […]
Dayenu — The Present is Enough
I recently received a message from my computer, which can be very courteous if it is in a good mood, alerting me that memory was almost full. Any one of your external brains may signal you about reaching critical capacity—too many photos, texts, emails etc. Can you imagine if you periodically received a message from […]
Wishes for a Meaningful Pass Over
Dear KE Community: A few years ago a group of hip Jews wrote and published The New American Haggadah for Passover. For me there was not that much new about it, and beside it being in English, I was not sure what made it American. So this year I created a new Haggadah based […]
A Fork in the Road
I am, and I suspect many of you are as well, at a crossroads. This intersection though is ever present—where past meets future at the juncture of now. It happens every minute and in the broader sweep of decades and generations. Technology is a wondrous marker of these transitions that has us contemplate: “Do I […]
This Moment
Perhaps you noticed. My weekly blog is now once every other week. A student this week provided her class with a wonderful image of what it means to be in the flow of life: Imagine a raft (the simpler the better) on a river. If the raft is imbalanced it will take on water, perhaps […]
The Man Who Mistook His Life for That
Many students sent me this past week a link to Oliver Sack’s My Own Life, an Op Ed piece in the New York Times. Dr. Sacks, the eminent neurologist turned author of books on people whose brains and or senses lack what some might call “normalcy” is facing his own death from liver cancer. […]
Ode to Brian Williams
When I was no more than 5 years old, I was pushing my younger brother in a carriage buggy, one of those more old fashioned types that the English call a pram. My memory of what happened is shrouded in the trauma that occurred—my brother’s tongue got caught (somehow) and deeply cut on the metal […]
The Darkness of Male Supremacy
In 1947, amidst the struggles of the birth of the State of Israel a young Bedouin shepherd boy stumbled across a half-dozen or more clay jars secreted in a cave in the area of Qumran. His findings, which he sold for less than $50, are the priceless Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of mostly Hebrew […]
A Calendar of Blessings
When Pope Francis assumed the papacy almost two years ago he greeted the thronging crowd in xt” The he bowed his head and beseeched those in attendance (and around the world) to bless him. Do leaders need our blessing? In Hebrew, the word for blessing is Baruch (Beit-Reish-Kaf) and as pointed out in an […]
Why ask Why and other Burning Questions
One of the most profound questions ever posed is “Why ask why? “ Sakichi Toyoda was not only intrigued by the question, the founder of Toyota, devised a system for his engineers to reveal the root causes of problems. Toyoda’s 5 Whys is an iterative question-asking technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a […]