Dancing Across the Sea
by Melanie Gruenwald We begin our Time: Present Moment Awareness course with the question- A fish is to water, as a person is to what…? How can it be, we are swimming through time, without even paying attention to it? The days pass, the years pass, we age (if we’re lucky), but how are we […]
Threads
by Dr. David Sanders What are the main threads that are woven together to form the cloth we call Kabbalah Experience? Posing the question in that manner already reveals a first thread—mastering the use of metaphor. The lens through which the early Kabbalists viewed sacred text was to move from the literal to the metaphoric […]
Sometimes there are good funerals
In loving memory of Avi Halzel Sometimes there are good funerals.The kind where a person has lived a long, full life and dies peacefully, surrounded by the people they love. And then there are funerals you wish didn’t exist. The ones for young people. Good people. People whose presence alone made the world better. Today […]
Strings Attached
by Dr. David Sanders Every so often we get to go back to the beginning, circle back to where it all started. More than two decades ago I sat around a dining room table, early morning on a Thursday, with four men, two who I knew and two who were new to me. Dr. Ryan […]
Seeing Through the Glass: Perception, Choice, and the Light We Carry
by Melanie Gruenwald “Ordinarily a person sees what is familiar to her experience… Her eyes are at the center of her universe.” — Allen Afterman, Kabbalah and Consciousness What we see is never neutral. We see through the lenses of our own stories—our time, place, assumptions, wounds, and hopes. Ordinary perception, as Allen Afterman suggests, […]
Every New Beginning
Every new beginning comes from another beginning’s end. I’ve quoted that line many times over the years, but lately it has stopped being a lyric and started being a lived experience. Life is full of transition, beginnings and endings. Sometimes we get to choose, and sometimes we don’t. There are moments in life […]
The Tree of Death
“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that…I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that is something I cannot allow to happen.” 2001: A Space Odyssey The Nobel Prize in physics in 2024 was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton. He is not a physicist. The Nobel Prize in chemistry in […]
Noticing the Good
At the moment, my mom, sister and law, niece and nephew are in the kitchen. Uncle Joel came in with fresh bread from Whole Foods. My house is full of baking smells and people I love. Hakarat haTov, recognizing the good.This is a day to recognize and appreciate the good in the large and small […]
Bottle Cap
by Dr. David Sanders Just when I was ready to give up on humanity (not on any particular human just the overall take on whether the “human project” as a species could be trusted for even one generation to stop killing each other and wrecking the environment) a little spark of light, a glimmer […]
The Season of Becoming: Finding Light in the Unfolding
by Melanie Gruenwald As I watch the leaves shift from green to gold to crimson, I am reminded that change is the only constant. Each leaf that loosens its hold and drifts to the ground feels like a small teaching — a whisper that everything is in motion, that life is always unfolding. This autumn, […]