Planting Hope
by Dr. David Sanders Carob is an acquired taste especially for a child. Every year, in the winter, on the holiday of Tu b’Shevat (Festival of New Trees) we were treated to raw carob. Most of my classmates after one bite promptly spit it out. After years of doing the same, I started to like […]
Kabbalah Experience Tu B’Shevat Seder
This Tu B’Shevat Seder, created by Dr. David Sanders, guides the reader with poetry, song, food, and reflections on the mystical four worlds, and how we traverse them. Tu B’Shevat is one of the four new years on the Jewish calendar, celebrating the birthday of the trees. It often falls in Jan/ Feb, when the […]
For All These Things
by Melanie Gruenwald For all these things A song by Naomi Shemer Every bee that brings the honey Needs a sting to be complete And we all must learn to taste the bitter with the sweet. On this fifth secular anniversary of our son, Koby’s (of blessed memory), death—showing up to class was the first […]
Holding Opposites
by Dr. David Sanders It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the […]
Practicing Awareness
by Melanie Gruenwald Last December 31st, Salomon, Hannah, Micah and I spent New Year’s Eve together. We each took a moment to write a personal note to our future self, reflecting on hopes and dreams for 2022. I was sifting through a kitchen drawer this morning and found these letters. I can’t wait to bring […]
Last Supper
by Dr. David Sanders If this was the last day of your life, would you spend it the way you’re spending today? ~Oprah Winfrey These last few weeks I enjoyed the heartfelt, personal responses of students to a prompt on contemplating their own death. Specifically, they were asked to “choreograph the day of their death […]
LGBTQ+ Safe Zone
by Melanie Gruenwald Kabbalah Experience is proud to be participating in the Denver-Keshet Leadership Project. Keshet is a national organization which works for the full equality of all LGBTQ+ Jews and families in Jewish life. (Keshet means rainbow, in Hebrew.) KE chose to make this year-long leadership initiative a priority, as it aligns with our value […]
Phone it Forward
by Dr. David Sanders To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing, You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in. — Michael Chabon When was the last time you used a pay phone? The last time you […]
Impermanence
This past Shabbat, Rabbi Sarah Shulman, at Congregation Hebrew Educational Alliance in Denver, shared a teaching about Ecclesiastes (Kohelet). The Jewish community traditionally reads Ecclesiastes during Sukkot. Rabbi Shulman addressed the concept of dynamic obsolescence of the objects we acquire in our lives (like cell phones, refrigerators and computers) and the fact that our bodies […]
Spooky Synchronicity
by Dr. David Sanders How is it that three scientists, one from Walnut Creek (California), one from Paris and one from Vienna are sharing the Nobel prize for physics this year? They have all been pioneers in the field of quantum mechanics and have all disproven an assertion by Albert Einstein. Their experiments, since the […]