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 […]
Addressing Your Masks
God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. The Book of Genesis starts off with a bang and ends with some dust. In between it is one masquerade after another. The ball gets rolling from the beginning —energy slows down to parade as matter. Then comes the Eden story in which human […]
Melting ICE
The United States remains one of only a handful of countries to retain the Fahrenheit temperature system and therefore, we are aware that ice begins to melt as it reaches and moves beyond 32 degrees. How Daniel Fahrenheit’s system places water’s freezing (and melting) temperature at 32 degrees is a complicated story. The number 32, […]
The Intimate Picture
Louis Kahn, the great American architect, died in 1974 in a washroom at Penn Station. He was alone when his heart gave out. His only son, Nathan was eleven. A shadowy figure in his life, his famous Dad was busy at work, travelling abroad, and unbeknownst to Nathan, a father to his half siblings with […]
Holding Your Opposite
Which is it—grey or gray? Isn’t it fitting that there isn’t a black and white answer. Turns out they are both acceptable ways to spell my favorite color. Gray is a great color to represent ambiguity and grey is also a great color to represent ambivalence. The fourth principle of awareness: Hold opposites and recognize […]