Celebrating and Mourning Bob Loup
To Our KE community: The man of a thousand lives slipped into another realm early Thursday morning. Bob Loup, a long-time student of KE whose daily meditation practice was “D’layt Atar Panuey Menay” (There is no place empty of You) was my surrogate Dad and the surrogate Zayde (grandfather) to our young girls. There is […]
Old Friends
Many years back I was in contact with an elementary school classmate who I had not seen in years and suggested to him that we organize a reunion of our 8th grade graduating class, there were 90 of us and it would have marked 30 years. We began to track people down but quickly found […]
Feel the Jewish
He has not asked me to come to his defense. But he is “family,” so I feel obliged to at least speak up. The issue at hand is larger than Sanders, whether that be Bernie or David. It is not about politics. It is about identity, about family, about relationships. I would like to suggest […]
Camera Shy
The word “umble” itself has no dictionary definition yet there appears to be a root meaning that connects the following 10 words: Bumble. Crumble. Fumble. Grumble. Humble. Jumble. Mumble. Rumble. Stumble. Tumble. Umbling in one form or another connotes a humbling experience—one you have to lift yourself up from—from thoughts that are a jumble, to […]
The Highest Opinion
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan agree 93% of the time on cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court (the only higher concordance between Supreme Court justices is Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor at 94%). While Ginsburg and Kagan, liberal women justices, have agreed with Justice Antonin Scalia far less (70% and 74% respectively) they were […]
Tumbling Walls
Man is a great wall builder The Berlin Wall The Wailing Wall of Jerusalem But the wall most impregnable Has a moat flowing with fright around his heart A wall without windows for the spirit to breeze through without a door for love to walk in. These few lines of poetry by the South African […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Call My Name
King Massasoit of the Wampanoag tribe was a man of peace. He welcomed the “white” settlers to his land. As a King he sold them land. Soon enough the settlers were so many in number they stopped buying land—they just took it. Native American leaders had choices—but those who could see ahead knew that their […]