Counting of the Omer Week Three: Tiferet
“Crystallize your goals. Make a plan for achieving them and set yourself a deadline. Then, with supreme confidence, determination and disregard for obstacles and other people’s criticisms, carry out your plan.” Paul Meyer This is the week of Tiferet (Day 15 is Chesed in Tiferet which starts Saturday night and ends Sunday evening). The first […]
Gevurah: The Strength of Setting Boundaries
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Genius will not. Education will not. Persistence and determination alone will solve the problems of the human race.” Calvin Coolidge This second week of the counting of the Omer (taking us from Day 8-Day 14) is connected to the Sefirah of Gevurah. […]
Counting of the Omer: Week One
Our counting of the Omer this year will pick up on a theme we began to address in last year’s count. This year our intent is to develop the idea of the seven week count as a seven week step program for change. With the end in mind, the final week of the count, corresponding […]
Productive Counting
We are just over a week away from counting the Omer—a fifty day count from Passover to the holiday of Shavuot—commemorating the journey the Jews traversed from Egyptian slavery to becoming a nation with the Torah as its religious covenant. This year we will again look at the fifty day count as a step program […]
Providing Definition
A number of our students subscribe to word of the day and today’s word, appropriately, is vernal. Vernal stems from the Latin word vernus meaning “pertaining to spring.” It is related to the word “verdant.” My love of language and words has instilled a curiosity in how words come into being. For instance, what is […]
Elevating Your Game
Starting this week there will be 64 and by the following weekend there will only be 2. I am referring to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, fondly called March Madness. For those who love the sport this is its highlight. The elimination process yields our national collegiate basketball champion. One team of players will taste […]
Heartflakes
We must begin by melting the ice in the heart of man to use our knowledge wisely. Angaangaq, www.Icewisdom.com The snow had just begun to fall last Thursday evening as the weather front, predicted to shut down Denver, rolled in. The city though was in full preparation with the promise that not only […]
The New Year for Trees
You could wait for Friday April 20th. That is when Arbor Day is celebrated in Colorado this year. Arbor Day in the United States is a local custom and it varies greatly. In Jewish tradition the New Year for Trees was designated long ago as falling in the month of Shevat—our current month on the […]
A Sign from God
There are plots and subplots. Which is which is often impossible to discern. Former Denver Mayor Bill Vidal is our next speaker on Aha Moments. The plot is laid out in the title of his talk: An Immigrant’s Journey and in the copy we have prepared: “Born in Cuba to a wealthy family, Bill […]
Spirited Dialogue
“Come and hear: The father of Samuel had some money belonging to orphans deposited with him. When he died, Samuel was not there and did not ask his him where the money was kept. People derogatorily called him, ‘The son who consumes the money of orphans’. So he went after his father to the cemetery […]