• 70 faces of Torah for Shavuot

    Updated: 2012-04-29 12:00:00
    As we count the Omer, we're counting down the days until Shavuot. (This year Shavuot begins on the evening of Saturday, May 26 -- just under four weeks from now.) Like children counting the days until a birthday or vacation,...

  • There You Are

    Updated: 2012-04-27 12:00:00
    What in me resists meeting You wherever I go? The petals fallen from the forsythia the wind, the trees flying wet chartreuse flags -- atop my filing cabinet the receipts for jury service and childbirth classes which I finally throw...

  • Two Kings Wearing One Crown

    Updated: 2012-04-26 14:32:18
    The relationship between religion and ethics is a perennial problem in philosophy of religion. In one sense, it seems redundant to say that a particular action is required or prohibited on both religious and moral grounds. If God is perfectly good, it follows that what He desires from us is moral. However, there are several

  • In which my kids teach me about tefilah

    Updated: 2012-04-25 12:00:00
    So What Is Prayer? It doesn't have to be services or words, though it can be both. It can be a feeling that God is present. It doesn't have to include asking for anything. It can be just awe or...

  • Ostriker and Amichai

    Updated: 2012-04-24 13:55:45
    As Yom Ha-Atzma'ut -- Israeli Independence Day -- approaches, I find myself reading a lot of poetry about the Middle East and/or written by Israeli and Palestinian poets. Here are two poems which have particularly moved me this week. A...

  • Revisiting Tazria-Metzorah, after death and after birth

    Updated: 2012-04-23 14:21:38
    This week we're reading Tazria-Metzorah (Leviticus 12:1-15:33) -- a double Torah portion chock-full of birth, blood, tum'ah and taharah, leprosy and eruptive afflictions, nocturnal emissions, and purification rituals. This stuff is, I suspect, what makes many moderns squeamish about Leviticus....

  • A birthday note for Yom Ha-Atzma'ut

    Updated: 2012-04-20 16:46:35
    Sunset over the Jerusalem hills, 2008. Dear Israel, There's so much I want to say to you on your 64th birthday* today. First I want to say: it's amazing that you exist. That so many of us made our ways...

  • Counting the Omer in the Toddler House

    Updated: 2012-04-20 12:00:00
    The year I was pregnant I counted the weeks until I could reveal your presence. With each turned page you were the size of an aspirin, a raisin, a grape. Your tiny heart fluttered. You grew fingernails and kidneys. Who...

  • A poem for today

    Updated: 2012-04-19 14:00:42
    flight on the train you had left me a message scrawled across brown paper wrapping hung like an empty garment bag hooked in the baggage net overhead it all seemed upside down no safety from that direction i could not...

  • A glimmer of hope coming out of Hebron

    Updated: 2012-04-17 22:55:55
    I want to signal-boost something I read recently which gave me hope: a post on Jewschool called The Hebron Matza Cover Initiative. Video about the Hebron Matza Cover Initiative; if you can't see the embedded video, you can go directly...

  • Ana b'Koach / Untie our Tangles (a melody for the Omer count)

    Updated: 2012-04-17 17:07:18
    The words of "Ana B'Koach" in Hebrew and transliteration. Back in 2010, I posted about a prayer called Ana B'Koach: My friend Reb David Seidenberg calls Ana B'Koach one of the 'masterpieces of mystical prayer.' (Here's the NeoHasid page on...

  • Poem in Spirit Voyages

    Updated: 2012-04-17 12:54:17
    I'm delighted to be able to announce that my mother poem "Psalm for the Sixth Day (Mother Psalm 5)" appears in the April 2012 issue of Spirit Voyages, "a quarterly art and literary journal with a spiritual twist." As the...

  • New toddler house poem

    Updated: 2012-04-15 12:00:00
    LIFE IN THE TODDLER HOUSE It's only a zoo when we throw a party: two-year-olds squabbling over the flowered magnifying glass, seven-year-olds borrowing every blanket in the house for their palace under the stairs. But even our own lone monkey...

  • The seventh day: crossing the Sea

    Updated: 2012-04-12 13:48:19
    Crossing the Sea. Image by Rina bat Tzion. Today is the seventh day of Pesach. (For Jews in Israel, and for Reform and Reconstructionist Jews everywhere, this is the last day of Pesach; for Orthodox and Conservative Jews outside of...

  • Glimpses of Pesach 2012

    Updated: 2012-04-12 05:00:00
    One end of the table, first-night seder. Mrs. Fausto and I were invited to celebrate the Passover seder last Friday with the family of one of our daughter Faustoette's friends. I was delighted to learn that the friend's aunt, who...

  • VR Podcast Episode 2: Bedtime Practices

    Updated: 2012-04-10 14:08:49
    I did warn y'all that the podcast was going to be "occasional," right? Though I'm not sure I realized, when I said that, that four months would go by between episodes... VR Podcast Episode 2: Bedtime Practices. The "angel song;"...

  • New poem: Bedikat chametz in the toddler house

    Updated: 2012-04-09 15:39:18
    BEDIKAT CHAMETZ IN THE TODDLER HOUSE What does it mean to remove chametz when my cupboard overflows with toddler-friendly goldfish and mini-muffins? If there is any chametz I do not know about -- odds are good there are stale O's...

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