Parsha

ESSAY: Your Strength and Your Song (Parashat Beshalach)

We search for the strength to face what is difficult right now and not fall into the collapsing energies of fear and despair.   Ozi vezimrat Yah.  “The Lord is my strength and song (Exodus 15:2),” the Israelites sang after their salvation at the Red Sea.  They knew something about facing impossible situations.   My Strength […]

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MEDITATION: Your Strength and Your Song (Parashat Beshalach)

In this meditation, we explore the phrase Ozi vezimrat Yah, “The Lord is my strength and song” (Exodus 15:2). We consider the fear that the Israelites felt at the Sea as well as our own fears and feel into how we might allow the divine energy of strength and courage and creativity to flow through

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MEDITATION: Breathing God In (Parashat Va’era)

When Moshe came to the Israelites with the good news of God’s redemption, they could not hear him because of “shortness of breath” and “hard work” (Exodus 6:9). In this meditation, we explore our own shortness of breath in relation to the pressures of a fast paced, productivity oriented society and we consider how we

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ESSAY: Floating Down The River With Moshe (Parashat Shemot)

I have been thinking about riptides, those powerful currents in the sea that take you further and further away from the shore and from safety.  If you fight them and try to swim against them to get back to the shore, you just exhaust yourself and make things worse.  The key apparently is to relax

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MEDITATION: Floating down the River With Moshe (Parashat Shemot)

In this meditation, we explore the image of Moshe floating down the river to salvation and feel into what it would be like to surrender and trust and let go of navigation and control to that extent, letting the river take us where we need to go. Source: Exodus 2:1-10 Photo by Pixabay at Pexels

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ESSAY: The Angel That Redeems You (Parashat Vayechi)

When we are really struggling, how do we move out of a place of stuckness?  How do we find the resources to emerge, not to keep getting sucked down into the whirlpool of hopelessness and helplessness, of fear and anxiety and collapse?    Yaakov must have known something about this.  He suffered for years over

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MEDITATION: The Angel That Redeems You (Parashat Vayechi)

We cannot redeem ourselves through our ordinary human capacities. Redemption only comes through surrender to the divine plane, to the angel that is always waiting to redeem us. In this meditation, we work with the famous phrase (and song) hamalakh hagoel oti (Genesis 48:16) that Yaakov said as a blessing to Yosef and his sons,

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