This is the journey we make in life, not once, but many times over, from Mitzrayim, a place of narrow straits, to a land of ease and flow. (Click image to read more)
QUICK THOUGHT: A Land Flowing With Milk and Honey (Parashat Ki Tavo) Read More »
Holding that fantasy in faith before us, the fantasy of total return, the fantasy of really coming home to ourselves and to God . . . (Click image to read more)
QUICK THOUGHT: Imagining Your Own Homecoming (Parashat Ki Tavo) Read More »
In this meditation, we explore the bikkurim (first fruits) ceremony as a celebration of homecoming, both physical, to the land, and in our meditation, spiritual, a continual return to the home of peace and rest inside ourselves that is our true home, a place that is not tight like Mitzrayim, but flowing like the land
MEDITATION: On Bikkurim and Homecoming (Parashat Ki Tavo) Read More »
(Originally published in 2020) It is as if we have a secret language between us and God that no one else knows . . . (Click image to read more)
SHORT ESSAY: Back and Forth Between Us and God (Parashat Ki Tavo) Read More »
We walk and we stumble; we walk and we stumble. All of us walk straight and proud some of the time, and all of us stumble and fall some of the time. (Click image to read more)
ESSAY: Lifting Each Other When We Fall (Parashat Ki Tetzei) Read More »
This meditation deals with the mitzvah of helping to raise up a fellow’s fallen animal. Hakem takim imo, “you shall surely raise [it] up together with him.” The meditation considers this verse in terms of our experience of emotional “falling” on life’s journey, exploring some different ways of understanding what this falling is, and then
MEDITATION: Lifting Each Other When We Fall (Parashat Ki Tetzei) Read More »
For a person — even in the midst of war — is still a tree of the field, still steady, majestic and connected. (Click image to read more)
ESSAY: Your True Tree Self (Parashat Shoftim) Read More »
This meditation deals with the phrase ki ha’adam etz hasadeh, “for a person is a tree of the field” (Deuteronomy 21:19), exploring what it might feel like to really imagine yourself as a tree, the majesty and the stillness, the groundedness and the sense of connection. This phrase is said in the context of war
MEDITATION: Your True Tree Self (Parashat Shoftim) Read More »
Our parsha begins with the word re’eh, “see,” and ends with a commandment related to the same word, the mitzvah of re’ayon, of “being seen” by God in the Temple during pilgrimages. Three times a year, the Torah says, yera’eh, a person is required “to be seen” by God (Devarim 16:16). This is such
SHORT ESSAY: Being Seen by God (Parashat Re’eh) Read More »
In this meditation, we consider the mitzvah of re’ayon, of coming to the Temple three times a year to “be seen” by God, a mitzvah which appears at the end of our parsha. We explore two aspects of the feeling of being seen by God, the feeling of having one’s suffering be seen and the
MEDITATION: Being Seen by God (Parashat Re’eh) Read More »