ESSAY: Breathing God In (Parashat Va’era)
Who is in charge inside –Pharaoh or God? (Click image to read more)
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Parsha
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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ESSAY: It Is My Brothers That I Seek (Parashat Vayeshev)
Yosef is given a special coat by his father, a kutonet pasim, a fine striped tunic, as a symbol of his status as his father’s favorite, most beloved child (Genesis 37:3). Growing up with his father treating him this way, it is no surprise that Yosef’s dreams betray this sense of superiority, with visions of
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MEDITATION: It Is My Brothers That I Seek (Parashat Vayeshev)
In this meditation, we look at issues of superiority and inferiority in the Yosef story and our own tendencies to live through the lens of constant comparison to others. And then we touch into our deepest desire, which, like Yosef, is ultimately to seek “our brothers” and our sisters, to seek fellowship and peer connection,
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ESSAY: The Sun Shines For You (Parashat Vayishlach)
The sun shone for him, for Yaakov. It shines for you, too. Rest in that loving light. It was made for you, to heal you. (Click image to read more)
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MEDITATION: The Sun Shines For You (Parashat Vayishlach)
After Yaakov wrestles with the angel, injuring his hip, the next morning the Torah says, vayizrach lo hashemesh, “the sun shone for him” (Genesis 32:32). The midrash explains that the sun came out to heal him after his injury. In this meditation, we explore what it would feel like to imagine that the sun was
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