Passover as the Secret High Holidays: Making Your Rosh Hashanah Resolutions Real Halfway Through the Journey
There are two New Years on the Jewish calendar (in addition to the new years for trees and for flocks): Rosh Hashanah and First of Nissan (announced on Shabbat HaChodesh). The deep spiritual connection between the two is emphasized by reading the haftarah from Ezekiel, who sees the journey from the 1st of Nissan to Pesach as an equal mirror of the journey from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, and for whom Pesach is the real Yom Kippur. There is a deep and very practical message here: most of our Rosh Hashanah new years' resolutions may fall apart following Sukkot, but the best time to really enact those resolutions in a sustainable way is to use Pesach as the renewal of putting those resolutions into practice. Especially with the change and limitation on diet, the open discussion of what it means to serve God and your own soul during the Seder, THIS is the time to restart doing those resolutions. We're only halfway through the year: you've got six months of leaning into the homestretch, pulled by the gravity of the upcoming holidays. What are your new years' resolutions? How can you implement them during Pesach?
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8:18
The Mishkan, Indigenous Wisdom, and the Right to Repair
We often fail to appreciate the virtues of the Shepherd period of Judaism, which preceded the Israelite period. In this dvar Torah, I focus on the virtues of sustainability and repairability of the portable sanctuary (Mishkan) over the permanent version (Temple), and I apply it to legislation before state congresses today.
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10:38
A People of the Book and a Generation That Has Never Read One
If you want to understand the crisis in education, look no further than Natalie Wexler's "The Knowledge Gap," one of the most important books of the past ten years. Is reading a skill you apply to any text, like stretching a muscle, or playing a video game, or is it, as our tradition defines it, something entirely different, something based on knowledge of the world, of life, and of relating to a larger story?
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13:12
The Tower of Babel and the Problem of Identity-Based "Truths"
The plain sense of the brief Tower of Babel story is that dividing people up by their own languages is a curse that prevents cooperation (even if the Rabbis read the story differently). Using Coleman Hughes's essay on the Civil Rights hero Bayard Rustin, I wonder if the curse of our times is the identiy-based division of truths: is this modern paradigm a blessing of diversity or a curse for our much needed cooperation in solving our collective problems?
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12:33
Did Isaac Have Imposter Syndrome? Is it a Curse or a Blessing?
Isaac's entire story arc suggests that he continually sees himself as the opposite of how folks see him. But is imposter syndrome a curse, or a blessing?
New Zealand