On my walk, I found a speckled yellow mushroom. An app on my phone told me this mushroom only grows in association with the Eastern White pine. The mushroom is just a hint, a temporary manifestation, of the massive web of tiny filaments that invisibly bound themselves to the roots of that Eastern White pine to help it grow. This is how I imagine the great love all around us: it steadfastly sustains our world, operates invisibly, except at rare moments when it shows itself to us.
Read MoreThese days, many of us are doing nothing – not to rest, but because we are trying to survive a pandemic. Many of you have told me how hard it is to do nothing right now: the feelings of pain, loneliness, boredom, frustration and helplessness. Your anger and grief about all you can’t do – attend birthdays or funerals, hug your families and friends; your deep desire to be, to do something. Alongside these feelings of loss, we experience another loss: When we aren’t doing anything, we sometimes come to believe we have lost our value, perhaps even our connection with that thing that is greater than us, which some of us call “God.”
Read MoreOur certainty that things cannot change offers us psychological protection by forcing us to abandon our expectations. But it also obscures the reality that change is a property intrinsic to everything that exists—our bodies, our relationships, even our social and political institutions. Opposed to our surety, hope locates itself in the premises that we do not know what will happen, and that in the spaciousness of that uncertainty is room to act. Torah invites us to imagine all that is still unknown sitting in the twilight, waiting to be thrust into history in order to embrace an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists—which excuses both groups from acting.
Read MoreThis week’s parasha enumerates the dates and observances of the main Jewish festivals and Shabbat. Reading these instructions, the rabbis notice something peculiar: while the Torah refers to Shabbat as mo’adai, “my chosen times”, it refers to the rest of the festivals as mo’adam, “their chosen time” (Lev 23:2, 4). The rabbis conclude this is because our ancestors needed to choose when to observe the holidays based on their own calculations. By contrast, God sanctified Shabbat at the beginning of time for all time.
Read MoreA few months ago, even though I’m afraid of heights, I joined the local rock gym. No, I had never been rock climbing before – it just seemed like a fun activity I could do together with my partner. But before we were allowed to climb on our own, we had to pass a series of small tests given by staff at the gym. The first lesson was “mat placement,” i.e., how to move the gym mats right under the highest part of our climb so that if we fell, we wouldn’t get seriously hurt.
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