The Talmud teaches that the way to relate to the wilderness, though it’s extremely challenging at times, is to — rather than fight the wilderness — instead make ourselves like the wilderness, open to receiving each experience, the joyful and the difficult, with an open heart, listening for what we could learn from it. When we do this, the Talmud says, Torah is given to us as a gift.
Read Moreon Shavuot, we are invited to peel away all these layers of ordinary perception — our sense of space, and time, life and death that separate us from each other and from generations that came before and will come after us to remember the most fundamental ways we are still connected.
Read MoreAs I strolled through the greenhouses at Longwood Gardens the other day, brilliant blossoms of yellow and white and blue dazzled my senses. The sun on my pale skin told me it had been snowing only yesterday, and reminded me how suddenly the seasons change—and how sensible, in this time of powerful transformation it is to celebrate Passover, our (perennial) liberation from slavery in Egypt. But this riot of color also made me wonder: How does the Omer—this period of quiet, patient waiting—connect to the process of liberation and the revelation that we experience at the end of the Omer on the holiday of Shavuot?
Read MoreI’ve been looking for meaningful full-time work since crash-landing in Philadelphia in August. After living in Boston for eight years and being known and seen as a resource in the community, I suddenly found myself a stranger again, trying to make it as a rabbi in a new city – one full of other talented rabbis, no less.
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