MAY YOU HAVE A SWEET, joyous, happy and rewarding New Year! And may your resolutions not prove too daunting; on reflection, may you not bog down in a swamp of self-recrimination. As the Talmud says, “All beginnings are difficult.” And…
Author: Neal Ross Attinson
Neal Ross Attinson is one of those text-compulsives who feels naked without a keyboard, or at least a a pad and pen. He is unafraid of adverbs, loves astronomy and gastronomy with equally unabashed passion, and lives with/in an eclectic library in Sonoma, California.
5 Thoughts: A Wrinkle is Time
1. “WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?” I asked. And the answer came: “Away.” 2. There’s really not much one can say about the passing of time, just as there is not much that can be said about falling in love…
365 Names of God: Design Group
DESIGN GROUP A friend of Ann’s brought us this term, which was then current among her friend’s med-school colleagues. While I believe that scientists shouldn’t budge an inch from their pursuit of Truth, this Name can be a great way…
Words to Bring Back: “Rejoice”
– Definition: v.i. To feel joyful; be glad. – Used in a sentence: Richard rejoiced when the Red Sox won the World Series. – Why: It’s little used outside translations of the Bible, but addresses a HUGE part of life…
Why I Love: Geronimo Cat
IT’S HIS INDEPENDENCE. IT’S watching him sleep. It’s his purring. It’s the feel and smell of his fur. (It’s also the smell of his paws.) It’s the way he closes his eyes when I pet him. It’s his occasional intense,…
The Loudest Silence
THE TRICK IS: HOW TO scream at the top of your lungs without making a sound. That’s one of the lessons taught by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a Chasidic teacher who lived in Ukraine at the turn of the 19th…
Are We (still) Not Men?
FORTY YEARS AGO THIS WEEK, my friend Ralfh came over to my apartment, held up an album cover, and said, “You have to hear this.” He slid out the vinyl disk, put it on the stereo, lowered the tone arm,…
Two Letters, One Torah
THE FIRST THING YOU NEED to know is that, in Hebrew, the letter D (dalet) looks a lot like the letter R (reish). It’s so easy to confuse the two, in fact, that Source Critics (those who see the Torah…
First Graf: The Illuminati Papers
THE LATE ROBERT ANTON WILSON is perhaps the greatest influence on my life and thought since even before Rabbi Akiva. His spirit is sprinkled here and there throughout this blog like raisins in a cake. A prolific author, RAW (as…
Don’t Look Up
OF ALL THE PET PEEVES this modern life offers, one of the most soul-sucking is checking out at the grocery store. I’m specifically talking about the debit-card machine. Time was, you could fill the two-to-three-minute transaction with friendly banter; ask…
365 Names of God: El Shaddai
EL SHADDAI is the name used primarily by the Biblical Patriarchs, usually translated as “God Almighty” and focusing on the deity’s providential or nurturing aspect. Scholars differ over whether “Shaddai” is cognate with similar Phoenician or Ugaritic words for mountains,…
The Torah can be taken, among other things, as a ‘polyphonic’ text, or a loose anthology of competing claims regarding the legal stipulations of the covenant. The edited Torah, following this approach, was not meant to be read as a practical and coherent handbook on how to carry out the law, but as a collage of competing understandings of the requirements of the covenant.”
— Rabbi David Frankel