Today: Return lost items. Explanation: The Talmud tells us that an item is only and truly “lost” when its owner despairs of its return. Your job is to not let that happen. Granted, this is one of those mitzvot which…
Category: Torah
The Text(s), the tribe, the learning, the being. (With a bit of random spirituality mixed in.)
365 Names of God: “The Light of Eternal Mind”
THE LIGHT OF ETERNAL MIND is how Moses (Charlton Heston) described G?d to Zipporah (Yvonne DeCarlo) and Joshua (John Derek) after seeing the Burning Bush in Cecil B. DeMille’s at-times unintentionally amusing but classic The Ten Commandments. It’s a potent…
Minute Mitzvah: Stuff & Nonsense
Today: Don’t crave someone else’s stuff. Explanation: One of modern life’s biggest distractions is feeling materially inadequate, especially in a gotta-have-it society like our own. Why dwell on your deficiencies? As Pirkei Avot says, “Who is rich? One who is…
Truth v. Lies
SOME TIME AGO, I HAD a Facebook encounter with a dear friend who’s something of an Evangelical Atheist. It all started when another dear friend posted the following “meme” to my “wall:” OMNISM: THE BELIEF THAT NO RELIGION IS THE…
365 Names of God: Goddess
GODDESS IS USUALLY THE NAME invoked by people who see the word “God” — and especially Its biblical avatar — as male-gendered and wrathful. “Goddess” is sometimes also characterized as the Nurturer, the Comforter, the Creatrix, the Great Mother; the…
365 Names of God: “The Divine”
THE DIVINE This Name tends to be used in circles where the word “God” might cause people discomfort for one reason or another. I’ve mostly seen it in New Age contexts as a non-anthropomorphic gambit to refer to an intentionless…
OKAY MOSES,” SAID GOD. “HERE’S another commandment: Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”
“You mean, don’t eat meat and milk together?”
“No. Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”
“You mean we should have separate dishes for meat and dairy?”
“No. Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”
“You mean we should wait a few hours after eating meat before we eat dairy?”
“Moses,” said God,”do whatever the hell you want.”
365 Names of God: “The Mystery”
THE MYSTERY is what I decided in 2010 to use instead of the word “God,” since it then encapsulated everything-I-knew-I-didn’t-know-about-G?d (including why I spell it with a question mark). It’s just too big, you know? And mysterious. And incomprehensible. And…
Tell me what you know of Torah,” asked the greybeard rabbi.
“I only know a little,” responded the young student.
The rabbi smiled. “That’s all anyone knows of Torah.”
365 Names of God: Not-Two
NOT-TWO One of our living-room Torah participants laid this Name on me a while ago. As a fierce non-dualist myself (meaning that I see the Universe as one whole Being rather than an assembly of parts), I instantly took to…
Why I Love: Torah Study
IT’S THE ENDLESS INTELLECTUAL PUZZLE. It’s that Hebrew writing closely resembles Klingonese (well, it does; come to think of it, so does some of the sentiment). It’s belonging to the 3,000-year-old Permanent Floating Book Club. It’s the spectra, vagaries and…
PS:
So: We’re at CVS just now, about an hour after I wrote “And On, And On,”, waiting our turn at the pharmacy, when this woman sits down next to me and says, “I’m very sorry about what happened in Pittsburgh.”…