TODAY KICKS OFF THE WOULD-BE novelists’ annual motivational event, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words a day for a total of 50,000 by November 30. (I participated one year, and have a fairly mediocre…
Tag: moments
All that we ever really have.
Day of At-Onement
IT’S HARD TO DESCRIBE THE feeling I get around 1 or 2 p.m. on Yom Kippur afternoon with no food since the previous evening. It’s an intellectual, buzzy sort of consciousness: colors are brighter, outlines sharper, and an almost euphoric…
Happy 5780!
THE WORLD MAY NOT HAVE begun 5.780 years ago — in fact, it didn’t — but since we’ve likely had writing for about that long, we might say that today’s traditional Jewish date may well mark written history’s 5,780th birthday.…
Right (of) Passage
ONE QUESTION THAT OFTEN COMES up during Torah study, especially the portions that concern the seemingly over-described sacrifices and Tabernacle (portable wilderness G?d-tent) and its holy furniture, is, “Does G?d really care about all these details?” One answer: “Who knows?…
Haiku: Timeless Time
THE SPACE ON THE CLOCK Between the Tick and the Tock. Have a good Shabbos!
To gain a yirah[awe]-inducing glimpse of the transcendent, you must sharpen your inner awareness to perceive divine Oneness wherever you look. You can practice shifting your inner vision to apprehend the scintillating divine presence in an apple, a table, a car, a baby’s eyes, anywhere in this world. When you make that choice and adjust your perception in this way, you have placed HaShem [that-which-some-people-call-G?d] before you, and yirah is sure to overtake your heart as if the floor beneath you had suddenly fallen away.”
–From the monthly YASHAR newsletter)
Why I Love: Cooking (Rewind)
IT’S THE PROCESS OF SCRAWLING ingredients on a shopping list, buying them, unpacking them, staging them, using them. It’s the quiet alchemy of watching those ingredients transform into something delicious and nourishing. It’s the adrenaline rush of following a new…
How I Missed the Moonwalk
THE LAST THING I REMEMBER is Neil Armstrong opening the LEM’s front hatch to begin his televised and epic descent. When I was seven years old, and crazy for space, I had memorized the names of all the astronauts from…
On Homo relator (w/ Special Guest Star John Wheeler)
IT TOOK A WEIRD BOUT of synchronistic weather to illustrate how our species loves to tell stories. First, you need to know about Mugwort Manor. It was a Victorian apartment near the corner of San Francisco’s Fulton and McAllister streets…
Allegiance Redux
A FEW YEARS AGO, I revised the Pledge of Allegiance — instead of stating support for a piece of cloth, it celebrates what that cloth stands for. In today’s hyper-partisan political and cultural climate, it’s important to be both precise…
365 Names (sort of): The Fragility
“THIS IS WHY SOME PEOPLE drink,” I told my friend, provoking him into loud laughter. We were talking about THE FRAGILITY: that immediate realization of the tenuousness of life, and its property of drastically changing in a cold heartbeat through…
“Free Moon Trips!”
THERE MAY BE NO QUICKER way to evoke reverent awe than by looking through a telescope at the night’s rich bounty. I was 13 when I first trained a small refractor, a gift from my parents, on the planet Saturn.…