I’VE SAID THIS BEFORE, BUT it’s more important now than ever: “I pledge allegiance to the Constitution Of the United States of America And to the ideal on which it stands: One nation of individuals Indivisibly intertwined With liberty, justice,…
Tag: It.
… can’t really be named, only experienced.
Hillel, Adapted
Q: “CAN YOU TEACH ME THE whole Torah in a dozen words or less?” A: “‘Don’t be a jerk.’ The rest is details; now go experience them.”
Silence is the language of God. Everything else is a poor translation.”
— Rumi
Minute Mitzvah: ALL ONE ALL ONE OK OK!!!
Today’s Task: Know that “God” is One. My dead psychic twin Sputnik, who rediscovered his natal Christian faith around the same time I came back to Judaism, was fond of saying, “Monotheism is not for wimps.” By that he meant…
365 Names of God: “The One Who Spoke and the World Came Into Being”
THE ONE WHO SPOKE AND THE WORLD CAME INTO BEING expresses a pretty profound metaphor, at least to those students of the Torah unbothered by anthropomorphism. Think about the many possible ways to spin a creation myth: divine entities dreaming…
LAUGH. SEE?”
— J.R. “Bob” Dobbs
Pocket Theology
BEFORE WE BEGIN, LET’S HAVE an agreed-upon definition or two (c. OED, mostly): mystic 1. one who believes that union with or absorption into the Deity or the Absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may…
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick
Points of Honor, Literary and Otherwise
– STUFFING SENTENCES TO CARRYING CAPACITY. – Never starting a blog post (or sermon) with “I.” – Punctuality. – Creative segues. – Repeating verbatim whatever someone wants said to another. – That only what I actually heard appears inside quotation…
A Short Course in Flabbergastery
IN HIS EPIC, THREE-VOLUME Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, the astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr., proposes the following metric: Let one astronomical unit (the mean Earth-Sun distance) equal one inch. On that same scale, one light-year, or 63,360 astronomical units, equals one mile;…
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
— Thos. Jefferson
Here’s What I Know …
… AND WHEN I SAY “KNOW,” I’m not talking about “faith,” “opinion,” or “reasoned analysis,” but an intimate, visceral, experiential knowing. (Torah has a word for it — דַעַת — “da’at,” which can also refer to intimacy of the sexual…