The sense that Jews have ever lived in a situation where the texts that a Jew encountered would not require some kind of internal habit of cultural comparison, at least over the last 2000 years, seems unusual and uncommon: a kind of aphasia of the Jewish mind.

“If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion. As society progresses, the forms of religion change, but its essential functions remain.”

 “If the ancestors’ eyes what might we see, if their hands what might we touch, if their ears, what might we hear? Whakarongo ki te tai. E tangi haere ana. ‘Listen to the tide, lamenting as it flows on.’ Words radiate a ring path, skimming thin, slicing obsidian smooth – a face. Like the tohunga 'spiritual expert’ scanning the pools of Te Waiariki – have you ever tried to read water? Can you feel their thinking about movement, sound, rhythm, light, space, distance, surface and … silence?”

Our portion clearly states that the Israelite camp was made of distinct individuals who were very different from one another and deserved to maintain their individuality (with a placement, a role, banners, flags down to the names and number,) and individuality and identity were preserved.

עס שטעלט זיך די פֿראַגע, ״װאָס טוען די חסידים מיט דער אינטערנעץ?״ דער ענטפֿער: שאַפֿן דער אויפֿקום פֿון דער ייִדישער שפּראַך װאָס קען יאָ צונויפֿפֿלעכטן דעם מאָדערנעם אינהאַלט מיטן מאַמע־לשון.

The Shmita is difficult. It is asking of us to let go of our livelihood, to risk our stomachs and our health and to have full trust in the Creator, trust which is beyond any logic or feeling that God will provide despite us letting go of work.

Much of what Fluxus did was ephemeral. What remains, along with books, are the artifacts.

Yes, we Jews are time travelers, we anchor our tradition in time. In our time, we go back to the past and look onto the future, reminding us of the unity of time and of our eternity.

Boris Lurie’s vision is a world of universal exploitation and the existential horror of it is grounded in his Holocaust experiences.

Our capitalist zeitgeist encourages us to shelter, to not seek help, to not show vulnerability, for the sake of our unconscious wish of dominance over others. 

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The struggle to portray reality in art has a different affect in the work of the Boris Lurie, a survivor of the Holocaust, beginning in Riga, Latvia. Lurie’s struggle to deal with his experiences and his losses in the Holocaust was reflected in his understanding of the values of Art and the role of the artist in society.

Our tradition teaches us that our ability to stop and question rules is nothing short than a must-do.

“Jewish futurism is the idea that our people is far closer to its beginning than its end, that our future relies on development of ideas that are by their nature radical, that long-term thinking is an exercise neither in escapism nor frivolity but the thing that we have been called to do since the days of our foremother Sarah, who set the tempo for us all by literally giving birth to Isaac at the age of ninety, exemplifying the idea that this is a religion in which the old can and does give birth to the young.”

Our tradition encourages us on numerous occasions to use our imagination in order to succeed in our Jewish practice.

Sometimes freedom can be found inside a boundary that is put around us by choice. For me, it is the boundary of my Jewish identity, my nationality. 

Freedom demands that we understand how the world around us works.

In Eastern Europe, the size and cohesion of your ethnic group is very obviously the backdrop to your personal power. In America, we try to detach ourselves from the paradigm, but it still haunts us, some more than others. (Why is it that being a minority is a signal that society needs to protect a group? Even in places where the “minority” is a majority?)

Cultural identification is much more ambiguous than first meets the eye. Cultural groupings that seem obvious now fall apart under closer examination.