After reading Love’s Work, I texted my chevruta who recommended it to say that I disagreed strongly with Rose’s account of Judaism: non-belief, absent from nature, characterized by reason. Her account seems to understand Judaism through Protestantism, which Rose herself acknowledges as the path that defined her re-entry into Jewish tradition.

What does it mean to say Shabbat was “last made, but first planned?” Let’s consider Alkabetz’s idea that Shabbat is a person, a queen. The personification of this day is not unique — it is the core of Kabbalat Shabbat as a concept, in which the Kabbalists would wait in the fields to welcome the Sabbath bride. 

Rabbi Lew was committed to the observance of Halakhah (Jewish Law), but when the rigidity that he held to the Halakhah came up against his sense of the dignity of human life, he turned. He was not in the vanguard of bringing the Queer community into the mainstream of Conservative Judaism, but he worked very closely with Kenny Altman, the first openly gay president of a Conservative congregation and would have performed Gay Marriages if his health hadn’t forced him to retire. His traditional practice gave authority to his departures from it.

Yes, Montesquieu did write about the separation of government branches but the main idea coming out of The Spirit of Law is that what matters for the freedom of citizens under a certain rule is not necessarily the form of their government but rather, their spirit.

I am deeply familiar with the axis of anxiety and belief, not through the experience of something genuinely threatening and traumatic such as illness, but in the much more mundane experience of fearing something indirect and unnameable.

Sami Elmaghrebi was a symbol of Morocco itself. In the 40s, he was one of King Mohammed V’s favorite singers, and in 1955, started his own record label in Paris.

The OPE (in English: Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia), concentrated the efforts of the leading Jews of St. Petersburg to improve the lives of the Jews of the Russian empire.

According to the Zohar and according to the Torah, humans were created in order to make choices. 

We visited the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, which is large, has multiple stories, and highlights episodes from throughout Jewish history in diaspora. One case held medieval Jewish wedding rings, which are shaped like tiny gold houses built on top of rings ornamented with fine jewels. The room regarding Ottoman Jews contains beautiful hats, clothing, and jewelry; across from a glass case holding earrings and arm cuffs is one full of silver rimmonim, the silver hats that adorn the tips at either end of a Torah scroll.

I think it would not come as a surprise to those who know me, or have at least read a few of the columns that I have written here, that “art” is one of recurring concerns. However, my underlying concern is not specifically fine art. Rather it is to see in the world the signs of expression, of the expression of the life force in the objects around me, a voice unrestrained by the decorum of social interaction.

In reality, all forms of clinging really do require an internal transformation. A person must choose to leave their parents to find a mate. A person must become sensitive to the needs of others to have a friend. As a partner, we must change to stay compatible with them.

So far there is very little haunting even to be found here, at least to my perception. The sensation of absence and a lost, sorrowful time is supplanted by anhedonia, a failure to feel the presence of anything Jewish absent or present.

I’ve been keeping tabs on the different Jewish businesses that have been popping up, with the dream to make a directory for “Jewish Downtown.” Jewish Downtown as a concept is a strange one as far as ethnic tourism goes because the Jewishness of Downtown is extremely deep historically, but there are no obvious markers of any of it. The Jewish history of Downtown is best found in books, maps and directories from before the 1970s. The living Jewish Downtown of today is found in mysterious nooks and crannies, far from prying eyes.

The source of all prayer is in awe rather than in desire. The easiest place for us to experience awe is in nature. Hopefully, you have had this experience. Picture postcards can render these experiences trivial. A spinner rack with sixty different views of Niagara Falls and fifty identical examples of each is an empty experience next to the power of the Niagara river as it swells up right before it shoots over the edge. Awe is a product of our radical amazement when the wonders of creation confront us.

Since prisons serve a symbolic function of hiding suffering, violence and poverty, I have come to think of them as having a haunting property. I use the term haunting to describe a sense of pervasive suffering that is not entirely present or visible to us. When I learned that the LA Men’s County Jail is located right next to Union Station in Downtown, I felt it explained something I already knew.

The consequences of the Jewish Enlightenment as a crash moment continue to reverberate and by this point have left no Jewish community untouched anywhere in the world. It is possible to view this as the crash that Rabbi Lappe refers to, although I don’t think this is how she sees it.

I think that every people has a central myth that places them in the center of it, and therefore in the center of the universe, but as the Rambam writes, the highest point of our spiritual centrality is our complete abdication of narrative centrality, and even of fundamental metaphysical difference.

In my course on kabbalistic meditation, the rabbi that taught us required that we not correct or aim to “fix” each other’s comments; rather we should trust that everyone has a “teacher within” that will impart the right lesson. Like psychoanalysis, meditation does not liberate the practitioner by simply listening to a teacher and internalizing the information. The lesson has to come from within oneself, even if a teacher is present to offer new ways of seeing and provoke the realization.

There were many experiences that gave me a sense of a nationhood that surpassed the boundaries that I had previously understood, until the point came that I started seeing Judaism as a civilization, one that was fragmented in its scattering and through the impositions put on it by different governments. More than being a diplomat who could defy a system for a higher purpose, I started to understand that there might be something heroic in representing another nation entirely: my own.

To have rights as men, Jews had to assert their rights as a nation. Dubnow’s accomplishment is in recognizing this as a consistently arising element in Jewish history. He believed that the creation and maintenance of Jewish institutions and of a certain amount of self-government was needed in order for Jews to thrive. This had been the case before emancipation. Emancipation hadn’t changed that fundamental element in Jewish history.