Balancing Compassion and Critique: A Yom Kippur Perspective on Israel
Dear Friends, I’m sometimes reminded of the adage about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that it has the capacity to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. That is, some of us go through life and are so hard on ourselves; day in, day out we find ourselves filled with self-recrimination and regret, focusing […]
The Jewish Story
Dear Friends, I wanted to share just briefly a bit about the mentality I’m holding each week when I write about Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East. I’m Jewish. I’m not breaking any news here when I say that, but I wanted to explicitly name that as part of the frame of reference from which […]
Identity, Israel, and Shared Humanity
Dear Friends, Each week I reflect, professionally, on a couple of fronts: for Friday nights, I try to write in a spirit that reflects the spirit of Shabbat—a poetic sensibility angled towards Shabbat as a palace in time, a foretaste of the world to come, where we indulge in transcendent possibilities, on giving respite to […]
Pesah, Protest, and Poetry
We just got finished celebrating beautiful, if painful, Passover Seders in our homes and in community.
I wanted to begin by sharing the words with which I opened our Seder here at Society Hill Synagogue, with over 150 people across the generations crammed warmly in our social hall:
Finding God in Alienation
Dear Friends, About a month after October 7, my wife Caroline, stretching to find something with which to introduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and, more precisely, a pathway through it to a better future — to our daughters Lila, 4 (and a half, she would want me to say), and Nina, nearly 2, encountered this column by […]