Rethinking Religion
Spiritual Politics
Justice in the City
The obligation to accompany another is an obligation to cross boundaries. In accompanying the dead, the boundaries that are crossed are those between life and death.
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Books
Torah Stories for Young Children
Alison Greengard and Carol Racklin-Siegel’s series of Bible stories is a thoughtfully laid-out reading experience, but one that also comes with limitations. In contrast, The Bedtime Sh’ma: A Good Night Book and Modeh Ani: A Good Morning Book, both adapted by Sarah Gershman with illustrations by Kristina Swarner and also published by EKS, are lyrical and engaging books for both the youngest listeners and early readers.
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Christianity
Whose War on Christmas? The Corrosive Power of Cheer and Commerce
Here we go again. “School Bans Santa over Religious Concerns.” “Christmas Concert Cancelled in Hawaii.” “Charlie Brown Violates U.S. Constitution?” The War on Christmas is afoot! Fox News is correct – there is a sustained effort under way to discredit the sacred truths of this holy day. The only problem is that they have fingered the wrong culprit.
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Interfaith
Beyond Interfaith Marriages to Multifaith Marriages
Self-definition is that glorious arrangement of you being you. “Interfaith” is not something a marriage or a person can be. We are still in the twenty-first century and we have parochial homes. A cradle Christian doesn’t stop being a Christian because she marries a Jew nor vice versa. Self-definition is normal, possible, obvious—and intimately necessary.
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Spiritual Progressive Analysis
Beyond Frankl: Towards a Meaningful Life
While Frankl left us with a theory about meaning, it is hard to piece together any practice to help establish a sense of meaning in life. Is meaning given to us from God, or do we pretend to have some real purpose in life in order to make it through the day?
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Spirituality
Life Is A Master Class
We live as artists of Torah in a place that contemporary culture has no room for. In the self-identified Torah-world, Torah living is no longer an art; it’s a sublimation. The question to ask ourselves is “How are we living our lives?”
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Judaism
Sabbath Practice as Political Resistance: Building the Religious Counterculture
One thing Abraham Joshua Heschel and Karl Marx had in common, aside from having both been spectacularly bearded Eastern European Jews, is the shared insight that time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. It is this insight about time—patently obvious but frequently forgotten—that makes keeping a Sabbath day both spiritually profound and politically radical.
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Rethinking Religion
Coming Out on Yom Kippur
The moment I put the tallis around my shoulders, my service started. Immediately, I was taken up in the embrace of the rich cloth, the whole texture, the weave of my life, my family, the renewal of New Orleans. As soon as I felt the cloth on my shoulders, and the fringes between my fingers, I knew that the tallit is for both men and women. As I sat there, I felt every bit a woman, a beautiful Jewish woman in a beautiful Jewish tallis.
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Spiritual Politics
Raising the Curtain on “Gandhi Centre Stage”
I have never bothered to respond to Gandhi detractors because, like the Mahatma himself, I tend to think their pathetic writings are best left to die a natural death—the eventual fate of all untruth. Nevertheless, when Michael Lerner urged me to reply to “Gandhi Centre Stage,” the article by Perry Anderson that appeared in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, I assented.
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Judaism
Exodus: An Allegorical Portrait of the Human Mind in its Relationship to God
I would like to share a new and quite radical midrash regarding the story of Exodus, one that I have found extremely powerful.
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Christianity
Online Ministry in a Massively Multi-Player World of Warcraft
Why do some people sit at a computer for hours and hours every day, building their homes in a fantasy world, rejecting reality even to the detriment of their health and relationships? Perhaps they reject the real world for good cause and the solution is for us to work to make our flesh-and-blood world better.
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Spiritual Politics
The Difference Between Holy and Nice: The Religious Counterculture
Polite. What could possibly be more antithetical to the heart of religion than the cool reserve of social propriety implied by that word? We’ve all seen it—the chilly, respectful friendliness; the ginger embrace that somehow reminds us of our separateness; the newcomers ignored at an Oneg Shabbat or coffee hour. We try to solve the problem through deputizing official badge-wearing “welcomers” or offering trainings in “hospitality” and, while some progress is sometimes made, the congregation is rarely transformed by these ex post facto measures into a community as religiously loving as the one described by Jasleen.
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Spiritual Politics
Privacy and Personhood in a World Without Mystery
It will not do merely to complain about the widespread and outrageous invasions of privacy that citizens of the developed world constantly suffer, nor to legislate against them one by one. If we really want to fix the privacy problem, we have to identify the underlying shift in society’s attitudes towards what it means to be a person.
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Christianity
Rethinking the Doctrines of the Trinity and the Holy Spirit
I was sitting on the balcony of a high-rise hotel in Southern California. The Pacific Ocean sparkled under a smog-free sky. A rabbi we’ll call Sol was enjoying the view with me. “Sol, we’ve become good enough friends now that I can ask you something kind of personal, right?” I asked. “Sure. Anything.” “What do you think of Jesus? I’m not asking that as a test question or as a prelude to an evangelistic presentation,” I explained. “I’m just curious.”
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Rethinking Religion
Levinas, Hitlerism, and New Atheist Revisionism
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, it became fashionable to view religion primarily as a source of strife. Future historians may view the rise of an intolerant new antireligious movement, New Atheism, as part of the generalized overreaction to the horror of September 11—an overreaction that also included the use of torture and mass detention, the abandonment of trial by jury, and the misguided American invasion of Iraq.
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