Review of After One-Hundred-and-Twenty by Hillel Halkin

After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is Halkin’s own midrash or commentary on Jewish perspectives of death, mourning, and the afterlife. He weaves his own humanity and stories into a remarkable work of scholarship. At the beginning of the book, Halkin acknowledges that Jewish perspectives on death are diverse and pointed out that he has his own biases. Thus, Halkin writes as himself and encourages readers to find themselves between the lines, which I did.

The Practice

Find it in the most unreasonable of places—from your sweaty mat to dirty street corners, in meditation and in the midst of violent gangs, from the criminally wealthy estates of Beverly Hills to remote villages with no running water. Find it in injustice, find it in unfairness, in the hungry child and the obese fairground-goer, in the deranged and the selfish, the sick and the wanting, the helpless, the hopeless, the homeless and feared. Find it in those who buy their way out of guilt, yell their way out of shame, drug their way out of compassion. For those who condemn you, for those who cherish you, for those who cut you off and those who embrace you—find love.

"Ba'nu Choshekh L'kadesh: Sanctifying darkness, seeding the light"

Every year at my boy’s school there’s a Chanukah concert that includes rap songs and other talent. A few years ago, it included the song the popular song, “Ba’nu Choshekh L’garesh”. I’m not so connected to modern Israeli culture, though, so it was my first time hearing it. Here’s a translation:
We come, the darkness to expel –
In our hands, light and fire. Each one is a small light,
And all of us together – an immense light!

Torah Commentary- Noah: Transcending Deluge-Era Consciousness

The story of Noah is on the surface rather straight forward. The people are bad, Noah is good, God decides to wipe out the Earth but saves Noah and a large number of representative animals in a big wooden boat. After bringing down rain for 40 days and nights, the rain stops, and Noah sends out two animal emissaries, when the second finds dry land, they disembark. Makes for a great children’s book, cartoon, or sci-fi movie. Versions of this tale are found throughout the ancient world, and much literature is dedicated to the roots of this story.

We're Mad as Hell – But That's Not Enough

An intriguing, thoroughly readable, and timely new book has just been published by the Kairos Center/Poverty Initiative, containing a collection of the recent writings of Willie Baptist, their Scholar-in-Residence and Coordinator of Poverty Scholarship and Leadership Development.

Dying to Know

“Dying to Know really is about the journey of death, and how we deal with it, and to its credit manages to take an optimistic and unflinching perspective, without trying to provide hard and fast answers—actually, by not trying to provide hard and fast answers.”

Sacred Activism: A Meditation on Inner Transformation

As our world becomes increasing ideologically polarized, bridging the gap between beliefs is equally crucial and difficult. Shaikh Kabir Helminski proposes that society takes up a new perspective that “recognizes the limitations of all religious beliefs, but without discarding the core values of spirituality [and] recognizes how much the secular world sacrifices to the idols of consumerism and materialism. But it respects secularism for not imposing a single interpretation of belief upon society and for allowing the freedom to choose one’s own lifestyle.”

The Pope Might Save the Planet… if You Would Join an Interfaith Effort to Support His Direction!

The best way to support the Pope is to build an interfaith movement based on these values articulated in the New Bottom Line. It is only when people begin to see a spiritual progressive movement in the public sphere with a strategy for how to save the planet that is willing to challenge the fundamentals of global capitalism that they will be able to imagine overcoming their own passivity, emotional depression, and mistaken certainty that “nothing will ever make possible a new economic system.”