When faced with a particularly weighty problem, the Baal Shem Tov would go to a particular place in the woods,…
Category: Spirituality
We Are As Clay
Ki Hiney Kachomer: We Are As Clay. A beloved piyyut, Hebrew liturgical poem, from the Yom Kippur service. A poem inviting us…
Fourteen Prayers for Peace
In 2009, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, with a simple, moving speech. He spoke of the challenge of…
The Simple Judge
So I’m driving along Commercial Drive, and I’ve stopped at a pedestrian-controlled crosswalk. A young man starts to cross the…
Kingdom Without a King
First thing in the morning, I like to take a 3-block walk to the Grind Café and Gallery on Main…
Freedom to Repair
Unetaneh Tokef. An anonymous, medieval prayer-poem declaring the holiness of Rosh Hashanah, fountain of the New Year, the Day of…
World Cat Day
Traditional Jewish thought sees the whole world as a laboratory for learning. On the one hand, everything has value in…
Researching God
Theist? Atheist? Agnostic? Don’t answer until you’ve done some rigorous research. That’s right, research: with a method, literature review, experimental…
Phenomenology of God
Philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) provides the framework for this exploration. In studying his own consciousness, Husserl recognized that we experience…