When Tikkun was founded, its name made clear its intent to repair and establish a means by which the values of tikkun olam would have their moral and ethical effect on not only the Jewish community but also the larger American and global ones.
2011
Descending from Mount Moriah: A Reflection on Interfaith Study
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We offer interfaith courses to our rabbinical and ministerial students because we believe that contemporary clergy working in an increasingly interconnected world should possess knowledge of other religious traditions and the skills to interact constructively across religious lines.
2011
Everything Is Alive
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“The affirmation of the divine unity aspires to reveal the unity in the world, in humankind, among nations, and in the entire content of existence, without any dichotomy between action and theory, between reason and the imagination. Even the dichotomies experienced will be unified through a higher enlightenment, which recognizes their aspect of unity and compatibility” (2:411).
2011
President Obama: Keep Faith
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The president’s Christian faith compels him to seek common ground with his political opponents in our shared desire to provide a secure and prosperous life for the nation, especially for those who are poor and vulnerable. It requires him to seek strength in our diversity, to explore solutions that bridge the partisan divide.
2011
Bridging the Secular-Religious Divide
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Secularism is growing in the United States, especially among the young. Perhaps 15 percent of the population already have no religious affiliation. While many among the nonchurched profess traditional views of God, it is not clear that such beliefs will remain vibrant without institutional support.
2011
The Unprincipled Nature of Judaism
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The most important principle in Judaism is the awareness that there is no such thing as “the most important principle” in Judaism. All of its teachings are equally as vital, and if you fulfill any one of them, taught the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, you have fulfilled all of them (Midrash Mishlei 1:17).
2011
A Memo on the Arc of the Universe
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I’m struggling with this right now, and I’ve struggled with it for thirty years … self-care and soul care and close-circle-of-friends care are not distractions from our work for tikkun olam or the kingdom of God, but rather are integral to it.
2011
Prophets and Sages in Tikkun
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According to R. Yannai, the prophets’ utterances must be refined, just as silver from a mine needs to be refined: “The words of Torah were not given as clear cut decisions (chatuchot). For with every word which the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke to Moses, He offered him forty-nine [seven times seven] arguments by which a thing may be proved pure and forty nine-arguments by which a thing may be proved impure.”
2011
Beyond Spiritual Narcissism
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Specifically, I have suggested two basic guidelines: the egocentrism test, which assesses the extent to which spiritual traditions, teachings, and practices free practitioners from gross and subtle forms of narcissism and self-centeredness; and the dissociation test, which evaluates the extent to which spiritual traditions, teachings, and practices foster the integrated blossoming of all dimensions of the person.
2010
Strange Land, New World
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I am the first Jew to live in this cloistered Benedictine monastery. I don’t blend. I wear a kippah everywhere I go, and I observe the Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. I’m studying to become a rabbi, and I live here in this remote community of Catholic monks vowed to chastity and obedience.
Articles
The Exile of the Presence and the Presence of the Exile
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Through all this long history of the succession of nations, one nation in the world trailed in the wake, Israel by name. Time after time it was cast about and driven from one country to another. Its rucksack, always ready at hand, was filled largely with books — books for the study of the Torah.
2010
Elements of a Philosophy for Diaspora Judaism
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Why be Jewish? Why join temples? Why bother to introduce our children to Jewish ideas and practices? Answers to these questions vary from person to person and from age to age, but the questions persist. The questions seem as perpetual as the Jewish people itself.
2010
Toward a Sacred Brain
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Perhaps no field of biology evokes the fear of loss of the sacred more than neuroscience, the biology of the brain. Yet sacredness and meaning pervade the musings of many neuroscientists. How do we understand the brain in a way that promotes enchantment, and not disenchantment, in day-to-day life?
2010
The Responsibility of Theology to Science
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Artists who create icons and sacred music often describe their activity as a form of prayer. I think too that if nature is understood, in some sense, as the work of God, then seeking to discover the ways of nature through science might also be experienced as a form of prayer.
2010
A Spiritual Approach to Evolution
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Don’t worry, we are not about to join the creationists with their rejection of evolution and insistence that God planted all those dinosaur bones to test your faith. The fact is that most liberals and progressives, in fact, most people who have completed high school, have been heavily indoctrinated into the dominant religion of this historical period, the religion of scientism, and as can be expected, will feel deeply uneasy — if not feeling that they are outright disloyal — if they consider the possibility that another worldview is not only possible but plausible.