Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/rethinking_religion/page/9/)
We can sense the shared matrix of poetry and music in the rhythmic loam of language from which they both arose. Some of our languages preserve the connection in name: in Hebrew we use shirah to signify both song and poem, as if all song implies poetry and all poetry implies music.
A world of chaos stands before us, all the time that we have not yet reached the “tikkun elyon”—the highest level of healing, repairing, transforming—by uniting all life forces and all their diverse tendencies. As long as each one exalts himself, claiming, I am sovereign, I and no other—there cannot be peace in our midst (Notebook 8:429).
It’s time to develop new, compelling arguments about why faith communities should eagerly welcome and fully include LGBT people — arguments not based on the claim that people “can’t help” being lesbian or gay.
Traditional Buddhism is a spiritual path for individuals, not a platform for social change — yet is it always clear where one ends and the other begins?
The future of God depends on the future of secularism. Most people will hear in that sentiment a prediction about the growth of secularism: If secularism grows, belief in God will commensurately shrink. If secularism stagnates, the world will continue to believe in God in 2100.
Without the compassion that arises when we realize our nonduality — empathy not only with other humans but with the planet — it becomes increasingly likely that civilization as we know it will not survive the next few centuries.
A Palestinian Christian appeal to Jews, Muslims, Christians and the entire world, issued in 2010.
God’s original plan for how to be kosher.
The atheists have all the best arguments. They find the religious world utterly indefensible, both morally and intellectually. Thankfully the God the atheist denies is not the God that people of true faith affirm.
During the past few years I have been giving workshops on the psychology of prayer at temples, synagogues, and Jewish book fairs nationwide. At each event, I invariably get asked the same probing questions: “Is it OK to ask God for assistance?”, “Do Jews still talk to God about their dreams and desires?”, “Do these personal prayers and meditations make a difference?”
The year 2002 should find Americans looking ahead, despite our natural instinct to revisit the scenes of the year past. Yet past and future are wedded, and facing some unfinished business of 2001 can help us face, though of course not finish, some of the business of the years ahead.
A longing for Kabbalah is abroad in the land. Even people with little connection to Judaism, no knowledge of Hebrew, many of them in fact non-Jews, are seeking initiation into the secret chambers of Jewish esoteric knowledge. Differing from the interest in Hasidism that centered mostly around Chabad in the preceding decades, this turn to Kabbalah has rather little to do with Jewish observance or with nostalgia for a romanticized shtetl past (a past that many denizens of “Kabbalah centers” in fact do not share). The Kabbalah seekers are after the Truth, with a capital T.
Naomi Wolf describes her struggle to “come out” as a spiritual person in a progressive, post-Marxist milieu which was “profoundly atheistic and hostile to religious and spiritual traditions.”
ONE: Name. Often unpronounceable, unmanageable, redolent of incense and cumin. A name that twists letters into spirals the way a djinn emerges from a lamp.
There is an ancient talmudic tradition that affirms that the world was created on Rosh Hodesh Tishrei, a day also known as Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year. Our Mahzor also reminds us that the world was created on this day. So it’s particularly appropriate for Jews to stop and think about how we are celebrating this most ancient Earth Day, how we are honoring the birthday of our home, the planet earth.