Browse Topics

Wondering Jew

Judaism’s Mystical Heart

An Interview With Dovid Din

The unity that Judaism is looking for is the point at which, without losing this brain, a corridor of correspondence is opened between this brain — the individual identity — and the transcendent identity. But it isn’t that I become annihilated and flow into the great river; it’s that I am maintained in a scale model relationship to the transcendent. I stay here, but I grow outward. I stay here, but I use my here only to be positioned onto there.

Low As The Sand, High As The Sky: What Is A Jew?

These people have been compared to sand and stars. When they fall, they fall as low as the sand, and when they rise, they rise as high as the sky.

The Talmud

Fixing The World

An Interview With Schlomo Carlebach

The way to receive light from God is through praying. The only difference is that some people pray unconsciously, some pray consciously, some pray super-consciously. You can walk into a restaurant and see a person who says, “I’m so hungry. I need some soup.” Deep down his soul is praying to God, “God, please give me life, I’m at the end.”

Man Of Silver, Man Of Gold

That crumbling house with its rusty iron fence, like a disillusioned spider’s web, became important. Even its blotch of drained soil, discolored and long sterile, was a symbol of warfare. This spelled out a larger drama of the world I was just beginning to realize I was living in.

Editor’s Note

The Eleventh Man

As I trudge up the road from the bus stop, I pause to catch my breath as well as the view. Before me loom towering white cliffs; beneath are the lush fields and orchards of the moshav, and beyond them is the Sea of Galilee or the Kinneret, as it is called in Hebrew, “the violin.” The curving road is lined with small stone houses; I had been told that Elyah’s was the last hut, on the highest slope.

An Interview With Ram Dass

Disappointments are exquisite clues to where you’re holding. And if you want to awaken, a disappointment becomes a great thing, so you get to love them as much as you hate them. They’re hurting you, and at the same moment they are awakening you to how you’re clinging.

Father

When It Is Right With The World

Father put his arms around his ebullient brood. “Hush,” he soothed. “There is no wind and it is too dark to see. The kite will fly when it is ready. We shall go to bed and wait until it is right with the world.”