Last in a series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. For a whole year's Torah cycle of weeks, we've been looking to Torah for resilience lessons. We began with Cain as an unlikely resilience teacher.  We learned resilience from Noah in the rain and Abraham never quitting because he loved more than himself.  We learned resilience from Rebecca, the first to… Continue reading Resilience in endings… and new beginnings

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. It's just a few weeks until Rosh Hashanah.  The Jewish season of teshuvah (repentance, repair, return) is upon us. And of course, what we repent, repair and return (to) depends exquisitely on what we remember. Truth be told, there are some things I'd rather not remember. I'd… Continue reading Resilience when we would rather not remember

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. If art and beauty are in the eye of the beholder, then what about spirituality and especially communal spirituality?  And when we feel disconnected – as everyone sometimes does – then what? This week's Torah portion (Re'eh) invites us to see that seeing our eye… Continue reading The eye is in the hand of the beholder

Modern spirituality seems to echo advice of an old standard: "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative." Who doesn't groove on light, love and can-do spirit? Each "yes" of affirmation and empowerment tends to feel good: a spirituality of "yes" energizes, validates and comforts. By comparison, negatives like restriction, redirection and disappointment can seem like lesser spirituality or even… Continue reading Spirituality When Life Says No

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. Ever feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill and soon will reach the top if you just keep going – but the top never comes? Mythical Greek king Sisyphus was condemned to this futility, and philosopher Albert Camus saw in it a metaphor for all human… Continue reading When resilience is just stubborn: the art of quitting

Bitching is easy. Holy bitching is another matter. Easy bitching is what our Torah ancestors did after 39 years in the desert – and who could blame them? Having buried beloved leaders Miriam and Aaron, the people called Israel were miserable: 39 years on the move, in the wilderness, eating manna. It is human nature to… Continue reading Bitching Bites

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. Watch enough cable or online "news," and you might sense a U.S. society more polarized than ever before by political party, class, race, ethnicity, geography and religion. Public disagreements speedily become disagreeable, and disputes fuel scorched-earth campaigns to destroy disputants. What are we to… Continue reading The time God got it wrong – Korach

Part of a yearlong series about resilience in Jewish spiritual life. "Waiting to Exhale." No, not the 1995 Whitney Houston movie hit. I mean life's occasional sense of waiting – waiting with anticipation, waiting with diminishing patience, maybe even Waiting for Godot. When we must wait, how can we wait with inner healthfulness, even resilience? We moderns… Continue reading Waiting to Exhale

Part of a yearlong series about resilience in Jewish spiritual life. I just returned from two weeks in Israel, in the days preceding the 70th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. The country felt consumed by this momentous occasion – recounting Israel's history, counting Israel's blessings, and counting… Continue reading What Counts? – A tribute to Israel

Part of a yearlong series about resilience in Jewish spiritual life. Here's a true confession of a self-described "Resilience Rabbi" spending a year writing about resilience: sometimes I don't feel very resilient. Sometimes I feel tired, drained, even hopeless. I suspect we all have those moments when we don't seem to bounce back from adversity,… Continue reading There is no “I” in Team

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. This year's Passover seder is history. Cups were filled and drunk and filled and spilled and drunk and filled again. Matzah was broken, crunched and crumbled. Soup was slurped. Stories were told. Songs were sung. A marinade of elation, pride, afterglow, exhaustion and indigestion… Continue reading Resilience After the Seder

Part of a yearlong series about resilience in Jewish spiritual life. The teacher of my teachers, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi z"l, recounted that one of his children asked him about waking and sleeping. The child asked, "If we can wake from sleeping, why can't we also wake from waking?" In essence, can we wake more? What might it… Continue reading The Koan of Shrunken Silence

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. Long before Frank Baum imagined Munchkins and "The Yellow Brick Road," Jews had a "Sapphire Path" that, according to Torah, Moses and 70 elders saw ascending skyward (Exodus 24:10).  While mystics and rationalists might part ways about these kinds of visions, the hope of… Continue reading The Sapphire Path

Part of a series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. The older I get, the more willing I become to admit that I don't know it all and can't do it all.  Life experience teaches all of us what the brilliant Albert Einstein recognized: "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I… Continue reading Take my advice

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. Pop the Champagne!  Cue the confetti!  It's a new year!  Everything's new and fresh! Of course it ain't so simple – but still we hope.  At new year's, we offer intentions. We turn the page (though more and more people keep calendars without paper "pages"… Continue reading A New Year (As New As We Make It)

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. Even an over-anxious cad like the Bible's Jacob can teach a lesson about resilience.  In this week's Torah portion (Vayishlach), he teaches six. It turns out that anxiety – seemingly a mainstay of modern life – can have spiritual purpose by cuing us to… Continue reading Israel’s Six Resilience Rules

Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life. Today's shrill era in which some vocally try to silence others isn't new. The only difference is that more of us – at long last – are calling it what it is. It takes resilience to "persist" against the constant drumbeat of silencing and gaslighting, and… Continue reading Nevertheless, She Persisted