Sacred Space & Spiritual Technology: #Pekudei
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Creating a space for the Divine to rest - from history to today.
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#Parsha #KiTisa: Our Cheat Code for The Divine
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This week's Torah portion, "Ki Tisa", is a roller-coaster journey of human desire and yearning, Divine connection, separation and reconnection, and finally, the divulging of the "formula" for which the Israelite nation - and hopefully, human beings, can connect with the Divine in their lives.
Read MoreOut of the Comfort Zone to Find the Land We Were Promised: An Election Week Reflection on Avram and Sarai's Journey
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Go, get out of your homeland - the earth that is beneath your feet, everything you've ever thought to be true, the mother earth that nurtured you that you always thought to be yours. Get out of it. Shake it up. Move out of your attachment to your own space and place, and go!
Read MoreWhy Didn't Noah Save Everybody aka How to Not Drag People Kicking and Screaming Even When You Really Want To
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Sometimes, it's not our job to drag others kicking and screaming into a new reality. That's their work. We have to do our own.
Read MoreMiriam's Dance: What We Talk About When We Talk About Feminine Equality; or Why Conscious Dance Is The Secret to Jewish Femininity
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Miriam knew the secret, the other women did too. When we don’t think we know the secrets, when we don’t have the tools within our basic human consciousness to understand, we bring in our entire bodies, and we dance.
Read MoreThe Torah of Time: Blessing the New Moon
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In a world defined by time, does time restrict us or take us somewhere beyond? Why is the Jewish nation's initial commandment a definition of time as a national construct?
Read MoreOn Compassion, Jacob and Parshat Vayetze
/Compassion. It's kind of the magical panacea that can cure pretty much anything: Fear; hatred; jealousy; anxiety; ignorance; emptiness; fear; fear and more fear.
Compassion: The genetic child of love and fear, that equidistant point between effusive love that can sometimes suffocate; and severe toughness that can harm even as it teaches restriction and caution.
In the Biblical portion of this week, we learn of the travels of the original entrepreneur Jacob as he discovers himself and starts his family by first returning to the land of his father, to understand the past before he can explore the future.
Jacob's Biblical character, as expounded in mystical Jewish teachings, is likened to the embodiment of compassion; the effusive lovingkindness of his grandfather combined with the severe restriction of his father, to create compassion and beauty; the harmonious midpoint that moves us along that road that is life.
I don't know about all the hate I'm seeing on Facebook lately, or the pure fear that's expressed from ignorance; or the legitimate fear of a world that's changing faster than we can handle; or even unbounded professions of love without the restriction required to qualify and ensure the love results in productive creation of a new world. What i do know is that when we find it hard to forgive; when we find it impossible to love; when we don't know how to stop hating or fearing or loving unboundedly even to our detriment, the magical medicine is always going to be compassion. It's the only thing that can erase the poison of a negative past, and turn it all into beauty and love.
Let's follow granddaddy Jacob on his adventures, and throw that compassion into the mix. The result? Beauty, harmony, love that is elastic and electric.
Shabbat Shalom.