Faith and Practice
Meerkats are cute, the kind of that cute doesn't get old. What does? The burnout, pettiness and distrust that's all too common in organizing circles.
To-Do List for the Social Justice Movement: Cultivate Compassion, Emphasize Connections & Mourn Losses (Don’t Just Celebrate Triumphs)
One of the first lessons I got in community organizing was that it was important to celebrate victories, even small ones. It gives people hope and encouragement on a path that is all too often tortuous and strenuous. The lesson I did not get, and wish I had, was that we also need to grieve our losses. We need to accompany our movements, tend to them, and treat them kindly.
Inside the Looking Glass: Writing My Way Through Two Very Different Jewish Journeys
A Catholic woman’s ancient Jewish blood calls to her. Her spiritual story, so different than my own, calls to me, forcing me to think more deeply about my own Jewish journey. My path may never lead to temple or God, but it’s definitely Jewish and definitely leading somewhere.
What Is Mine? Finding Humbleness, Not Entitlement, in Shmita
The Moroccan-born 18th-century biblical commentator Or HaHayim (Hayim ben Attar) insightfully observed that the reality of war in the world causes fear and pain, even to those who do not reside in the war zone but who live lives of material comfort and safety.
This insight mirrors my experience and emotional state as we begin 5775: While deeply grateful for the abundance of blessings in my life, I don’t feel at peace given current events and the suffering that persists in our world.
And so I’ve kept Or HaHayim’s words in mind, with the hope that we may all be able to approach this season next year with a greater sense of security, calm and blessing in our own lives and throughout the world.
Engaging With the Days of Awe: A Personal Writing Ritual in Five Questions
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the whole repentance thing over the years, and I’d like to think I’ve gotten better at it. The enormity of the ideas behind Yom Kippur is tough for me. If you look at the language of the prayers themselves, they’re more than a little scary.
The Internet Confessional Goes to the Goats
How sharing our sins, one Tweet at a time, can remind us that we are all human, flawed, and susceptible to daily corruptions. In the age of (public) guilt, a Jewish season to revisit our bad decisions, and make better choices in the days and months ahead.
How Is This Rosh Hashanah Different from All Other Rosh Hashanahs?
At the religious and spiritual level, 5775 will be a seventh year according to the ancient counting, a Sabbatical Year of Shmita (“release” or “non-attachment”). In such a year, Torah (Leviticus 25) commands that the earth be allowed to rest. This will be the first Sabbatical/Shmita Year since the dispersion and exile of Jews from the land of Israel about 2,000 years ago.
At the political and activist level, we are entering Rosh Hashanah with a major leap in involvement of the American Jewish community in addressing the climate crisis that is bringing global scorching upon the world — unprecedented droughts, floods, famines, with worse to come.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of ZEEK’s series on Jews and climate justice.
Should Rabbis Proselytize Non-Jewish Spouses? A Response to JTSA Chancellor Arnold Eisen
Authors
Responding to “Wanted: Converts to Judaism,” Shaul Magid proposes an alternative to proselytizing, calling for creativity in crafting a new Jewish strategy for inclusive liturgy and rituals in a “post-ethnic” America.
Towards a New Tzniut
My third day of rabbinical school, a male colleague ran his finger slowly up my arm to my shoulder and said, in a voice that was somewhere between flirtatious and downright creepy, “You’ll be wanting to cover up, then.”
Let It Go: From the Mountaintop to the Field
How taking a fresh look at Shavuot, Sinai and shmita can nourish the spiritual side of our activism — and help us embrace letting go and the “content of our covenant.”
Under Your Tongue: Fresh Farmers Cheese Pie with Rhubarb-Rose Compote
You could always drop what you’re doing and stock up on ingredients for this dairy Shavuot recipe, created by Erin Patinkin, co-founder of Ovenly, dubbed “Best Bakery 2013” by Time Out New York.
This Year's Revelation
What if God’s revelation to us this year were an instruction to rise above polarization?
Everyone knows Passover. Everyone knows the High Holidays. But what’s so special about Shavuot? In a word: revelation.
Truly Transformative: Motherhood and the Spiritual Practice of Parenting
My mother always said that she never believed in God until she had kids. Something about my brother and I coming into being — from sex into clumpy cells, and then somehow into little creatures that emerged from within her with noses, ear canals, and personality quirks — changed everything about how she understood the world to work. She never told me, really, what had happened for her, but if I had to guess, I’d imagine words like miracle, impossibility, and soul would be involved.
A Seventeen-Year-Old Jewish Feminist’s 10 Plagues: "If They Listened, They Would Hear Us Planning Our Way..."
Locusts: They descend on us, pick us bare, for the future of the Jewish people. We don’t align with denominations. We don’t look good in demographic surveys. We don’t care about continuity. We care about meaning, and that scares them. We do not exist to feed the future. We are not here to raise Jewish children. We are here to be Jews in our own right.
A Rabbi’s Re-Imagining of the 10 Plagues: Blood Money, Self-Judgment, Consumption, Time, Extremists, Gun Violence, and More
Frogs, writes Rabbi Elianna Yolkut, are cold-blooded amphibious creatures that hatch in cold environments, so the rabbis teach that the plague of frogs was meant to remind the Egyptian of the emotional distance and lack of intimacy that is a necessary prerequisite to enslave someone. Today technology is the cold-blooded creature that jumps into every moment of our lives, taking away our very ability to connect with others, to create space for intimacy with our children, our significant others and our friends.
Ten Feminist Plagues: Right-Wing Governors, Media Double-Standards, Flawed Criminal Justice System By Sarah Seltzer
Blood. The blood that is spilled, metaphorically speaking and literally, by governors who are refusing to expand Medicaid under Obamacare and give healthcare to the most vulnerable among us. People with treatable conditions are already dying because they fall in the gap between Medicaid and being able to afford regular insurance. It’s really a travesty.
The Opt-Out Option: Resistance & A Feminist “House Cleaning” of the Soul’s Chametz
This is the last sentence of my horoscope for the week of April 3, 2014:
“You need to be free of the past, free of fearful influences, and free of the self you’re in the process of outgrowing.”
I’m thinking about this sentence as many around me observe Passover, as I opt out of it for the second year in a row, doing a thing that feels razor-sharp-right for me, and also confusing and dangerous. (More than one thing can be true at a time; let’s remember this always.)
A Woman’s Freedom: Ten Plagues, to the Tune of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free" (For the Third Night)
What would it take for women to be free? All women — all ages, born as women, chosen to be women, or just born of a woman and know that the divine female is in us all and is calling to be liberated. What would it take for us all to be free?
I am writing this in a busy cafe, Nina Simone is singing serendipitously in the background, “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.” You and me both, Nina….
The Ten Plagues of Egypt have been compared to birth pains, necessary contractions in order for a new nation to come to life. READ MORE
Amnesia: A Plague of Modern Life, Or, Why It’s Time to Wake Up to Importance of Interdependence (Second Night)
Amnesia is the plague I want to call out. It is a widespread phenomenon of modern life here in the US.
To wit: I am the granddaughter of immigrant garment workers. The forgetting is such that I never even realized the significance of that reality until well into my adulthood. One take on that significance: flight from the familiar into disorientation and vulnerability. Humble origins, a tiny one-bedroom apartment for four people. Being “the stranger,” the ger, the experience that the Haggadah takes pains to remind us of and to transport us to.
The 10 Plagues According to Women: For the First Night, Introducing Zeek's Intergenerational Feminist Series for Passover
Editor’s note: This year, Zeek introduces an intergenerational Passover series of feminist plagues. We’ll publish a new one for each day of Passover. This project was inspired, generally, by the 39th Annual Feminist Seder held this March at the home of Barbara Kane and the conversations we had there about creating more intergenerational spaces for feminists and social justice activists, and, specifically, by Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s reading there of “The Ten Plagues According to Women,” which appears here. Over the past few weeks, I reached out to Jewish feminists between the ages of 17 and 70-something, asking each to use the 10 Plagues as a point of departure. To redefine them or reflect on what each sees as today’s plagues, from a Jewish feminist perspective. (These were all written before the Kansas shootings, and it’s with a sad heart we pay particular attention to the connections made between the death of the firstborn and gun violence. —Erica Brody
Read Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s The 10 Plagues According to Women
The Jewish Ecosphere Springs Forward: Social Justice & Innovation in the Expanding Universe of “JOFEE”
The JOFEE Dialogues with Nigel Savage, Jon Marker, Nili Simhai, Seth Cohen, Lisa Farber Miller & Jakir Manela
One night this week — before spring arrived! — a statistic kept popping up in my Twitter feed: “Americans spend 90% of their time indoors.” Disturbing, right? As it turns out, the architect Marc Kushner had mentioned this disturbing fact during his TED2014 talk about how design and space impact our culture, communities and lives, deeply. Although he was talking about architecture, I was struck by the amount of time Americans spend outdoors — or don’t. Could it really be so little? The EPA thinks so. READ MORE
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- 5000 Pages of Zeek
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