Holidays

Featured Teaching: Lag B'Omer: Liberation=Balance

Featured Teaching: Lag B’Omer: Liberation=Balance

The point of it all is balance, the middle path, the balancing and counter-balancing of our emotional state. Lag B'Omer gives life and hope to the days that are otherwise meant to mourn.

Read more...
Shavuot: The One Becomes The Many

Shavuot: The One Becomes The Many

The holiday of Shavuot is a celebration of the ‘Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai’— when infinite Divine intelligence was revealed within the finite world of time and space.

Read more...
Shavuot: The Ultimate Love

Shavuot: The Ultimate Love

G-d's gift of the Torah is an expression of the highest love imaginable. Within the Torah, G-d revealed Himself and His innermost desires and showed us the way to love and come ever closer. Where fear once predominated, there became a universe permeated by love, inspired by the most positive, life affirming partner/power, G-d Himself.

Read more...
Meditations on the Dreidel

Meditations on the Dreidel

The means to our survival has always been a relentless cleaving to our center, and to the Divine Center-point of all reality. When the dreidel is spinning intensely around its center, the four sides blur and appear circular; the multiple surfaces of the cube become as the single surface of a cylinder, as they cleave, so-to-speak, to the oneness of their center.

Read more...
Lights & The Art of Giving

Lights & The Art of Giving

Chanukah is traditionally referred to as the festival of lights. Speaking of the laws of this holiday, the codifiers of Jewish law strongly suggest

Read more...
Chanukah: A Light Meditation

Chanukah: A Light Meditation

What is their story?  What are they telling us? Most clearly they are telling us is to simply quiet down. Often we become so entangled

Read more...

Insights into the Prayers of Yom Kippur

Yaale Tachenuneinu — Reflective Light The usual acrostic pattern of the Piyutim (the special songs of the High Holidays) follows the Aleph Beit, beginning with the first letter aleph and following the established order. But here we find the order reversed, and there is a reason why. There are two forms of

Read more...

Kol Nidrei: All Vows

Yom Kippur night is a unique time for men in that a prayer shawl (talit) is worn during the night service. Although we should make sure to put the talit on before sunset since we are commanded to wear the talit only during the day, when we do so at

Read more...

The Story of the Unesana Tokef

This powerful prayer is said to have been first published in the 11th century by Rabbi Kolonymus of Meinz, although it was not composed by him but by a Rabbi Amnon. The story is that Rabbi Amnon was a wealthy sage, who for years had been pressured by the local authorities

Read more...