Sonoma County, CA * (415) 779-4914 * Irwin@irwinkeller.com
When I'm done with some of the prayers for specifics, I try to broaden out and pray for love. Always love. That it should enfold this world. That there should be a field of love so thick, so viscous, that it slows bullets and catches falling people.
When I pray, at some point, it is no longer me lofting prayers into the world; it is the world drawing prayers out of me…
Read moreWhen Shabbat falls in the darkest part of the month, the Jewish world reads Torah's queerest story. What is the medicine?
Read more
Whether or not we agree with the laws in Leviticus, there is something important about Torah's understanding that the physical body produces spiritual states. Our bodies affect the spiritual fabric of the community. So how do we include our bodies in our spiritual lives? They deserve it.
Read more
And indeed as you stand in the Scola Tedesca and look up at the women's gallery, you see what looks like a theater loge. There are low upright pillars to about knee level, and then a gilded latticework screen up to perhaps the neck of a seated woman, and above that it is open. This gallery is not meant to hide the women, but to foster flirtation.
Read more
If Torah were a musical, what sort would it be? For Shabbat Shirah, a diversion into the Broadway version of Torah, for which the Parting of the Sea ends Act I.
Read moreWe are now in the annual 4-week saga of Joseph, and I find myself eyeing him across the ages. I see him young, middle aged and, at long last, at the end of his life, settling in to be a grandmother, the matriarch of his line. (Audio version.)
Read moreWe don't always say yes to what Shabbat offers. Maybe we say no more often than we say yes. But she never gets the hint. And she never gives up on us. She keeps showing up at the door in all her beauty, the Shechinah robed in time, with the fierceness of lions and the voice of songbirds. And so it is also after a week like this one. A horrible, unthinkable week, here she is again. Despite it all.
Read moreYom Kippur sermon 2018, about my visit to my great-great-grandfather’s grave in Baden-Württemberg, and what it taught me about teshuvah.
Read moreIn fifteen minutes, or for some of us less, we left it all behind. For the sake of life, for the sake of survival, we left it all behind. Most of us, but not all of us, were able to go back to our smoke-steeped houses in a week or ten days. But on that first night it was the same for all of us: we didn't know if we would have a home to go home to. On that first night, we experienced letting go and leaving behind. With lech lecha in our ears, we grabbed those few things, threw them in the car, and hit the gas pedal into the Unknown.
Read moreI ran into the Shechinah in an art museum. It was the Art Institute of Chicago. Maybe not the way it is now, but the way it was when I was a kid. She was in one of the Impressionist rooms. In front of Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of la Grande Jatte. (Audio Podcast.)
Read more
Audio feed of this fantasy about making perfume for the tabernacle.
Read more
Dreams brought me to Germany, and ultimately to a graveyard in Waibstadt, to meet the ancestors. My first reflection on the experience.
The flood was terrible. But what about the days, weeks, 350 years to follow? Noah's story doesn't just end with a rainbow. Every disaster requires recovery.
Dedicated to Rita and Terry Rowan.
The angel's suggestion that behind transformation lies language – that should mean something to us. If we want to mend the field, we start with language; we start with our words. Our words conjure a world. And we want it to be a world that we want to live in.
Read more
How does our biblical Creation story set us up for binaries, oppositions, hierarchies? And how does it also call us to see the fullness of the Universe? And how does that affect who we are and how we get along? Rosh Hashanah Drash 5778 –– AUDIO VERSION.
Read more
It sounds nice to talk about hate this way; it's nice to convey your values in three words. But hate isn't a thing out there in the world that we can fight. When someone says, "Fight hate," I am really at a loss for what it is I am supposed to do, other than repost the meme.
Read more
Angels, nazirites and the Paris Accords. AUDIO version.
Read more
I bit in, and everything in me suddenly said, "Why yes, Grandma Minnie." A few bites later, it was again just a delicious thing and now sentimental too. But for that first moment, I had the unmistakable sensation of my grandmother next to me, our hearts turned toward each other in a way that hasn't been possible for nearly half a century.
Read more
Now beware. There are risks associated with stirring the waters, as any activist knows. The thing is, when you stir the waters, the waters get stirred. There are ripples; and the consequences can be unpredictable. Other activists might be stirred up or stirring up in different ways, and the hulls of your ships might bang up against each other – the hulls of your friendships, your partnerships, colliding. This happens. And so it is important to remember that someone stirring the water differently is not necessarily your enemy. And that there is room on these waves for all of us to ride.
Read more
So how do you create monumental Iron Age architecture without axes, hammers or iron tools? Yes, it could just mean that the milling happened at the quarry, many miles away where the ringing and clanging would not bother anybody. But that's too easy an answer for us Jews. Instead, our midrash, our vast array of legend, goes wild here. How did whole stones come to be so regular and perfectly shaped if iron chisels were forbidden? How were they transported if iron crowbars couldn't pry them onto wagons? One midrash suggests that the stones, once uncovered in the quarry, perfectly shaped, would hoist themselves up in the air and levitate to Jerusalem.
Read more