I know the long traverse from bedside to bathroom to lobby to cafeteria. I love the cafeteria food, even though it’s not really any good. I look at the beige, crusted over fettuccini with vegetables, and I think, “Oh, it’s a bad night for the vegetarians.” I think that until my eyes wander over to the tuna casserole and I realize that it’s a bad night for everybody. But the food here is cheap and made with sincerity, geared to feed hungry healers and anxious families, and I can taste that straightforward intention. Less than four bucks later, I’m back in Mom’s room, with a paper bowl of salty beans and rice and another of carrots and, fortified, I can feel the kitchen staff at my back in this great recovery campaign we’re waging.
Read moreParashat Vayechi - Bedside Pearls
We have had magnificent moments in the hospital room. An Erev Shabbat in the ICU more intense and magical than any I could hope to achieve here. And then this week: moments of recovery. The first half-smile. An attempt to form a word. The squeeze of a hand. A reaction to a song or story or voice or face. A soft moaning that shifts in pitch until it matches a niggun being sung around the bedside. Each of these is a treasure.
Read moreSix Degrees of Inspiration (An Introduction to Shoftim)
And who can be a prophet? It does not need to be a monarch or a celestial being or a Messiah or an extra-terrestrial. But instead Shoftim says it will be someone mikerev acheyhem – someone of the people, of the community. Someone kamocha – like you. Yes, you. Really. You. Meaning, I think, that prophecy will come to us, if it does, each in our own language and our own medium.
Read moreThe Kedoshim Question: Aural Argument
Rabbi Hillel had been in happy retirement since his death, spending slow days playing Scrabble with Rabbi Shammai, who always complained that Hillel was making up words; Hillel insisted that if he had a plausible definition, especially a humorous one, his words should count. But now Hillel had been persuaded out of retirement in order to argue this most unusual case. He stood at the bench and beamed, despite his slightly disheveled appearance, compounded by matzah crumbs from the sandwich he'd snuck into the chamber in his pocket.
Read moreKi Tetze: Confessions of a Cross-Dressing Rabbi*
The deep preoccupation people feel when they encounter someone and are uncertain how to read their gender is very revealing about how central - unnecessarily central, stupidly central - gender is to our culture. It seems someone’s gender is the most important thing we can know about them. When a baby is born, their sex is the first thing we ask, before we even ask about their health. We don’t know how to begin thinking about a baby without a proper pronoun, and an appropriate set of colors, toys and aspirations to go with it. (Even if the aspiration is that the baby should defy the limitations placed on their gender.)
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