They say that in a moment of great unsettling, the Holy One issues forth two angels – one on the right and one on the left, to hold the disconcerted person by the elbows and keep them from falling. In other words, the al tirá is not an instruction but a conjuring of Divine support. The moment of al tirá
Read moreOn Crossing Great Waters
Maybe I come from a long line of non-swimming, land-locked Keller men, flagrantly violating this rabbinic injunction, generation after generation, or generation before generation, all the way back to the Exodus from Egypt, where some proto-Keller would have stood gaping at the Sea in abject terror.
Read moreKi Tisa: The Scent of Shechinah
But this was another time.
When scents were devised with sensibility.
Mortar and pestle. Delights olfactory
Made with industry but no factory.
A time when the word "natural"
Was not needed before the word "fragrance"
Because what else would it be?
Kingdom of Priests
Mesopotamian and Canaanite cultures also had a priesthood function for people like me, for the girlymen who served the gods and goddesses dressed as women, called kulu'u in Babylonian and k'deshim in Hebrew, which again means "holy ones," but which was translated into the Latin Vulgate by St. Jerome in the 4th Century as effeminati (a term which I must immediately begin using to describe my own tribe).
Read moreAfter the Disaster
Noah and Na'amah bounced from house to house for some time. They weren't always easy to host. They would wake loudly from bad dreams; they were alternately controlling and passive, overjoyed and immobile. The Urartians didn't know whether they should ask what Noah and family had experienced, or whether they should keep a polite silence. And Noah, after a while, didn't want to tell it. After all, no one could ever really understand what they had been through. It became a story mostly discussed inside the family, and periodically presented as a special event for wide-eyed school children.
Read more