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There is a moment
in this week’s Torah portion, Chayei Sarah, that always catches me. A moment that always strikes me in the simplicity of what it says and in the vastness of what it doesn’t say.
This week we see Isaac and Ishmael, shoulder to shoulder, burying their father. How is it possible to resist the expectation to be enemies and let go of the past's hold on us?
Read moreMaybe Hagar conjured the angel in a vision because in her suffering her thoughts were stuck in her head, and her fear caught tight in her gut, and she needed to be drawn out of herself; she needed to be witnessed from the outside, to witness herself from the outside, in order to make sense of her next steps. And she did.
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While our bodies are something like 75,000 cubic centimeters of saltwater, our minds, our spirits, are Oceans. It is comforting to be contained in these familiar bodies. But there is something in us that wants to be vast. This is, I think, why we live here, why we go to the Ocean when our spirits are low, why we dream of being on or in the Ocean. We want to recapture the sense of endlessness that our souls once knew.
Read moreIn 2016, on the eve of the World Series, during the holiday of Sukkot, amid a nasty and unsettling presidential election, I found myself watching baseball like I hadn’t since childhood. The Cubs, after a 108-year drought, won the World Series title that year. This year, as I begin to ease into SF Giants fandom (gimme a break; I’ve only been in the Bay Area for 32 years), and as we head toward post-season, I think back on the lessons I learned from loving the Cubs, leaving the Cubs, and returning to the Cubs. I decided to repost this essay, written on the eve of the 2016 World Series.
Read moreA setting of Psalm 68:10, which I translate as: “May You release bountiful rain, O God; may You revive the land in its weariness.”
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