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Doing Something Wrong

L’chayam

You want I should tell you about Abie — he should rest in peace. Sixty years I know him. . . . A long time. . . . The things I could tell you. You know the Freiheit? No? Of course not. By you it means nothing.

The Bat Mitzvah Papers

First I was a Presbyterian; then I converted to Judaism; now I wander around in the same humanist/deist fog that substitutes for Organized Religion with so many of my contemporaries. Not exactly satisfying; not bad either.

My Favorite Joke

A canary with a machine gun, socks, a whiz-bomb

Wondering Jew

Judaism’s Mystical Heart

An Interview With Dovid Din

The unity that Judaism is looking for is the point at which, without losing this brain, a corridor of correspondence is opened between this brain — the individual identity — and the transcendent identity. But it isn’t that I become annihilated and flow into the great river; it’s that I am maintained in a scale model relationship to the transcendent. I stay here, but I grow outward. I stay here, but I use my here only to be positioned onto there.

Low As The Sand, High As The Sky: What Is A Jew?

These people have been compared to sand and stars. When they fall, they fall as low as the sand, and when they rise, they rise as high as the sky.

The Talmud

Fixing The World

An Interview With Schlomo Carlebach

The way to receive light from God is through praying. The only difference is that some people pray unconsciously, some pray consciously, some pray super-consciously. You can walk into a restaurant and see a person who says, “I’m so hungry. I need some soup.” Deep down his soul is praying to God, “God, please give me life, I’m at the end.”

Man Of Silver, Man Of Gold

That crumbling house with its rusty iron fence, like a disillusioned spider’s web, became important. Even its blotch of drained soil, discolored and long sterile, was a symbol of warfare. This spelled out a larger drama of the world I was just beginning to realize I was living in.

Editor’s Note