Using the traditional Passover seder and its text, the Haggadah, as a template, From Illness to Exodus explores illness and healing—the narrow space, and the way out.
From Illness to Exodus invites the ill person and healer alike to address hard questions with compassion, curiosity, and a mature faith
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Is it enough to say the right thing without feeling it – or to say the wrong thing with the right emotion? Do I have a God complex or impostor syndrome? How do I avoid the extremes and practice with both humility and confidence?
Make today different from all other days – what will you do to achieve this? What stories do we tell about our bad habits to justify them to ourselves? How might we reframe them to make them holier?
When you think about modern plagues, do you think of them as outside forces that are affecting you, punishment for societal ills, or things that you’re doing that harm others?
3,000 years of Jewish wisdom, 3,000 people seeking healing, and one nice Jewish doctor with messy, curly hair trying to use one to make sense of the other. Take two stone tablets and call me in the morning?
When we turn away from tragedy, and try to pretend it never happened, the effects can be profound. Filmmaker Judith Helfand joins me on Episode 21 of Healing People, Not Patients to talk about the conspiracy of silence that sprung up in her family after her Aunt Ethel, age 12, died suddenly during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Judith didn’t even know about Ethel until she discovered a sepia-toned photograph and said, “Who’s this little girl that looks like me?” The clip describes how the willful silence that her Bubbe Sarah kept in order to cope, grew into a decades-long, whole family effort to keep Bubbe from ever getting sad again. You can hear the whole interview here.
Ethel’s story is the subject of Judith’s new film project, Good Mourning, Ethel. She’s working to raise funds to bring it across the finish line. If you’re interested in helping, click here to view the trailer and make a donation.
Nearly forty years ago at summer camp, I learned a song about a bridge.
This year, I learned the significance of the bridge.
Read MoreI said a strange goodbye last week. After three years, thanks to a computer system “migration,” I had to part ways with… a password.
Most of my passwords these days are ones that Google randomly generates for me, ones I couldn’t remember if I tried. But this was one I created myself, one that, thanks to multi-factor authentication protocols, I wasn’t required to change every 90 days. And it was one that, if I’m being honest, was too tangentially related to the actual words in the phrase for anyone but me to land on.
With several letters, numbers, and symbols altered, the password was ‘Al Shelosha Devarim, the beginning of Mishnah Avot 1:2, which in its entirety reads, ‘Al shelosha devarim ha’olam ‘omed – ‘al haTorah, v’al ha’avodah, v’al gemilut hasadim. “The world (‘olam) stands on three things: on Torah, on service, and on deeds of lovingkindness.”
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