Originally published June 20, 2022 at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-kaf-word/
Forget about being “cancelled” on social media, suspended from work or losing a book deal; when Miriam used a racial slur in Parashat Beha’alotecha, she was punished with leprosy.
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Originally Posted May 6, 2022 at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/kubler-ross-and-the-kohen-gadol/
There is a truism that we don’t speak ill of the dead. In Judaism that truism is anchored in the fact that the two weekly portions Aharei Mot and Kedoshim are often joined as a “double” parsha. “After death – holies.” Usually this is understood as meaning that after someone dies, we say holy words – words of comfort and praise, not criticism or conflict. But I think perhaps it can also refer to action: after death, we do holy deeds.
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Originally published January 17, 2022 at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/oasis-in-time/
The late Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” Like most things Yogi said, his famous quotation was a malapropism, a fumbling of a more conventional truism about a particular individual belting the notes that mercifully signal the end of an opera.
But what do you do if there’s no one to sing, no signpost to tell you the end has arrived?
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I was on suicide watch for a patient a few years ago. After a long series of emails and text messages and phone calls, the psychiatrist, the therapist, the patient and I were all satisfied they were safe. After the dust settled, I mentioned to the therapist that I had recommended a book to the patient by Rabbi Naomi Levy. “Are you mixing religion and medicine?” she texted back.
“That’s my brand…” I replied.
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Parashat Bo 5782/January 8, 2022
The beginning of Parashat Bo feels like the kind of long slide into the abyss I wrote about two weeks ago.
With the plague of fiery hailstones just ended, God sends the locusts. “They shall cover the surface of the land, so that no one will be able to see the land. They shall devour the surviving remnant that was left to you after the hail,” Moshe and Aharon warn Pharaoh (Shmot 10:5).
In the months after the October 27th, 2018, terror attack in Pittsburgh, I had one consistent source of solace, the site of the last hopeful thing that happened to me immediately before the attack: the newborn nursery, where scarcely an hour before the shooting started I made my rounds with my tiniest, most precious patients. I was often late to work those months, lingering extra minutes in each room, snuggling every baby for no reason other than to bask in the calm of a sleeping newborn. I would leave the house for rounds some days and tell my wife I was going to therapy.
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December 31, 2021/27 Tevet 5782, Parashat Vaera
Originally posted at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/blood-in-the-water/
Early in the pandemic, we said and did a lot of things that made little sense. Recommendations changed almost daily. We gravely took specific precautions that turned out to be useless, like hanging plexiglass shields and buying stores out of toilet paper. And we talked a lot about “silver linings,” like how glad we were to take a break from working in offices or wearing dress clothes. Twenty-one months on, the recommendations still change faster than we can keep up with, precautions we thought we finally had figured out now turn out again to be minimally effective, and the only silver lining I see is in my hair.
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Parashat Shmot 5782, 20 Tevet/December 24, 2021
It was the smokiest backyard fire I have ever built.
We had an unseasonably warm, dry day in the middle of last week. Through sheer force of will I caught up on work, cleaned up after the dog, and hauled out the fire pit one last time before winter. We still have an enormous pile of cut firewood from the limb of our neighbors’ tree that crashed into our backyard on June 13th, sitting unused due to an excessive amount of rain, stress, and general exhaustion that has kept us from using it.
Unfortunately, the kindling, “dry leaves” that I had gathered in armfuls from the yard, wouldn’t light. Only the tops were dry; the lower surface where they had been in contact with the grass was wet and already composting in place. This didn’t become clear until they were already on the fire. I managed to salvage the endeavor by finding some newspaper indoors (not easy in 2021 – we’re reduced to burning junk mail coupons), but what resulted was a roaring fire that gave off so much smoke I was still smelling it the next day inside a facemask that hadn’t even been next to the fire.
Building that fire was part of my attempt to climb out of a well of depression, the latest in a series I have experienced since the start of the pandemic. I wasn’t just building fires: I was playing music, finishing a collaborative piece of writing I’d been working on with Rick Light, even going out a few times to places that were vigilantly checking vaccine cards.
And then I got Omicron.
Read MoreMy Times of Israel piece from October 27, 2021, published in the print edition of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle on November 5, 2021. Never got around to posting it here for some reason, but two months later, as maintaining daily gratitude again becomes a real struggle, it’s worth re-reading.
A joint post on Times of Israel with my friend Rick Light of Kavod v’Nichum and the Gamliel Institute about how the pandemic has changed some of our oldest rituals – and how it hasn’t changed them. While we write about burial practices, we are really talking about why all of our rituals and routines are the way they are, even in the most non-routine of times.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-we-keep-and-what-we-leave-behind/
A while ago my rabbi asked a group of us if we had ever had the experience of feeling our prayers soar up to heaven. Most of us, myself included, had some point of reference for that feeling. But I can think of no prior experience so joyous as the one I had last week.
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