It is 50 years since the greatest social justice prophet of our time, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. One year earlier, on April 4, 1967, he gave a powerful and controversial speech about the Vietnam war that linked the civil rights struggle and the anti-war movement. In this speech […]
Embodied Freedom: The Traditions of Passover
BY DAVID JAFFE This article was originally posted on Shambhala.com. The Passover prayer book, or Haggadah, that my family used when I was growing was in English, Hebrew, and transliteration of the Hebrew. The story told is that when I was nine years old, I cut out strips of white paper and taped them over […]
How Purim Can Fill an Emotional Need for Connection
BY RABBI DAVID JAFFE , 2/28/2018 I never really “got” Purim as a young adult. The endless noisemaking during the M’gillah reading felt tiresome and the need to feel happy at the parties reminded me of the same pretense as New Year’s Eve. It was only during my rabbinic studies in Jerusalem that I fell in love with this […]
A Tip for Feeling Joyful
The Talmud tells us, “When Adar Enters, Joy Increases.” The question remains, how do we feel joy? Is joy some objective thing that happens, or is it a subjective feeling? Even if it is an objective reality, if you are not feeling it, what good is it? I wanted to offer a thought about proactively opening our […]
Change is Possible: Thoughts for Adar
The Talmud tells us that Haman was pleased when he picked the month of Adar to destroy the Jews because Adar seemed to have auspicious qualities for his evil plan. It was the month that Moses died and there were no other holidays. His thought process assumed that the nature of a particular day or […]