from Rabbi Misha Shulman
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by Rabbi Misha
“I often think about our ancestors in Europe who would get pulled out of their homes in the middle of the night, or attacked in the streets of Germany, and imagine how different they would have felt if there were a non-Jew standing with them to protect them,” said Rabbi Arik Ascherman on Sunday morning.
by Rabbi Misha
This week we concluded our deep and illuminating communal study of Diaspora, led by our philosopher in residence, Dr. David Ponet, in which we read texts by Jean Amery, George Steiner, Edward Said and Hannah Arendt.
by Rabbi Misha
On Tuesday we brought Adam’s mother, Barbara to burial. Barbara was an extraordinary woman who lived fully and richly for 95 years. Though she traveled the globe once she was retired, reaching all seven continents, her home was always New York City.
by Rabbi Misha
Remember that tender moment in the Torah when Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt? I’ve been thinking about it this week.
by Rabbi Misha
Tuesday night at 11pm a Talmudic phrase flashed through my brain:
בִּשְׁעַת הַמַּכְנִיסִין — פַּזֵּר. בִּשְׁעַת הַמְפַזְּרִים — כַּנֵּס.
by Rabbi Misha
The world has gone mad. Human beings have abandoned morality. One person alone remains righteous and blameless. This person will save us from extinction.
by Rabbi Misha
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my brother, Tari, a Buddhism scholar from a mountain village near Jerusalem, whose been here for the last few weeks.
by Rabbi Misha
It’s like some kind of ancient spell. You say certain words, throw some ingredients into water, wear certain clothes and put your fist to your chest.
by Rabbi Misha
This week I’ve been getting excited. Yes, the world rages on. The stupidity knows no bounds. One of the worst leaders we’ve known is speaking at the UN as I write.
by Rabbi Misha
When you go to the theater there is one moment you can always count on to be beautiful, and that’s when the house lights go down on the crowd and the play is about to begin.
by Rabbi Misha
After ten days of probing, difficult questions, this morning’s Soul Math challenge quite literally cut to the chase. Excellent Jew that he was, Ibn Paquda offers an answer to the question of our purpose - in the form of another question: How much time are you wasting?
by Rabbi Misha
In a famous exchange between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt following the publication of The Banality of Evil, Scholem accused Arendt of having no love for the Jewish people.
by Rabbi Misha
For a couple of weeks I couldn’t get this one Hasidic niggun out of my head...
by Rabbi Misha
For a couple of weeks I couldn’t get this one Hasidic niggun out of my head...
by Rabbi Misha
As the world jumps up and down, throwing my heart around, grabbing at my attention with all its sparkling might...
by Rabbi Misha
“Would you kill a baby chicken for a billion dollars?” This was the question Manu posed to me as part of our morning prayers today. My heavy-handed response that followed was a reflection of the troubling effect this week’s events had on my soul. “Do you know what a sin is,” I recall myself asking. “No,” said my seven-year-old.
by Rabbi Misha
In the upside down ways of the world, people want to win. “Total victory,” says one leader, "I didn’t lose, I won big,” says another.
by Rabbi Misha
Please forgive me in advance for stepping out this week of my rabbinic frame of mind and inhabiting my position as a concerned Israeli living in the US. I won’t be invoking the tradition today, which means I won’t be talking about morality, humanity, responsibility and love.
by Rabbi Misha
In honor of the arrival of summer, two Iberian poems to drive us out of the never-fading anxiousness about the state of the world and into the plain reality of this beautiful season:
by Rabbi Misha
As somehow always happens when you study the Book of Job, we ended up chewing on Job’s final words. We were already in hour three or four of our wonderful Tikkun Leil Shavuot this week, which focused on Job, when the words were spoken:
by Rabbi Misha
Amazingly in synch with the times, this Shabbat’s parashah deals with reward and punishment.
by Rabbi Misha
There come times when the only thing to do is to break the rules; to go against the foundational principles; to do the exact opposite of what you always believed to be right. Is this one of those times?
by Rabbi Misha
War engenders despair. It gets in your head and speaks about your meaninglessness and powerlessness. It kills people as a means of killing hope. Which never works. Like life, hope continues.
by Rabbi Misha
When the Holy Blessed One came to create Adam the first human, the ministering angels divided into various factions.
by Rabbi Misha
In the second century in Palestine, after the failed Bar Kochva rebellion, the Roman Emperor Adrianus imposed harsh laws on the Jews that included forbidding the practice of the religion.