Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There)

g’neivat da’at,

a core purpose of Jewish law is to articulate those limits, helping us discipline ourselves without becoming ascetics and enjoy ourselves without becoming hedonists.

a fable written by Rabbi Y. M. Tuckachinsky that depicts a set of twins in their mother’s womb. For months, they live a quiet, pleasant life, but sensing that things are about to change, they wonder what’s in store. The more spiritually minded twin insists that they will continue on to another life, “a great new world, a whole new realm of being…Th

Instead of reading this prayer as describing a being in the sky, why not understand it as a nondualist affirmation that God is everything and everything is one?

The Torah is best read not as a book of scientific truths, but as a book of moral truths.

Kriah is supposed to be socially outrageous and primal. Mourners are not raising awareness for a cause, they are expressing the sense that their world has been torn apart. Kriah is Judaism’s way of providing mourners a controlled outlet for the almost feral despair they may be feeling—the impulse to just shred everything around them.

not in order to have my problems solved, not in order to receive something, but in order to fully encounter myself.”

Revelation thus cannot be viewed as “a pure expression of God’s will,” but rather “as an expression of God’s will filtered through the mindset and mores of its intended audience.”

What we do know, and what Judaism affirms, is that, as it says in the biblical Song of Songs, “Love is strong as death.” We never stop loving those we’ve lost, and in some way they are always with us. But our focus is on this world, this life. That is what Judaism tells us: To choose life so that we may live.