The Hebrew new-year greeting can be hyper-translated as “May good change, shanah tovah, renew itself upon us”. Everything changes. We grasp wind, inventing meaningful patterns: cycles, progress, ‘good change’. We also (hopefully) see through our inventions, see them as useful temporary crutches to believe in and discard as necessary. A new year acknowledges the inevitability of change, […]Read Post ›
We can’t live in the world of Purim. Once a year we reveal the old secret: the world is meaningless chaos, our lives are irrelevant nothingness. An awful truth, we drink and laugh in order to see it and in order to cover it up. We don’t sing psalms of praise: we know now our […]Read Post ›
Reality is random chaos – inasmuch as we are conscious beings, we can swim through life letting Things happen to us. Or: we can respond to Things, and imbue our actions and choices with meaning. This is the essence of Yom Kippur as ‘Day of Judgement’ – taking a pause from the flow of being-happened-to, […]Read Post ›
Relationships to the world and to God are often framed as intimacy, yet here the same is said in more violent terms: “If you stop listening and act in keri, I will punish you with fiery keri!” What is keri? The most interesting interpretations link it to chance, accident, chaos. We can see the world like […]Read Post ›
