


Spirituality When Life Says No
Modern spirituality seems to echo advice of an old standard: "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative." Who doesn't groove on light, love and can-do spirit? Each "yes" of affirmation and empowerment tends to feel good: a spirituality…

The Way We Weren’t
Memories may light the corners of Barbra's mind, but they often darken our own psyche. Resilience is found in your ability to understand memory as a particular tool that can be employed to bring understanding, comfort or inspiration.The…

Seeing it All
Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life.I've heard it countless times, especially over the last few weeks: "Depending on where I look around me, I see either beauty or devastation, hope or despair."True that:…

Now Count This!
Counting the people of the tribes of Israel is a recurring event of the Book of Numbers, so I thought I’d do a little modern counting of my own.18. White supremacists killed 18 people in 2017, twice the number killed by Muslim extremists,…

When Resilience is Just Stubborn: The Art of Quitting
Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life.Ever feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill and soon will reach the top if you just keep going – but the top never comes? Mythical Greek king Sisyphus was condemned…

Bitching Bites
Bitching is easy. Holy bitching is another matter.Easy bitching is what our Torah ancestors did after 39 years in the desert – and who could blame them? Having buried beloved leaders Miriam and Aaron, the people called Israel were miserable:…

The Time God Got It Wrong – Korach
Part of a yearlong series on resilience in Jewish spiritual life.Watch enough cable or online "news," and you might sense a U.S. society more polarized than ever before by political party, class, race, ethnicity, geography and religion.…

Call Me By Your Name
Part of a yearlong series about resilience in Jewish spiritual life.Have you ever imagined yourself with a different name? My grandmother wanted to shed her Yiddish name and be known as Shirley, an American sounding first name. For similar…

Waiting to Exhale
Part of a yearlong series about resilience in Jewish spiritual life."Waiting to Exhale." No, not the 1995 Whitney Houston movie hit. I mean life's occasional sense of waiting – waiting with anticipation, waiting with diminishing patience,…