I know. Hanukkah passed. But the season of darkness hasn’t. Now that you aren’t distracted by dreidels, light eight candles anyway. For the Light.
You heard of Hegel. The German idealist (1770-1831). Whose writing is so dense even philosophers have trouble understanding him. Whose name is associated with the “dialectic”. (Go ahead. Say it. dīəˈlektik. It’s fun.) How can Hanukkah help us interpret Hegel?
Given the global growing divide in wealth concentration and given that this happens to be a year of shmita (release) when all debts are to be forgiven (according to biblical law), it makes sense to use the holidays of Passover and Easter to reconsider our relationship to money. Are we enslaved to a certain way of perceiving money? Could our relationship to it be ‘reborn’?
Continue reading The TEN Plagues of Money
While the films, The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game, each tell an important and inspiring story about Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing respectively, I found neither to be as great alone as they were together. Juxtaposed as a single experience — which happened because I saw them less than a day apart, brought a certain poignancy into view. Let me explain.
Continue reading Hawking AND Turing
Given my perhaps naive belief that interfaith orientations and integral philosophies are part of humanity’s next evolutionary step in spiritual development, I wondered what kind of music would show up in our culture to reflect this transition in consciousness? Then I turned on the radio and, Voila!
NPR was doing a story on polyrhythms or many rhythms happening at the same time “creating a different shape in the sound”. One example of a polyrhythm is Fake Empire which played during an Obama 2008 election campaign ad. It has two simultaneous beats, 3 and 4. There are plenty of songs with polyrhythms and while it’s not something totally new, we might ask: How can polyrhythms help us develop spiritually?
“The point of [polyrhythm] is to make listening to two rhythms at once feel natural, as easy as talking while you walk. LaFrae Sci says, that’s a life skill.”
Here’s my analogy: If we can learn to hear two or more rhythms simultaneously in music, we can learn to empathize with two or more belief systems simultaneously. Doing so might help us to hear the many sides of a story, appreciate the different points of views in a conflict, and even feel comfortable with learning about and from more than one religion. We might even develop the social equivalent of harmony – justice. In other words, polyrhythms could very well accompany an expansion of consciousness.
You can read here how I teach youth to hold and harmonize multiple ideas about faith, identity, and community so that they will have the life skills to solve practical, global problems with peers from many faiths and cultures for the benefit of all humanity. That may be a tall order. But at the very least, polyrhythms ask us to change the way we listen to music. In the process, they might help us to change the way we listen to each other.
Explore the Resources my this website to learn more about interspiritual ideas and programs.
Seder means Order. Passover Seders follow an order of 14 Steps. I won’t list them all here but I will ask you to notice the relationship between Step 4,Yachatz, and Step 11, Tzafun.
Yachatz is about being broken; the bitterness of slavery, the Red Sea splitting. It is symbolized during the Seder by breaking matzah (the unrisen bread) and then hiding the bigger half. Tzafun is about healing the brokenness; bringing the broken-off part out from hiding. It’s about healing into something new; coming into wholeness. At the Seder, it is symbolized by the search for the broken half which, once found, is broken into smaller pieces so that all who are at the table may eat of it.
Why does Yachatz/the broken become Tzafun/the whole? How does this happen? In addition to Passover telling a story about transformation from yachatz/the brokenness of slavery to tzafun/the wholeness of freedom, here are two more examples from Jewish history. Continue reading Passover’s Process
The New York Times today (1 Oct 2013) posted the results of the first major survey of American Jews in over a decade conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. The data are not that surprising. But the conclusions confound me.
Data show that intermarriage continues to rise and that fewer Jews raise their children with a Jewish identity. “Of the “Jews of no religion” who have children at home, two-thirds are not raising their children Jewish in any way. This is in contrast to the “Jews with religion” of whom 93 percent said they are raising their children to have a Jewish identity.” The conclusion is that “this secular trend has serious consequences for what Jewish leaders call Jewish continuity.” Which leaders? What do they mean “not Jewish in any way”? Is Jewish identity and continuity really threatened, or only these leaders’ idea of it? What if identity consisted of another idea?