Today I turned off the news and social media to sit outside and watch the clouds drift overhead while I think and write. Once again, Pauline Dubkin Yearwood, עליה השלום, entered my thoughts as she has so often in recent months since she
Read More
Sometimes when I study Torah these days I get a little lost in the details of animal sacrifice and numbering and valuing people and animals. My original purpose in this study was to try to understand what the Torah says comprehensively, pervasively,
Read More
Today a book I’ve been excited to read came in the mail: Barbara J. King’s Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat. I learned of it from Facebook, which everyone loves to hate but where I learn
Read More
Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) is most often translated “law.” Strong’s points out that the word “derives from yârâh (Strong’s #3384) meaning ‘to shoot out the hand as pointing, to show, indicate’, ‘to teach, instruct’, ‘to lay foundations’,
Read More
I never thought I’d hear myself say this: Trump gave me a huge gift when he was elected. It’s hard to imagine myself saying that because my inspiration usually comes from very different kinds of sources. Yet perhaps it’s just the mind-
Read More
I often say that translation is interpretation. There is a powerful example of this fact in the creation stories of Genesis. I can’t help but wonder how history would have played out had two words been translated differently. ADAM IN GENESIS 1-3
Read More
For those of you who follow my blog and who are puzzled with my Torah Ecology posts or find them unreadable…I would like to explain. In a few words, my blog is about religion and food and the intersection between them. This has
Read More
What we eat shapes ethical consciousness. It is a key to social and environmental justice and to restoring harmony in our relationships with our world and with G-d. It has the power to dull our senses or stir our sense of joy and gratitude. What we
Read More
For G-d so loved a pattern that s/he created the world with a dazzling array of them. We have only two real jobs in life: to appreciate the diversity of patterns and to nurture the garden.
The biggest change the Industrial Revolution brought was opening the flood gates to a disconnect between human beings and the rest of creation. We approach a time when we will experience the devastation that results from that disastrous disconnect, when we will experience what
Read More