eShalom Archive

I was speaking with a friend of mine, a rabbi out in Santa Monica, doing a wrap up of our experiences of the High Holidays, when we fell upon the subject of midrash. You may know midrash as a relatively small but important body of literature from around the sixth century into the Middle Ages, […]

It begins with the month of Elul, a time we set aside to begin preparing for the High Holy Days. We are invited to hear the blast of the shofar every day leading to Rosh Hashanah, allowing its sound the opportunity to begin centering ourselves on what’s to come. On Rosh Hashanah we gather with […]

(I wrote this column some time ago, as will be clear from the opening paragraph. But its message about Sukkot still fits.  Well, kind of, in that our Covid-colored world limits what we can do in a sukkah this year.  Nonetheless, the theology remains apt.) I was caught in a traffic jam today in the […]

There are a couple of ways to talk about atonement. The first, one of my favorites, is to point out that the English word is a conflation of at-one-ment, and tells us that the goal of atoning is to arrive at a sense of inner wholeness, of peace.  In the Jewish way, you arrive at that […]