Itzik's Well Podcast - Irwin Keller

A vision isn't moot just because there aren't currently the will and skill to carry it off. There will be. A drash on Parashat Pekudei, plus a musical setting of Vihi Noam. (Plus an extra opening story in the audio version.)

How is it that we can listen to a voice in our ear, directing us on paths that we know will lead to disaster, and still not question? Two weeks in Israel: war, rain, sorrow, and a GPS disaster.

The war in Israel and Gaza has, I notice, offered to Supporters of Israel and Supporters of Palestine proof of what they already believed. And our city councils have become the proxy battleground. Righteousness is easy. Blame is easy. But empathy is hard and will break us open. If we can't manage some empathy here, what hope is there for reconciliation in the land we all love? This is a Come-to-Ph...

Nations have a life of their own, behaving in ways few individuals would. Maybe remembering the angel of the collective can bring out our best.

Today is ten years since my mother’s death, and the haunting is sweet. She is gathered into me like Jacob was gathered into his people. The ancestors are in us. We are ancestors too. What traits and traumas, what hope or despair, openness of heart or resilience of spirit, will be gathered from us into those who come after?

The truth is I no longer even know what I’m crying about. At this point, I seem just to be yielding to the big blur of suffering. Sea of Tears (Audio) Or Read it in Print

I am walking around afraid. Not always afraid of something specific. My body is fueled by adrenaline and programmed by the epigenetics of generations of ancestors whose fear responses enabled their survival and mine. My soul has fluttered right out of my body. Is there any solid place where it can land?

At the end of Torah, Moshe dies, after much struggle and resistance. Torah seems to take a breath, a long exhale, as we roll back the scroll to the beginning. And so in our lives as well, the exhale after the long-anticipated death of anyone we love. The gasp, the exhale.

For Yom Kippur, I explore what it is in our American Jewish soul – the longing, the fear, and the insecurity – that keeps us silent when Israel (and Palestine) are under discussion. Now is the time to find our voice. 

    The Lurianic story says that Creation came about through a shattering of light-filled vessels. The primordial light is embedded in all of us. And our bodies and our separateness are all a kind of mask over an ancient, light-filled Oneness. How can we use that mystical insight? Ancient Light – Click to Listen Or Read it in Print

Moshe is denied entry to the Promised Land. But he is invited to climb the mountain and look to the horizon and see what no one else can.

We are in the narrows now. Is that such a bad thing? A drash  reconsidering the Beyn Hametzarim – the three narrow weeks leading to Tisha B'Av. Ah, the Narrows (Audio) Or Read it in Print

Yom Yerushalayim – Jerusalem Day – celebrates the reunification of the City. But it feels anything but unified. It can only be honored as a vision, but a vision in need of revision.

The month ahead – the month of Nisan, which begins Wednesday night – is not only the first month of the Hebrew calendar, it also contains all the subsequent months within it as if in utero. It is the Shekhinah, the Divine Mother, birthing time. What do we want to birth in this next year?

Money is power. And the more money you have, the greater your power to do good and the greater your power to do evil. In the Purim story, the Queen Esther story, Haman uses arguments about Jewish disloyalty to convince the king to order the destruction of the Jews. But to clinch the deal, he offers to fund the operation himself. He offers 10,000 talents of silver for the king’s treasury if the kin...

Just as the memory of earthquakes is wired into our bodies,  so the memory of earthquakes is wired into our mythologies. Our ancestors understood earthquakes to be the very Earth trembling in God’s presence, as we ourselves certainly would. God is the physics of the earthquake and more than the physics. God is also in our pained experience of the catastrophe. 

We name this not only Shabbat Shirah but Refugee Shabbat, to help us renew our compassion and empathy for the refugees who are right now lodging in tent cities and crossing great waters and wandering from place to place in search of home. We were refugees too. They are our story rewritten in the present tense.

What if at some point they had refused to go along with it anymore? What if they had declared a general strike? If they had gathered at the palace in protest? If they had decreed a day of fasting and crying out to their gods or to ours? Would it have made a difference to Pharaoh? Even if it didn’t, mightn’t it have made a difference to us? Introducing Interfaith Public Fast of Sonoma County

For me, looking back over this year, what stands out most is how many individual stories in our community reached their conclusions. Looking at them, suddenly, everything shifts. A story of individual trauma and triumph gives way to a larger story of life pouring through the details of circumstance. Every act, every turn of the story, is imbued with a greater knowingness. Seeds have borne fruit. L...

There is an invitation for collective teshuvah in front of us at this moment of history, being proffered by too many modern-day prophets to count, and by too many to ignore, taking the form of the movement for reparations. This critical piece of teshuvah is an invitation for the collective to develop its moral conscience, to look at how old harms continue to live with us until they are addressed,...

Rosh Hashanah reminds us to think beyond the human scale of our lives, and get on Cosmic terms. Is our Judaism big enough to go galactic? And what does a Cosmic consciousness require of us in the here and now?

Parashat Eikev offers another Jewish entry point to a consideration of reparations. “Beware,” Moshe says, “lest you come to think that your good fortune is of your own doing.”

    Shabbat Chazon 5782 Where evening becomes day, light alternates with leaf, and experience becomes story. The Plain of Threading (Audio) Or Read it in Print Featuring Min Hametzar – Psalm 118:5; Setting: Rabbi Shefa Gold.

Prophecy is not dead. But it does require the right conditions to emerge. What are the insights waiting to come from or through us? How can we make it easier to hear them?

Tisha B’Av, coming up in a few weeks, might be a cautionary tale. This is what destruction looks like. This is what it looks like when there’s nothing left to be done. But the 17th of Tammuz is a blueprint for possibility. “Do something now,” it seems to tell us. Fast. Plead. It’s not too late. It’s not over yet. A drash for 17 Tammuz. Plus a new niggun, “Niggun in the Breach” performed by the Ner...