Itzik's Well Podcast - Irwin Keller

story from the Book of Judges about an angel prophesying the miraculous birth of a child, and the unnamed woman who was to be Samson's mother. (AUDIO)

If there is some balance between human and nature, and between human and Divine, that’s represented in the Book of Leviticus, then these terrible consequences are not a doling out of punishment, but the natural outcome of letting the delicate balance fail. We understand this now, in a new way, in this time we live in where every year we wonder if the sky will be like iron and the earth like copper...

    A little about what Torah, time, and community might mean. Not Torah – Audio Or Read it in Print

It is the moon, not the sun, that governs our dreams. And we needed to dream a different life, to dream a renewed self, before we could even think of putting on our sandals, packing our matzah, and taking our first step toward freedom. So now is the time we are commanded to follow the unfolding of the moons.

Every call happens in a circumstance, and every circumstance has, if we listen for it, a call. We have spent two years refining our ability to live in our conditions while responding to the Divine call arising from them. Let us not stop being prophets just because we are getting some of the goodies back. Let us not sweep the pain we feel or the revelations we’ve received under the rug of normalcy.

We are in a time of general emergency, it seems to me. A time in which we need our hands to be especially skillful. We need our hands to be busy in the work of peacemaking, tending, healing. May it be said that in our time, the hands of peacemakers were blessed. A drash for Parashat Pekudei, plus a new song – Vihi Noam.

It is important to resist any schmaltzy Fiddler-style nostalgia for Jewish life as it was once lived in the Ukraine. But it is also right to notice how that land is imprinted on us, and how we are imprinted on it. There are not many places you can go in the world that doesn’t have some Jewish imprint. In Ukraine it is profound.

The priest’s regalia as described in this week’s portion, is not just fancy clothes; it is protection magic. Designed to deflect, to protect, to allow the priestly service to continue despite the magnitude of what the priest processes. So I ask you: what is  your  protection magic?

    I sat in the resonating chamber of the Great Synagogue, just as I had stood at the Temple of Poseidon, and wondered about this human impulse to build a house for the gods. Why? We could go outside and worship on a mountain, or before an altar of ocean, or in the Italian countryside among colonnades of umbrella pines. But no, instead we build structures of great weight, at great expen...

    Joseph is not asking for the transport of their physical bones. Joseph is asking the Children of Israel – asking us – to raise up, to honor, to carry forward with us, their complex and multiple qualities. Their fullness. Their selves . And that is what we are about to do. Even if it has taken 4000 years and 7000 miles to make good on Joseph’s request. Joseph's Bones (Click to Listen)...

Once upon a time we were animals alongside the other animals – before we evolved the self-awareness that cut us off from the others, that got us caught in our heads, in our bodies, in our civilizations; that got us kicked out of Eden. Now we only have a dim memory of what it is like to be the animals that we are. And so we seek out, through our imaginations and our liturgy and our magic, the conne...

Sondheim's sense of “in it but not of it” is not just a gay vantagepoint in 20th Century art, but a Jewish vantagepoint also. American Ashkenazi Jews of the mid-20th Century, the children or grandchildren of immigrants, were also involved in a struggle to assimilate into a culture that wasn’t theirs. And they often had a dramatic influence on that culture, creating much of what we imagine as Ameri...

The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse comes during the week of Vayishlach, and the painful Torah story of Dinah. What do these stories have to tell us about how our society looks at male violence? And how might we still see, hear, and heal Dinah?

A prophetic dream helps Jacob recognize the Divine that is immanent in space. What do we need to do to have a zap of realization? It's easy when we're in stunning nature. Harder at the hospital.

In Chayei Sarah we see Isaac and Ishmael shoulder to shoulder burying their father. How is it possible to resist the expectation to be enemies and let go of the past's hold on us?

Maybe Hagar conjured the angel in a vision because in her suffering her thoughts were stuck in her head, and her fear caught tight in her gut, and she needed to be drawn out of herself; she needed to be witnessed from the outside, to witness herself from the outside, in order to make sense of her next steps. And she did.

While our bodies are something like 75,000 cubic centimeters of saltwater, our minds, our spirits, are Oceans. It is comforting to be contained in these familiar bodies. But there is something in us that wants to be vast. This is, I think, why we live here, why we go to the Ocean when our spirits are low, why we dream of being on or in the Ocean. We want to recapture the sense of endlessness that...

In 2016, on the eve of the World Series, during the holiday of Sukkot, amid a nasty and unsettling presidential election, I found myself watching baseball like I hadn’t since childhood. The Cubs, after a 108-year drought, won the World Series title that year. This year, as I begin to ease into SF Giants fandom (gimme a break; I’ve only been in the Bay Area for 32 years), and as we head toward post...

You will not, in death, get the apology that you have been waiting for in life. So why carry it to your grave? Why not imitate the grave now and release the debt? What would it feel like to let go of the apology you think you are owed? What a relief that might be not for them, but for you. Can't Take it With You (Audio) Or Read it in Print

On the morning of Day Two, you realize there is no shower coming, and there is no mirror to reflect how well you’ve tamed the wild of your face. There is no internet to amuse you, and no savior to bring the important item you forgot. This is when you begin to surrender. Letting your existence, along with your appearance, go fallow. This is when I begin to feel the sorrow that comes from living in...

Psalm 27, the gorgeous, heart-filled, and raw piece of holy poetry that accompanies the month of Elul, challenges us to ask what our lives would be like if we couldn't see the good, the magic, the Divine, in the world around us. What if I couldn't? It's hard to say...

A Yiddish women's blessing for the month of Elul teaches us that three anagrams forming the word Elul offer us a roadmap for transforming dread to love to action and fulfillment.

Maybe our journeys of hardship and danger are not tests of endurance or tests of faith. If they are tests of anything, maybe they are tests of love.

Ultimately, an ethical will is for us, not for our children or grandchildren. Because we can’t really control what people in the post-us future will do. We can’t force those who follow us into a mold of our devising. The future belongs to them, not to us, and it is a mistake to cling too tightly.

Since we began sheltering in place, we have, by my count, spent 69 consecutive Shabbatot together, here in this dazzling Zoom Room. Sixty-nine opportunities to sit together and breathe. Six-nine opportunities to gently push back against the narrowness of the time. To feel expansive. Shabbat has been our technology for resilience. The light inside the tunnel. Light in the Middle of the Tunnel (audi...