The Neshamah Project

What can a sukkah teach us about meeting difficult emotions? This week, Rabbi Ben Newman shares a simple practice: let the story rest, enter the feeling, and notice what unfolds. Alongside an interpretive reading of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), we explore Sukkot, Buddhist insights into impermanence, and the possibility of meeting our changing lives with curiosity and openness.

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman revives Riffing with the Rabbi with longtime friend Marcia Salter, joined along the way by Rabbi Shoshana Leis, for a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to truly listen—to one another, to uncertainty, and to the “still, small voice.” Together they explore truth and perspective, conflict and communication, Hillel and Shammai, Elij...

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, I read “September, Both/And,” a reflection from my book 52 Gates: Reflections on Living. September carries its own kind of wisdom: the light softens, the leaves begin to turn, and beauty arrives alongside the knowledge that everything changes. This piece sits inside that tension—the strange human capacity to feel gratitude and grief at the same time, to lov...

In this teaching from the Degel Machaneh Ephraim, righteous judgment becomes an act of creation. Through the shofar, harsh judgment is transformed and integrated into compassion.

This week on The Neshamah Project, we explore three teachings from the Or HaChayyim on the opening words of Parashat Re’eh: “See, I place before you today blessing and curse.” These teachings unfold as a spiritual progression. First, Moses invites us to taste the deeper fulfillment of spiritual life for ourselves. Then, the Or HaChayyim draws on the Zohar’s teaching that each of us carries a nitzo...

In this episode, Rabbi Ben explores two teachings from the Degel Machaneh Ephraim about how spiritual transformation unfolds. Every action becomes a stone: one act leads to another until, almost without noticing, we have built a mountain. Teshuvah, prayer, and generosity offer ways to change direction by laying down different stones. The episode also considers what happens when Torah becomes more...

Professor Shaul Magid (Harvard Divinity School) joins me for a conversation about spirituality and the political. We trace his path from the seventies counterculture into the yeshiva and Bratslav worlds of Jerusalem, his relationship with Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi — including their final encounter — and why he stands both inside and at the margins of Jewish Renewal. From there: peoplehood and w...

In this episode, Rabbi Ben explores the mystery of the red heifer through the teaching of the Or HaChaim. Rather than treating mystery as a problem to solve, the Torah invites us to practice wonder, humility, and openness before realities larger than our understanding. Sometimes mystery is not the absence of truth, but the beginning of a deeper encounter with it.

This week on The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman explores three mystical commentaries on Korach—from the Moroccan kabbalists Abir Yaakov and Or HaChayim, and the Degel Machaneh Ephraim—on spiritual gifts, ego, leadership, and holy disagreement.

Rabbi Ben Newman is joined by Rabbi Shoshana Leis for a lively exploration of a Hasidic teaching on ayin and yesh—emptiness and being. Together they reflect on spiritual leadership, ego, creativity, perception, and the possibility of infusing ordinary embodied life with sacred awareness.

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben explores a teaching from the Noam Elimelech on the Menorah as a symbol of spiritual integration. At the beginning of the path, we may need many practices, disciplines, and supports. But over time, those many lights are meant to become one light: a life of deeper emunah, wholeness, and achdut. This episode reflects on how modern seekers can move fr...

In this week’s episode of The Neshamah Project, we explore a teaching from the Noam Elimelech on Nasso about wonder, desire, and sacred participation in the world. The Torah’s phrase yafli—to make a special vow—is read through the lens of pele, wonder or miracle. The teaching reminds us that miracles are not ours to control, yet we can become vessels through which wonder moves. It also offers a po...

A teaching from R' Elimelekh of Lezhinsk, Noam Elimelekh, on BaMidbar, Numbers 1:1, 2:1 on humility and renewal.

This week on The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman explores a visionary teaching from the Meor Einayim, in which Shabbat becomes far more than a day of rest. The Me’or Einayim teaches that Shabbat is a foretaste of the world to come — a glimpse of a future reality in which divine awareness fills everything, even the “lowest” parts of existence. What if our moments of stopping — Shabbat, silence,...

Ephraim on the spiritual power of letters, language, and perception. Drawing on a story of the Baal Shem Tov transforming a harsh decree into “only a trace of fear,” the episode reflects on how the same letters can spell nega, affliction, or oneg, delight. The teaching invites us to ask: what word is our life spelling right now, and can we rearrange the letters into something more whole, healing,...

During the week of Passover, this episode explores the Exodus as an inner journey rather than a distant story. Drawing on Hasidic and mystical teachings, Rabbi Ben guides listeners through reflections and short meditations on constriction, trust, voice, and the possibility of change in real time. Instead of focusing on ritual alone, this conversation asks: Where are we still in our own narrow plac...

In this episode we will dive into two comments from the Degel on Parshat Tetzaveh. The Degel reads tetzaveh not only as “command,” but as tzavta — connection — teaching that the purpose of creation itself is conscious relationship: from the world, to Israel, to the tzaddik, to the Divine. He then turns to the image of “pure olive oil, crushed for illumination.” Olive oil represents wisdom. When we...

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman explores the deeper meaning of “Vayikchu li terumah” — not as giving something to God, but as taking the Divine into our own lives. Drawing on Hasidic and kabbalistic teachings, we look at how Torah, sacred language, and sustained practice can shape us over time, like the forty-day formation of both the human body and the revelation at Sina...

A mystical reading of Mishpatim that reframes justice as part of a longer soul-arc. Drawing on the Degel Machaneh Ephraim and the Zohar, this episode explores how moments that feel unfair may be part of a deeper reckoning, not punishment but completion. For modern seekers, it becomes an invitation to loosen certainty, release resentment, and see conflict as a doorway to spiritual maturity.

his episode of The Neshamah Project explores a Hasidic teaching that insists liberation happens one person at a time, each according to their own inner awareness and capacity. We reflect on Moses as a figure of parental love—one who carries others forward and, like The Giving Tree, gives so deeply that he does not enter the land himself. Alongside this, we consider a vision of power rooted not in...

For Tu Bishvat, I recorded a special episode of The Neshamah Project Podcast that moves from soil to soul. A spoken-word meditation on the four layers of being: doing, feeling, thinking, and simply being. From dirty hands and daily obligations to emotion, insight, and the quiet fire underneath it all. No climbing, no escaping, no bypassing. Just roots, trunk, branches, and breath. One chain. One t...

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, we explore a piercing teaching from the Noam Elimelekh on the Exodus that reframes Pharaoh as the inner force of resistance to change. Drawing on Hasidic psychology, the text examines why stopping harmful behavior isn’t the same as true freedom, and why partial transformation often collapses under pressure. This episode speaks directly to anyone who has exp...

A dream-text from R. Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin wrestles with a haunting question: what does it mean to count as a person in sacred community? Moving through golems, speech, da’at, obligation, and minyan, this reflection probes the line between intelligence and responsibility, creation and covenant. Read through the lived time of Parashat Bo, it opens a startlingly modern conversation about personho...

This week we explore two Hasidic teachings on Parashat Va’era that ask how spiritual power becomes healing rather than harmful. Drawing on the Degel Machaneh Ephraim and the Maor VaShemesh, the episode examines the Torah’s pairing of firmness and compassion, judgment and mercy, showing how the same force can destroy or heal depending on how it is held. Together, these texts offer a bracing vision...

What if meaning isn’t something we think our way into, but something we do our way into? In this episode of The Neshamah Project, we explore a teaching from Ohr HaMeir on the opening of Shemot, where holy names are not fixed labels but living realities formed through action, movement, and intention. Prayer is not only spoken. It is embodied. Hands, breath, posture, and presence become ways meaning...