Do you recognize this man? I was just turning five years old when Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom debuted on television. Marlin Perkins was the host and he quickly became one of my grandfathers.  A question I had, but was embarrassed to ask my parents was: What is Mutual of Omaha? I understood why the show was called Wild Kingdom—those were words I could figure out. But what was a “Mutual of Omaha?”

As a child I was intensely interested in language—where did words come from, how did people come to call this with that name? At age 5, I distinctly remember holding a door open for a woman and as she passed by me and looking in my eyes, said, in a slow and deliberate manner, “Thank you.” It dawned on me. Thank you was not ‘thankyou’—a nonsense sounding phrase that people said—it meant she was thanking me.

This was an early Aha moment for me. I have them daily. How does one develop the capacity for Aha moments? Should one even attempt to analyze Aha moments? Is it like training to be spontaneous?

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Brewery Creek, a few miles west of Villa Grove, Colorado, is as beautiful as any place on Earth.  A few miles from the continental divide, within sight of eight fourteeners, rushing downstream through meadows of wildflowers and wild animals galore.  So dark at night you understand how the Torah can compare the number of stars to the number of grains of sand on the beach.  It’s hard when you’re there to not see God.  We need not even wax poetic; King David left us a full vocabulary in Psalms to translate what we are seeing and feeling (the heavens tell the glory of God, the earth proclaims his handiwork; the sun comes forth like a bridegroom from his chamber; the mountains skip like rams; I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence does my help come?)  Certainly we recognize the way nature recharges our batteries.

Many Jews may visit, but few practicing Jews live in places like that.  We have a few stories of our people living isolated lives in the country.  Moses lived in the desert to escape and get inspiration — but only for forty days.  Shimon bar Yochai – one of our greatest Rabbis and Kabbalists – lived an isolated life in a cave for twelve years — but nearly went crazy. Read the rest of this entry

I don’t usually watch scary movies. I was an English major, I know about the willful suspension of disbelief. Even knowing Audrey Hepburn still stands at the end of Wait Until Dark won’t get me to watch the film again. Even knowing it isn’t real and she isn’t in danger — and even for the second time — it’s hard to prepare for the terrifying change at the end of the film.

Suspecting that change is coming, how do you prepare for it? Tighten your muscles, squeeze your eyes shut, hold your breath? Welcome it with a pulse of excitement? Laugh with pleasure at the unexpected twist of a punchline?

We are in the month of Elul, the last month of the Jewish year. I know that the daily weekday morning prayers end every day with the call of the shofar, the ram’s horn, more commonly recognized from its cameo appearance in services on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year’s Day. And yet each morning the sound of the shofar is a jarring reminder of the passage of time, that another year is about to end, and a new one, with all its possibilities, about to begin.

It is an uncomfortable, and sometimes scary and even terrifying, sound. Read the rest of this entry