Polar Opposites
Perhaps human beings will always need contrasts to appreciate the fullness of life: Light and dark, holy and defiled, life and death. Perhaps that is why we characterize knowing something thoroughly as knowing it “inside out.” The brilliant film Inside Out, which after many watchings I know “inside out”, portrays the inner workings of our […]
Statute of Limitations
“I felt a connection to these people. In an odd way blood calls—their suffering from so long ago called out to me and I felt a needed to do something for them—I just didn’t know what to do.” As Jay Sanchez reports, a lawyer admitted to the bar of New York State, his interest in […]
Saving Face
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won the best short documentary–her second in four years–this past Sunday at the Oscars. She works within a small budget and a time frame. Her films, by Academy rules, must fit completely within the allotted 40 minutes. Her topics are not easy ones to consider, let alone watch: brutal attacks on women by […]
Tumbling Walls
Man is a great wall builder The Berlin Wall The Wailing Wall of Jerusalem But the wall most impregnable Has a moat flowing with fright around his heart A wall without windows for the spirit to breeze through without a door for love to walk in. These few lines of poetry by the South African […]
The Depth of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is really nothing more than an act of self-healing and self-empowerment. I call it a miracle medicine. It is free, it works and has no side effects. The day I forgave the Nazis, privately I forgave my parents whom I hated all my life for not having saved me from Auschwitz. Children expect […]
Dayenu — The Present is Enough
I recently received a message from my computer, which can be very courteous if it is in a good mood, alerting me that memory was almost full. Any one of your external brains may signal you about reaching critical capacity—too many photos, texts, emails etc. Can you imagine if you periodically received a message from […]
A Fork in the Road
I am, and I suspect many of you are as well, at a crossroads. This intersection though is ever present—where past meets future at the juncture of now. It happens every minute and in the broader sweep of decades and generations. Technology is a wondrous marker of these transitions that has us contemplate: “Do I […]
This Moment
Perhaps you noticed. My weekly blog is now once every other week. A student this week provided her class with a wonderful image of what it means to be in the flow of life: Imagine a raft (the simpler the better) on a river. If the raft is imbalanced it will take on water, perhaps […]
The Man Who Mistook His Life for That
Many students sent me this past week a link to Oliver Sack’s My Own Life, an Op Ed piece in the New York Times. Dr. Sacks, the eminent neurologist turned author of books on people whose brains and or senses lack what some might call “normalcy” is facing his own death from liver cancer. […]
Ode to Brian Williams
When I was no more than 5 years old, I was pushing my younger brother in a carriage buggy, one of those more old fashioned types that the English call a pram. My memory of what happened is shrouded in the trauma that occurred—my brother’s tongue got caught (somehow) and deeply cut on the metal […]