Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland
Blessings… What are they? Every blessing, at its core, is a form of prayer, since it typically asks God to help accomplish what we ourselves cannot. Yet the blessing is more than prayer because it assigns a decisive role to the one who pronounces it. Let us consider, for example, the blessings of children made by their parents: placing hands on them in the solemn act in which the parents see themselves as God’s co-workers and as essential links between the[…]
How many times have you said something in anger and then regretted saying it? How many times have you acted out of fear or prejudice and made a mistake because of that? I did it enough times to realize that neither anger nor fear helps to respond the right way to the events surrounding us, enough times to try to conquer this flawed psychological constitution. I realized the same thing by watching people who were losing it and then seeing the consequences of[…]
The world stands upon three things: the Torah, the Temple service and acts of lovingkindness. (Pirkei Avot 1:2). These are the building blocks of the world, without which everything would collapse. What is built above these three things? The world! With everything it contains, including a lot of junk – things that are not good, precious and worthy. If we then picture the whole world as a big building founded[…]
11 years ago, in the second year of my doctoral studies in philosophy, during the early stage of writing my dissertation (which concerned Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust) I decided to spend several months studying the history of Western antisemitism as well as another several months studying the reality of the concentration and extermination camps. Almost every[…]
