This week is all about Kosher Vegans, Tu B’Shvat and a big OneShul announcement!
PunkTorah Radio: Kosher Vegan Cookbooks and Birthday Trees
Also, subscribe on iTunes!
Independent Jewish Spirituality
By punktorah
This week is all about Kosher Vegans, Tu B’Shvat and a big OneShul announcement!
PunkTorah Radio: Kosher Vegan Cookbooks and Birthday Trees
Also, subscribe on iTunes!
By punktorah
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnswnXcRnec
Editor’s Note: It’s #FlashbackFriday with this old video from PunkTorah, originally posted March 2009!
The insights I got from watching the really bad Jodie Foster movie Contact, suffering from adult ADD and Zen Buddhism made me better understand Parshat Pekudei.
By punktorah
Editors note: with MLK day coming soon and the recent “freedom to twerk” controversy, we’re reposting this MLK-inspired dvar on Parshah Yitro from 2011.
OK we’ve been there…Moses carried Joseph’s bones… while the rest of the folks in Israel were collecting weapons, gold and silver. Moses didn’t care. He carried the bones in his arms. Then, God goes and sends them the long route.
Fast forward to Martin Luther King. He carried the bones of his ancestry, while others carried cars and homes, jewelry and focused on oppression of others. MLK could have ignored it all and done his thing in his hometown.
He could have not had as much stress in his life, but he chose a different route. A much harder road to travel. He put himself at risk and was armed more with his beliefs rather than weapons or grandiose items.
Now, fast forward to you right now. What do you carry with you in your heart and spirit? What helps you understand what to keep with you and what to throw out? The Ten Commandments.
Sometimes we are forced to take the long route, and it doesn’t mean it is wrong or bad for us, sometimes we need to circle the goal to see what the purpose really is. We are a lot like Moses and Martin Luther King; both men didn’t want to carry the “baggage” per se, but did so because it was a part of them, and a part of something they valued.
If you look at the ten commandments, where Moses is trying to get people to listen, he is setting up ethical laws… and so was Martin Luther King. If you really look at the bigger picture, the commandments, when followed by differing groups of people, serve as an alliance of sort. They are laws but laws that bring people together rather than tear them apart. In what ways do the ethics of the Ten Commandments bring you together with others or, tear you from others? Have you had peers or friendships that have been weighted by the knowledge that something in a commandment was being attacked, even if at the time you didn’t think of the commandments but instead, the behaviors? Being stolen from, lied to or someone being disrespectful to your parents or to you as a parent could be just some of the reasons you felt a friendship was being tested.
In whole, the ten commandments are often intertwined with our spirits even when we don’t see them; bringing back last week with the bones carried, and MLK with his ancestry and desires; we see that there are things we carry with us that are a part of us. The Ten Commandments are most certainly with us; just recognizing them instead of being oblivious to them, is the key.
This week’s d’var is written by Michele Paiva, wellness expert, publisher and syndicated radio host.
By punktorah
The universe is pretty boring. One look at the periodic table and you’ll know everything. These elements make up the whole show. You and I are a stew of those elements. So is a chair, an asteroid, the fossil of an extinct dinosaur and your breakfast cereal.
The reason we have something instead of nothing is a complex tale, but the bottom line is that the laws of nature began to form right after the Big Bang: a moment of intense pressure release where all the stuff in the periodic table, the stuff that makes you, me and everything in between, came bursting forth. What we see today is the result of that chaotic ballet.
Everything in the universe is the same, and yet, we have incredible diversity. Solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, life, inanimate objects, forces of nature, poets, artists, madmen and everything else comes from the same old boring junk that hangs on a chemistry teacher’s wall. What makes it all different is not what it’s made of, but what is done with it.
Why are things the way they are? It’s not the stuff, but it’s the forces behind the stuff that gives it substance. An apple appears harder than water because of the way gravity plays with the molecules which make up the juicy fruit. And a person is more complex than a butterfly because millions of years of evolution have taken that butterfly and that human in two different directions.
But all of this, in the end, is about relationships.
What we think of as an atom is held together by a relationship of forces to protons, electrons and neutrons. What holds all that together are subatomic particles called quarks. And what we think holds all that together is a bunch of strings, or perhaps multiverses. We don’t know the answer to that yet, but a lot of people smarter than me are working on it.
What we do know is that everything in the universe is held together by relationships of stuff to one another.
If everything is held together through relationships, and we as people are made of the same “everything”, then what about our relationships? What holds us together? We know what the laws of nature are. So what are the laws of human nature? And is it really all that different? Could the same stuff that binds the universe together bind us together as well? And what do we call that?
Let’s talk more about this Friday night, August 23rd at 5PM EDT at OneShul.org. For more info, check us out on Facebook.
Rabbi Patrick is the director of PunkTorah and OneShul. When he’s not waxing poetic here at PunkTorah, he can be found playing in rock bands, officiating weddings and searching for the best cappuccino on the planet.
By Ketzirah
My teacher, Jill Hammer, posits that Passover is an initiation ritual. A ritual where we, as individuals are initiated into a tribe year after year, century after century, millennia after millenia. Really Passover is part of an extremely long initiation ritual that begins the night before Passover and ends at Shavuot — where we are transformed by accepting the Mitzvot and the relationship with the Holy One.
This long transformative period begins at the first of Nisan, which is know as the New Year of Kings. This is one of the four new years known on the Jewish calendar. It is the marker in time where we turn our thoughts to recommitting ourselves to the Holy One individually, but more importantly as a nation of people. To be a “king” you cannot just have an individual bound to you, but a full nation of people.
Most Passover seders are fun, family events that [Read more…]