Building the Temple
Babel On . . .
The world's first "skyscraper" was built after the great Flood. All of humanity, unified by a single language, decided to build "a tower that reaches the sky" (Genesis 11:4), known today as the Tower of Babel.
The Gift of Responsibility
One of the "Gifts" that Thomas Cahill discusses in his best seller The Gifts of the Jews is the notion of journey.
B'reishit: Gateway to Astonishment
When God began to create the heaven and the earth... God said, "Let there be light"... "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water"... "Let the earth sprout vegetation"... "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night"...
Choosing to Be Chosen
Once, I was invited to address a local middle school class as they began a unit on the history of world religions. The teacher asked me to summarize Judaism in about 10 minutes. At least I had more time than Hillel when he explained the Torah "on one foot."1 But where was I to begin?
Is It True? Not Yet
Our biblical story of creation is stirring, and poetic, but is it true? If we want to know about the creation of the universe, we are not likely to open the Hebrew Bible; instead , we would probably look to science.
Learning How to Say “Sorry”
"It's not my fault!"
We've all said it. It's rarely easy to accept responsibility for the mistakes we make or damage we cause. Sometimes we know instantly we've done something wrong; sometimes it takes time for us to realize the extent of our mistake. But even after that realization, it's always painful to say, "I'm sorry."
Finding the Strength to Look Beyond the Horizon
Here's one of the few facts I remember from my high school physics class: Because the surface of the earth is curved, the farthest distance a person can see is about four or five miles. Everything beyond that, even with the best telescope, is obscured from view.
Four to five miles! For some people (not me) that's a short, early morning run. Our vision is so limited! Our perspective is so circumscribed. So much lies beyond our horizons at any given moment.
The same is true in our daily lives. So often we become accustomed repeated patterns and habits of mind that help us tread water, but move us no further. We tacitly accept the idea of inexorable fate — it's our lot to struggle, we can't change it. The weight of the present prevents us from imagining alternative futures. We lose sight of alternatives — of a different world beyond our present circumstances — a world just around the corner, beyond the horizon.
Moses appears to fall victim to the same trap in this week's Torah reading, Parashat B'haalot'cha.
What Happens When We Just See What We Want to See?
On July 2, 2014, the prestigious science journal Nature retracted two heralded papers in the field of stem cell research, papers it had published only a few months earlier. The articles described a revolutionary process called STAP, where biologists subjected mature adult cells to physical stresses and transformed them into stem cells. Yet, in the editorial announcing the papers' retraction, Nature's editors reported that the "data that were an essential part of the authors' claims had been misrepresented" and that the authors' work was marred by "sloppiness" and "selection bias" ("Editorial: STAP retracted," Nature, vol. 511, no. 7507, July 2, 2014). All told, as the journalist Dana Goodyear has written, "a far-reaching and sensational conjecture" was "defeated by flaws that were at best irreparable and at worst unconscionable" ("The Stress Test," The New Yorker, February 29, 2016, pp. 46-57).