Elul 21: The airline safety guide (Love)

You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am Adonai. (Lev. 19:18)

You shall love the stranger that dwells with you (who will be for you like the native-born among you), as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am Adonai, your God. (Lev. 19:34)

And you shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might ... (Deut. 6:5)

If you've paid attention to your flight attendant, you know that in the event of an emergency, you put your own oxygen mask on first. Only then do you help someone next to you, including a child. Why? Because if you don't have oxygen, you're useless to anyone else.

It's the same with love.

Start by loving and caring for yourself. It's not selfish; it's just a place to start.

Then move outward: your neighbor, your community, the strangers around you.

Then, finally, the realm of God: the spiritual love that holds all the others together.

But it all starts in your own home.

Comments

To Bigotry No Sancton? Hardly.

This is a sad day for the American dream. North Carolina voters approved an amendment banning same-sex marriages, partnerships, and civil unions on Tuesday. It joins an infamous assortment of 30 states - and the last in the South - to add this prohibition to their state constitutions. The vote wasn't even close: an overwhelming 80% of voters publicly pronounced their bigotry. Yes, BIGOTRY. There is simply no other word for it, despite the sanctimonious wrapping of opinions in their version of the Bible. The obscenity is that the bigots invoke "God" and Newspeak simultaneously to proclaim the sanctity of their position. According to the New York Times , '“We are not anti-gay — we are pro-marriage,” Tami Fitzgerald, chairwoman of the executive committee for the pro-amendment Vote for Marriage NC, said at a victory rally in Raleigh, where supporters ate pieces of a wedding cake topped by figures of a man and a woman. “And the point, the whole point is simpl

The Words of a Tragedy

Words matter. If they didn't, if there were no consequences to our utterances - good and bad - Jewish literature would not be chockablock with cautionary tales from Talmud to midrash to watch what we say. Those stories of the rabbi and the feather pillow and the broken mirror did not come out of a vacuum; they were written for a reason. Let's be honest: politicians love rhetoric and television/radio pundits need inflammatory language the way an active alcoholic needs booze. No political party has been innocent, yet the right wing has taken the cake lately. An American president accused of not being an American, "don't retreat, reload," the "2nd amendment remedies," Nazi, Hitler (briefly abused by the left against VP Cheney but taken to the nth degree by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and others), death panels, a Sarah Palin map of the US with gun cross hair sights over names and places of politicians who were on a political hit list and a politician hosting an

Omer Day 1: Just enough

(graphic: https://www.pinterest.com/serenityinhim/new-love3/ ) "With the mitzvah of counting the 49 days, known as Sefirat Ha'Omer, the Torah invites us on a journey into the human psyche, into the soul. There are seven basic emotions that make up the spectrum of human experience. At the root of all forms of enslavement, is a distortion of these emotions. Each of the seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot is dedicated to examining and refining one of them. The seven emotional attributes are: 1. Chesed - Loving-kindness 2. Gevurah - Justice and discipline 3. Tiferet - Harmony/compassion 4. Netzach - Endurance 5. Hod - Humility 6. Yesod - Bonding 7. Malchut - Sovereignty, leadership" Daily Omer Meditation Over the next 49 days, I'm going to post a meditation from some source or another (perhaps myself) with my reactions/responses. Please feel free to share (with attribution, please), comment, and otherwise join me on the 49-day spiritual journey to

Cantor Confidential

Search This Blog