Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a contributing columnist for the Forward and the writer of Both/And with Jay Michaelson. He is the author of 10 books, and won the 2023 New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing.
Jay MichaelsonContributing Columnist
By Jay Michaelson
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Opinion No Crystals Needed
What is meditation, and why is it continuing to appear in more and more synagogues long after the Kabbalah craze and other spiritual fads have faded? As someone who has practiced meditation for many years and has now begun to teach it in Jewish settings, I’ve found it useful to start with what meditation isn’t….
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Culture The Other Disappeared
The architecture of Jewish memory has undergone explosive growth in recent years: Holocaust memorials and museums, plaques, donor walls — and works of literature, like “The Ministry of Special Cases,” Nathan Englander’s new novel about Argentina’s “disappeared,” the thousands of students, dissidents and labor leaders tortured and killed during seven years of military dictatorship. Between…
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Culture Leonard Cohen: Poet of the Holy Sinners
Book of Longing By Leonard Cohen Ecco Press, 240 pages, $24.95. Leonard Cohen has long been a poet of the sacred and profane. Like his fellow Jewish pop troubadours, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, Cohen has, for 50 years now, written and sung about love, God, temptation and sex — though arguably to greater extremes…
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News The Attraction of Irrelevance
Is our religious consciousness enhanced when we attempt to make our sacred scriptures relevant to a contemporary mind, or when we accept and enter into their foreignness, and allow them to be “irrelevant,” ancient, and utterly new? This week’s “double portion” of Tazria/Metzora begs the question, with 59 verses about tzaraat (a skin disease similar…
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News Take Back The (Seder) Night
Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own By Marge Piercy Schocken, 304 pages, $22.95. It’s well known that Passover is the most widely observed of Jewish holidays, and there’s no shortage of explanations as to why. Its themes are universally relevant — freedom is much easier to relate to than,…
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News Boston Rabbinical Program Challenges Denominational Boundaries
For better or for worse, what one first notices about the fledgling Hebrew College rabbinical program is what it is not: It’s not affiliated with a movement or committed to a single view of how Jewish law is meant to be understood. And it’s not very big or old — the first of its 45…
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Culture Where the Borscht Sounds Like the Sea
What a great idea! Most people who know of Woody Guthrie associate him with Dust Bowl ballads of economic hardship, or with the lefty patriotism of “This Land Is Your Land” (like many such songs, its political bite has been dulled by repetition). But not many know that, from 1942 until his slow decline into…
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News Spiritual Pioneers See a Different Shade Of Judaism: Green
I grew up, although I didn’t know it at the time, as an Abraham Joshua Heschel Jew. My spirituality may have been expressed in synagogues, but it wasn’t nourished there; it grew, instead, along backwoods roads, in caves and on cliffs, and along the lakeshore where I grew up in Florida. Those were the places…
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