Reflections in the Well

There is a diagram that appears on the walls of synagogues, in the margins of medieval manuscripts, in the notebooks of mystics, and increasingly on the screens of people who encountered it through a passing reference and found themselves unable to stop thinking about it. It is called the Tree of Life. It consists of […]

There is a particular kind of disruption that arrives without announcement. Not the slow erosion of things wearing out, not the anticipated loss that grief has already begun to accommodate—but the sudden shift in which the world you were navigating simply reorganizes itself around an absence you did not choose. One moment the path is

Every tradition has a name for the force that opposes the divine. It has many names, actually—and the sheer proliferation of them is itself the first clue that something more complex than a simple monster is being described. The adversary appears as a courtroom officer, a cosmic rebel, a serpent, a tempter, a dragon. He

Most people who have heard of the Omer think of it as a countdown. Forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot, ticked off one by one until the calendar moves on. That framing is not wrong, exactly—but it misses almost everything that matters. A countdown measures distance to an event. What the Omer measures is something

Every so often, someone asks me a question that gives me genuine pause. My niece recently asked my thoughts on the concept of the firmament—not the flat-earth notion that has found a second life on social media, but something more considered. She sent along an image: one of those collectible display bubbles, the kind used

A friend was recently pondering a question she couldn’t answer. What is the question for which my life is the answer? She turned it over for days. Most people would. It has the shape of a riddle but the weight of something more serious—the kind of question that, once heard, refuses to leave. She brought

Everyone has been taught how to pray. Very few have been told what prayer is actually for. The gap between those two things is where most people live—reciting words they were given as children, wondering why the words feel hollow, suspecting in private that no one is listening. Some abandon the practice entirely. Others double down on the

There is a gap that runs through most spiritual lives—between the practices we maintain and the transformation serious practitioners seek. The forms are kept. The calendar is followed. The observances are honored. And yet something essential remains unchanged, untouched by all the outward faithfulness. It is only in bridging this gap that the true transformation

The world has been stripped, silent, cold for months. The light is thin; the fields are empty—a bone-deep exhaustion settled over everything. This is the long dark—winter not just as season of nature, but cosmologically. And yet, nature has begun to stir. Much of the snow has started to retreat. Queen Persephone prepares to return

Kalani me-roshi, kalani mi-zero’i. My head is heavy. My arms are heavy. This is G-d speaking. Not metaphor. Not poetic language about divine transcendence observing human suffering from a distance. The Talmud records this in Tractate Sanhedrin: when a person suffers, the Shekhinah says, “My head is heavy, my arms are heavy.” The Divine Presence