I want to name the dissonance of this moment: looking back on the week gone by, we have witnessed some of the highest heights of human achievement and yearning, side by side with the crassest depths of human behavior. The tone of our public life has felt especially coarse; language from the highest levels of leadership  has not only failed to uplift,  but has actively degraded.  Where a president of the United States can casually threaten to “wipe out” an entire civilization, as though the...

I’ve been sitting with a poem all week. I couldn’t put it down after a friend sent it to me, as we were trading possible readings and poems for our Passover Seders back and forth. It’s by Naomi Shihab Nye—a Palestinian-American poet, which feels worth naming on a night like this—and the excerpt she sent begins with this line: “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” I keep thinking: that’s just Passover. That’s exactly what...

My teacher died this week, and the older I get— and the deeper I get into the part of my adulthood where the titles and roles that I have both chosen and  earned feel more authentic to me, the more I realize what a profound and disorienting thing it is to lose a teacher.  Rabbi Weiss taught me many things— at the top of the notebook page on the first day of the first class I ever took with her (Bible 1: Literary Artistry of the Bible) , I wrote:  August 31, 2010:  “How do we know what we...