256 results for author: Owner of Ma'yan Tikvah - A Wellspring of Hope


Earth Etude for Elul 3 – One Natural World

by Rabbi Robin Damsky~ While I do a great deal of writing for In the Gardens – our nonprofit that brings organic edible gardens to greater Chicagoland, donates 80% of our produce to the hungry and teaches mindfulness practice – when thinking about Elul, I had to dig in, no pun intended, for what to say. Modafinil pill http://www.modafinilpill.net/buy-modafinil/ Because it’s not just about sharing the love of gardening or teaching about sustainable and healthy food. It’s about creation and our future. It’s about living on the earth as an interconnected whole. For me, this is the main message of the High Holy Days. In the last two years I ...

Earth Etude for Elul 2 – From the Perspective of the 9th of Av, 5777

by Hazzan Shoshana Brown~ Writing on the mourning day of Tisha b’Av, I am inclined to think of this “etude” as rather more of a kinah (lament) for the magnificent temple of our Earth, third planet in our solar system. Not to say that Earth is a churban, a ruin like our ancient Temple in Jerusalem, but to say that like that once beating spiritual heart and ritual nerve-center of the nation of Israel, our planet is both magnificent and utterly vulnerable to the predations of human greed, violence, and recklessness. And yet I have got the analogy turned inside-out – for it was the Temple that was built to mirror the grandeur of Creation, ...

Earth Etude for Elul 1 Alarm Clock for the Soul

by Rabbi Katy Z. Allen~ Today marks the beginning of the month of Elul, a period of self-reflection and the search for forgiveness. Each day during this month, you will find here an Earth Etude for Elul, a short reflection on teshuvah and Earth by a member or friend of Ma’yan Tikvah. We hope these Etudes will help you along the way on your journey.  It’s Elul. Once again. We’ll hear the shofar in the mornings, trying to wake us up. An alarm clock for our souls. For every morning, the Sun rises. Sometimes I’d like to hit snooze, but Ruach HaKodesh – the Holy Spirit – won’t let me, or, if S/He/It ...

Shanah Tovah 5777

by Rabbi Katy Z. Allen   As you enter this new year may distance bring clarity     and may the many shades of the forest be clear to you  as separate and individual colors each unique in its own right   may the sky be ever visible to you  between the leaves    may you understand that the leaves the sky and the tendrils are all interconnected    and when you cry out for help may your prayer be answered.     Shanah tovah, may you have a good year.     ...

Earth Etude for Elul 29: Hope Sprouting

by Rabbi Judith Kummer   ~ When the world is whirling and despair for the future begins to crowd in I turn to growing things, seeking hope.   The sweet potato plant cutting I made last week, Bereft of leaves but stuck into a vase to root anyway-- Just in case-- has now sprouted tiny purple and spring-green leaves, against all odds.   How did it know to grow, know it could grow?  What generative force propelled it forward into a future I sometimes cannot imagine?   In the garden Swaths of bright blooms Separate out into  a single glorious flower, Beauty against all ...

Earth Etude for Elul 28: Our Repentance, Prayer, and Deeds of Righteous Action Will Stop Climate Change

by Dr. Mirele B. Goldsmith ~ This year, as the sun sets on Yom Kippur, our prayers will reach a pinnacle of intensity as we recite the UnetanehTokef prayer:  “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.  How many shall leave this world, and how many shall be born; who shall live and who shall die, who in the fullness of years and who before; who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by sword and who by a wild beast; who by famine and who by thirst…   But repentance, prayer, and deeds of righteous action, can remove the severity of the decree.” The Unetaneh Tokef was written ages ago, perhaps as early as the ...

Earth Etude for Elul 27: Teshuvah in the Garden

by Maxine Lyons ~ My perennial love relationship with the earth is expressed most explicitly in tending my flower gardens. For me it is spiritual work, a way to respect the earth while feeling more mindful of how growth and change is an ongoing  process and mirrors the major themes of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The spiritual work of Teshuvah on the Yamim Norayim for me often centers on facing challenges, reviewing the aspects of my life that need changing and seeking new ways that I can re-commit myself to positive actions to bring about those changes. The natural world starts me on this path.  For example, the row of pine trees that form a ...

Earth Etude for Elul 26: You Were Wrong

by Ben Weilerstein ~ I You were wrong about environmentalism, man, no that’s not what I think no, I’m not really an environmentalist because if I say I am you’ll say in your head I’m saying things you don’t think need to be said, out loud, at all so, no, I’m not an environmentalist and I don’t feel a rush of flight, of my heels lifting up off the ground when I recycle a plastic bottle not like I do when I recite over and over again until it doesn’t leave my head for years,  “stop! the! pipeline!” or something like that, y’know my voice woven into hundreds and thousands of others because dammit this isn’t about ...

Earth Etude for Elul 25: Bees, Fireflies, and Stars

by Ruah Swennerfelt ~ The bee was busy, humming around me and traveling from flower to flower, while I was sitting and weeding. I stopped my work to take a closer look and was amazed to see that, as the bee dove deep and touched a certain spot in the flower, the flower reached its stamen up to the bee’s butt and deposited some pollen. This interaction occurred again and again. I saw so clearly how the bee and the flower miraculously co-evolved for them each to survive. I stopped my weeding task and sat still, contemplating this complex planet of ours and the wonders of how all of life is interconnected. I’m aware of how easy it is to be ...

Earth Etude for Elul 24: What Is Remembering?

by Steph Zabel ~ What is remembering? As I’ve ponder this question over the past several days, the following thoughts have come to me… Remembering is a return to wholeness and truth: a wholeness of self, of spirit, of place in the world. When we remember who we are, why we are here, and how we relate to the world around us, these remembrances — these truths — infuse our lives with richness and radiate outwards to all the lives around us. I think that remembering must also paradoxically involve forgetting… For instance: When we remember that all human beings, of all backgrounds and beliefs, deserve love, dignity and compassion, ...

Earth Etude for Elul 23: Tandem

by Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman               Biking home on Orchard Street With the wind behind me, and Jamaica Pond Wrinkled and clear beyond the houses, A peregrine falcon winged down A feathered grace, gliding on my right.   For a breath, two, we flew side by side.   My grief, of late, has become more precise. There are worlds Beyond worlds, the eons will stretch Over bedrock and magma, blue and green. There is life and Life and God unending No matter what we do, where we are. So I cry for us, for here, for what we know and ...

Earth Etude for Elul 22: Earth Rituals

by Molly Bajgot ~ This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.  ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love ...

Earth Etude for Elul 21: The Food We Eat

by Leora Mallach ~ The severe drought affecting the northeast this growing season is causing farmers to apply for federal disaster relief (they must prove at least 30% crop loss to qualify). According to USDA data, Massachusetts topsoils were 25% drier in July 2016 than the 10 year mean, and there are mandatory water restrictions in many towns. The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), established at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1995, tells us: Drought is an insidious hazard of nature. It is often referred to as a "creeping phenomenon" and its impacts vary from region to region. In the most general sense, drought ...

Earth Etude for Elul 20: An Old Problem

by Rabbi Jacob Siegel ~ I like to think of climate change as an old problem. True, human-made climate change and the potential it has to wreak disaster on our earth’s ecosystem are new and unprecedented. Every year extreme temperatures rise and extreme weather events become more common. These are challenges we have never faced. On the other hand, this is an old problem. We, as the Jewish people, know what it means to face a crisis of existence after a cataclysmic destructive act − the destruction of the Temple – which itself was destroyed because of a moral failure of society, sinat chinam, or baseless hatred. We also have a deep wisdom ...

Earth Etude for Elul 19: Canopy to Heaven

  by Judith Felsen, Ph.D.   ~ There is a canopy of trees that open to the worlds above so those who come to rest beneath their arbor can transcend both worlds. Their trunks are pillars reaching heights we dream to touch and do not dare to try, and yet we come to rest and seek reprieve from weariness of life within their shelter. Can you see this canopy within yourself, its crown and all its glory yielding to still greater heights? This resting place was made for you and offers you its peace and wisdom in release from worldly thoughts and cares. Will you not let yourself now journey to that ...

Earth Etude for Elul 18: Help the Honeybees

by Susie Davidson ~ I always enjoy perusing the Jewish holiday-themed emails from Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center. Earlier this year, Rabbi Waskow pointed out that Earth Day ended just as Passover began. "As the traditional Haggadah says," he quoted, "In every generation we face destruction -- and so in every generation all of us -- every human being --  must seek freedom, justice, and healing anew." Waskow suggested passing around an inflatable Globe at the end of the Seder, and singing a song that began: We have the whole world in our hands. We have the frogs and the forests in our hands, We have the wind ...

Earth Etude for Elul 17: Ode to Water

by Rabbi Laurie Gold ~ Walt Whitman’s beautiful poem, “The Voice of the Rain”, has always moved me. I hope you appreciate it, too. And who are thou? said I to the soft-falling shower, Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated: I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain, Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea, Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d, altogether changed and yet the same, I descend to have the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe, And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn; And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own ...

Earth Etude for Elul 16: Choosing Again to Be Good

by Joelle Novey ~I had the opportunity to sit with good folks of many faiths over the last year as we studied the words of Pope Francis’ Encyclical on ecology, Laudato Si.   Also this year, I had many moments of feeling overwhelmed by the bad things in our world that seem so much bigger than any one of us: the irrevocable and global suffering already being caused by our damaged climate; the harm being done to black bodies and spirits by the pernicious persistence of racism; the unrelenting meanness of this year’s presidential campaign rhetoric. What gives me hope as we enter a season of reflection? I’m turning to Pope ...

Earth Etude for Elul 15: Water and Clarity of Mind

by Carol Reiman ~ The month of Elul comes round again, time to prepare for what comes next.  Yom Kippur melodies rise, twist, turn in on themselves.  Time to look in on my self, to find the familiar in a new way, to find my marker in the year. Drawn to water for clarity of mind, sitting by brook or sea returns me to calming rhythm. Rushing thoughts ebb and flow through my meditation. As the currents go their ways, all settles into place. In the water space, my boundaries blur; I am a dot in something big, feeling a depth within. Mixing old and new, waters swirl. Gushing forth, hope lifts me up above the surface, setting me once ...

Earth Etude for Elul 14: Paradox

by Rabbi Katy Z. Allen ~ An individual's ability to accurately perceive changes in the rate of violence in the world over human history is near to impossible. Truly understanding global fluctuations in violence requires knowledge of events over such a vast breadth of space and time that it is essentially beyond a human's ability to comprehend. Which of course doesn't stop us from trying. Steven Pinker has tackled the concept, and he reports us that violence in the world has been going down steadily over the millennia, the centuries, and the decades. Pinker has his detractors, of course, and they claim that his reporting and understanding of ...