DAY 11 8.20 CONSIDER AN APOLOGY

40 ways in 40 days to find your focus: High Holidays Virtual Journey with Amichai Lau-Lavie:   I used to pride myself on having no enemies, nobody on my merde-list. Sadly, that is no longer the case. I have no big enemies (that I know of!), no big fights, but there is some tension and […]

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DAY 10 8.19 20 MINUTES A DAY

40 ways in 40 days to find your focus: High Holidays Virtual Journey with  Amichai Lau-Lavie:   Love is NOT a battlefield. Sorry Pat Benatar. This is the gist of the comments I got yesterday, in reaction to my usage of ‘battle’ as a metaphor for this internal process of self-perfection. Elisabeth suggested I think of […]

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Day 9. 8.18 BATTLE CRY, AND DRUMS

“The mind performs a penitential act of perceiving its deficiency, but there it stops. It declares war against the enemy, but it does not levy a troop not make an excursion into his country. It languishes in inaction, and, at the end of a year, or of seven years, it is found no better, and […]

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DAY 8. 8.17 ADVICE FROM LOYOLA

I meet Z., a third year rabbinical student, for breakfast yesterday, at an East Village café. He is busy reading the journals of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. Why? ‘The man was a genius when it comes to ways of self reflection,’ he says. “He instructed his followers to go into the […]

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DAY 7 8. 16 NEED A FIX?

What’s t/here that needs fixing? There’s this story about some great rabbi, I think it was Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who was just done with his morning prayers during these days of preparation for the High Holy Days, when he heard a cobbler, walking down the street with his portable shop:” I fix shoes! […]

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