Bad Rabbi Media

"The whole book is sort of a meditation, of a prayer designed to protect the person who is reading it." Jeff Wengrofsky, the most authentic punk-rock person I personally know, wrote a memoir, and you should buy it and read it. In some ways an unintentional pean to the Lower East Side, Jeff gets into what it was like to grow up feeling like an outsider ("The sensation of feeling like an outsider is not a pleasant one, so I was looking to find some new form of community, and let go of whatever past I had") and why discovering punk was a world-opening revelation ("Punk rock was very theatrical, there was the opportunity to recreate oneself; it valorized the outsider…and all those things spoke to me"). He talks about the process of becoming a filmmaker, including a possible encounter with the ghost of a dead punk rocker in the Nola hotel room he died in, and the horror shorts film festival he's curated for the past 11 years in Brooklyn -- interspersed with reminiscinces of his time apprenticing to a Hasidic Kabbalist in the Lower East Side who'd been a beat poet in the '50s. He also gets into his own religious and spiritual journey with Judaism, including the humbling intellectual intricacy of Talmud study. "It absolutely blows me away to see that the parts can fit better in a counterintuitive way…and it makes me also a little humble about my own intuitions…"   "I like films that are surprising…I like to delight the audience by surprising them," he told me, and this in some ways is the headline for his artistic process more broadly -- the canvas of which is not just film, not just writing, not just music, but life itself.                     

It was both challenging and illuminating to speak with my old friend Shawn Ruby, an Israeli citizen who is deeply rooted in his Zionist identity (having originated in Canada and raised his family and made his life in Israel, one child a high-ranking IDF officer), firmly anchored in an unwavering pursuit of moral clarity, and overall one of the most thoughtful people I know. We spoke an hour past the time the last group of hostages was supposed to be let out, in the midst of what he described as a great national anxiety, "everyone is sitting by their radios and tvs." "There is enormous mourning. I find myself crying all the time. And it’s just been like that continuously." "We were on the way to shul, when a neighbor came and told us something was going on down south, and it’s really bad...A good friend of ours lost his life that first day of fighting…this is a kid that we’ve known forever, we’re good friends with his partners. So that’s when it became very real." "I was raised on Holocaust stories and pogrom stories, and it’s not like that anymore, we’re fighting back—and it’s good that we’re fighting back…But when you have power, you have responsibility—and we have responsibility also for the lives we’re taking now..." "I am livid at my government for allowing Hamas to sit on our border for the past 15 years…I think the reason was to keep the Palestinians divided. That was immoral and wrong." "What we’re doing is occupying the Palestinians for the past 50 years, and that is a moral stain on our country…and we were powerful enough to figure out how to solve it in some way. We were the more powerful party...We have to make people aware that as the more powerful party there are things we can do to move this thing along." "How do we move people to a different place? It’s not that they don't think the occuparion is immoral—they do think the occupation is immoral. They just think the alternative is national suicide." "I want to live with these people. I want Gaza to be successful. But not if they’re going to keep trying to kill me." "I don’t think right now that the Israeli response is so disproportionate to what happened to us, and to what is needed to make sure it doesn’t happen again…cause it’s not revenge. But we’re interested to make sure it doesn’t happen again."        

"One of my Palestinian friends said, Everybody’s pro-Hamas right now. Cause they did something! On an internal level, hamas’ bid to take over leadership of the Palestinian struggle is very strong. On the other hand, I have another Palestinian friend saying, what do you mean — Hamas is a disaster for our people. It’s always been a disaster for our people. We’re all sitting around not working for a month now…" Whenever anything happens in Israel, the person I want to hear from the most is Rabbi Shaul Judelman, Israeli resident of the West Bank town Tekoa, coexistence activist and co-founder/co-director of the non-profit Roots-Shorashim-Judur. That's why he is BAD RABBI's first 3rd-time guest, and why I'm so excited to stop typing right now and get this episode up so you can listen to it already. I basically just dumped out all of my current observations, anxieties, analyses, and critiques on the (metaphorical) table in front of Shaul and asked him to poke, prod, add, subtract, organize, and shed his own considerable light on it. We didn't agree about everything, but imo it would be silly not to take everything he sees and says very seriously. Here are some salient excerpts from our conversation: "Society is overflowing with purpose. Because it’s The Home. The Home has been shattered... So there’s this incredible sense of unity…The army failed us. The government is inept in many ways. In general we’ve been on a long slide of losing faith in our national institutions that are supposed to take care of us. But the Israeli society has just stepped up in the most emotive, amazing way, to take care of each other... "[Prior to 10/7,] the reservists were threatening not to serve. The pilots were threatening not to fly. The leaders on both sides were just fanning all they vitriol. So it looked pretty bad. So when the attack came, I imagine Iran and hezbollah thought we were a society that was falling apart. But we were already enlisted. You had 300,000 people who were already enlisted to show up every Saturday night to fight for the Israeli they believed in. For the values they believe in. For the home they want to live in...By the next day [i.e. 10/8], the big protest movement had organized a control room and were evacuating people under fire from all the border towns, setting up places for people to go, already doing the food package in…it was a matter of sending out a WhatsApp on the channel. Because the network was there…the army at the end of the day turned to them for inspiration."   Why is Bibi still in office? "The entire north of the country is worries about hiznollah commandos storming in through a tunnel…That day of reckoning is going to come. But the sense of right now, the most important thing to do is that our people in the south can’t go home until Hamas is out of power, until their ability to fight is done. Until that’s done, there’s a big swath of our country that is empty. And we owe it to those people who we’ve already failed to give them the security that they can live their lives within the established borders of the state of Israel."   "Imagine you’re a Palestinian committed to peace, and your Israeli partner says, 'I think we have to hit Gaza, we have to hit Hamas, I don’t see another way out.' The cost of that, whet it means on the Palestinian civilian life is tremendous and how can you possibly say that. But I think that most Israelis have come to that feeling." "On the Israeli side, people were triggered by Palestinians saying, I don’t think any children were killed, Hamas only attacks military targets, your media is lying to you. And you have someone in our WhatsApp group who just buried her niece."   "For a lot of people, the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, who is the victim? & both sides have a pretty good case. But if you’re a Palestinian and you’ve been watching the world ignore you more and more, and looking at Occupation get worse, and Israel doing this, and the world's not paying attention, and all of a sudden the world is coming out and saying that the Israelis are the victim?…[And at the same time,] if you’re going to look at what happened on Oct 7, and you’re NOT able say that Israelis are the victim??… "So right there is a very challenging moment. "People hold onto their victimhood, because they’re some kind of weird thought in the world that whoever is the victim is right. And it’s really a very detrimental perspective on the world. Because it just leads people to claim victimhood."

Poetry, right? I don't know about you but I'm feeling like I could use some poetry right about now. To that end! Right before the High Holidays started I had a conversation with one of my favorite Jewish writers, poet and translator Atar Hadari. The episode was slated for release on Monday 10/9, and of course intervening world events made it nearly impossible to think about poetry, much less listen to it read aloud, much less claim a moment of open-ended reflection to contemplate, assimilate, absorb. But at this point, I feel like we could all use a bit of poetry in our lives. And Atar's new book Gethsemane transports readers to a setting that is chronologically remote but cluturally ever-present: Israel during the time of Jesus, the people and events narrated in the New Testament. Atar does us the honor of reading three poems I requested from Gethsemane . From wildly illuminating and entertaining angles, the poems explore some of the fundamental differences between Judaism and Christianity as communal spiritual value systems -- and does so from a place of profound empathy, sensitivity, and understanding. Jewish characters, some of whose names still reverberate into our modern "Judeo-Christian" culture, some 'background characters' whose names were never known, observe the events of Jesus's life with emotions we are not used to associating them, given the New Testament's flat characterization of them as either stone-hearted legalists or zealous converts. In the landscape of Gethsemane, ancient Israelites view Jesus with a wide range of attitudes: curiosity, bemusement, annoyance, pity, indignation, indifference, respect. (“There are many kings of Israel that come off a lot worse than Jesus does.") They wonder things like, How did Jesus make a living? How is this a paying gig? Through these homey, local voices, a value system emerges organically that pokes and prods at some of the fundamental premises of the New Testament's theological challenge to Judaism. Miracles, in this view, are both freely acknowledged and deprioritized. And taking responsibility for a commmnity's 'mundane' spiritual needs -- via the Temple rituals so mocked in New Testament, via adherence to the legal minutae of Jewish Law -- is the highest stature a person can attain. "They *needed* the money lenders…it’s just a whole system of commerce they doesn’t work without money lenders…it’s like, Jesus went and threw all the clerks out of city hall. 'Well that’s great Jesus, but how am I going to pay my taxes!'"      

"So now I'm in a weird place" is a sentiment many can relate to these days. Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, following the latter's barbaric 10/7 torture-rape-massacre of 1400 Israelis, and kidnapping of 240 more, has provoked some of the most acute fissures of my generation, with implications that can't be fully predicted except to say we will be living with them for generations more. Joshua Leifer experienced what he describes as an acute awakening about the nature of left-politics in the wake of the massacre. "I reacted very personally to people I knew personally from the left-journalism milieu, reacting excitedly, triumphantly -- or just justifying the Hamas attacks." "I was surprised by the controversy of the humane left piece...and even more surprised and kind of appalled by the published response to it." "These were things that I thought were basically uncontroversial ideas." "I don't think my fundamental analysis of what's happening has changed. but my sense of where i fit into the american political scene...has changed a little bit." "That argument incensed me...I just couldn't accept that that was something that was being said. and it turned out to be the case that his sentiment was pretty widely shared among progressive Jews."   Toward a Humane Left - Dissent Magazine Inhumane Times | Joshua Leifer | The New York Review of Books (nybooks.com)

“We are all characters in our stories, and we have to look internally, and hopefully at the end of 90 minutes we’ll become a better person. But sometimes the characters don’t change, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, you were offered the opportunity to grow and learn from your experiences, and instead you’re still being the same turd you started out as.’ ” Bonus episode! I've been wanting to interview the awesome Daniel Zana for a while because I'm such a huge fan of the Jews on Film podcast he cohosts with Harry Ottensoser. There are so many different kinds of Jews, and so many ways of connecting with Jewish identity and tradition, and art is such a prominent and useful channel for connection and openings to new (or long-hidden) feelings and ideas. So I asked Daniel to give some thought to a few movies people might enjoy and engage with during this Highest of Holiday months. He digs up some great recs from the Jews on Film archives (feel free to pause and check out relevant eps!) and hits all the right notes. You'll laugh, cry, think, and feel! No spoilers! Shana tova umetuka goodness & sweetness & growth & this year!

Since arriving at Central Synagogue almost two decades ago, Rabbi Angela Buchdal has transformed it into a sui generis experience of communal prayer: backed by a professional band and musical director, her own professionally trained singing voice, and a crew of clerical colleagues with similarly formidable vocal skills, not only is Central’s building packed, their livestream boasts an endless scroll of remote participants from around the country and across the world.   This has all happened at a time when in general, Jews are exiting Jewish institutions and rejecting traditional forms of worship. Plummeting synagogue membership is an ongoing topic of concerned conversation in the fora of organized Jewish leadership, and as Rabbi Buchdal points out, the same trends hold true across Christian denominations.   So I wanted to know how she did it!   The short answer is, she a) went against the grain by leaning into – and deeply investing in – the worship service itself; b) demanded the service adhere to the highest standards of aesthetic excellence and spiritual authenticity, thereby c) consistently creating a tangibly elevated spiritual experience for/with participants. “People have certain standards for what they expect. As a synagogue that's in New York, our people are going to Lincoln Center, and they're going to Broadway shows, and they're seeing the highest level of artistry and craft and beauty. I'm competing for my people's time against them. And when they come, I want the level of their worship experience to invoke the same kind of beauty and aesthetic excellence that they are used to hearing. It shouldn't be that their secular life is at this level, and their religious life is down here. Shouldn't we be investing as much or more in our worship as anything else. God is worth it, and our tradition is worth it, and I think we can create that model. This is why our belief in the worthiness of it is where the real work is -- it's about self-dignity.  “So collected the best musicians--and not just the best musicians, it's a team of regulars who knows the music inside and out. They never play the same thing exactly the same each week, they are doing a midrash [personal interpretation] on the prayer every time. And they are responding to the energy in the room in the same way that I am. So I would say that my job as a cantor is to be an energy-worker: it's like, how do you feel the energy of this community, and how do you channel it in some way? You have to be in the moment and present.” Ultimately, for Rabbi Buchdal, the prayer is meant to serve as a vehicle for experiences of awe that can in turn lead to transcendence: which in turn, hold the potential to transform our lives for the better. Certain ingredients must be consistently present in order to catalyze this alchemy of inner and outer perception, the inner and outer self.  “I think the most important thing is that we are all authentically praying. And that includes my musicians by the way. I feel so sad when I hear rabbis say, 'My synagogue would not be the place I pray if I had the option. It's not a worshipful experience for me.' I'm thinking to myself, Well then what hope do we ever have?? For me, I look forward to Shabbat every week; it changes my entire mood.  “That's what it's supposed to do: the ritual itself is transcendent, and pulls you out of your everyday. And that is what we're trying to create: it's really an experience of awe.”                                    

Friends, I can't tell you enough how excited I am to share my most recent Bad Rabbi Media interview with Nick Bryant -- intrepid investigative journalist, author (The Franklin Scandal), interviewer (The Nick Bryant Podcast), and most recently, Director of epsteinjustice.com -- an organization dedicated to pursuing accountability for the scores of victims abused and traumatized by Jeffrey Epstein's government-backed child-trafficking ring. Nick has been investigating and uncovering similar operations, in which children are pandered to social and political elites, who are then permanently compromised by blackmail photographs, for over two decades.  In addition to meticulously documenting these unconscionable case studies, Bryant has moved into activsim as the Director of epsteinjustice.com. "We're mobilizing people...we're not going to have another opportunity like this in our lifetime." With a now 37,000 strong petition, the backing of six Epstein victims and 42 anti-trafficking/anti-exploitation organizations, epsteinjustice.com seeks to establish a Truth & Reconciliation commission that calls to account all of the abusers to whom he pandered children through his extensive network of elite pedophiles and their protectors. "We need to make the perps accountable, and we have to make the government accountable...Why is the government aiding and abetting child-trafficking?" Bryant understands that the task ahead, while clear, is far from simple. "There are 100 senators, a total of 535 federal legislators--and not one of them has called for an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. It's a bipartisan thing: the Epstein cover-up has gone ghrough Bush 2, Obama, Trump, and now Biden...both sides of the aisle are guilty." For Bryant, there is only one logical conclusion: "It's really up to us to clean this up now...I believe something can be done, and I belive this is the time. Every American knows theres something seriously wrong with Epstein. And our government and media are depending on us to be apathetic."    

Early in my conversation with return guest Melanie Landau, I told her that she is one of my favorite wanderers, and she responded that I'm one of her favorite witnesses. Of course, it's an honor to witness such high-level wandering with the intensity of introspection and the commitment to translating insight into practice that Melanie brings to her wandering path. We talked a lot about the deep grief she has worked through since the breakup of her marriage, the host of realizations that emerged from that process, and the work she has done to leverage those realizations into growth. "Like, how I'm co-creating reality in my habitual responses to things...Like a reflexive victims mentality about things it shouldn't apply to, like my kids leaving their toys out even after I've told them not to. Or I'll take it to the other extreme: deny my reactions, deny my desires." For Melanie, these realizations have had applications both personal -- she's currently producing a film about the intimacy of couples (whom she interviewed in their homes) where one is a couple's therapist, and political ("Each side is similarly acting on triggers and exacerbating the situation by their responses.")  "The path I'm learning is to be aware of the reactivity and slow it down, but not by denying the realness of how I'm experiencing it...by being able to hold myself and soothe myself enough that I don't have to be reacitve to it."  

I was pretty rapt listening to Jordan Mann articulate the Jewish Liberation Fund’s (JLF) vision for a progressive Jewish future – and not only because “power,” “systemic strategies,” and “structural change” are my love language. Jordan’s personal connection to the work, both the crackling passion he brings to it and the personal journey that brought him there – from his childhood as the son of a Jewish father and black mother in “very white and conservative” central Illinois (“The reform synagogue would have evangelical Christians come in to teach us about Muslims”), to working with college students in a stint with Hillel (“Doing Purim&Dragons with Jewish college students at Hillel helped my clarify my own Jewishness more than any synagogue”), to running 90-100 miles/week (!) as a professional track athlete – made the time fly and left me with a whole new basket of questions for the next time we speak.  SERIES!  JLF is currently holding a political education series that still has one remaining installment. What We Need to Win centers three progressive Jewish funders, asking them: Why is values-aligned funding important for you and your movement? The fourth and final session, about the critical yet underdiscussed role of collective giving and funding in movement-building, is upcoming—Thursday Sept 7. Hope to see you there! ***** “I wish that wearing this kippah around didn’t mean I was right wing on Israel. I wish that wearing this kippah around signaled that I was someone who would be someone who would be showing up at a Black Lives Matter rally. Or someone cares about making sure that we have a higher minimum wage.” ***** “For us the Jewish future we believe in is one where all ppl are free from different forms of oppression. Whether it’s identity based, whether it’s economic oppression. Making sure that we have a world where the Jewish philanthropy ppl do is about not just making sure Jewish ppl are safe, but making sure the Jewish people are safe in solidarity with other safe ppl, in community with them, fighting for them — willing so stand beside just about everyone in the fight for a just world.” ***** “What kind of Judaism is one that’s just all about fear of annihilation? Celebrating through marching in the street for an increase in the minimum wage, or fair pay for care workers, or environmental Justice, reproductive rights: that’s a really compelling vision of Judaism for me. If Judaism means that, I think there would be a lot more people who would be a lot more excited about it than I’d we were just talking about annihilation.”

“I think this is such a great line for your podcast. It’s from my third album, Exile. ‘I am in exile in my own home. My real home is moving, it’s a wandering home. I give birth to contradictions, I give up in indecision, and worry.' ” Basya Schecter is one of my favorite wanderers. From a prolific early singer-songwriter career as the leader of Pharaoh’s Daughter, to her nine-year stint as the full-time musical director and then spiritual leader of communities in Manhattan and Brooklyn, to her recent sabbatical and transition to a more fluid mix of communal leadership and “musical adventures,” she has embodied an insistence to listening to one’s inner voice that I deeply admire. Speaking about the surprising comfort and inspiration she was able to find within the Jewish Renewal community (after a Hassidic upbringing in Borough Park that traumatized her relationship with Jewish community) — and about how the contingencies and demands of single-motherhood pushed her to reconfigure her life in a way that opened unexpected portals to self-connection — she is also frank about he perils of burnout and the non-negotiability of maintaining an active creative life. “Creativity is finding the thing inside you that you didn’t know was inside. To find that thing that’s higher and beyond what I can actually do, and yet something that comes through anyway. And it’s a surprise. Those are gifts. Those are such gifts. Then those gifts become your friends.”

Dudes: please check out Stephen Daniel Arnoff’s podcast and book, Bob Dylan: On Man and God and Law. One of my favorite pop-culture rabbit-holes, the podcast delivers on so many levels: informative, illuminating, a ton of fun and at times breathtakingly insightful. I was super excited to talk to him about how he came to approach song lyrics as sacred text, how music “saves your life and keeps you company,” and his esteemed lineage of invaluably “weird” teachers (“Weird is good. I like weird.”) He describes his journey from passionate singer-songwriter to pursuing a doctorate in ancient midrash, the Talmud professor who promised to help him “preserve a creative life” in the process, and the very live question that drives his musical-intellectual-spiritual work: “I want to know if there is any meaningful use for religion? In the way that rock and roll is of use. In the way that love is of use. In the way that feeding people is of use.” He also gives his take on what, ultimately, Dylan’s life’s work is all about. Spoiler Alert: it’s EMPATHY. “The question How does it feel? is the question of the age. We live in an age where we’re either going to fail as a human race for lack of empathy, or we’re going to survive. Only those who are empathic will survive…You can’t abuse, you can’t enslave, you can’t belittle another person if you have empathy.”

One of the things I love most about Jon Madoff is that on any given day in the midst of of numbly scrolling on my phone to avoid contemplating any number of personal and collective inevitabilities, I can run into a video of him JAMMING TF OUT on his guitar -- alone in his basement with headphones, in a venue backing up a friends band, on an internet show or a clip from a festival leading his own band -- and for a minute or two be reminded of the pure joy of the creative process. As a musican, composer, and band leader, Madoff has made himself into a vehicle for some of the most innovative, virtuosic, and grooveworthy Jewish music being produced today. As a human, Jon opens up about how his creative life has been both crippled and catapulted by a navigation with intense anxiety, how music is a good addiction in the Marley-an sense of, "When it hits, you feel no pain," and why Fugazi hits him directly in the kishkes. On navigating anxiety as a musician: "That voice attacks what means the most to you: the overactive critical voice that does not stop telling you you did everything wrong. This barrage of self-criticism and self-doubt, just a million times a minute. The Buddhists call it monkey mind. I could very easily have an anxiety attack just listening to music. I was judging myself against who I was listening to. And I thought somehow that I should be able to analyze this piece of music and know exactly what is going on. And if I can’t I’m just a failure!"

Jeremiah Lockwood is not only the hardest working man in Jewish music, he is one of its truly great living visionaries and practitioners. In this great conversation he describes his journey growing up in a "cantorial family" with a grandfather who was a famous, record-selling star at the end of the "Golden Age" of Jewish cantorial music; to being a teenager obsessed with Southern Blues apprenticed to the great bluesman Carolina Slim; to starting his own band, The Sway Machinery, "singing hazzanus in a hard aggressive rock band that's sort of a hedonistic party band, and also a ritual experience, and also drawing very explicitly and heavily on West African music..." (because of course it does!) He talks about how his initial inspiration for the band came from a nomadic Saharan tribe whose members were transcribing their traditional music into a rock band format. Speaking of indigenous musical traditions (including Ashkenazi hazzanus) as forms of "esoteric knowledge," one of his overarching projects is to uncloister it so that "it should be readily available for people to get joy from it, in terms that are legible." Listen to the interview, then go listen to his music!

Check out this incredibly fun and lively live podcast recording I did with historian of Yiddish popular culture Eddy Portnoy. Appropriately enough, this episode, which deals with the lost forms of Jewish identity Eddy Excavated through his research in to the Yiddish Press, was itself temporarily lost. We recorded it in May 2020; in the interim, Eddy's insights about the lost and latent posibilities of Jewish culture and identity -- and the surprisingly moving and off-beat, often darkly hilarious tales they emerge from -- have only become more urgently relevant. Enjoy! "Family lore conveniently forgets that Zeide the antiques dealer was actually Zeide the beggar; or that Bubbe the saintly seamstress was also Bubbe the hooker, who turned tricks during the slack season to make ends meet. These elisions are the lies we tell ourselves to elevate our pedigree and to make ourselves look palatable in the mirror of history. But along the way if we decide to ignore the sometimes ugly realities of our past, we lose some of the pieces of the story that make us human, and we do a disservice to the historical record." - Eddy Portnoy, Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press

...the surprising things we learn about ourselves as we get older, the vast territories of unknown self suddenly exposed — eg, the ways our families’ immigrant histories impact our live and choices and relationships, every day — and how bracing and humbling it can be to realize we’ve labored under such partial understandings — was a recurring theme Niedzviecki reflected in with deep insight. The conversation had me revisiting some of my memories about his parents, jovial suburbanites who loved a good barbecue and always had an extra fridge stuffed with canned sodas. Not knowing they were immigrants from Russia who started with nothing except a tin suitcase that remains in the family as an heirloom. “It’s so easy to get lost in 21st century life. The first thing is, Who are you? Where do you come from. And if you don’t have an answer for that, you’re in trouble already.”

Remember Israel, Palestine, etc.? For a few weeks in May it led most news cycles, between the end of Bibi's 12-year reign and installation of a new leading coalition, to the renewal of Gaza hostilities and the ultra-disturbing flashpoints of violence between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. If this all feels a bit fuzzy and distant, to be fair it was like, FIVE WHOLE MONTHS AGO. That's why it was so great to recently catch up with Rabbi Shaul Judelman, our first return guest! As co-founder and director of Roots-Shorashim-Judur, which works at the grassroots level to build community among Israelis and Palestinians, Shaul brings a level of nuance, insight, clear-eyed vision and hard-earned experience to the conversation that is rare and indispensable. That's why I love talking to him -- and that's also why I was surprised, heartened, and surprised to be heartened by what he sees as signs of optimism, of all things, in some of the societal initiatives and dynamics that have developed in the aftermath of the violence and the initiation of a new era in Israeli political leadership.

Parenting is one of those subjects where it always feels like there’s a reverse correlation between how much it’s talked about and how well it’s understood. Like, the more we talk about it, the dumber we get. This is why I was so happy to read Dasee Berkowitz’s new book, Becoming a Soulful Parent, and talk with her about it – because what she offers is a new way of talking about parenting that actually has the potential to make us wiser, and possibly even help us grow as people. Berkowitz, Director of the Becoming a Soulful Parent program at the Ayeka Institute in Jerusalem, explains the essence of her approach as asking ourselves this question, originally posed to the first human by his Creator – Ayeka? Where are you? – as a prompt for introspection: “Where are we as parents? What’s triggering us? What’s inspiring us? What can we imagine being different? Where are we stuck?” With a model that invites us to “really listen to ourselves and embrace our own vulnerability” – she offers a refreshing contrast to the “parent expert” approach. By her own account of her experience leading parenting workshops, being honest and real about her experience invites other parents to be honest and real about theirs, and listens deeply to each other.

"How can we blend the sense that the ecstatic, the effervescent, the beyond, is our human birthright, and we can also be modern liberal people thinking about intersectionality and social justice?" We're stuck, dudes; it's no joke. That's why I needed to keep talking about the transformative potential of psychedelics to facilitate real healing, on both individual and collective levels. And that's why Rabbi Zac Kamenetz was the perfect person to talk to. As founder and CEO of Shefa, an organization dedicated to grounding psychedelic therapy in Jewish spirituality, Zac is working as we speak to advance the breaking down the categories, patterns, and stories that keep us entrapped and entrenched in needlessly self-destructive, yet ever-escalating personal and societal death-spirals. "Our anxiety, our fear, our trauma--that in and through these things that I'm feeling, the whole range of what we can and do feel, I can be on the most profound spiritual path imaginable." We're in a time in which we have to weave together improbable threads of hope together into a coherent, livable future. Zac and his work are focusing on imo one of the most important threads we have at our disposal.

Dudes. In the midst of a pandemic, deep economic crisis; shocking and mean-spirited governmental incompetence, abuse, and neglect; deep cultural malaise punctuated by eruptions of collective indignation and outrage at the systemic racial injustice embedded in U.S. society – what could possibly be worth talking about? What could possibly help? There’s only one thing I can think of: a shift – an expansion – of consciousness. That’s why I wanted to talk to my old friend Aaron Genuth, a psychedelic educator, advocate, and organizer with Darkhei Refuah, Paths of Healing – with a focus on Orthodox and Hassidic communities. Aaron talks about his own experience growing up in Orthodox Judaism and the intriguing openings and opportunities that exist within traditional religious communities that generally trend culturally conservative. He gives his take on the current wave of psychedelic acceptance currently unfolding in the zeitgeist – “There is a growing recognition that mainstream pharmaceuticals are in many many cases not working, and in some cases making things much worse” – and about the healing potential of psychedelics as treatment for addiction, depression, trauma, end of life anxiety. No less importantly, he gets into their benefits as a spiritual practice and a catalyst for deepening awareness – and even more broadly, their capacity to help us “to channel what’s right and what’s true into a holistic and regenerative system of living.” (He also talks about why the microdosing trend may be a capitalist plot.) In short, I learned things! Gootimes!