Pro­duc­ing con­tent on the Web since 1995.


some say­ings of ר‘משבצונה“ל

For many years I have worked hard, and strug­gled with mas­ter­ing virtuous. Now, in addi­tion, I’m work­ing on becom­ing more virtual.
This is an expres­sion of that effort.
* * * * * * *

השיבנו ה‘ אליך ונשובה חדש ימינו
כעוד לא היו
* * * * * * *
ומביא גאלה…
לצאצאיהם

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All pho­tographs are by Mark Hurvitz unless they are obvi­ously not.

The pho­tos in the ban­ner at the top (only a shal­low sliver of a much larger photo) are either from our home or our trav­els and are offered for their beauty alone (though a brain-teaser for me: “Where was that?”).

davka flickr

st. paintings

At least three col­ors of painted mes­sages on the pave­ment. By the time there are three col­ors that fit within the photo, none can have any “mean­ing” what remains is the pattern.

davka flickr

3 pavements

Three pave­ments poured next to each other (con­tigu­ous), but not at a prop­erty line.

keep those cards coming

chang­ing technologies

Most peo­ple who know me under­stand that I am not averse to tech­no­log­i­cal change. I have been inter­ested in how com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies have been used and changed for many years. In June of 2010, I wrote about my involve­ment in the devel­op­ment of what I called “the elec­tronic leaflet”. When I was in college […]

now is the time for change

the month of elul אלול has begun.

Bradley Burston writes:

in Israel, the future can come down to just one night

Actu­ally, every­where in the world our future is deter­mined by the actions at each of the moments we live them. Nonethe­less, tonight (Sep­tem­ber 3, 2011) after Shab­bat in Israel: ה אלול תשע”א, peo­ple all over the coun­try are expected […]

what would dad think?

polity not piety™

Yes, that’s a “trade­mark” sym­bol there. Why not? I con­tinue to tell peo­ple that I came to the rab­binate out of “polity” not “piety”. My involve­ment was as a com­mu­nity orga­nizer. A quick check on Google indi­cates that I’m nearly the only per­son to have used it… and, at that, sig­nif­i­cantly more frequently.

nathan hurvitz

Our […]

beyond the straits and narrow

a grow­ing haggadah

We printed a pri­vate new edi­tion of A Grow­ing Hag­gadah last year for per­sonal use. We will use it again this year. If you are inter­ested in hav­ing a PDF ver­sion of the text to print and use (in whole or in part) at your Seder you can down­load it here:

A Grow­ing Hag­gadah (for […]

the new year; traveling for chocolate… and much more

Switzer­land was actu­ally “Plan B”

We had hoped to get to Fire Island (Long Island) at The Pines for Rosh haShan­nah to be with a col­league and at the beach. How­ever, because “the sea­son” at The Pines was still going strong, the two estab­lish­ments where we tried to book rooms could not com­mit, barely even return­ing our […]

pirkei imahot

I am not the first to use the phrase, but begin­ning on March 15, 2000 I began a file in which I col­lected our mother’s say­ings. I will peri­od­i­cally share them here. One of her pri­mary expressions was:

if you can’t say any­thing nice about some­one,
don’t say it

It’s that simple.

Our mother was not a learned per­son. Though she […]

Hiroshima 広島市 Day Again (may we have many)

Last year at this time I wrote about the “MAD“ness of nuclear arma­ments. In essence:

There does not seem to be much value in hav­ing nuclear weapons.

They may exist for a MAD (Mutu­ally Assured Destruc­tion) pur­pose. And yet, many peo­ple tell me that Israel’s ene­mies don’t care about MAD, because they (as well as dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist Christians) […]

the electronic leaflet

from prayer­book to leaflet

I have been involved in writ­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing leaflets at least since 1966 when our fam­ily com­posed a leaflet [text] we dis­trib­uted in front of our congregation’s Yom Kip­pur obser­vance call­ing atten­tion to the war in Vietnam.

The Hurvitz Family’s Yom Kip­pur Leaflet call­ing for an end to the war in Vietnam (1966)

Dur­ing […]

מזל טוב

queen city of the west

When Deb­bie and I decided to con­tinue our rab­binic stud­ies at the Cincin­nati, Ohio cam­pus of HUC-JIR rather than at the New York cam­pus, a num­ber of our friends made fun of us. They joked that we’d spend all our time in rock­ing chairs on the porch of our apart­ment. We actually […]

the boy and I

the boy with his hands raised

As I men­tioned here on April 10, when I was in my early 20s, I tried to imag­ine the life of the boy with his hands raised being led from the War­saw Ghetto. I spent months with him, I kept his image before me daily. I looked into his eyes, […]