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.

promise of dawn

dark morn­ings

As the north­ern hemi­sphere moves deeper into win­ter with less light for each day, our morn­ings begin near dawn. This is a beau­ti­ful time of begin­nings and promise. While the sounds we hear each morn­ing are not those of birds chirp­ing and chil­dren learn­ing, but the clank­ing of men at work, even these call […]

can an aipac supporter explain this one?

aipac gives koch a pass for flout­ing iran sanctions

I know that Emer­son said: “A fool­ish con­sis­tency is the hob­gob­lin of lit­tle minds, adored by lit­tle states­men and philoso­phers and divines.” But, I don’t this is an issue of fool­ish con­sis­tency. I’d like some­one to explain if they feel differently.

alex seitz-wald, news report:

Ear­lier this month, Bloomberg […]

what's the difference between 48 and 11?

back then

I under­stand that dur­ing the first half of the 20th cen­tury not even the major­ity of world Jewry sup­ported a nation­al­ist solu­tion to Jew­ish exis­tence. Jew­ish work­ing class move­ments were gen­er­ally non-Zionist and many of the “lead­ers” of world Jewry were inter­na­tion­al­ists, look­ing for inter­na­tional solu­tions. Why, then, should I be sur­prised that the […]

a cold peace

where is this place מצרים? Is it the Egypt we know?

I ask these ques­tions in my Hag­gadah. And I answer:

Yes, though only the name of the place is the same, the peo­ple have changed. In fact we are at peace and allied with the Egypt of today.
The Egypt of the Hag­gadah is more than a place, […]

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 […]

first they came for the canary

what are the police doing in egypt?

At a cer­tain point dur­ing the recent (2011) Egypt­ian rev­o­lu­tion it was not always clear with which side the police iden­ti­fied. These Police are dif­fer­ent. They’re singing about canaries in coal mines. They offer a per­son­al­ized vari­ant of the old metaphor.

First to fall over when the atmos­phere is less […]

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 […]

when?

…when­ever”

How often have we heard peo­ple respond in this way?

I’m always ready to go out and enjoy life. But, the daily alarm of the sho­far in Elul reminds us to mix those plea­sures, and that time is…

Lena Horne [from notes on the Idel­sohn Society’s blog, to which I can­not link directly] sang this song “Now!,” written […]