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?”).

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.

3 pavements

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

jewish environmentalism and tu b'sh'vat

a thought regard­ing the his­tory of Jew­ish environmentalism

In Jan­u­ary of 1970 I needed to make (what for me then was) a sig­nif­i­cant per­sonal deci­sion. I was born on Jan­u­ary 22 on the Gre­go­rian cal­en­dar. How­ever, the year I was born, that date cor­re­sponded with Rosh Jodesh Sh’vat. I noticed then, that in 1970 Jan­u­ary 22 would coin­cide with Tu b’Sh’vat. […]

#blogelul : return

the month of elul begins once again

return

Hosea 14:2:
שׁוּבָה, יִשְׂרָאֵל, עַד, יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ: כִּי כָשַׁלְתָּ, בַּעֲו‍ֹנֶךָ.

I return to this writ­ing, that I have not vis­ited since early March, shortly before Pesach.

I have been many places, but now is the time for return.

As she did in antic­i­pa­tion of Pesach, my col­league of unimag­in­able strength, Phyl­lis Sommer […]

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 out […]

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 I stud­ied music and was involved […]

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 father died 25 years […]

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 fam­ily use)
A Grow­ing Haggadah […]

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) believe that […]

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 the […]

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 had a number […]

The People of the…

We have been called a Peo­ple of the Book for nearly 1400 years. We did not invent the term. It was given to us (as well as to Chris­tians) by our cousins the Mus­lims. Nonethe­less, even as our tech­nolo­gies move us beyond the phys­i­cal book, the text remains. We return to the text that has served […]