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.

how much is any life worth?

redeem­ing prisoners

The value of פדיון שבויים‎ (Pidyon Shvuyim, the redemp­tion of pris­on­ers) is very impor­tant in Jew­ish life. Mai­monides states that it takes prece­dence over sup­port­ing the poor or cloth­ing them… because the prob­lems of the cap­tive include those of the poor: being hun­gry, thirsty, unclothed, and they are in dan­ger of their lives.

an entire world?

Tal­mud […]

steve’s song

jews and judaism in amer­i­can elite culture .01

On Sun­day evening, Novem­ber 8, 2009 I attended “Steve Reich Talks about his Jew­ish Music at JMF”. I was a bit sur­prised (after being told to reserve my free tick­ets in advance) that there were per­haps fifty peo­ple in the hall wait­ing to hear the words of this very popular […]

swann song

jews and judaism in amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture .01
now, …with har­vey and sheila!

There was a time, it feels strange to write this… a gen­er­a­tion ago, when being Jew­ish was very “in”. The thing to be in Amer­ica. Amer­i­cans con­tinue to, even increas­ingly, con­vert to Judaism in the 2000s. How­ever, back in “The Six­ties” some forms of Jew­ish cul­ture were […]

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 […]

for multiple transgressions of…

The words of Amos, who was among the writ­ers of Tel Aviv, which he saw, con­cern­ing Israel in the days of Cas­tro, Sartre, Rus­sell and all the rest…

The fol­low­ing text appeared in the Octo­ber 1968 edi­tion of Mid­stream mag­a­zine. It was dis­trib­uted very widely as a long leaflet in the late 1960s. Jay tracked down a copy for […]

Let My People Go!

Nisan, the month of our liberation

Actu­ally, the com­plete phrase is “Let My peo­ple go… that they may serve Me.” from Exodus 5:1.

It is inter­est­ing how the phrase has been used (and abused).

Exo­dus and Liberation

When you check the phrase in the Wikipedia you learn not only, what you had know as a child, that the phrase had been […]