Drunk With Fire This balance between ecstatic and normative, between in and out of love reflects a deeper ebb and flow within us. There are two forces which vie for domination in our lives. Each one must be honored. They are our wild ecstatic, sensuo ...

Through the Thou a person becomes I. —Martin Buber, I and Thou The philosopher who guides us on this path most clearly is Martin Buber. He talks in terms of what he calls “dialogic thinking.” Put simply, that means that there must be an I and a ...

Ecstasy undermines our sense of ego and personhood. On one level, that is terrific. It is the gate to the shared identity of intimacy. Moreover, it is the healing of the original sin of misperception, the thinking that I am separate from God. It is t ...

The Grateful Dead and Getting Grounded The Grateful Dead’s music was possibly the modern muse that most invited us to spin out of our narrow lives and sense the world of ecstasy. I remember that after Jerry Garcia died, there was a stinging critiqu ...

This blog post and all the Torah that I am hugely privileged to share in these days, weeks and months, I offer for the full healing of my son Eytan who just been in a bad car accident in Israel. Thank God, though weak and bodily traumatized, he will ...

In Ecstasy The perceptions of falling in love is but one expression however of a broader kind of perception. This higher way of seeing is the path of Ecstasy. Ecstasy, from the Greek word ex-stasis, means “to move beyond stasis,” that is “beyon ...

The Wisdom of the Womb Fifth century masters tell of an angel who comes and teaches all the wisdom of the world to us as we are growing in the womb. But upon our birth, that same angel puts its finger to our lips, and we forget all that we have learn ...

Continued from yesterday. Good morning everyone. A gorgeous day to you all. This pattern of arousal from above, followed by a fall to which we need to respond with avodah — human work — is not only the pattern of love in relationship. It reveals ...

“Joy whose hand is ever at his lips, Bidding adieu.” (Keats) Suddenly finding ourselves having to work for what was first experienced as a gift of magical purity can be infuriating, until we realize that losing paradise is not a cruel personal pu ...

Vessels and Light Light is the symbol of love. When the vessels are repaired then they will once again be able to hold the light. So falling in love is somewhat like gazing directly into the midday sun: we cannot contain the light without first prepa ...