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Q: What is Jewish Renewal?
A: Let me begin with the issue of renewal itself. There are some people who after the Holocaust felt that we have to do restoration. We have to get back to where Judaism was before Hitler decimated 6 million. And it was such a deep cut, as it were, of vital power and energy of our people. When the refugees came, they s...
And that’s how I began first, because I read the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I was very much impressed by the original of all monastic stuff in Christianity and even the dervishes in Islam, which was with the Dead Sea community. And the first group that I brought together was called “Be’ Nay Or,” because it was based on the ...
However, as time went on, the kind of community that I wanted to create, which was a monastic urban kibbutz — it didn’t come to be. And more and more, I felt that the people here in America needed first of all to lower the threshold and then to find ways where in this setting we could renew those values and those exper...
The most important thing was to remove all the debris that was between souls and God. And so, therefore, I took the Hebrew prayer book — and working with it is called “davening,” which I believe comes from the word “davenum,” just as when we say the grace after [a] meal we call it “benching,” from benediction. When peo...
I created something I called “davenology” in order to help people be able to go into that experience. Having done that, it became also clear that we had to do a theological job, which was that every religion has the magisterium, the teaching part of the religion, and it also has a cosmology, a reality map. And the real...
So that was dealing with the more conceptual stuff. But beyond that, ever since what we call scientism and the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, what you couldn’t touch and what you couldn’t see, what you couldn’t measure didn’t exist for people. But then out-of-body experiences and all the old stories that ...
Furthermore, there’s an element of medieval awareness that said the body isn’t good, the soul is good. Leave the body behind or suppress the body and opt for the soul. Now that we’re talking holistic stuff, it didn’t make any more sense to do that. Also, Earth is suffering. If we could hear the outcry of Earth, her air...
So when you look at all these things, the outcry, then the question comes: What is there in the way in which we deal with our commandments that would help heal the planet? We discovered something else — that much of our understanding of Judaism was very masculine, patriarchal, and was therefore left-brainish, and it di...
Q: Why is there a thirst for spirituality? Why do people yearn for the experiential?
A: Let me begin, first of all, with something that happens in all mysticisms. There is a four-level way in which people deal with things. There’s hatha karma yoga, one level. There’s bhakti yoga. There’s gani yoga. And then there’s raja yoga. In our understanding, we speak about the four letters of the divine name and ...
A rabbi friend of mine put it this way: “When I was a baby, when I was hungry, my mother took me to the breast, and it was good. And when I was lonely and I cried, my mother took me to the breast. When I was upset, my mother took me to the breast. And now I’m grown up. When I’m hungry, I go to the fridge. When I’m upse...
But after this kind of paradigm shift, people want autonomy, and they want to have their self-experience. It began in the ’60s and a re-sensitizing where we are. And then later on, more intuitive stuff, and gestalt and psychology moved from behaviorism to Freud and then to humanistic psychology to transpersonal psychol...
Q: But is it also a hunger for relationship with God?
A: That’s precisely the point. The definitions we had of God that were the old ones had to be discarded. No person can really have a real relationship with God unless they have been an iconoclast first. Abraham had to smash the idols of his father, and so we have to go through the same thing. We have to smash the idols...
William James once asked a deacon in New England, “What do you do when you see yourself in the presence of God?” He said, “I see an oblong blur.” Well, the oblong blur is not what the heart can use. The heart needs to have a relationship word. So we talk about “father.” “Father” after Freud wasn’t so good. “Judge,” “ki...
So this is why our people have gone to speak of Melech instead of Melech Ha’olam, “king of the universe,” “the spirit of the world.” In other words, the life force in the world. With that we can have a connection, because the life force operates in us.
How do I know there is a God? Listen to the pulse. I don’t beat my pulse myself. The voice of my beloved is in the pulse. Once you begin to speak about the longing that we have and you sing the melodies that bring the longing to the fore, and you express that in prayer, in that longing there is a response that comes fr...
Q: Christians talk about a personal relationship with God, so when you say that it sounds very Christian.
A: This is so funny, because it looks to me the other way. Jesus is so thoroughly Jewish, and he talks about God as Abba: “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.” The Judaism has been filtered out for Christians, so they don’t know anymore what his origin is. And the worst thing yet is with Islam. They don...
I remember when I was a child, my dad had just finished his prayer, and I peeked underneath his tallit, which he had over his head, and I saw he had been crying. So I said, “Papa” — I was speaking German at that time — “why do you cry?” He said to me, “Because I talked with God.” So I said, “Does it hurt when you talk ...
Q: There are apparently disaffected Jews who are turned on to Judaism because of the renewal movement. Why was God absent in the synagogues, and how has renewal reenergized synagogue life?
A: I don’t want renewal to be seen as a denomination, but rather as a process, as a moment. Any revitalization, any connection that we have with that which is beyond ourselves and in ourselves at the same time is a revitalization, and it happens to some people in Orthodoxy and some people in Reform, and even it happene...
There was this attitude that people had because very often oppression came connected with God — oppression by clergy, oppression by rabbis, oppression by people who couldn’t understand one generation. There was such a gap between one generation and the other, and they couldn’t bring God across.
Another element: as long as we had three generations in one household, then the grandparents could talk to the grandkids because both of them had an enemy in the middle. But once it happened that we now have these nuclear families and single-parent families, family values have to be rejected by the next generation.
Q: But tell me about synagogue life. You were saying that God was absent from institutional life. Why was that, and how did Jewish Renewal help?
A: First of all, it went back to reform in Germany that wanted to make sure that Judaism was the religion of reason. And reason then took God into “god idea.” “God idea” is just a concept, and the living God is not a concept. After all the “god ideas” had evaporated, the best thing that in many synagogues they could he...
It’s not true that that was absent completely, because there was a Reform prayer book for home use. [It] was pious, if you will, very heartful. But the pulpits were not doing that, and so people didn’t have a connection with that, and they talked a lot about Israel, which you need to talk about, about United Jewish App...
Q: You were influenced by other faith traditions. You took a trip to meet with the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman. How were you influenced? What did you gain from them?
When I began to read about Rama Krishna and saw that there was a Hasidic rebbe, as it were, in India, when I began to read what people were describing as difficulties in mental prayer — and this was a Trappist monk who had written that book — that touched me a great deal. When I came to Boston University, I wanted to t...
Q: You visited the Dalai Lama. What did he teach you?
A: That meeting with the Dalai Lama, which came about in the ’90s, had a prehistory. In 1962, when the Dalai Lama had to flee from Tibet, I sent off a telegram to Ben-Gurion and suggested that he should give him sanctuary in Israel. That never happened. I can understand why not. But then I was concerned about what will...
I know what it means to live as a monk. I also know what it means to be the manager of a community. I expressed to him my compassion, really, for the role that he had undertaken and how this cuts him off sometimes from being able to do his own spiritual work. He then grasped my hand and appreciated that.
We work in different spaces, but it doesn’t mean that we do different work. We each want to preserve as much of the ethnic and traditional material that we can, but to transform it so that it can be practiced in the present. Once I see somebody like this doing it, I feel that I have greater connection with such a perso...
You see that in every religion, the people to the right claim that they are the ones who need to be listened to, rather than to have a direct connection with God. They’re always afraid of spirituality because it seems to bypass their standing at — how would I say it? — the controls of things.
Q: You have written that Judaism has unique gifts to offer the world. What are they?
A: I believe that Gaia is whole and that every religion is like a vital organ of the planet. You cannot say that Earth can be alive with only the heart or with only the kidneys or with only the guts. It needs to have the whole thing. So if, for instance, I were to say, “We are the liver,” okay? (Everybody wants to be t...
What do we bring? First of all, we bring something about time. Commodity time has killed our relationship to nature. We have fluorescent lights that want to say it’s daylight when it’s night. We have temperature arrangements which make us feel that all seasons are gone now. We don’t live any more in organic time. Many ...
The organic thing is important, number one. Second, we go to study. The way laypeople study Torah with us isn’t found anywhere else — the sense of wrestling with texts and working it through and asking, “How does this text speak to me at this time?” This is very much how we do Torah study in Jewish Renewal. I wish that...
I’ll give you a little example. I spent some time at a Trappist monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. Shabbat was coming [and] as for rolls and for wine and for candles they said, “What do you need it for?” I explained and they said, “Could we come and join?” It was wonderful. We had a nice Shabbat together. The next week I...
If you read the Torah clearly, you see that nobody could get so rich that they own everything, that they create a feudalism. And nobody can get so poor that they can’t have access to a corner of the land that’s being left for them. The sense that we have of tzedakah — I want to say, nowadays, I picked up a newspaper th...
I wish that when they talk about faith-based charities they wouldn’t be just organizations [but] that they would do a lot more organically and communally in these things. These are the contributions we made, and people can watch us do them and participate with us and then bring it home to their situations.
We need to reconstitute and fix, if you will, that disturbance that creates life in the beginning. But it has to be made organic. It has to be harmonized. So we are told [in Kabbalah] that there are sparks of holiness and goodness hidden in so many places. The task that we have is to reconstitute these and to bring the...
One of the ways we do that is to ask, “What is the just, the balance of that?” At one point I wanted to create a research situation in commerce and ask people, “Tell me, when did you feel you did a righteous deal? You didn’t rip off somebody else. They didn’t rip off you. And what was the feeling that you had?” We need...
A: I’m going to be 81 years old. I’m about to go into a place that’s going to be a lot more withdrawn from outer activity. I’ve worked for a while to bring consciousness to aging, and that was in my book, FROM AGING TO SAGING, to be able to help people see what to do with the later part of their life. We don’t have liv...
Q: Is there more you want to say about the impact of renewal on community and synagogue life, the impact on Jews who might not have ended up staying Jews?
There was a time when Christians lived in a story they used to call the history of salvation. When a Jew lived in a story the story had an ending — Moshiach will come, the Messiah will be here, there will be peace on earth and good will for all people and so on. There is a same story in Buddhism, that Maitreya will sho...
FARGO, N.D. — A Fargo man is accused of burning a woman and ripping the skin off her arm with a hair straightener, telling police she tried to commit suicide by burning herself, court documents say.
According to charges filed Friday in Cass County District Court, the man, Mark Gorman Beito, 28, called police at 10:25 p.m. Thursday.
When police arrived, a woman told them Beito had just burned her.
After arguing, the woman told police she went to the bathroom to straighten her hair, accidentally burning her left wrist. Beito saw this, plugged the straightener back in, and grabbed her arm and squeezed it with the straightener, which ripped her skin when she pulled her arm out.
Beito told police the woman was suicidal and was going to burn herself to death.
Police also found two bags of marijuana and paraphernalia and a small bag of pills.
Beito was charged Friday with two Class C felony drug charges. He has pleaded not guilty to additional charges of possession of drug paraphernalia, interfering with an emergency call, both Class A misdemeanors, and to a charge of simple assault, a Class B misdemeanor.
His next court case is set for Jan. 20.
CHICAGO — A Chicago teenager who had been shot in the head multiple times was presumed dead and covered with a sheet by paramedics before onlookers noticed he was still moving, police and fire officials said Tuesday.
Erin Carey, a 17-year-old who had just graduated from high school, was shot in the head on Chicago’s West Side early Monday and responding paramedics apparently believed he had suffered fatal head wounds, police officials said. They covered his body in a sheet and tended to other victims.
The Chicago Tribune reported that witnesses alerted officers and paramedics that Carey appeared to twitch under the sheet. On police 911 audio, an officer is heard notifying EMS at the scene that Carey appeared to move “from side to side” under the sheet.
“We’ll have a unit go down and check on that male,” a dispatcher responded.
WLS reported its cameras were on scene at least 15 minutes before paramedics removed the sheet and began administering CPR. News footage showed the teenager appearing to breathe under the sheet.
Chicago Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said detectives were investigating whether Carey may have been involved in the escalation of the shooting incident. A Mac-10 machine pistol was found in the street near Carey’s body, he said.
Carey was a summer intern at a senior living facility in Chicago, according to his family’s pastor.
At least 56 people were shot, making it the most violent weekend of the year — one resembling weekends of the previous two years when murder rates soared. At least 650 people were killed in 2017 and 771 people were killed in 2016, the most violent year in Chicago in 20 years.
But last weekend was the hottest of the year in Chicago, testing the city’s ability to control violence when much of the population is outdoors. Temperatures reached close to 100 degrees all weekend and Sunday was the hottest Father’s Day in Chicago in 20 years, with a heat index that made it feel like 109 degrees in t...
Dates said he spoke with Carey’s mother on Tuesday morning. “She’s obviously very disturbed,” he said.
Dates said Carey had just graduated from a high school in suburban Evanston, where his family enrolled him to keep him away from the violence on Chicago’s South Side.
Dates said he was at the hospital Monday night comforting Carey’s family members, something he does frequently given the violence in the city.
E-CIGARETTES increase your risk of suffering heart attacks or depression, new evidence has shown.
Vaping has found that users are significantly more likely to fall victim, compared with those who don't smoke.
"When the risk of heart attack increases by as much as 55 percent among e-cigarettes users compared to nonsmokers, I wouldn't want any of my patients nor my family members to vape," said lead author, Dr Mohinder Vindhyal, assistant professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine Wichita.
"When we dug deeper, we found that regardless of how frequently someone uses e-cigarettes, daily or just on some days, they are still more likely to have a heart attack or coronary artery disease."
Up until now, we haven't known a lot about how e-cigs might hinder heart health but this new data should be a "real wake-up call", said Dr Vindhyal.
Vaping devices work by heating e-liquid which tends to contain nicotine and other chemicals.
According to Dr Vindhyal, there are now more than 460 brands of e-cigs and over 7,700 flavours - some of which put you at risk from "popcorn lung".
The new study found that compared with nonsmokers, e-cig users were 56 per cent more likely to have a heart attack and 30 per cent more likely to suffer a stroke.
Coronary artery disease and circulatory problems, including blood clots, were also much higher among those who vape - 10 percent and 44 percent higher, respectively.
And vapers were also twice as likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and other emotional problems.
The study is one of the largest to date on the health ramifications of vaping.
It included data from 94,467 people over a three year period.
In their analyses, researchers looked at the rates of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, coronary artery disease, diabetes and depression/anxiety among those who reported using e-cigarettes (either some days or daily) and nonusers.
Those who reported using e-cigarettes were younger than nonusers.
Researchers compared the data from tobacco smokers and nonsmokers.
Traditional tobacco cigarette smokers had strikingly higher odds of having a heart attack, coronary artery disease and stroke compared with nonsmokers - a 165, 94 and 78 percent increase, respectively.
They were also significantly more likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, circulatory problems, and depression or anxiety.
And scientists also compared data for nonsmokers and e-cig users, and found that daily e-cigarette users had higher odds of heart attack, coronary artery disease and depression/anxiety, whereas some days users were more likely to have a heart attack and suffer from depression/anxiety, with only a trend toward coronary ...
"Cigarette smoking carries a much higher probability of heart attack and stroke than e-cigarettes, but that doesn't mean that vaping is safe," Dr Vindhyal said.
More research is still needed but the study concluded that there was a clear association between any kind of smoking and negative health outcomes.
The best thing you can do is to quit altogether.
Microsoft described a security feature in Office 2010 designed to block malware associated with older Office binary file formats.
The feature, called "Office file validation," checks to see if a binary file used by Office applications such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel (with .DOC, .PPT and .XLS extensions) is a trusted document or stored in a trusted location. If not, the file will get protected in a sandbox, or "protected view," which will limit...
The validation feature was first introduced in Microsoft Publisher 2007 to check .PUB files, Heise explained. It will take longer to open binary files in Office 2010 because of the validation process, but the delay will be barely perceptible. Heise said in the blog that "most files validate in the 1 to 100 milliseconds...
The new Office file validation feature extends concepts from an earlier Microsoft security tool called "MOICE," or Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment, according to Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys.
"Office documents received by e-mail or downloaded through the Internet are opened in a protected environment, a 'sandbox,' and if the document attempts to modify the underlying operating system, it is blocked by the sandbox," Kandek explained in an e-mail. "If the user wants to edit and save the document, he has to pr...
IT pros might feel nervous about letting users edit such sandboxed documents, which can be enabled through Office 2010's "backstage view." Heise explained that Microsoft provides group policy settings in Office 2010 to turn off that option.
In general, client-side attacks leveraging binary files represent a growing security concern these days, according to Tyler Reguly, senior security engineer at nCircle.
"The whole genre of client-side attacks is coming to the forefront, especially when you are talking about Office," Reguly said. "So those older documents, like Office 97 to Office 2003 formats -- before they got into the new Office 2007 format -- they really are one of the primary target points right now."
Office 2010, which was released last month as a beta, relies on Microsoft's newer Open XML file format that first appeared in Office 2007. In general, there has been a decrease in security vulnerabilities associated with Open XML document formats, according to Reguly.
Despite the new security checks in Office 2010, users still need to run antimalware at the gateway and the desktop, according to Reguly.
"You need to be scanning your e-mail -- there are too many threats coming in," Reguly said. "While this [Office file validation] is going to help and reduce the problems, it's not a be-all and end-all. It's one more layer in that onion of security."
ነዘን ነገራት ኣብ ስልኪ መን ክብለን ከምዝኽእል ወስኑ- ደዋላይ ወይ ተቀባላይ?

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