The Ansche Chesed blog is a place where you can find enriching material to read about God, Torah and the Jewish People.
Good prayer is an interior experience, meditatively sinking into heart, mind, and soul. All religions prize this inwardness, through various traditions of hermitage and retreat. In Judaism, one word for spirituality is פנימיות, or “interiority.” A term for meditation is התבודדות, or “aloneness.” So why don’t Jews pray alone? Why do we prize gathering in… Read more »
Heschel famously summed up the difference between the spiritual life of modern, Westernized Jews and their pre-modern (whenever and wherever they lived) forebears: “To Kabbalah and Hasidism the primary problem was how to pray; to the modern movements, the primary problem was what to say.” [Quest for God, 83]. In Heschel’s view, we shouldn’t worry… Read more »
President Trump deserves credit for beginning his recent address to Congress by affirming that America is “united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms,” specifically condemning bomb threats against Jewish school and JCCs, vandalism in Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia, and the murder of an Indian immigrant in a bar in… Read more »
This year, our AC Wednesday night Talmud class is studying an excellent chapter (Bava Batra, Chap. 2) about responsible use of land, environmental hazards and zoning — the rules which enable us to be good and safe neighbors. (If you have never come to our class, please join us! We meet Wednesday at 7pm, followed… Read more »
Last Shabbat we read a parasha of death. Both Sarah and Abraham pass from the world in their ripe old ages, 127 and 175 respectively. And despite all the havoc Abraham wreaked upon his sons, Ishmael and Isaac, at last they join together to bury him lovingly in the cave at Machpela. All… Read more »
