More in ‘spirituality’

In the new Forward, Jay Michaelson confronts the increasingly ubiquitous notion that spirituality and religion are essentially separate. “I, too, have often claimed that spiritual practice is distinguished from religion by its pragmatic focus—what a practice does—rather than its significance in a system of myth or dogma,” he grants, but he’s not content to leave ...

My 4-year-old daughter Maxine has been obsessed with a book about Noah’s Ark (which she calls Noah’s Work of Art). The other day, I asked her about the portrayal of God she was picking up from it. “God is the person who makes the laws,” she said confidently. “And if you break them you are in big, big trouble.”

Some people love conferences. Me, not so much. The last time I set foot in one was nearly a decade ago, and it was not a happy experience.
I had gone to Austin, Texas, to read a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and seeing so many musicologists at close range ...

The Brooklyn building where I live is populated mostly by big Yemeni Muslim families; on special occasions, celebratory ululating travels up the air shaft, and often you can hear the teenagers arguing with their parents in Arabic. But now and then I hear the chanting of prayers in Hebrew. When I moved in, my boyfriend, ...

In 1990, Rodger Kamenetz traveled to Tibet with a group of American Jews to meet the Dalai Lama. On that trip, which he describes in The Jew in the Lotus, he happened to learn that some Buddhists meditate within their dreams. He began to wonder how dreams had been understood in Jewish texts and found ...

I met Laura Jacobs a few years ago when she was my writing student at Sarah Lawrence. I knew right away that she’d be great in class. She was funny, a straightforward yet sensitive speaker, and possessed the kind of flexible and empathic instincts that help a workshop run smoothly. One thing puzzled me: In ...

In her new book, Inventing Jewish Ritual, Vanessa L. Ochs, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, looks at the recent proliferation of so-called Jewish rituals, ranging from the innovative (infertility rites) to the ridiculous

(“bark mitzvahs”). She also guides readers in creating their own traditions, and explores how traditional communities can move ...

Every time I see Dr. W, my endocrinologist, I leave in tears. Not sad tears, exactly, and not because I’m in physical pain, and not tears of joy, either. Just tears: the old fashioned kind, indicating catharsis, the spilling over of complex emotion. It’d be fair to say that I indulge in a fair degree ...