Josh in Conversation with Joshua Leifer
We are grateful to Joshua Leifer for sharing his insights with us. Please enjoy the conversation recording.Joshua Leifer is a journalist, editor, and translator. His essays and reporting have appeared widely in international publications, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Haaretz, The Nation, and elsewhere. A member of the Dissent editorial board, he previously worked as an editor at Jewish Currents and at +972 Magazine. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale University, where he studies the history of modern moral and social thought. Tablets Shattered is now available for purchase.
At Home in the Darkness
At this time of year, where I live in Toronto, the trees have shed almost all of their leaves and their branches stand bare against the grey sky. Day by day, the hours of sunlight shorten while darkness holds on longer to the mornings and rolls in earlier and earlier in the evenings. Overhead, skeins of Canada geese honk their way south, and I almost take their leaving personally, abandoning me along with the snow and cold. With the loss of light and warmth, I find myself habitually focused on what I am losing, fighting against the changing season and its natural impact on me. When I face these outer and inner changes unmindfully, I fall into habits of either pushing myself to resist rest,...
Guest House (Behar 5784)
The last couple of weeks have been one of those moments when I pinch myself and ask, "Really, I get paid to do this?!" Because over the last two weeks, I have spent a total of eight days on IJS retreats--first for our Sustainers Circle and, this week, for our staff, both of which are extraordinary groups of people. My days have been filled with reflection, thoughtful conversation, study, and a...
A Conversation with Rabbi Sharon Brous
We are grateful to Rabbi Sharon Brous for speaking with IJS President & CEO, Rabbi Josh Feigelson! Please enjoy the conversation recording below.Rabbi Sharon Brous is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish community that launched in 2004 to reinvigorate Jewish practice and inspire people of faith to reclaim a soulful, justice-driven voice. Her 2016 TED talk, “Reclaiming Religion,”...
Moments of Presence (Emor 5784)
I want to tell you about my amazing Shabbat last week. It came on the third day of a five-day retreat we held for about 25 members of our IJS Sustainers Circle, a group composed of former board members, alumni of our Kivvun program, and major donors. The retreat was full of meditation sessions, rich and musical prayer tefilah (prayer), mindful movement, mindful eating, and a lot of love. But...
Finding Faith in the Face of Doubt
How can we maintain our faith, emunah, in the face of struggle and strife? In this video, Rebecca Schisler shares a teaching from Exodus that can help us understand what it takes to keep faith alive even when facing profound doubt.
Being a “Tent Peg” by Practicing Emunah, Steadfastness
Written by Rabbi Lisa Goldstein, from the IJS Awareness in Action Program When we look for an example of emunah (the soul trait of trustworthiness or steadfastness) in Jewish tradition, we return to Moses, the trustworthy leader of the Israelites, during their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. In fact, God comments on Moses' trustworthiness, comparing Moses to other prophets. God...
Compassion (Kedoshim 5784)
My sons never knew their maternal grandfather. I never knew him either. He died of a brain tumor while my wife Natalie was in college, which was before we met. By all accounts Peter was a wonderful person. He loved chess and theater and active life outdoors. He loved his daughters and, no doubt, would have doted on his grandchildren. He was beloved by his extended family. While all of that is...
Camping Trip: Acharei Mot 5784
In recent days I feel like I've been living in a world suffused with the word camp. The encampments on college campuses, which are themselves reflective of ideological and political camps, have occupied our collective attention. As the parent of one student in college and another about to graduate high school, I have been following events with concern. As a scholar of the history of Jews and...
Reconciliation and Freedom: Shabbat HaGadol 5784
"All revolutionaries are patricides, one way or another." That's a line from Yuri Slezkine's classic of modern Jewish history, The Jewish Century. The book was published in 2006. A few years later, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, that line became a powerful lens as I reflected on the intergenerational conflict in American Jewish life in the late 1960s and early 70s. My thesis was...
A Conversation with Rabbi Shai Held
We are grateful to Rabbi Shai Held for speaking with IJS President & CEO, Rabbi Josh Feigelson! Please enjoy the conversation recording below.Rabbi Shai Held—philosopher, theologian, and Bible scholar—is President, Dean, and Chair in Jewish Thought at the Hadar Institute. He received the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and has been named multiple times by...
Seeing is Believing: Tazria 5784
One of my favorite parts of Shabbat is reading the New Yorker. It's the only time during the week I can sit for an hour or two and just read, uninterrupted by demands of work or family. And as I told my eldest son recently, while college certainly helped with my own writing, it was in reading the New Yorker that I really learned how to write. So I find those Shabbat mornings when I'm sitting at...
Home is Where the Heart Is: Shemini 5784
Nearly twenty years ago my family and I moved to Evanston, Illinois. I had just been ordained a month earlier, our son Micah had just been born two weeks prior, and we moved into an empty condo apartment two blocks from the Northwestern University Hillel, where I had taken a job as the campus rabbi. Natalie and I had rented apartments in New York up until then, and this was the first place we...
Pre-Passover Pausing in the Kitchen Practice
For those who observe the practice of kashering our kitchens for Passover, this process can induce a lot of excitement, but it can also engender a small or great deal of anxiety for many. Changing over the dishes; removing every scrap or loaf of chametz/ leavened goods from the fridge, the freezer, the pantry; from the floor (tiny crumbs count!); from the oven and the stove; from the seat...
Pesach and the Omer: An Opportunity for a Spiritual Reset
Especially in this deeply fraught and challenging year, Pesach – and the seven week period leading to Shavuot – offers all a precious opportunity for a “spiritual reset.” This part of the Jewish yearly cycle resonates powerfully with our mindfulness practice, which invites us to explore our inner life with curiosity, growing in awareness of our reactive, fear-based habits. Attending with...
Rising Above the Waves of Fear and Anger After October 7
Originally published on Times of Israel on March 27, 2024These are fearful times that try our souls. Our nervous systems are overwhelmed by the ongoing trauma of October 7, the devastation of the Israel-Gaza war, surging antisemitism, political turmoil, and more. Threatened on so many fronts, our default inclination as human beings is to speak and act reactively, or remain frozen in silence. Our...
Mitzvah Means Connection: Tzav 5784
The other day I listened to a talk by one of my favorite teachers of mindfulness, Gil Fronsdal, about the war in Israel and Gaza. I listen to Gil's meditations and short talks several times a week. I'm drawn to the clarity, simplicity, and depth of his teaching. I find that practicing with him early in the morning, or while I'm walking the dog, is helpful. Like his previous talk on the war last...
Purim 5784: Quit Rage
When my son Toby was seven or eight years old, we watched the Revenge of the Sith, the third of the Star Wars "prequel" movies—the one that tells the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader (spoiler alert, I guess—but, really?). In the climactic scene, as Anakin is about to battle his master Obi-Wan Kenobi, his eyes are yellow with rage. He has been overtaken by anger. He shouts at...
That’s What Friends Are For: Pekudei 5784
One of the main reasons Natalie and I moved to Skokie eleven years ago was so that our children would have other kids to play with on Shabbat afternoon. We had previously lived in Evanston, which had a wonderful but very small shomer Shabbat community. There were basically the same few kids, and no one else at our children's grade levels. When Toby came along, we realized we wanted a different...
Enough is Enough: Vayakhel 5784
I travel frequently for work. My checklist of things to do before I leave home includes not only packing undershirts and a toothbrush, but also emptying the compost bin that sits next to our sink. I seem to be the member of my family who can stand the smell the easiest. So before I get in the taxi to the airport, I dump the compost into the larger bin outside. I therefore think about the compost...
