Both the lid and the curtain separate and contain. But there is a key difference: On occasion — once a year on Yom Kipur, in fact — the High Priest can pass thru the curtain; at no point is anyone ever to remove the lid from the Covenant Ark. One is slightly permeable, the other is permanently sealed.
What does this teach us about atonement?
Read MoreWhen we imagine utopia, I think many of us imagine a place without the need for this sort of judgement, a place where we all just somehow magically get along. But utopia, etymologically, is a not-place, a world that does not and cannot exist. To build a utopia of ideas is trivial, and also useless — no one can live there, because it is not real. The useful utopia — the eutopia, if you will, the good-place — will have to exist here, in the world with actual humans in it, the world full of disputes and quarrels and judgements.
Read MoreI sometimes try to imagine myself at scale, fitting myself in to the largest space I can comprehend. I’ll start with holding the entire room I’m in in my head, then the entire building, then the street, the neighborhood, the city, stretching my awareness out and out to the nearest coastline, the nearest ocean, the great grand curvature of the Earth. I usually cannot get very far before my head starts swimming, before the smallness of me and the hugeness of this so so tiny planet overwhelm me and splay me out like so much insubstantial nothing.
Read MoreAs long as our movement is a source of petrifying dread to those who are Not Us, we will never finish our crossing. As long as we cross with the purpose of conquest, destruction, and dispossession, we will never reach the other shore. Only when those we must share this beautiful Earth with have no cause to fear our crossing will we be able to complete it. We will never get truly free if we attempt to build our freedom on the corpse of others’. It’s all of us or none of us.
Read MoreEver since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by the plague of darkness. Maybe it’s the cinematic immediacy of it, the relatability of the fear of the dark; maybe it’s that of all the plagues, the ninth is the most purely psychological — the darkness isn’t said to damage the crops or the livestock or the people or the buildings or any other part of Mitzráyim’s physical infrastructure; it is a plague of pure foreboding, of dread. The lights go out, and they do not come back on again.
Read MoreFor my part, I don’t pray to G-d for strength. Better, it seems to me, than asking G-d to strengthen my heart is to ask G-d to batter it. To break, blow, burn, and overthrow me. I pray for G-d, who knits together the wounds of those with shattered hearts, to splinter me. If this is what comes from strength, let me be weak. Let my knees tremble. Let everything pierce me, flow thru me, overwhelm me.
Read MoreWe want to be wise, but so did Pharaoh. How sure are we that our wisdom is any better than his? What stands between the inchoate urgings of our souls and the wholesale slaughter of children?
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