By R Nico Soco I love you, I love you because you give me space. I love you because you have space not only for me but also for my siblings who came to you from the four corners of the earth. Because in your heart there is room not only for us but also for them and in that
Read more
In every generation, one must see oneself as if one had personally experienced the Exodus from Egypt. As it is written: “You shall speak to your children on that day, saying, this is how the Holy Blessed One redeemed me from Egypt. Isn’t it puzzling that despite the horrors and hardship of slavery, the children of Israel weren’t eager to
Read more
If Yom HaKippurim is about connecting with our souls through structural purity, then the revelation of Purim is about connecting with our souls through disorganized, messy mundane experiences!
Read more
Inventory Reconciliation: “Inventory reconciliation is the process of comparing physical inventory counts with records of inventory on hand”. No, I am not reading the wrong script, because parashat pekudei is indeed an inventory reconciliation. Pekudei is the last in a sequence of five Torah portions dedicated to the building of the Tabernacle. Now, after asking for a variety of contributions,
Read more
“In our society, narrowness means the decay of truth and the “relativism” of facts. In our society, narrowness means our lack of ability to break our silos and our algorithmical segmentation, defined by our social media preferences. In our society, narrowness means being customers of propaganda as opposed to seekers of information. In our society, narrowness means the politicization of
Read more
What could TikTok and Facebook users learn from a 600 year old man who built an ark? “These are the stories of Noah. Noah was a righteous and perfect man, for his generation” The Torah contextualizes a human being, who in the midst of a corruptive and chaotic reality is told by God to build an ark in order to
Read more
#emotional-exhaustion Let me ask you to guess something: How many searches do you think are made on Google on a daily basis? Who thinks 900 Million? Who thinks 2 billion? Who thinks more than 5 billion? The number is about 5.5 billion searches per day. Now let me share with you another amazing fact: On August 16, 2013, Google was
Read more
During this very special time of the year, as we think about the book of life, we have the opportunity to rethink verses of our own narrative and portions of our own journeys. Without aiming to erase what is harmful to us, we aspire to recognize its presence in our emotional archive so we can rethink, deemphasize and reemphasize our narratives.
Read more
In 1845 Heinrich Hoffman wrote the famous —Struwwelpeter, or in its English version “Shockheaded Peter”. The book tells several stories, presenting pretty horrifying consequences of children’s misbehavior. It has a very clear methodology and goal, scaring children for the sake of preventing misbehavior. Even when written thousands of years earlier, this week’s Sidrah is Torah’s version of Shockheaded Peter. We
Read more
Po Ve Sham 