I have read... Oh my god god help us god help all of us I cannot... release this thing I have nowhere to... just... place it and cover it up forever        forever I have nowhere with this

What makes an atheist pray--earnestly, the wrong prayer, even, but just to do something, say something in the language, which, in my mind, God hears..

Why am I searching all these weeks for the right words, unaware of the desperate need to recite the Mourner's Kaddish over every lost life

Oseh shalom bimromav

Hu yaaseh shalom aleinu

v'al kol Yisrael. V'imru: Amen.

May the one who creates harmony on high, bring peace to us and to all Israel

To which we say Amen.

I have never in my life felt as removed from myself--from everything--as I do now. 

Not a moment goes by where I feel "normal". Not a moment that isn't punctuated by horror, grief.. 

As we gathered today to celebrate Nowruz... 

As we gathered to celebrate warmth, revival, and rebirth during this moment of great calamity, this continued--and seemingly endless--cycle of global tragedy.... I found myself unwilling.

I asked how; perhaps more importantly, I asked why.

The answer appeared suddenly, unexpectedly, in verse:

To love in a war-time is
(in spite of everything) to wear earrings,
so that holes
don't disappear

--Kateryna Kalytko

Why? To ensure, I suppose, that we don't forget how.

On this first day of spring--on this "new day"--and on every day thereafter, I wish nothing but peace. I wish only peace. All else will follow.

نوروزتون مبارک،‌ عزیزان من

On the 19th day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I do not believe. I do not, I cannot believe. In the reality of all this. Just.. in anything. In anything. And yet I find myself, as I often do during moments of great distress, returning to Hebrew school worship--Iessons in faith, in humility before God, long since abandoned but ever simmering at the edge of crisis. Perhaps it was the comfort of repetition; perhaps the strength of what, in childhood, felt like a great wisdom--a precipice beyond which all was clear, all was visible.

Every night I cover my eyes. Pray for peace.

shema yisrael

adonai eloheynu

adonai echad

Hear me, oh Israel. Our Lord is one.