The Examined Life
Learning how to live also necessitates, from time to time, spiritually pondering the brevity of time at our disposal.
Rabbi Tal Sessler, Ph.D., is the author of four books in philosophy and contemporary Jewish identity. He is the Senior Rabbi of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel, and the incoming Dean of the Rabbinical School at the Academy for Jewish Religion in California, where he also teaches Jewish philosophy.
Learning how to live also necessitates, from time to time, spiritually pondering the brevity of time at our disposal.
Judaism redeems us from prospective social loneliness in a transactional culture dominated by purely instrumental business relationships of give and take.
They perished because they did not prioritize love and family.
If you can embrace life in the here and now, then you are truly free.
Moses overcomes the smallness of mind inherent in envying those who attain high status and glory.
The Torah is addressing the universal Moses lurking within each and every one of us.
This precarious balance between macro and micro is exactly what the Torah expects from us as individuals.
We experience the world through the existential lens of our epic mental constructs.
It is a stunning real-life parable about the prospective darkness inherent in the human soul.