The Audacious Yehudah

As a concerned young adult living in Bangkok, I tried to make sense of the brokenness around me by doing volunteer work with like-minded meditation practitioners. Following the social action trail, we found ourselves in one of the many refugee villages along the Laotian/Thai border that continued to exist in the decade after the fall...
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Rabbi Ian Chesir-Teran

Vayeshev: No to Nekamah

This Chanukah, let’s choose to follow the examples of Joseph and Tamar, and say no to nekamah. When the time comes to say the “Al Hanissim” prayer, let’s skip the vengeful words “nakamta et nikmatam.”
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Real Leadership

Rabbi David Ackerman on Pinchas' two distinct visions of leadership, and two sharply divergent paradigms of proper behavior on the part of a leader.
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What I Learned In Prison

About three years ago, I was called by the Head Chaplain of the Butner Federal Correction Institution located forty-five minutes north of my home in Raleigh, NC. This is the same penitentiary where (in)famous prisoners like Jonathan Pollard and Bernard Madoff currently reside. The chaplain’s message came with a southern drawl: “Rabbi, we have a...
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Parashat Bamidbar: The Imperative to Provide Refuge

My father’s family were refugees from Vienna, who fled just before World War II broke out, but not before my grandfather had been deported to Dachau. He remained incarcerated there from November 13, 1938, until January 19, 1939. He knew he had to leave Austria with his family. But leaving wasn’t easy. First, it meant...
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