The State Department called me yesterday to see if I’d speak to a group from Belarus. It is a eclectic mix of officials- a Jew, Christian, and Hare Krishna — all coming to the U.S. on this junket: RELIGION IN THE U.S. A Freedom Support Grant Project for Belarus These visitors are invited to the United States under the auspices of the State Department International Visitor Program. March 6 – 28, 2004 Objectives: The participants will be exposed to the…
Last night Union Seminary’s Barry Ulnalov lecturer was Karen Armstrong, the former nun who went on to tv and literary stardom as a guide to religion. I enjoyed her work History of God, and I went expecting to hear her wax philiosophic…but this was a spiritual memoir event that weighed heavy on the memoir trope of “how a reject became famous” — she was funny and charming but ultimately she had very little to say.
The UJA’s Shira Ruskay Center for End-of-Life Issues has added my book to its resource list.
Jonathan Mark’s piece on the event last Monday captured the discussion beautifully.
Last night I attended the Temple of Understanding benefit at the posh University Club on the UES. Whirling dervishes, Bahai chants, a klezmer band, a praying Yogi, Coleman Bark’s hipster Rumi poems over cello and circle drum, a Lebanese scholar reciting Gibrhan, a giggling Cokie Roberts — all were on stage at one time or another….I sat with Sister Joan Kirby, an Episcopal priest, and some donors who couldn’t make heads or tales of the evenings lineup.
Rev. George McLean, a Methodist, invited me in this morning to the New York Theological Seminary to address the D. Min students on the topic of Mel Gibson’s The Passion. It was a challenging speech – and some of the students, a Catholic priest among them, spoke with admiration of Gibson’s work. But he was receptive to my perspective, which I appreciated. My gist was this: 1) I, like many Jews, view the film through two lenses: The exile and…
Ilana Abramovitch sent this one to me — she works at the museum (one of the folks who invited me to do the educator’s conference last year) and is putting this program together. I’ll be in D.C. but this looks great. Sunday, March 21 Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust presents: Memory After the Holocaust With Douglas Greenberg, Geoffrey Hartman, Daniel Liebeskind, Leon Wieseltier, Yosef Yerushalmi and James Young Sixty years after the Holocaust, memories…
After teaching Talmud to a group of students from the New York Theological Seminary I got invited to the big house – I’ll be going to Sing Sing to teach Talmud to a group of Christian inmates. They have all been involved in christian education while being incarcerated and are interested in learning from a rabbi. I think that my great uncle was a chaplain there, so this is another of those full circle experiences.
My latest project, to beam Reb Zalman into JTS via videoconferencing, is taking shape for March 8th. I recentlly stumbled across a page of Reb Zalman links which included a piece I did with him entitled Kavanah for Living. There’s a copy of the address he gave at the Oberlin graduation which is a poetic and phophetic work.
Last night I read Nicole Krauss’ short story “The Last Words on Earth” in the February 9th issue of The New Yorker. Brilliant and funny.