Dear Steve 2025, Has the way we care for one another improved? Are you still devastated to see mentally ill people, psychotic and disheveled, lining our streets like discarded byproducts of a polarized society? Do we still abdicate higher ground by hiding behind ill-conceived mental-health laws that value autonomy over dignity and individualism over compassion? […]

Dear Friends, Thank you for being a part of this year’s of Jewels of Elul. I hope that you found the introspections from the past 29 days to be mind and heart opening. This year’s open ended theme “What If”, led to some wonderfully creative pieces that were read by people all around the world. If […]

What if we weren’t afraid to ask the hard questions? You know, the ones that compel those of us with privilege to reflect honestly about our own status. To ask the kind of questions that might force us to get uncomfortable and acknowledge when we may have made people feel like outsiders, even inside our […]

As I write this, news just broke about the Trump Administration’s policy separating children from their parents who are seeking haven in the United States. Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, VA, got a permit for a similar rally in Washington D.C. to mark the one-year anniversary […]

One day in fourth grade, the rabbi visited our classroom to teach us the V’ahavta in Hebrew. The V’ahavta is a prayer which commands us to love God with everything we are, in everything we do. We sat filled with fear and excitement that the rabbi himself was teaching us that day. He assigned each […]

Sarah: What if. This is the start of stories we tell ourselves, ingraining our fear of the yet unknown. What if I never fall in love again? Or write another joke? Susan: Yes, to hold not-knowing with grace is a gift to ourselves — and to the world. To embrace possibility. Sarah: My therapist says […]

What if my father was an optimist, a romantic, one who insisted that man is innately good? What if he saw only what he wanted to see, made excuses for himself as well as for other people? What if my father had not himself experienced the voracious appetite that Jew haters had for hating Jews. […]

Throughout Jewish history, we’ve been called the People of the Book, a people dedicated to understanding the manifold elements of Torah and applying it to our daily lives. Yet, a cursory survey of the Jewish landscape—in Israel and the Diaspora—reveals something dark and disturbing: Judaism, either as an assimilated people or as an extreme fundamentalist […]

“Arise shine for your light has dawned” -Isaiah 60:1 For each of the seven weeks leading to Rosh Hashana, we read special Haftarah’s that are collectively called the Haftarot of consolation. Our ancestors had lived through destruction and devastation, but these passages from the Prophets promised that this reality was not the end of the […]

If we were able to see our pasts with total clarity, we would remember a time we weren’t carrying the emotional burdens of regret, recriminations, self-hatred and hatred of others. Through years of painful experiences, we came to believe in the idea of holding onto this oppressive, senseless cargo. It is sad (and all too […]

What if in our teshuvah we focused on being ‘translators’ of God’s tradition? Eliyahu HaNavi revealed in the Gemara: When we say the words יהא שמיה רבא מבורך, ‘May God’s great name be blessed’ in Kaddish, God hangs His head and laments, ‘Woe to the Father Who exiled His sons, and woe to the children […]

In 1994 I wrote a song that asked “what if god was one of us”. Twenty four years later I have no answers, only questions. What if the worst was true? What if the best was true? What if neither, what if both? What if some random electron decides to inhabit that remote section of […]

What if? Two little words that inspire children to dream and scientists to ponder. For my family, we could ask “what if” when we think about what might have averted the January 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein; our 19-year-old first born son.  What if we had all stayed home for a family game night, taken […]

I was raised in a toxic environment. I spent 20 years of my adult life addicted to drugs and alcohol. I lived on the streets as a thief and with a cardboard sign to support my heroin habit. All of it led to a lot of pain and suffering for myself and others. My life […]

A decade after the genocide, Rev. Cecil Murray was in Rwanda with researchers from the center I direct at USC. He visited a Christian organization serving women survivors of the genocide – most lost their whole families and endured horrific sexual violence. Many were dying of AIDS. Some were mothers whose only living children were […]

What if we only ever listened to leaders in positions of formal authority? When Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, what if we asked “Who are you to dream?” When Dolores Huerta said Si Se Puede, what if we said no we can’t? When Abraham Joshua Heschel called on us to pray with […]

What if we believed that, one day, we were going to die? What if we could imagine our final moments? Most of us don’t really believe our lives are finite. But on Yom Kippur we are forced to admit the essential fact of this life: that it will end. Yom Kippur challenges our comfortable pieties […]

Being the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I have often appreciated how incredibly optimistic my mother always was, despite everything she lost — her father, her home, 80 relatives, and so much more. As I think about my parents’ survival, and how they clung to Judaism and picked up the pieces after the war, my mind […]

What if the boys of Pointe du Hoc did not climb? What if the The Flag was never raised above Mount Suribachi? Near my iMac, I have two glass vials filled with dirty sand from two old forgotten shores, half a world apart. Inconspicuously they hide behind loud and shiny technological miracles of man’s modern […]

What if you grew up in the small suburb of Parkland, Florida, as a normal kid, Hebrew teacher, lifeguard and youth group president with aspirations of being a filmmaker? What if one-day, loss and risk turned your life upside down? Mine did. What if we did not have to bury our heroes? Heroes should be […]

We are all aware of things about ourselves that we want to improve, but what about the things we’re not aware of? How can we change that which we do not even know exists, yet unwittingly guides our behavior? And how can we come to terms with the fact that even the best of intentions […]

On a recent trip to Israel I rented a car. Driving in Israel is harrowing. Driving in the Holy Land can be anything but holy. One busy Friday afternoon, as I rushed to finish buying food for Shabbat, I turned a familiar corner and was cut off by another car, who narrowly missed plowing into […]

As a public educator and activist, who is also: a formerly Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic rabbinic student, who formerly lived as a man, and now lives her true self as a woman – one of the questions I get way too often, is: What If? What If you would have been born into another Jewish community? What […]

What if each nation devoted itself to building a unique civilization, an experiment in what it could be like to be human? What if the nations could compete honorably and decently among themselves to see which of these experiments would best advance knowledge, creativity, prosperity, righteousness and godliness? What if each nation could be independent […]

Every day I ask myself: What if Matthew stayed home from school that day? What if he had skipped baseball practice? What if I had waited for him on the field? What if I had run faster to the field after his panicked and tearful phone call? What if his friends had been able to […]

I recently challenged members of a Florida synagogue who were polarized politically: “Take someone to lunch who voted the wrong way in 2016,” I said, “and speak to that person.” After the sermon, a psychologist gave me the greatest correction: “Next time,” he advised, “say: ‘and listen to that person.’” What if we started listening […]

Elul 5: I Have a Few Questions ~ Rick Lupert

I speak to each of my parents every week, on occasion maybe twice a week if there is something particularly unusual happening in one of our lives or in the world. This means that for the last 30+ years I’ve had at least 1,563 conversations with each of my folks. I also see them once […]

Sometimes, a Broadway show is not just a performance. It is a dream set to music. That was my experience when I saw “The Band’s Visit”, the multi-Tony Award-winning musical version of the Israeli film of the same name. “The Band’s Visit” is the story of an Egyptian police band, booked to sing in the […]

What if the planet wasn’t round What if the silence had a sound What if we took our paradigms and flipped them upside down What if we made room for us all What if we didn’t let you fall What if we wore our bodies like the splendor that they are What if we synthesize? […]

I like to play around with gematria, a kind of playful reflection on Jewish letter/number coincidences. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical value – aleph is 1, bet is 2, etc. Therefore, every word in Hebrew has a numerical value often shared with another word. So, when I am asked, “What if?”, […]

Life is composed of finite facts and infinite possibilities. Part of the art of living is to take the possibilities and elevate those which enhance our lives, improve our world and grow our souls. What follows are meditations on what might be. In the Talmud, one Rabbi has a dream about an upside down world. […]

A few months ago, I went out to lunch with Bruce, an old friend, who asked me “what it would take to bring back Jewels of Elul?” I answered, “Time and money.” He said, “What if I gave you the money?” With this brief, generous response, Bruce gave me two gifts – the funding for this year’s […]