Dialogue

The realities of a new city and a new life have finally begun to settle in. I’ve had my ups and downs this last week…it is to be expected, but a lot of positives have emerged.

For one I think that Boston is going to be a good place for me to find out where I’m holding with my practice. It’s got a nice orthodox community and I’m working at a very traditional conservative Jewish organization. I think that by in large I’ve ignored the conservative movement in large part because it’s the community I agree with the most in terms of my practice and I’d like to get a chance to see what that community feels like to be a part of.

I've also made a few friends in the orthodox community that god willing will open up opportunities for me to continue my learning and grow.

I've also come to realize that my time in Israel and the growth it expatiated was truly profound. The way that I approach relationships has changed because of it. It made me realize that many of the decisions I made / make where I try to minimize damage by telling half truths, by constructing almost real stories are the relationships where I hurt the people involved in the exact way that I was attempting to prevent. Only now that I lied or in any event didn’t tell the whole truth it made it far worse than if I had just said what I meant.

I was thinking that a Rabbi in Jerusalem told me that spending time in yeshiva, is never a waste of time, that not everyone makes the same choices spirituality and personally but the goal is the emerge from the experience with far more power than one ever thinks they have. He claimed that when you walk out of that kind of experience that you have to be careful of the power you now have. The strength of the words has only just hit me.

I emerged from Israel and then time spent at home in NJ with a brand new perspective on life, with a new kind of empowerment about the possibilities and the vast ranges of the human experience. I emerged in a new place with new possibilities.

I did so not because I had choices that were easy but because I made choices that were hard. I think this morning of the binding of Isaac, of a story I was told of Abrahams struggle with gods instructions to him and what he knew he must do and I know ultimately we all must have a dialectic relationship with hakadosh baruch hu, what emerges is you and me, me and you, gone is just me now a relationship exists, now a dialogue emerges from which a conservation starts.