At your funeral or at your 90th birthday they're not going to say, "I am so grateful to him or her because he/she was happy." Living lovingly toward others will definitely have moments of happiness, but one might do well to understand that it is not the happy moments...
Judaism has a variety of ideas about the afterlife, but it's not emphasized in our theology and it's not really connected to redemption at all. Redemption is when there's justice and peace on earth. [NOTE: the author is a Rabbi]
Empathy is a strange and powerful thing. There is no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It's simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting and communicating that incredibly healing message of, "You're not alone."
I work in a decent sized, local, indie bookstore. It’s a great job 99% of the time and a lot of our customers are pretty neat people. Any who, middle of the day this little old lady comes up. She’s lovably kooky. She effuses how much she loves the store and how she...
Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other.
It's nearly impossible to love our neighbors if we don't know our neighbors. And herein lies the tension of our times: We live in such a connected world with such limited or nonexistent connections. Relationships matter. Stories matter.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been...
Years earlier I had read some writings of Jurgen Moltmann, a German theologian who argued that God "experiences" our sufferings and grieves with us. Our soul is so connected with God, he said, that it's impossible for the Divine Being not to share our aguish. Now...