Rabbi Dan Ornstein

Set far back from a main road in Westfield, Massachusetts, the Genesis Spiritual Center provides silent respite from the endless grind of work and worry. Established by the religious order of the Sisters of Providence, the center is one of a slowly decreasing number of Catholic retreat settings in the United States.

I look carefully at the charcoal drawing. Do I see a long-eared rabbit or a long-billed duck?

The Grassi Lakes stand about 5,000 feet above the town of Canmore in the Canadian Rockies. Though the region is a popular recreation area for tourists from all over the world, indigenous peoples have lived there for centuries.

My celebration of Shabbat, the traditional Jewish Sabbath, is a rather sedate, internal affair: long Friday night dinners with friends and family, leading worship at my synagogue on Saturday, and catching up on reading or a nap before Sabbath’s end on Saturday night.

Of all the miracles of engineering, I am most impressed by suspension bridges. Instead of being held up from the bottom, they are suspended from the top, as if they were floating in the air. The Whitestone, Throgs Neck, George Washington, Brooklyn, and Verrazano Bridges are all vital connectors without which we could not drive into and out of New York City, and they are all suspension bridges.

The tulips in Albany’s Washington Park fanned out like waves, their bright colors made more vibrant this year by a cloudless Mother’s Day Sunday. It was time for our annual Tulip Fest.

Before I rushed off to worship services one morning, I glanced out my backyard window at our bare black oak tree that shook in the frigid, late February wind. Alighting peacefully on one of the branches was a striking, sharp-billed blue jay.

Chapter Two of the biblical Book of Exodus compresses into a mere five paragraphs the extraordinary story of Moses the Israelite boy born into a slave family who becomes the prince of Egypt and then a liberator of the oppressed. Surrounding him are compassionate, powerful women who subversively resist the genocidal decrees of the Egyptian Pharaoh to enslave and destroy the Israelites. Most important, Moses’ character develops as he makes courageous choices to side with his actual people, the persecuted; these choices are wildly out of sync with his supposed status as a member of the royal household.

I made the mistake of reading the news on my iphone the moment I woke up this past New Year’s Day. The world before and after midnight, January 1st was the same cesspool of misery and meanness that my most ardent magical thinking failed to transform.

This year, a lot of people have commented to me, “Rabbi, it’s amazing that in 2024 the first night of Hanukkah coincides directly with Christmas day. That’s so rare.” This coincidence is rare, having occurred only four times since 1910, but it’s not amazing.