A good friend died this week. He took his own life. We are all shocked and saddened by his passing and we are all asking ourselves – why? Which is to say, we are having the normal human reaction to such an unnecessary loss. I am not going to praise him here, you did not…
Author: mira
Mira Z. Amiras is Professor of Comparative Religious Studies and founder of the Middle East Studies Program at San Jose State University. She is past-president of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, and has served on the Executive Council of the American Anthropological Association. She is co-founder, with Ovid Jacob, of Beit Malkhut, a study group in Jewish sacred text. She's most attached to the creatures of her body and her household — first and foremost, her kids, of course: Michael and Rayna — and then the other folks large and small of various species, including Roshi and Vlad, a whole lot of hummingbirds, the old parrot who lives next door, and a beautiful garden that does what it will.
on suicide
Just when I was feeling all kadished-out. Just when I thought I couldn’t write another thing about death, death and dying, loss, grief, the ones I love, terrible events … Just when I thought that the kaddish project — our kaddish in two-part harmony — had done its job a few months shy of a…
my father’s favorite boys speak up
Did the tzaddik walk into a bar? Did he drink a beer? Did he watch the World Series on that day? So. The answer appears to be (I’ll cut to the chase) — no, he did not. The whole tzaddik walks into a bar story that I told, turns out to be almost completely off….
the religion of labor: remembering a.d. gordon
I can’t seem to let A.D. Gordon go. And yet his is not an ideology that almost anyone seems to care about these days. Isn’t the modern task to seek more leisure and relegate labor to lesser beings — transient workers, illegal immigrants, cheap Arab labor, robots if you’ve got ’em? Aharon David Gordon was…
a tzaddik walks into a bar…
They were driving between X and Y — who knows where they’d been. They were rushing. Last game of the World Series was about to start, and they weren’t anywhere near getting back on time to watch the game.
my father’s favorite boys
Fred and Harold and my dad were like the Marx Brothers. Or the Coen Brothers. Or the Brady Bunch. Or. Or. Or maybe there was nothing like them at all. A team. A pack. A family. A coven. A comedy show. My father loved ‘those boys’ with all his heart, and all his might and…
yahrtzeit for galina
your quizzical smile eyes cocked, waiting you say nothing, save ‘why?‘ and they pour out their secrets and you — you collect them and you do them justice but that’s just our business— that’s just our business your fingertips arranging their tales for the ages their children will read you they’ll wish they could find…
malkah, magnes, and the military police
Malkah was at the Madrid airport, as wholesome as she could be. She had a husband with her and two squeaky clean children with her. And all their camping gear. And all her archives notes. And all her permissions to conduct research. And she got detained anyway trying to leave the country. It wasn’t the…
a kaddish for captain jack sparrow
Okay. So. Another Pirates of the Caribbean came out today. And I had absolutely no plans to see it. But we happened to be in the neighborhood, and there wasn’t a line, and there were plenty of tickets, and the timing was right — There were also plenty of good seats. Bad omen, right? Good…