Altar

Words From a Stone

Josh Fleet

This sentence was torture.

This sentence is therapy.

My life is a conflict of interests. I am a writer plagued by the ineffability of my visions. I am an editor prone to shaking the tree free of every leaf. I am a dreamer with no morning memory.

Words war across pages and consume my mind. I often lose myself for hours at a time within the borders of a good book. But ask me to describe the terrain, and I will not know where to begin or how to end.

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The Joy of Jail

Elad Nehorai

I’m sitting in a holding cell. In jail. I was arrested a few hours ago, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me.

And I’m shaking with happiness. This is the best day of my life.

Four hours earlier:

The bong was beautiful.

It was strong, with an intricate glass heart coming out of its side.

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My Holocaust Problem (not as big as my grandparents’)

Mark Mikhly

It was a first date, and we were eating ice cream. She’d just finished telling me a fun story about getting matching tattoos with her dad. “My family is quite conservative,” I explained, “but my grandparents had matching tattoos.” “Cool!” “Yea, right across their forearms.” I cringed myself through the subsequent awkward pause and light chuckle.

I cannot stop making casual references to the Holocaust.

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Moonlight

Dr. Benjy Epstein

Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.

--Viktor Frankl

The moon, unlike the sun, will not cancel the darkness that surrounds it. A dark night, despite the presence of the moonlight, remains. However, in that time and place of darkness, regardless of what has transpired within it, the moon’s light can still be perceived.

In Egypt, a place that embodied personal and national bondage, surrounded by an abyss of despair, a new beginning was granted. A tiny speck of moonlight was given to a single moment. When this gift was handed to the slaves in Egypt, it was offered as ‘a gift of becoming’ with a simple message: in the midst of being bound by your dark, cold chains, you can still feel the opportunity to renew. This was our liberation.

We were constricted, enslaved physically, mentally, and spiritually in the dark night of Egypt, within a system that told us nothing will change. As slaves, we lacked the clarity and precision to know that the freedom to change and transcend time, resided within, not without.

Our entrance into the moonlit Torah, was an entrance that offered us the key to escape servitude for time everlasting. It was freedom from the past, present, and future, enabled by the now. The only way to freedom was through a direct encounter with this moment. The first commandment of blessing the moonlight of the new month was the sanctification of the now, taking this moment back for yourself, choosing to transcend the bonds of time.

This was our instruction on how to truly be free – sanctify the moon, sanctify this moment, the essence of freedom as your means to redemption. The gift of the present is that ultimately it provides the true freedom to unwrap our passions and unhinge from our fears because, right now, I am lit.

The Torah therefore teaches us to remember the Exodus every day and on each holiday. We need to constantly bring ourselves back to the present moment. We need to find the moonlight within, that freedom suspended above any bondage, and let it act as a meditation, as a guide back to the moment. Remember you are free. Remember how to be free. Remember that you never have to be a slave again.

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For Kemal, an Obit

Anonymous

I found out yesterday that Kemal died.

When I Google his name now, the first thing that comes up is a Gothamist headline: “6 Men Fatally Shot in Violent Start to Weekend.” I learned that “At 2:50 p.m., 28-year-old Kemal Haddock* was found at Spender Place and Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant with several gunshot wounds to his body; Haddock, who lived on Jefferson Avenue between Bedford and Nostrand Avenues, was taken to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.”

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Free Birds

Aaron

And so there I stood, my first morning in Chiang Mai, a labyrinth of a city scattered with crumbling temples. The journey north required a truck, a boat and two trains, but it only took ten minutes of wandering the streets before I turned a corner and found a weathered woman who offered me three birds in a cage. A mere one hundred Baht and I could free them, she explained through a toothless grin, and metaphorically free myself as well. I turned her grin into a smile as I purchased the birds and set them free across the sunny temple grounds. The next 48 hours unfolded as much of the last three years of my life has: disconnected, unpredictable, and utterly satisfying.

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We Need To Look To Each Other

Hillel Liss

When someone is teaching, they must connect themselves to the soul of each of their listeners, so that they are both sharing an idea, each using it and shaping it along the way. Moses’ sin of hitting the rock, explains Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, was in fact a failure to properly connect himself to his People. And, this is perhaps the same sin our Rabbis are committing today. Their inability to relate to the day-to-day issues of their congregants is not merely concerning; it’s a paradigm shift.

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"Radzyn"

Michael Weber & Joel Golombeck

The overflowing wine turned the white threads beneath it red.

The thousands of eyes staring at the Rebbe would not dare assume that he felt uneasy, but his appearance certainly suggested it. He would usually be waving his hands with an abandon both reckless and intentional, orchestrating whichever tune the moment called for. But, now he was silent. He stared down at his cup with the concerned eyes of a father to a sick child, opening his mouth to speak then stopping himself once more.

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