I’m really obsessed with the question of the mechanics of moral transformation. How do we not just talk about the ideas of kindness and justice and so on that we wish for, that we aspire to, but to go beyond platitude and cliché and really get in there with what happens at an individual, nervous system level, what happens in a culture, what happens... See more

Why is there difference, if everything is part of one God?

And that’s really the driving question for many mystical texts.

the discussions that you describe in that classroom about good and evil and how to be moral, and how to engage difference and how to engage serious, complex questions and disagreement, where good and evil are not at all clear, or what to do with that, it all feels so resonant with, I think, the questions we know that are with us, not just in this c... See more

The best things I’ve ever learned were not content. They were some sort of contrast with someone else’s way of thinking that at first seemed really strange to me, that I allowed in, that I allowed to question me.

I feel like some of the things we’re learning scientifically, or maybe that those of us who aren’t scientists are being invited in a new way to take in, is how even — so we say one of the things that feels most reliable is, you look up and the sky is blue, right? But that the sky is not blue; [

laughs

] that our eyes make color of light. So even tha... See more

But also, even the spaces between letters and words is as important, also, [

laughs

] as the letters that you learn. There’s such richness. It’s so layered, that experience.

And so we know that education isn’t a guarantee of moral sensitivity, but he taught us that memory is the ingredient.

Through the pandemic and all the loss and all the death that we’ve experienced as societies and as a world, it was just so clear that we don’t know how to mourn collectively.

perhaps Elie Wiesel’s favorite phrase was “and yet.”