Ariel Burger — Be a Blessing | The On Being Project

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

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

It’s closest to Mount Sinai. It’s closest to the origin. But it’s really the white space around the edges that ultimately is most important, because that’s where we get to write our questions, and we get to expand and grow and evolve a tradition that, without us, would have long since become either dormant and rigid, or would’ve disappeared entirel... See more

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.

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.

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.

It is an exercise in what Wiesel’s friend and teacher, the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, spoke of as the religious calling to be maladjusted with positive moral force, neither indifferently conformed to the reality of evil and suffering, nor inured to wondrous and redemptive possibilities we can make real.

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

There’s a place for simplicity, too, but there’s often a speed — we’re moving with such speed, instead of taking time to really question, how am I seeing this, and how am I perceiving, and how am I hearing, and what am I missing? And who’s missing around the table? And what tools are we missing in our work? And what are we taking for granted? Those... See more