For futher reflection

how memory is in fact the thing that can join knowledge and ethics.

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

And so part of the question is, what do we need to bring to educational moments and encounters, beyond a student’s brain or beyond a teacher’s brain, and beyond the knowledge that they’ve acquired; and how do we do that? How do we bring our hearts and our hands and feet into the learning experience so that we can really encounter something that cha... 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

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.

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 found this teaching that you did on — and so one of the things you say about Elie Wiesel, it sounds like you all talked a lot about “moral madness” — and boy, does that sound like an apt way to talk about the world at this part, in this century, right now — and that the way to meet that is not necessarily a kind of straightforward sanity. I kept ... See more

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