I found G?!d through the words of the poet Mary Oliver. She came to me in the summer of 2018 as this city kid expanded their love for nature, working at a farm camp for teens. When I first read her lines “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it,” I immediately felt that these were instructions for living a specifically Jewish life (from “Sometimes” in Red Bird). The practice of paying attention to everything with a blessing of astonishment, out loud, feels quintessentially Jewish. Her prolific body of work chronicling the wonders of nature and the human condition opened the door to my spirituality. I use her words as often as I can in the services and rituals that I lead, and I am certainly not alone in that. I love the familiar warmth when I come across one of her poems in the supplemental pages of a siddur. In this essay, I plan to use those life instructions as wayfinders to explore how her words can and have opened up Jewish spirituality and liturgy.
James Tissot???s Journey to the Jewish Museum
After the wild acclaim of his illustrations of the Christian Bible, Tissot began a project to illustrate the Hebrew Bible. He made one of…