One of the many lives of the Bodhisattva was spent as an ascetic. This one time, he came back as the most superior ascetic in the whole order and everyone used to follow him. There was another ascetic in the same order who was jealous of the Bodhisattva. So, to remove the Bodhisattva from his…
Our words and stories hold power so here goes mine, my loves… A while back I suffered with a medical issue that lasted for over a month. I didn’t share it with everyone because I thought it was so weird to say “I’m in pain but I don’t know what’s wrong.” It sounded so trivial…
I have told many times the story of Bodhidharma and his meeting with the Chinese emperor Wu — a very strange meeting, very fruitful. Emperor Wu perhaps was at that time the greatest emperor in the world; he ruled all over China, Mongolia, Korea, the whole of Asia, except India. He became convinced of the…
Story retold by Rabbi Allen S. Maller…
Her mother once gave her a bag of nails and told her that every time she lost her temper or insulted somebody she must hammer a nail into the back of their fence.
The first day the girl hit…
David the shoemaker was surprised when the king’s messenger entered his shop. And he was shocked when he was ordered to make a pair of Jewish shoes for the king. David protested. There is no such thing as Jewish shoes. There is a Jewish hat called a yarmukah, and there is a Jewish shawl called…
Once there was a king who received a gift of two magnificent falcons from Arabia. They were peregrine falcons, the most beautiful birds he had ever seen. He gave the precious birds to his head falconer to be trained. Months passed, and one day the head falconer informed the king that though one of the…
A seagull was flying over a beach in the Black Sea when it saw a mouse. It swooped down from the skies and asked the rodent, “Where are your wings?”
Each of them spoke a different language, and the mouse did not understand what the seagull said, but did notice that the animal standing before it had two big strange things emerging from its body.
It must suffer from some disease, whispered the mouse….
I think I rode one of the scariest roller-coasters possible when my infant son was diagnosed with terminal leukemia.
The heavy handed specialist gave us no hope at all. There was nothing they could do, he informed us. He thought John had a year at the outside.
I went home and in a kind of timeless pause where the infinite and the material meet, I decided…
The man slowly looked up. This was a woman clearly accustomed to the finer things of life. Her coat was new. She looked like she had never missed a meal in her life. His first thought was that she wanted to make fun of him, like so many others had done before. “No,” he answered…
In Mark 2:10b-12, the Bible talks about a man who was paralyzed. He heard that Jesus was in town teaching at another house. The paralyzed man convinced four of his friends to…
