I Only Have 5 Minutes?! Weekly Torah with Avram Ellner: Recent Episodes
Avram Ellner
Bringing you 5-ish minute (emphasis on the "ish") reflections on the weekly parsha (Torah portion).
"There's nothing more rabbinic than an interrobang." - J. Harris
“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.” - Gilda Radner
Sometimes, getting caught in the present is just as harmful as getting caught in the past.
"Flood the path with light,
run our eyes to where
the skies are full of promise."
- Augustine of Hippo
Have you ever had that moment when you lock eyes with someone, and the entire world melts away like melting wax?
Yom Kippur, Float Tanks, Joseph Campbell, Zohar, Jewish demonology, Pema Chodron, and the path towards healing.
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” – Pema Chodron
"On Rosh Hashanah the world is re-created, and so all of God's names are once again drawn into a single unity. On this Day of Judgement it is decided what name of God will descend on each individual that year. Listening to the sound of the shofar, we can discover which name will descend upon us." - R. Ze'ev Wolf of Zhitomir
Here we talk about one of the hardest parts of teshuvah, what happens after you make teshuvah and theoretically things are resolved.
"And the more that I give, the more I've got to give.
It's the way that I live- it's what I'm living for!"
Do you ever have that moment when you know you need to stop talking, but you can't? Don't worry, God has those moments too.
How do we give compassion and understanding to those who are hurting? How we find compassion when we ourselves are the ones hurting?
What do we do when we feel like we have more curses than blessings in our lives? (I'm looking at you, 2020.)
What is a blessing? What is a curse? Perhaps they're more closely connected than we think.
Our first episode! Tune in to hear some reflections on Parshat Va'etchanan, theological dichotomies, and love.