"I need to reclaim my American spiritual roots. This website has been about Jewishness for me because the neoconservative project for the Middle East made me Jewish (as I have said many times) but I will have a Jewishness that is authentic to my experience. I love the Passover deliverance story only if it is shared. I hate the Purim story, I don’t even know what my Torah portion was about. The story of the binding of Isaac has helped me understand my relationship with my father, and all authority, but honestly I was more thrilled by getting to the place it took place in Minnesota when I was 21 — Dylan’s Highway 61– than by Mount Moriah in occupied East Jerusalem. I don’t need Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount to believe in the binding …
Religion is the thing that gives your life meaning. It’s the codes and ideas and koans and dreams and stories that sustain you and give you purpose and explain your responsibilities to yourself and others and the land. It’s not a book in a church.
Emerson said the dead books scatter your force, lose your time and blur the impression of your character. My codes are American ones, shot through with Jewish diaspora yearnings and my wife’s mystical explorations, and my story is American and my guides are American pantheists from Thoreau to Joan Osborne.
I honor Rabbi Hillel who understood that life is right under your feet when he said, If not now, when. I honor my Eastern European integrationist ancestors who spoke of “doykeit”– hereness. I am going to be here and now, honor the place I stand and stop helping anyone locate meaning in fantasies about somebody else’s olive trees thousands of miles away," – Philip Weiss.
(Photo: Israeli forces evict a group of settlers from a disputed house in Hebron on April 4, 2012, a day after they were ordered to leave the Palestinian property in the occupied West Bank. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld indicated that 15 people had been escorted off the premises, among them women and children, one of them seen in the picture holding a teddy bear and a plastic toy gun as he walks next to family members. By Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images)
The Dish 