Rabbi Natasha Mann

While I was in the midst of Elul, my ponderings on the Season of Repentance were interrupted by the very mundane fact that my bank card details were stolen. I found myself leafing through a month’s worth of purchases and marking out what was mine and what was not. And, of course, there were in-between spaces - was it fraud, or do I just not remember? It was an unnerving experience, but it was also oddly intimate. There is some criminal out there who stole from me, and in return, I now know about their taste in clothing and pizza. (For the record: good taste in clothing; bad taste in pizza.) Of course, this interrupting my thoughts about forgiveness felt in some ways destined - because it forced me to wonder what forgiveness would look like. I cannot forgive this person because I don’t know them, they have not revealed themselves to me - and as much as I know about their preferences of ride-share services, I need a face and a name and an apology to be able to say “I forgive you”. Frau...

In 1991, researchers remotely piloted robots to search the eerie environment of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. And they found something quite unexpected on the ruined walls of the No.4 Nuclear Reactor: life . Black fungi were growing happily amidst the radiation. And I say ‘happily’ for a reason - they were growing toward sources of radiation, because they were absorbing the radiation and using it to grow.  It seems that every time we assume that life cannot survive in an environment, we are proven wrong. Bacteria live in the toxic vents of the deep ocean floor, under such high pressure that the water boils at 340°C. Extreme heat and cold, extreme pressure, the vacuum of space - you name it, it seems that life can find a way.  The radiation-hungry fungi of Chernobyl have been on my mind recently, largely because I’ve been wondering about the difference between surviving and thriving. Life, after all, is very good at surviving. It’s written into the code of living things: w...

The Ne’ilah at the End of This Book  Neilah 5780           I’m going to confess something that I think will make some of you annoyed with me. I’m sort of banking on the fact that it’s late into the fast and that you won’t have the energy to boo me away from the shtender. I’m not exactly doing teshuvah here (partaking in repentance), because I don’t have any intention of changing.           Here’s my confession: I usually start reading a book at the end.           I know, I know. I read a lot of books, fiction and non-fiction, and I start at the end of both. In non-fiction books, I like to start in the index. I love a good index (and yes, I’m aware of how painfully nerdy that sounds). I like to see what’s going to come up multiple times and in multiple places. It’s like a taster. Oh, I see you’re going to quote Levinas and talk about the Leviathan, the giant sea-monster, right - sold! I also sometime...