Chevre, What do the following things have in common? Sexual impropriety, harassment and rape in places ranging from the family home to the workplace to universities to whole industries to public spaces like streets and parks. Sexual abuse and molestation by priests...

Chevre, For most of us, I would guess, it’s not so hard on Thanksgiving to bring to mind many things for which we are grateful. For some of us, though, that might be a little more difficult. A recent article by Prof. David DeSteno, a psychologist teaching at...

Chevre, Reading this week’s Torah portion, Vayera, my eye was caught by something I’d never noticed before. It arises from reading two separate stories as a related pair. Story #1: God & Abraham, Sodom & Gomorrah Sodom and Gomorrah are thoroughly corrupt....

Chevre, We are the stories that we tell. And those stories are selective. We cannot recall every event. And we cannot recall every detail of every event or the telling would become a replica of the event itself, taking the same amount of time as the original. In other...

Chevre, With this post our Elul learning comes to a close. In this last post I’ll share Prof. Nussbaum’s constructive ideas. Having demonstrated the problems inherent in anger and transactional forgiveness, she offers two better alternatives. The first is...

Chevre, In part three of our Elul learning series, I’ll share Prof. Nussbaum’s critique of the usual styles, as I’ll call them, of forgiveness. Nussbaum describes these as utilizing “transactional-forgiveness.” And she rejects them for what she sees as their moral...

Chevre, In last week’s post, I presented Prof. Martha Nussbaum’s critique of anger as a force for justice. In her book Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, Nussbaum rejects anger as a motivational force, as a practical force and as a moral force in...

Chevre, A new book is out: Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness, by Jennifer Berry Hawes. It tells the remarkable story of how some survivors (and family members) of the murderous rampage at that church...