Rabbi Dan Ornstein - Lessons at the Clark
The Clark Art Museum once hosted an exhibition of the works of the great French artist Jacques Louis David, whose magnificent scenes chronicled the French revolution and the reign of Napoleon...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein - To Speak the Truth, or not?
At a recent writing workshop I attended, I read a short, painful piece about the illness and death of a high school friend to my fellow writers. For some time since writing the piece, I have been...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: Springsteen Raised a Cain
Bruce Springsteen stands out almost without equals among the musicians who touch my soul. I rarely regret his outsized melodies, gritty voice, and emotionally explosive poetry that explore working...
View ArticleDan Ornstein: At The Seder - Giving A Voice To The Voiceless
Each Passover season for the past twenty one years, the Jewish residents of our region's group homes for developmentally disabled adults have been coming to our synagogue for a model Seder, or Passover...
View ArticleDan Ornstein: Buying Two Stairways To Heaven
A few months ago as we drove to an appointment, one of my daughters and I bonded around the British rock band, Led Zeppelin's 1971 classic, "Stairway To Heaven." With some uninterrupted time and the...
View ArticleDan Ornstein: Anxiously Remembering to Live
A half-hour north of Albany outside the town of Stillwater you will find the Still Point Interfaith Retreat Center, in my opinion, one of the Capitol District's most beautiful and serene rural...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: Searching For Khaled
I was a twenty-one year old junior in college when I met Khaled Nusseibeh. We were both undergraduates at Columbia University in New York thirty years ago, and my memories of him and our brief...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: A New Internet Idea: Google Divine Images
Below is my imaginary letter to Sergei Brin, the co-founder and owner of Google.
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: My Masterpiece
She walks up to me after morning services, her face uplifted and bright. “I wanted to let you know about some great news I got from my son,” she grins. Those few moments after morning worship before...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: “Saying Grace” Over Grace After Meals
Moving from New York City to Raleigh, North Carolina upon ordination was my first serious foray out of a somewhat insular northeastern cocoon and into “real” America. I was not exactly sheltered until...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: The Bricks Of Empowerment
The Passover ritual of the seder meal helps its participants to relive the Israelites’ terrifying transition from slavery to freedom in ancient Egypt. At the seder, eating the unleavened bread called...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: The Noise Which Brings Quiet
What I always notice about water tumbling from a cliff or gurgling downstream is the way the noise from its rush makes everything near it sound much quieter. Perhaps it is because I am in the...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: Wise Blood
Several weeks ago, as I planned my overly ambitious summer reading list, I came across my son’s copy of Flannery O’Connor’s famous first novel, Wise Blood. Contemplating whether or not to read the...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: Chickens
From my late adolescence until recently, I was an ambivalent vegetarian. My gastronomic relationship with the succulent flesh of cows, sheep and chickens was mostly one of respectful abstinence,...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: The Mosquito
I hate mosquitoes, having endured my share of sleepless nights itching from their bites and being startled by the maddening drone of their speeding wings. I reserve my greatest antipathy for those...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: The Art Of Two Grandmas
At 78 years old, Grandma Moses became an accomplished primitivist folk painter. From that advanced age until her death at 101, she famously chronicled the American rural experience with an...
View ArticleRabbi Dan Ornstein: Frozen Poetry
Throughout my neighborhood, the icicles hang down from the eaves of the roofs like colonies of bats clustered along the walls of caves. Emerging from the heavy cover of melting and re-freezing snow,...
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