In the midst of our wreckage that I speak to you, both as a Jew and as a New Orleanian, because survival is not just a matter of urban planning, or of financial aid, or willfulness. It is something deeper. It is of the soul.

According to Jewish tradition, the upcoming festival of Shavuot is the anniversary of the giving of the Torah and the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Oddly though, we find no clear link in the Bible between the Shavuot festival and the giving of the Torah.

When tragedy, illness and accidents occur, our worldview morphs immediately. Stability is shaken as reality turns upside down. The Omer says we must go slowly.

I started my journey in my 20s in Jerusalem. I didn't know anything about spirituality. I wanted to have answers. I wanted to "do it right." So I learned for a full 10 years. Along the way, I acquired a lot of knowledge. But I was so busy fitting in that I didn't notice that I had departed from myself.

On Shavuot night, thousands of Jews will place learning at the center of Jewish life, encountering texts and ideas late into the night, across Jewish practices and ideologies. What does it mean to take Jewish learning into the year?

Instead of fighting over the different forms of prayer, let us pray over the different forms of fighting, and ask that we reunite as one, with our hearts and ears, in respect and in dignity.

You would think people would get excited about mass prophecy, but alas, there's no denying: Passover, the holiday of the Exodus, is way more popular than Shavuos, when we received the Torah. Why is it that we are more attracted to drama than to enlightenment? The solution is cheesecake.

So many of us are in constant motion, hurtling down the street with smartphone in hand, running from work to social lives to home, running from north to east to south and back again, chasing a truth of some sort and not finding it -- and, perhaps, wondering why we're not hearing God's voice more often than we do.

The children's classic "The Runaway Bunny" might seem an odd place to begin a theological reflection. But for a child who has ever tested the strength of a parent's love, this story offers both reassurance and challenge.

Quite often we find new meaning and strength where we least expect it. Quite often it lies waiting for us to discover. We simply have to look within ourselves.

We walked through the wilderness with eyes wide shut. Instead of neglecting the lessons of Bemidbar, perhaps -- in an age of questionable leadership -- we need to read it more slowly and carefully and pay better attention to the landscape.

Our Sages tells us that the truly rich man is the man who is content with what he already has. "Searching for Sugar Man" reminds us that it is who we are that give us our identity, not what we possess.

Jewish prayer begins with kavanah -- intention. It gives meaning to our rituals of marriage and birth and death. It inspires us to perform a mitzvah on a more conscious and ultimately more rewarding level. It lies at the heart of Jewish devotional life.

The whole purpose of the covenant at Sinai is to create a society that observed the sabbatical year. It is in a land where Shmita is observed that human beings will learn to respect the Earth herself, by remembering that none of us can own her.

If God is so Great, why can't He just create a world without any pain whatsoever? I don't want people to stop talking to God. I'm not even angry at God for something terrible like cancer. I just want people to think.

Does allegiance to Jewish memory subordinate compassion toward others or elevate it? Does commitment to peoplehood mean devotion and solidarity with our own before all others or alongside them? Both voices sound in tradition, and they are both Jewish.

The current focus of many synagogues on maintaining and acquiring new members suggests a narrow message -- namely, that someone is joining an organization that they can easily "unjoin."

The human experience is not always pretty. Sometimes it's very tragic and difficult. Lag BaOmer is a day of joy that stands out in a time of sadness. It is a day that six years ago we forced ourselves to leave our broken hearts behind and participate in The Great Parade.

Violent deaths should never happen. But when we are witnesses to such evil, we must engage even more fully with the work of perfecting the world.

Why is Cannabis smoking identified with the secret number 420? Once, when I was young, I looked answers in the Hebrew Bible and mystical tradition.

While we cannot erase the problematic verses about homosexuality from the Torah, we can classify them as teachings that actively negate fundamental principles of Torah, and so are no longer to be accepted as "holy" -- artifacts of the human limitations of our ancestors' quest for holiness.

The Boston Marathon of 2013 ended tragically, but the marathons of our lives must continue. Monday's finish line must become today's starting line.

As our nation reels and begins to recover from this week's attacks, our religious traditions can offer wisdom and comfort. Here are five primary sources from the Jewish canon. I hope you find some of them helpful in your own grieving and processing.

The loss of life and the sheer violence of this premeditated act are unfathomable but the best tool we have to process and deal with this is our faith and the power of prayer.

The ability to experience the same thing over and over again and yet to feel as if one is seeing it for the first time is a poetic sensibility. This is the core theme of "Big," a comedy that makes a serious comment about being an adult but seeing the world from the perspective of a child.