Posts Tagged ‘Life Lessons’
Life Beyond Politics: A Compassionate Way To Lasting Social Change
Life Beyond Politics The election is over. The results are in. Half of our country is ecstatic, and the other half is sorely disappointed, if not devastated. But we must learn to live together and talk to one another again. We’re going to have to do something we haven’t done well as a society for…
Read MorePerspective Shift: Notes from Africa on What Matters Most
In June, I spent two weeks in Tanzania with my eight-year-old son, Evan, and extended family to celebrate my brother’s sixtieth birthday. In that physically and emotionally demanding environment, I admired sides of Evan’s personality that I hadn’t seen before. And I myself experienced a perspective-shifting reprieve from the toxicity and ugliness of so much…
Read MoreA Father’s Love Knows No Bars
With Father’s Day around the corner, I’ve been thinking about a kind of love familiar to millions of men around the globe—including the nearly eight hundred thousand incarcerated men in America with children on the outside. I am reminded of the power of that bond as I listen to Kory, a 21-year-old Black man with…
Read MoreUnleashing the Power of Mandela’s Inspiration: Paving a New Way
Remembering Nelson Mandela’s Message Ten years ago this month the world lost one of its greatest moral leaders. As we close out what has been a traumatic year for so many across the globe, I’d like to pause and remember the example of Mandela, who reminds us that people can change, human beings have the…
Read MoreThe Art of Swimming in the Great Sea of Sadness
Words have failed me in recent months. As a Jew and a human, I experience the horrific bloodshed in Israel as a firehose of tragedy so overwhelming that I can’t seem to catch my breath long enough to say anything meaningful at all. Then there’s the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, tame by comparison, as if…
Read MoreGive Change A Chance: How To Grow From Life’s Challenges
Time For Change When I was in the theater world, we used to perform this improv game where, in the middle of a scene, the director would shout from the side of the stage: “Make a new choice!” If I’d been a lumberjack chopping down a tree, now I was a terrorist felling a television…
Read MoreThe Graduation Speech You Need to Hear: A Message of Hope and Inspiration
If I were giving this year’s commencement speech, here’s what I would say: Dear graduating class of 2023, You live in a perilous world. You know that as well as anybody. Your generation has lived through COVID, a broken political culture, the terror of gun violence, and the specter of nuclear war once again rearing its ugly…
Read MoreWhat Are We Really Teaching Our Kids?
I published this article in Inside Higher Ed in September 2020. Even though it addresses the crisis in education brought about by both COVID and the George Floyd tragedy, its message seems highly relevant to our current climate, as well: What or why to teach are more important considerations than how to teach if we are to…
Read MoreHow The People of Ukraine Are Living Out The Deepest Lessons of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
Pierre Bezukhov at the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace Ukraine And Russia Whenever I mention that I teach Russian literature these days, I get a weird look of surprise, confusion, or even disgust. I’m not alone. A few weeks ago a German university canceled a class on Dostoyevsky in order to make a…
Read MoreWhat Mandela Learned From War and Peace: How to Keep Hope Alive in Troubled Times
In Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela singles out War and Peace as a book that had a profound influence on him during his 27-year incarceration. He says that he returned to the novel over and over again, referring to it as his all-time favorite years later. As the world remembers December as the anniversary…
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