Writing, Editing & Creative Media Consulting
Posts tagged prayer
God, Prayer & No Traffic from San Diego to Los Angeles
010 years ago
I’d love for this to be an instructional story about how to effectively request and obtain Divine intervention that yields a traffic-free journey between cities in Southern California. It’s not. But the trip between San Diego and Los Angeles did provide me with a fascinating experience of gratitude that wasn’t quite prayer, and yet, wasn’t NOT prayer. As it happened, I knew I had to write about it.
Luckily, one of my clients, ELI Talks (who is hosting FREE live, TED-style talks in NYC next week – see this link for all details and registration info), provided the inspiration with an online conversation on God that had me asking some questions about prayers and where they go, once uttered.
The result of that process of questioning is this piece, “Got God? Thoughts on God from a Sometimes-Theist,” which appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy this past Tuesday.
An excerpt:
Driving back from a social media training in San Diego to Los Angeles before the High Holidays, I felt something move through me. I turned down the radio and began to speak words aloud. “I am grateful,” I began, adding simple phrases until they became sentences of gratitude. Spontaneous, uncomplicated gratitude, so large that I had to speak it aloud even with no audience to listen and applaud, hadn’t happened to me a lot in my life. It sounded like prayer, albeit (my inner writer scolded) a not-so liturgically or poetically-compelling one.
But who was I talking to? God? My ancestors? A muse? Or, as many say in California, “the energy of the universe”? It felt like I had written an important letter, but had failed to address the envelope, or was sending to an email address that had been discontinued. Who would even hear this expression of thanks, this gratitude for things ranging from family to the completely appreciated lightness of traffic, from the laughter I received during my presentation to feeling the sunshine on my arm as I drove? Where was God? And did it matter? Or was it important to express the gratitude regardless of whether or not it was directed at anyone (or Anyone)?
Read the entire piece at eJewishPhilanthropy.com. And as always, please feel free to share any feedback…
“Disconnect to Connect” – Unplugging for the Sabbath
014 years ago
The Jewish Standard recently asked for my comments about whether people are too technology-reliant these days, and how it can impact Jewish connections and community.
People first used e-mail, for example, to keep in touch with others they wouldn’t otherwise reach, Kustanowitz said.
“It was a way to mass-produce these kinds of communications that were still about continuing a relationship and adding value to a relationship,” she said.
Such developments have led to what Kustanowitz called an over-reliance on technology, without a sense of deliberation or thought. Just as Jews are supposed to have a certain amount of kavanah, intent, when they pray, she said, so, too, should people have a sense of kavanah when sending out e-mail and posting to social networking Websites.
To read the entire article, visit the Jewish Standard online.