PURIFICATION RITES

What cleaning our homes is really all about By Elissa Strauss         I like housework and I find it satisfying. I get a frisson of joy from fluffing my pillows, or watching the bottom of the bathtub gleam like a pearl. Making the bed is a more powerful stimulant than my morning

PRIESTLY SUBTEXTS

An actor explores how to announce a plague, or its purge By Zvi Sahar And he that owneth the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, It seemeth to me there is as it were a plague in the house. Leviticus 14:35   Our most secure and safe place is our home. Between its four

THE HEALING OF THE HOUSE

A dialogue with Leviticus 14, Verses 33 to 53 By Ruby Namdar               Leviticus: And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, When ye be come into the land of Canaan, which I give to you for a possession, and I put the plague of leprosy in a

OPEN THE GROUND

A new song about mothering in the wild by Alicia Jo Rabins   A note from LABA fellow Alicia Jo Rabins about her song: I am interested in internal wildness, emotional wildness, the secret corners of ourselves we try endlessly to tame – though they may be kept secret even from those closest to us.

WILD AT HEART

Cain and Abel and Us by Karen Loew             Mountain meadows are fields. So are rolling prairies, and farmers’ plots.  In the Biblical imagination, these grassy, open spaces are places of wildness, where the unexpected can happen. (Think of the untamed forest in Grimms’ Fairy Tales.)  In Genesis, fields are

CAIN AND ABEL IN THE GARDEN OF ROCK AND ROLL EDEN

Creating love out of the broken pieces by Stephen Hazan Arnoff In “Adam Raised a Cain,” Bruce Springsteen explains what happens when children inherit the burdens of a father whose pain trumps his ability to love: In the Bible Cain slew Abel and East of Eden he was cast You’re born into this life paying

HOW WE GOT BACK TO THE WILD

Cain, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a trip up the Alps by Elissa Strauss             For centuries the Swiss Alps were nothing more than an inconvenience for travelers. They were something to skirt, a sign that it was time to veer left or right because carrying on forward simply wasn’t worth

GATEWAY TO THE WILD

Freedom and its discontents by Basmat Hazan and Ruby Namdar               Ruby:  The tale of Cain and Abel, describing the first murder in human history, happens in an open field. Do you think the field location carries a special meaning? Basmat:  Yes – the field is not just the