The Virtue of Empathy: Thoughts for Behar-Behukottai, May 16, 2015

I recently attended a daily minyan but could hardly concentrate on my prayers. What was the problem?

One of the worshipers chanted all his prayers in a loud tone of voice, generally a paragraph or two behind the hazzan. The more I tried to focus on my own prayers, the more the loud voice of this person distracted me. Instead of experiencing the prayers with a feeling of spiritual elevation, I found myself feeling annoyed, even angry.

Disruptive Innovation: Thoughts for Aharei Mot-Kedoshim, May 2, 2015

The business analyst, Clayton M. Christensen, distinguished between two types of innovations. A sustaining innovation builds on a company’s basic business by improving its products and providing better value. A disruptive innovation creates a new market that displaces earlier technologies. Sustaining innovation focuses on improving existing products; disruptive innovation moves in a new, unexpected direction that radically changes the market. Sustaining innovation is evolutionary; disruptive innovation is revolutionary.

Coercion and Freedom: Thoughts for Passover

by Rabbi Marc D. Angel

 

Some years ago, I served as scholar-in-residence on a trip to Spain and Israel sponsored by the American Friends of the Technion. The closing event  was a dinner at the Technion in Haifa. It was a week or so before Passover.  One of the Israeli participants in the program--I believe she was a teacher or administrator of the school--noticed that I was wearing a kippah, and she came to speak with me.

Facing our Faces: Thoughts for Parashat Terumah

In his book, “Creativity, The Magic Synthesis” (Basic Books, 1976), the late psychiatrist Dr. Silvano Arieti discussed the process of creating a work of art. The artist perceives something directly and then attempts to interpret it through imagery. Various processes are at work. “Preceding thoughts and feelings about an object affect the way he perceives it directly. In other words, past experiences of the object—everything he knows and feels about it—influence the way he sees that object” (p. 194).