Quotes from Lawrence Kushner

you choose to believe what you want, and you choose to do what you do. First comes life, then comes law. You are still responsible. You cannot hide behind anything. Since when does religious tradition permit you to short-circuit any morally uncomfortable decision?

We participate in a perpetual organic conversation with our universe.

All creation is patterned according to an inner blueprint or arrangement that carries within it a genetic memory of everything that ever happens.

allowing the river of light-the deepest currents of consciousness-to rise to the surface and, without anxiety, animate our lives. We are thus blessed to return to the scriptural text of our ordinary lives and live out its dream. Not to leave life but to learn how to be fully present in it.

We seek a metaphor for holy words that will return them to us once again as an ayfz hayim, a tree of life (Prov. 3:18). One that yields heightened self-awareness and God's Word. One that permits sustained intellectual inquiry and Scripture's holiness. One that preserves clarity, but not at the expense of mystery. One whose playfulness does not dilute piety. One whose public objectivity tolerates personal intimacy. In the spiritual code words of our generation: a holy text.

If a group of people can have a psyche and think of itself as an organic being, then surely a people should also be able to dream. A series of motifs and archetypes should keep reappearing and seem to each individual dreamer, as Jung suggested, to emanate from a transcendent source.8

Recall our own recent, immediate experiences. Since dreams are often initiated by something that happened only recently, we must ask about yesterday's residue.

Pay especially close attention to the seemingly trivial details and the little discrepancies.

We must not allow embarrassment to distract attention from elements that make us uncomfortable. Disgust and dread are the sorts of feelings we frequently marshal to conceal deeper layers of our psyche.

What first occurs to us on remembering the dream/reading the text may be the most important thing.

Assume full responsibility for the dream. For "through the dream the man makes the matter his own; it is in his will, and he is responsible for it."19

We must therefore entertain the hypothesis that there is an important connection between being 'dialectical' and dreaming, just as there is between dreaming and poetry or mysticism."21

As any good teacher of dreams will tell you, you are all the people in your dream. Fritz Perls taught, "[All] the different parts, any part in the dream-is yourself, is a projection of yourself."22 And to ask why we made our story this way and not that way is to reenter our sacred text once again as living participants. We could have made it another way, but chose to cast it in this one. We must be all the parts of our dream, even the ones we don't like.

This is the great dream of which each individual dream is a personal manifestation. Dream is ontogenetic. Myth is phylogenetic. "Dreams and especially myths are a primary medium for intuitive insights into the ultimate nature of human existence . . . [they] are not restricted to ... sleep. They pertain rather to the symbolic dimension of human experience as a whole."24

Spiritual and cultural strength is measured not by rigidity or power, but by the vitality and flexibility of the response.

We should draft dogs," he said. "People would say, 'But I love my dog; I wouldn't send him to Vietnam. He might get killed.