The Velveteen Rabbi

The Velveteen Rabbi wrote a nice account of my recent talk at the URJ on dreams.
She begins:

After services there were a series of study luncheons; I went to Dream Interpretation from Genesis through the Rabbis, a talk by Rodger Kamenetz (author of eight books, among them my perennial favorite The Jew in the Lotus). I didn't have my computer with me, so I wasn't able to transcribe it, but I jotted a few notes down on paper. It's simplistic, he said, to assert that Judaism is purely a religion of the word; instead, "Judaism is a religion of the struggle between the word and the image, between the interpretation and the dream."

The question at the heart of his talk -- and at the heart of his next book, due next year -- is "what happened to the revelation dream?"

You can read the rest here: http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2005/11/urjbiennial_sha_1.html

It's fine to be a religion man

In the NY TImes, Thursday May 10, in a story about six accused in a terrorist plot.
"It's fine to be a religion man," said Murat Duka, 55, a distant relative of the defendants and the first of about 200 Dukas to move to the Northeast, arriving in 1975 to work as a roofer. "But if you get too much to the religion, you get out of your mind and you do stupid things."