Author Archives: kherzogcohen

My colleague and dear friend Rabbi Nicole Luna recommended Earth Prayers, a book that can easily fit in your coat pocket. I share this beautiful Chinook blessing — the refrain, “Teach us, and show us the way” is an apt message as preparation for Shabbat begins. The Chinook people lived just south of here, alongContinue reading “Teach us, and show us the way”

…because Jews have faced the threat of extinction on account of radically evil, human acts, Jews have a distinctive vantage point from which to speak about the destruction that humans now inflict on God’s creation…to protect God’s world from further abuse by humans is a Jewish moral obligation. —Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Judaism and Ecology Just downContinue reading “Down the Road”

I took this close-up of a favorite old Western Red Cedar, which stands on the edge of a gully, reaching up higher than the eye can see, on a local loop trail (Ludlow Falls). The local loop trail in three acts: the first alone, the second with my photographer mother as my coach, the thirdContinue reading “Through our inner artist’s lens”

The way we stand you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the sun. See how we lean together in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another. HowContinue reading “Edge after Edge”

And I thought over again My small adventures As with a shore-wind I drifted out In my kayak And thought I was in danger, My fears, those small ones That I thought so big For all the vital things I had to get and to reach. And yet, there is only One great thing, TheContinue reading “Look at the Trees”

After days of counting up and planning we’ve arrived. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that we made our way to the place where Michael and I stood under the chuppah almost thirteen years ago as the holiday of Shavuot began, a sacred day of standing under the chuppah with God at Sinai. Michael andContinue reading “The path to boundless love”

Photo by Jane S. Herzog, my mom. As part of my sabbatical practice, I intend to shadow her in the Washington forests, the lush Olympic Peninsula pathways and the stark fields of clear-cut logging.

(This poem, by Billy Collins, is magnificent; photo credit: Winn Fuqua) He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood, the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft. I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness. But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads I see him sinking behind stands of winter treesContinue reading “The Man in the Moon”

by Kimberly Herzog Cohen (inspired by a poem written by my teacher, Rabbi David Stern) It’s Blursday And cups of coffee pile in the sink. Shoulders crunched, my Omer counter chimes, A beckoning call to Close windows Extract ear pods Declare recess for Zoom school on the second floor. The door opens, All before andContinue reading “Ode on the Omer: In a Pandemic”