Thoughts from Rabbi Lee Moore This article is from the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah Blog Chesed is often translated as loving-kindness, but I prefer the term Grace. Chesed denotes a kind of expansiveness that we often do associate with love. Where there is a willingness to open, a willingness to accept, a willingness to allow what was previously wrong be OK –Chesed breaks through. This kind of breakthrough feels like love in the sense that Chesed provides a truly unconditional milieu where connections are forged and closeness happens beyond what one might have thought was possible. We see Chesed at work when we reach the edge of what is possible, and then realize that we can actually go farther, expand our horizons, generate new ideas, forge new connections, embrace new ways of being, and discover new places to be. A realm of opportunity and growth, Chesed displays the kind of love that the world naturally provides, even though the world may not ‘deserve’ it. For this reason, Rabbi Ebn Leader has emphasized birth as a key metaphor for this symbol-cluster. At birth, a being has done nothing to merit its coming into this world. It is freely created with no […]
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