Jay Michaelson

Jay Michaelson is a columnist for the ForwardZeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (which he co-founded in 2002), and Reality Sandwich magazines, and the executive director of Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture & Spirituality.  He recently returned (in February 2009) from five months of silent meditation retreat in Massachusetts and Nepal.  Jay is the author of God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual Practice (2007), Another Word for Sky: Poems (2008), and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (2009). A recent visiting professor at Boston University Law School, Jay has taught at Yale University, City College, Elat Chayyim, the Wexner Summer Institute, and many other institutions. Jay holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from Hebrew University, where he currently is pursuing his Ph.D., as well as a J.D. from Yale and B.A. from Columbia.

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In Defense of Spiritual Vulgarity

The other day, I was having lunch with a yoga-teacher friend of mine who, after…

Bound Astarte Talkatively Tallness–Recent Spam Poetry

Perhaps you’ve noticed that a lot of the email spam we receive every day has,…

Monotheism and the Spirits of Nature

Recently, on a trip to South Korea, I was moved to tears at a rock…

Rethinking Jewish Spirituality

Jewish spirituality is, in large part, in the state-change business.  At the better synagogues-i.e., the…

Peoples of the Blog

By now, we’ve all heard the hype: Web 2.0 is changing the very notion of…

The Trouble with Business

When I graduated from college, my enemy was clear: the man in the grey flannel…

The Dream of the Magician

"You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is."…

A Jewish Perspective on the Jhanas, Part Two

Part II: Is there God in the Jhanas? So what about that “Is“–that sense of…