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This week on The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman explores the Noam Elimelekh’s reading of Lech Lecha as three journeys of spiritual transformation: working with desire, refining habitual reactions, and loosening our attachment to inherited status and identity. Through an egalitarian translation and contemporary reflection, the episode traces a path toward yirah (awe), ahavah (love), and tiferet (beauty and harmony), asking how spiritual practice becomes visible in the way we listen, respond, and treat one another.

What can a sukkah teach us about meeting difficult emotions? This week, Rabbi Ben Newman shares a simple practice: let the story rest, enter the feeling, and notice what unfolds. Alongside an interpretive reading of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), we explore Sukkot, Buddhist insights into impermanence, and the possibility of meeting our changing lives with curiosity and openness.

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman revives Riffing with the Rabbi with longtime friend Marcia Salter, joined along the way by Rabbi Shoshana Leis, for a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to truly listen—to one another, to uncertainty, and to the “still, small voice.” Together they explore truth and perspective, conflict and communication, Hillel and Shammai, Elijah, Kabbalah, and the difficult discernment between compassion, boundaries, and action. It’s an unscripted spiritual riff on how deeper listening might help us hear what is emerging between us—and within us.

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, I read “September, Both/And,” a reflection from my book 52 Gates: Reflections on Living. September carries its own kind of wisdom: the light softens, the leaves begin to turn, and beauty arrives alongside the knowledge that everything changes. This piece sits inside that tension—the strange human capacity to feel gratitude and grief at the same time, to love what is here while mourning what is broken. 52 Gates is now available as an audiobook on Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/52-Gates-Audiobook/B0H9BWHVV1 And I have 10 free Audible promo codes to give away. The first ten people who email [email protected] can get a copy for free.

In this teaching from the Degel Machaneh Ephraim, righteous judgment becomes an act of creation. Through the shofar, harsh judgment is transformed and integrated into compassion.

This week on The Neshamah Project, we explore three teachings from the Or HaChayyim on the opening words of Parashat Re’eh: “See, I place before you today blessing and curse.” These teachings unfold as a spiritual progression. First, Moses invites us to taste the deeper fulfillment of spiritual life for ourselves. Then, the Or HaChayyim draws on the Zohar’s teaching that each of us carries a nitzotz Moshe—a spark of Moses, an inner capacity to hear and recognize Torah. Finally, the word Anokhi returns us to Sinai, suggesting that the Divine Voice is still speaking and placing the choice between awakening and forgetfulness before us *hayom*—today, in each ordinary moment. Taste it. Find it within you. Choose it, again and again.

In this episode, Rabbi Ben explores two teachings from the Degel Machaneh Ephraim about how spiritual transformation unfolds. Every action becomes a stone: one act leads to another until, almost without noticing, we have built a mountain. Teshuvah, prayer, and generosity offer ways to change direction by laying down different stones. The episode also considers what happens when Torah becomes more than information—when study becomes relationship, and wisdom begins to flow like a living well from within. The question is less whether today’s practice changed your life than: What stone did you place today? Because mountains are built that way. So are souls.

Professor Shaul Magid (Harvard Divinity School) joins me for a conversation about spirituality and the political. We trace his path from the seventies counterculture into the yeshiva and Bratslav worlds of Jerusalem, his relationship with Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi — including their final encounter — and why he stands both inside and at the margins of Jewish Renewal. From there: peoplehood and what it's become, his position of counter-Zionism and what it does and doesn't claim, Korach and the friend-enemy trap, survivalism as a spiritual dead end, and ahavat chinam as a practice. We close with the tools he thinks Judaism needs for whatever comes next. Shaul's forthcoming book, The Scourge of Jewish Nationalism: Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum's Anti-Zionist Thought, comes out this August from University of California Press. Find his writing at shaulmagid.substack.com and his weekly Thursday-night podcast on Spotify.

In this episode, Rabbi Ben explores the mystery of the red heifer through the teaching of the Or HaChaim. Rather than treating mystery as a problem to solve, the Torah invites us to practice wonder, humility, and openness before realities larger than our understanding. Sometimes mystery is not the absence of truth, but the beginning of a deeper encounter with it.

This week on The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman explores three mystical commentaries on Korach—from the Moroccan kabbalists Abir Yaakov and Or HaChayim, and the Degel Machaneh Ephraim—on spiritual gifts, ego, leadership, and holy disagreement.

Rabbi Ben Newman is joined by Rabbi Shoshana Leis for a lively exploration of a Hasidic teaching on ayin and yesh—emptiness and being. Together they reflect on spiritual leadership, ego, creativity, perception, and the possibility of infusing ordinary embodied life with sacred awareness.

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben explores a teaching from the Noam Elimelech on the Menorah as a symbol of spiritual integration. At the beginning of the path, we may need many practices, disciplines, and supports. But over time, those many lights are meant to become one light: a life of deeper emunah, wholeness, and achdut. This episode reflects on how modern seekers can move from spiritual collecting toward embodied unity.

In this week’s episode of The Neshamah Project, we explore a teaching from the Noam Elimelech on Nasso about wonder, desire, and sacred participation in the world. The Torah’s phrase yafli—to make a special vow—is read through the lens of pele, wonder or miracle. The teaching reminds us that miracles are not ours to control, yet we can become vessels through which wonder moves. It also offers a powerful spiritual approach to pleasure: we are not asked to reject the physical world, but to engage it with awareness, gratitude, and holiness. Wine can lead to dullness, or it can become song, blessing, joy, and sacred presence. The question for contemporary seekers is simple and profound: does our desire numb us, or does it awaken us? When refined, pleasure becomes practice, and longing becomes a path back to the Infinite.

A teaching from R' Elimelekh of Lezhinsk, Noam Elimelekh, on BaMidbar, Numbers 1:1, 2:1 on humility and renewal.

This week on The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman explores a visionary teaching from the Meor Einayim, in which Shabbat becomes far more than a day of rest. The Me’or Einayim teaches that Shabbat is a foretaste of the world to come — a glimpse of a future reality in which divine awareness fills everything, even the “lowest” parts of existence. What if our moments of stopping — Shabbat, silence, meditation, music, stepping away from constant productivity — are not escapes from the world, but rehearsals for the reenchanted world that is slowly emerging? What if rest itself is preparing us to experience reality differently? Blending Hasidic wisdom, mindfulness, and contemporary reflection, this episode explores how Shabbat offers us practice for a future rooted not in endless striving, but in awareness, delight, connection, and the rediscovery of the sacred hidden within ordinary life.