The Neshamah Project

What happens when a quarrel becomes the place we live? Rabbi Ben Newman explores Hasidic readings of Isaac’s well, Rehovot—“wide places”—as an opening into expanded awareness, compassion, inner peace, and listening. Alongside teachings from Me’or Einayim, Maor VaShemesh, Toldot Yaakov Yosef, and Sefat Emet, his poem “A Space for Us” brings these sources into everyday practice: feeling our feet, loosening rehearsed responses, and giving the people we love room to surprise us.

How does a life of holiness transform us, and what do we mourn when someone we love dies?

In this episode of The Neshamah Project, Rabbi Ben Newman explores the Or HaChayim’s mystical reading of Sarah’s death in Genesis 23:2. Through the names Kiryat Arba and Hebron, the commentary connects the body’s four elements with the power of sacred action and devekut—attachment to the Divine—to transform our embodied lives.

The teaching then turns to the struggles through which we grow in holiness and the different dimensions of Abraham’s grief: the pain of losing Sarah and the loss of the goodness and presence she brought into the world. Together, these reflections open a conversation about spiritual practice, mortality, and the enduring influence of a person’s life.

Three teachings from the Degel Machaneh Ephraim on Vayera offer practical ways to bring Jewish mysticism into daily life. Rabbi Ben Newman explores the healing power of presence, the sacred roots of love and awe, and the practice of working skillfully with our emotions. Reflections on Hasidic wisdom and mindfulness, with a question to carry into your day: “Am I working with this middah, or is this middah working me?”

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.