Explore popular quotes and sayings by Erica Brown.
Last updated on December 18, 2024.
Dr. Erica Brown is the director of the Mayberg Center for Jewish Education and Leadership and an associate professor of curriculum and pedagogy at The George Washington University. Erica has a daily podcast, “Take Your Soul to Work” and is the author of twelve books on leadership, the Hebrew Bible and spirituality. Her latest book Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile (Maggid) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Council award. She has been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, First Things, and The Jewish Review of Books and wrote a monthly column for the New York Jewish Week. She has blogged for Psychology Today, Newsweek/Washington Post’s “On Faith” and JTA and tweeted on one page of Talmud study a day at DrEricaBrown. Brown was a Jerusalem Fellow, is a faculty member of the Wexner Foundation, an Avi Chai Fellow and the recipient of the 2009 Covenant Award for her work in education.
I have a principle I often invoke in class: comfortable people don't grow. Good teachers need to engage in the paradox of making students feel comfortable and uncomfortable in equal measure.
That's true of every form of literature - each writer brings new things to it because each of us is an individual.
I love lighting Shabbat candles at the onset of Shabbat. It helps me create a strong and firm demarcation of time.
In every life there is a challenge. For every challenge that I take on, if I follow through, I accomplish. When I have accomplished, then I have achieved. If I achieve, than I can proudly say I did my job well.
I love space opera, and I believe that every sub-genre has potential no matter how old it is.
Teaching is almost like an act of prayer for me. I feel that I am present at the intersection of people and ideas in a very holy way. There are not many places where successful adults can take a break from work or domestic issues and freely and safely explore their inner lives or global issues through an ethical lens.
For me, study is a divine and daily imperative, and I study a page of Talmud daily so that I am not only teaching. My teaching is constantly being fed by my learning.
For some reason, I write about crash-landed spaceships quite a lot and my wife is sick of hearing of hearing my ideas for new tales about them.
In fact, because I am very time conscious and want to make the most of every moment, I make it a practice to remove my watch before I light the candles as if to suggest that for this brief period, my life must transcend time.
If people are not safe, they will not make themselves vulnerable. If they feel too comfortable, they can become complacent or lose their curiosity. They can become intellectually lazy about what matters most.
I would advise anyone who is at the start of a rest ritual like the Sabbath, to take it slowly and grow incrementally into it. Recognize that it will be hard at first. It's a discipline but then it is a true and deep joy.
I love going to synagogue on Friday night and being swept in the melodies. Everyone seems more friendly and unburdened by the week and ready to be taken elsewhere.
If we are indeed created in God's image, then we, too, must create and then we, too, must rest.
In order to survive, the human race must defend itself.
I don't read or write SF for cutting edge ideas; I read and write it for the storytelling, and every story is new. So have I brought anything new to it? Only in so far as no-one before has written about the characters I've invented in their particular situation.
If our writing is worth anything at all, then we have to put ourselves into it.
I took to religion at about age 12; it was very hard for me to be Sabbath observant as a kid in a home which was not Sabbath observant. I think my parents thought the whole Jewish thing was a phase.