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Many Lamps, One Flame

Many Lamps, One Flame

Written by: James Nerlinger
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About this listen

Many Lamps, One Flame is a reflective podcast exploring faith, tradition, and lived experience through careful reading and thoughtful commentary.


Each week includes two streams: Reflections in the Well, longer meditations on meaning, struggle, and the human condition, and From the Scroll, weekly reflections on the Torah portion, drawn from the text and rabbinic tradition.


These episodes are written first, then spoken — unhurried, text-centered, and attentive to the quiet ways moral and spiritual redemption take shape through human action.

Copyright 2026 All rights reserved. Judaism Spirituality
Episodes
  • Ep. 5 — The Tapestry and the Tear

    Ep. 5 — The Tapestry and the Tear
    Jan 20 2026

    Every tradition is preserved through structure, and every structure eventually risks obscuring what it was meant to protect.

    This episode examines institutions not as villains, but as necessary frameworks that require discernment rather than blind loyalty or reflexive rejection. Fidelity is distinguished from preservation, and honesty from destruction.

    Repair begins where denial ends.
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    6 mins
  • Ep. 4 — What Was Never Meant to Be Outgrown

    Ep. 4 — What Was Never Meant to Be Outgrown
    Jan 20 2026

    Maturity is often mistaken for independence from obligation, mystery, or faith. This episode argues otherwise.

    Drawing on Paul’s distinction between childhood and adulthood, growth is reframed not as subtraction, but as increased responsibility—bearing more, not less. What is abandoned is not trust, but indulgence.

    Some things are not left behind. They are carried.
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    6 mins
  • Ep. 3 — Formation Before Illumination

    Ep. 3 — Formation Before Illumination
    Jan 20 2026

    This episode challenges the modern assumption that clarity is the beginning of spiritual life rather than its consequence.

    Formation is presented not as delay or deprivation, but as the necessary condition for insight that does not destabilize or distort. Illumination is treated as something that must be held, not seized.

    Capacity precedes vision.
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    6 mins
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