RJ Blog

Next Wednesday, May 23, will be a big day for our family.

That night, my wife, Dana Gershon, the outgoing president of The Rashi School’s board of trustees, will be honored at the school’s annual dinner. Dana has been president of the board for two years and, with four daughters, all of whom are Rashi students, we spend a lot of time at 8000 Great Meadow Road in Dedham, where we’re all part of the wonderful kehillah that is Rashi. Needless to say, between meetings, classes, sports, parent-teacher conferences, plays, t’filah, and more, it’s very often where our family hangs out. Read more…

by Ruby Macsai-Goren

As a typical teenager, I do a lot of extra-curricular and academic activities, attend high school, and spend lots of time with my family and friends.

However, I spend minimal to no time learning about Israel. I know very little about Israel; my knowledge is extended to what I have learned from my years in Hebrew school and what I know from my Middle Eastern History class.

While I have had the limited opportunity to learn about Israeli politics, I have no idea what the culture and land itself is like.

I am incredibly excited to travel with NFTY to Israel to learn all about Israeli culture, people, climate, land, terrain, and many more things that I would never be able to truly understand without visiting Israel. Visiting such a beautiful country is one of the things I am most looking forward to.

Additionally, I am very excited to spend time with other Jewish teens. I don’t belong to a youth group at home, so this trip will be one of the first times I am surrounded by kids my age that all share the same religious background. I am also ecstatic to make new friends, and I know my Israel trip will be a memory I will keep for the rest of my life.

I know my group will be a great team of kids. I’m sure we will have a blast traveling, hiking, camping, shopping, and learning while on this trip. I expect to learn more about Israel as a place and to get to know what life as an Israeli teen would be like. In addition, I can’t wait to find out all about the beautiful land in Israel. All in all, I am incredibly excited and cannot wait for this upcoming summer!

Ruby Macsai-Goren is a 2012 NFTY in Israel Participant from Evanston, IL.

This is the first in a series of profiles of participants who will be joining us this summer in Israel on NFTY in Israel, KESHER Taglit-Birthright Israel, and the NFTY-EIE High School in Israel. We asked people to share what they are expecting, anticipating, and most looking forward to. If you’ll be joining us in Israel this summer and would like to write for this feature on our blog, send us an email at rjisrael@urj.org!

Originally posted at Youth and College Israel Programs: The Blog

Once, a man threw a party and invited his friend Kamtza. The messenger made a mistake and delivered the invitation to the man’s enemy Bar-Kamtza. When Bar-Kamtza showed up the host tried to convince him to leave and Bar Kamtza tried to convince the host to let him stay; in the end he was forcibly evicted. He said: “Since the leaders of the community were present and didn’t intervene, I’ll get my revenge on the whole community by inciting the emperor against them.” And so he did; thus was the destruction of the Temple and the loss of our sovereignty the result of gratuitous hatred.
-Babylonian Talmud, Gitin 56a (abridged)

So who could have prevented our destruction? The messenger? The host? Bar Kamtza? The leaders? The emperor? All of the above? Read more…

About 200 Jewish activists, rabbis, and communal leaders gathered in New York City for the Jewish Organizing Institute and Network for Justice’s (JOIN for Justice) recent National Summit. At the summit, JOIN for Justice honored the URJ’s Senior Vice President Rabbi Jonah Pesner with the Tekiah Social Justice Award.

Rabbi Pesner was honored for his work as a pioneer in the field of Jewish organizing and particularly for founding Just Congregations, the URJ’s groundbreaking community organizing effort. During his 20-year career, he has engaged thousands of synagogue congregants to join together in successful campaigns for health care access, affordable housing, public education, gay and lesbian rights, and rights for nursing care workers.

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My grandfather raised three independent daughters. Long before many women worked outside the home, my mother and her sisters had careers. Until each married, they worked in the family business. One aunt went on to have her own business, another worked for aerospace division of McDonnell Douglas, and my mother spent most of her career working in the apparel industry. All were strong women who balanced family, career, and community responsibilities.

My grandfather also wanted his daughters to have access to Jewish education and to be able to participate fully in Jewish life. So, back in the 1920s, though raised in an Orthodox home, he and my grandmother joined a Reform congregation, Temple Ahavath Sholom in Brooklyn. They were active members, and my mother often spoke of her connection the temple. During their lifetimes, my mother and my two aunts were all active in their Jewish communities. They joined and supported synagogues and communal organizations.

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Over the last year, many Americans have spoke against the voter suppression laws that have swept the nation, state by state. But there are few who can speak with more passion or heart than those who actively organized, rallied and marched during the Civil Rights Movement to fight for expanded rights, including voting rights, for all. One of these leaders is Representative John Lewis (D-GA), who, 50 years ago, put his body on the line to defeat Jim Crow laws that blocked African Americans and other citizens of color from accessing the polls and exercising their rights as Americans. Read more…

There are times in which we will want to harm the innocent from the outset. And their presence and their killing is actually beneficial and helpful to us.  For example, harming the infants from the wicked king’s family, who are currently innocent; their killing helps us to harm and pain the king so that he will stop fighting us.
– Excerpt from the book “Torat Hamelech”

For some reason, when ideas are put down in a book they are given more authority. Seeing something crazy in writing makes it literature, and if it is written in Hebrew it is holy. The book I am talking about today is neither literature nor holy. It is simply evil.

In 2009, Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, who head the “Od Yosef Chai” Yeshiva, wrote a book that permits the killing of non-Jews. This book is called Torat HaMelech (The King’s Torah), and it is a manual on how Jewish law can justify hate and violence.

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As we all know (I hope!), our thirteen Reform camps offer the most inspiring Judaism our children can experience. More than 10,000 youngsters had a taste of a Reform Jewish summer in 2011, and this year’s registration numbers are even better.

I have the pleasure of serving as the Chair of the URJ Camp Harlam Council. Harlam is our camp located in the Pocono Mountains, northeast of Philadelphia. We serve nearly 1,000 campers and 225 staff each summer. Additionally, I am honored to be a Vice-Chair of the NAC, our Reform North American camping organization that has oversight for the camps. As an engaged participant in NAC events and meetings, I appreciate the benefit of ‘seeing the big picture’.

A few days ago, Director of Camps and Israel Programs Paul Reichenbach shared a  confirmation essay with the NAC community. Its author, Maura Grindle from Temple Beth Shalom in Arnold, Maryland attended our three-year old North American sports camp called 6 Points. Kids from around the world have come to 6 Points. Its success is unparalleled. Sports experts offer clinics and training expertise in a variety of sports. But 6 Points is far more than just a sports camp.  It teaches Jewish values and pride, albeit within the sports setting.

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by Rabbi Jason Rosenberg

Marriage equality has been in the news, pretty much non-stop, for a couple of days now. First, North Carolina passed Amendment 1, banning any kind of legal civil union, other than heterosexual marriage. Then, President Obama came out in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, a first for a sitting U.S. President. It has been, to say the least, a busy few days in the marriage equality world.

That makes this as good of a time as any for me to speak out in favor of marriage equality. It’s something I’ve done before, as have many of my colleagues. But, I think it’s also important to say not just why I support same-sex marriage, but why I do so as a rabbi—why I believe that LGBT equality is a religious issue.

It is, to say the least, a complicated issue. It would be an understatement to say that not all rabbis, and certainly not all clergy, support marriage equality or LGBT rights. But there are at least three interrelated reasons that make me feel compelled to not only support LGBT issues, but to do so vocally and forcefully.

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by Rabbi Stephanie Kolin

There’s a story told about East End Temple in New York City, the congregation in which I grew up. For 16 years, Rabbi Deborah Hirsch was my rabbi and rabbi to many families like mine. One day, a young boy I used to babysit, Matt, was walking with his mom; they were also members of East End Temple. They stopped for a moment on an NYC sidewalk to speak to a certain man. When the man walked away, she said to her son: “Matt, do you know who that was? That was the rabbi from Town and Village Synagogue.” And Matt replied, incredulous: “Men can be rabbis?!”

By the time I was ordained in 2006, the fight that Rabbi Sally Priesand, Rabbi Laura Geller, and others who fought to add women to the Reform rabbinate felt far behind us. As a woman, I didn’t have to argue my way in, make my case, prove myself beyond all measure. As that young boy, Matt, articulated so well, I was boringly normative by then. We can move very quickly from inconceivable to “it’s always been that way,” but it serves us well to remember the courage, passion, and perhaps above all else, imagination, required of the pioneers of a new reality to build and achieve that new reality. Forty years ago, some spectacular women felt called to imagine themselves into the unfolding story of Reform Judaism as ordained leaders of our congregations and organizations. And a new world emerged.

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