RJ Blog

Rabbi Michael Namath, Program Director here at the RAC, tells a story to our L’Taken students: One day, as a few people were walking by the riverside, they saw babies floating down the river.  Several people jumped into the river and started pulling the babies out to try to save them, but more and more babies kept coming faster and faster. One of the men jumped out of the river and someone screamed to him, “Where are you going?”  He said, “I am going to see who is putting the babies in the river and try to stop them.” (Version [...]

by Barbara Lerman-Golomb The year I was applying for college, the essay prompt for the application to the University of Pennsylvania was “No man is an island” by the poet, John Donne. I didn’t end up applying to U of P, mainly because to me, going away to college meant leaving Philadelphia and attending a school in New England. Besides, I prefer free writing and the idea of expounding on a prompt felt too restricting. I hadn’t thought much about that poetic line until Hurricane Sandy hit. Suddenly, I became acutely conscious of the fact that I live on an island. [...]

The Jewish community tends to think of October as the month to recuperate from the High Holy Days, but October is also the National Mental Health Awareness Month. Mental health and mental health coverage are critical issues for millions of Americans, but there are a number of overlooked issues including the serious mental health concerns confronting the LGBT community. These issues may be frequently neglected in mental health discussions because of the risk of suggesting that queerness is, in itself, a mental illness or necessarily leads to mental illness. Most famously, the American Psychiatric Association listed “homosexuality” as a mental [...]

As Jews, the concept of caring for the welfare of others seems to be a given. We are encouraged to give tzedakah and stay aware of the global crises that pervade our world.

by Michael Sarna Coming off of a semester that I was less then satisfied with this past spring, I knew that I wanted to try to apply myself over my summer break as opposed to merely do some run-of-the-mill activity. Having burned out of the Camp Counselor game, I knew that I wanted to take on a new type of challenge; one that would not only be interesting to me, but would also help to define my career aspirations and really push me in the right direction for what I want to do with the remainder of my college experience. [...]