Jane:

We have been blessed with an extraordinarily beautiful country. I hope gas prices ease off to the point that more people can take advantage of travel at ground level, especially family trips in the summer with the kids.

You mention a number of songs with foreign titles. Have you found a good source for American Jewish music? For those of us not fluent in Hebrew, it is nice to have songs that we can understand - songs with meaning like Rock of Ages (Marc Cohn has a really great recording on CD) or other modern songs. There used to he hundreds of American hymns in Reform hymnals, but these have been deleted by NY in favor of more minor key Middle Eastern or Eastern European type music which, unfortunately is all Greek to most of us.

Reform Jewish music is one of the best parts of Reform Judaism. Part of the reason it is so fantastic is that it continues to change. MB, if you don't know the music, then you need and are obligated to learn more about it. Take a look at some of the new songs that have come out recently by the likes of Rick Recht, Danny Nichols, Julie Silver, and others. They are great and most of them do sing in English MB.

dcc;
Thanks for the tip.

William:
Like it or not, Hebrew is a foreign language to most Reform Jews and always has been (clearly it is the language of many Israeli Reform Jews). Other than rabbis and Hebrew teachers, only a tiny handful of Reform Jews could carry on an intelligent conversation with God to save their soul if they had to do it in Hebrew. Not many more Conservative or Orthodox Jews here are fluent either. We force our kids to spend years of afternoons and nights and weekends studying Hebrew, and at the end they only have the limited ability to pretend to read it, like a performer in an opera singing in a script in a foreign language. Isn't there anything with real value that our children would benefit more from than performance language classes?

And no, I don't have an obligation to learn Hebrew any more than my parents, grandparents or great grandparents did. They were devoutly religious Jews and chose instead to a course of study that focused on substance, on things which would inspire and guide them in their daily lives at work, at home and at play. They opted to enrich their lives with useful knowledge, the kind which improves our community, our nation and the world. They chose wisely.