Reform Judaism

Rituals for Thanksgiving
November 19, 2009

by Rabbi Phyllis Sommer
(Originally published in Ima on (and off) the Bima)

It's hard to believe that the holiday of Thanksgiving is nearly upon us. Just one more week!

Thanksgiving is such a wonderful American holiday. It's simple - say thank you for the blessings in life and share a meal with those you love.

But often, the meal takes over, stress of family and needing a "picture perfect" celebration cause a little fraying at the edges. Creating an atmosphere of gratitude can be tricky when you're just trying to keep your 3-year-old from pulling the tablecloth off the table, don't you think?

I have created 3 different Thanksgiving services, based loosely on the idea of the Passover seder. After all, one good holiday centered around the table deserves another, doesn't it?

Filed Under: Holidays | Jewish Living | Youth and Family Life

Biennial Photo Contest: Congratulations to the Winners!
November 18, 2009 (3 Comments)

Our contest yielded some fantastic entries: photos that truly captured the spirit and excitement of the Biennial and the beautiful city of Toronto.

After sorting through over 400 entries, our web team and staff from URJ Books & Music voted... and here are the winners! A big THANK YOU to everyone who participated and shared their images.

Grand prize: Steve Medwin wins a Flip digital camcorder for "Torah Service"

Second prize: W Zimmerman wins a signed copy of Tina Wasserman's new cookbook Entree to Judaism for his entry, "Kippah Collage"

Runners-up: Joy Weinberg. Ros Schwartz, Emily Goodstein, Kate Bigam, and Emilia Diamant will also receive prizes.

See their photos and the slideshow of all entries below...

Filed Under: Community | Jewish Living

Beyond Pita & Falafel: Sustainable Eating in Israel
November 17, 2009
Miriam Farber is currently living in Jerusalem and studying in the Year Program at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies. She is an alumna of Eisner Camp and NFTY. To read more about Miriam's time in Israel, visit her blog at http://tovahhaaretz.blogspot.com.

(Originally posted at RACblog)

A few months before I left to spend this year studying in Jerusalem at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, I brainstormed a list of all the things I was looking forward to enjoying once I arrived in Israel...most of which was food. Falafel, shwarma, shoko b'sakit (chocolate milk in a bag), chocolate bars filled with pop rocks, the fruits and vegetables of Machane Yehuda, Jerusalem's open-air market. So much of what I love about Israel is connected to its foods.

In the almost three months since I've been living in Jerusalem, the ways I connect to Eretz Yisrael through eating its food have moved beyond junk food and street food, to incorporating my Jewish social justice values in the way I cook and eat in Israel, through a CSA share (community-supported agriculture) and the Tav Chevrati.

Filed Under: Israel | Jewish Living | Social Action

Galilee Diary: Jewish identity/Israeli identity
November 17, 2009

by Marc Rosenstein
(Originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Galilee Diary)

Take your son," - "Which son?"
"Your only son," - "Each is the only son of his mother."
"The one you love," - "I love them both."
"Isaac."
-Midrash Genesis Rabbah 39, on Genesis 22:2

The other day I observed a Bible class in the regional high school at Kibbutz Sasa, in a gorgeous setting in the mountains of the Upper Galilee. This is a relatively small high school (about 350) and serves a number of non-Orthodox communities in the region. The classes tend to be small; there were only about 15 ninth graders in the lesson I visited, but the levels of interest and knowledge were pretty heterogeneous: there were some kids (mostly boys) who sat slumped in their seats and seemed to be working at demonstrating how uninvolved they were (one boy either fell asleep or pretended to do so, forcing the teacher to wake him up), while others participated actively, answering and asking questions as the teacher reviewed with them the dramatic narrative of Abraham's almost-sacrifice of Isaac. The teacher was dynamic and energetic, and worked at trying to get the students to think about the problematic nature of this story.

Filed Under: Israel

Songs of the Season
November 17, 2009 (1 Comment)

by Larry Kaufman

When JanetheWriter reminded her friends on Facebook, 'tis the season to be satiated with the songs of the season, I promised her I would tell my favorite White Christmas story.

When this happened, the United Nations had already voted for the establishment of a Jewish state in what had been the British mandate of Palestine, but the state of Israel had not yet come into being. I was a senior in high school, teaching Hebrew to the second graders at the Euclid Avenue Temple in Cleveland. As the holiday season approached, the head of the Hebrew program, Sara Palay, asked me to write a couple of songs for the faculty Chanukah party, and I complied. I have totally forgotten one of the two lyrics I penned, but I still remember most of the other one:

I'm dreaming of a green Eretz
Just like King David used to know,
Where the Negev's bloom
Dispels the gloom
That started two thousand years ago.
I'm dreaming of a green Eretz
With every candle that I light....

Filed Under: Holidays

D'var Acher: What We Want to Hear
November 16, 2009

by Eric Polokoff
(Originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Reform Voices of Torah)

Two girls from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania were nervously riding a New York City subway. They relaxed when seeing a familiar sight. Upon spotting a Chasid one whispered to the other, "'Look! A Lincoln impersonator!'" (The New York Times, "Metropolitan Diary," October 12, 2009).

It's easy to make mistakes. Sometimes we see what we want to see--or hear what we want to hear.

His eyesight failing, Isaac was unsure whether the son he was about to bless was his beloved Esau or Jacob. Isaac lamented: "'The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau!'" (Genesis 27:22). He dismissed what he actually heard and misled himself. Rebekah, Isaac's wife, likewise misconstrued things. Previously God had informed her "'the elder [Esau] shall serve the younger [Jacob].'" (25:23). Having overheard Isaac readying to offer Esau his innermost blessing (27:4), Rebekah wrongly feared that God's prophecy would be subverted. Enlisting Jacob's support in a scheme to present him as Esau, Rebekah tellingly mischaracterized Isaac's proposed blessing to his brother as God's (27:7).

Filed Under: Torah

D'var Torah: Hearing is Believing
November 16, 2009 (2 Comments)

by Evan Moffic
(Originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Reform Voices of Torah)

The Torah has a way of conveying great drama in concise language. As a work of literature, it also incorporates some of the most sophisticated techniques of foreshadowing and thematic coherence. We see a masterful illustration of this literary virtuosity in the opening section of this week's Torah portion.

Genesis 25:19 opens by telling us that we will learn of the descendants of Isaac―namely, Jacob and Esau, his twin sons. The first instance of foreshadowing appears in the very next verse. Rebecca, we read, is "the daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-Aram, the sister of Laban the Aramean" (25:20). This web of relationships becomes important a few chapters later when Rebecca urges Jacob to flee to her brother Laban to escape Esau (27:42-45).

Filed Under: Torah

Tragedy at Ft Hood and its Aftermath: A First-Person Account
November 13, 2009 (1 Comment)

We thank Sylvia, a Reform Jewish lay leader and physician/psychiatrist at Ft. Hood, for sharing this letter with RJ.org and our readers.

Dear family and friends,

Most of you by now have heard that though I work at Ft Hood, I am fine and I thought I would send you an update as I have not had much time to write to you.

I am still fine though a little tired after a day of being on call at the hospital for 11 hours. I think it helps that I have only been at Ft Hood a short time. I do know Major Hasan, as his office was not too far from mine and we often crossed paths. I think I am mostly sad, not only for the people shot and their families, but for Major Hasan as well. I am not sure he meant to survive, and now his life will be forever marked by this one horrific deed. It will be so difficult to remember the good he has done, his need for understanding and gentleness.

I think each and everyone of us, given the correct circumstance, could kill others as we each pray that we will never find ourselves in that place.

Many of my colleagues are furious, others still numb, some keep themselves so busy they have no time to think - but it will eventually catch up with them. Ironically, I was in a hospital classroom that was so interior we never heard the alarms on post -- and we were learning PMDB (prevention and management of disruptive behavior). We had reached the part of the class to manage combative people (without weapons thank you - if weapon, RUN!!) which used to be called "take down" but was referred to as "we no longer call it a take down" and it has been renamed "therapuetic containment". We were startled when people suddenly showed up telling us we had to hurry up and finish or end the class. They removed the removable walls and told us there had been a disaster code for mascal (mass casualties). As things unfolded, those with access to a TV knew more than we did.

Filed Under: Community | Jewish Living

Rabbi Yoffie on the Forward 50
November 12, 2009 (2 Comments)

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, recently made it into the Forward 50, The Jewish Daily Forward's list "of the men and women who are leading the American Jewish community into the 21st century." About Rabbi Yoffie, the Forward says:

Rabbi Eric Yoffie is no stranger to boos. But that's because the president of the Union for Reform Judaism isn't content with preaching to the choir. A decade ago, Yoffie was booed briefly when he argued for "legal guarantees" for gay couples in an address at the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. In October, Yoffie garnered a few more boos, this time from Jewish doves at J Street's national conference as he assailed the U.N. inquiry into the Gaza conflict. "Richard Goldstone should be ashamed of himself," Yoffie said to the audible disagreement of some of the assembled. (Yoffie knew he would be facing a tough crowd; writing in the Forward 10 months before, he had labeled "morally deficient" and "appallingly naïve" a J Street statement criticizing Israel's military campaign in Gaza.) But Yoffie also directed his fire at targets more agreeable to his audience, criticizing Jewish groups that "have their heads in the sand" when it comes to recognizing the urgency of achieving a two-state solution. Whether scolding doves or hawks or skewering Israeli leaders or American Jewry's machers, the 62-year-old Yoffie doesn't pull his punches. In the process, he has given voice to an American-Jewish middle that is simultaneously critical of the West Bank settlement movement and fiercely protective of Israel.

Others on the list include familiar names: Jerry Silverman, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America (formerly United Jewish Communities), and Michael Oren, Israeli ambassador to the U.S., both spoke at the URJ's 70th Biennial Convention last week (live blog and video here!), and David Axelrod, Senior Adviser to President Obama, was a keynote speaker at the RAC's Consultation on Conscience in April (video here!). As the Forward notes, Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street, dialogued with Rabbi Yoffie at J Street's first national conference in late October, and Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service, is a close friend and colleague of the RAC's Rabbi David Saperstein - they spearheaded a fast for Darfur together earlier this year. And Sarah Lefton, founder and producer of G-dcast.com, coordinated Rabbi Saperstein's animated narration of Shoftim in August!

There are plenty of other recognizable names and a lot of up-and-coming ones on the Forward 50. What do you think of the selections? Who else would you have included? read MORE

Filed Under: Jewish Living