The early American synagogue occasionally reflected its frontier environment. Fist fights, defending the honor of women congregants, and even duels were not unheard of. Perhaps the best known of these riotous events involved a rabbi and the president of the synagogue in Albany, New York, in 1850. And not just any rabbi, but the future founder of the American Reform Movement, Isaac Mayer Wise! The president was Louis Spanier, wealthy, charismatic, and the brother-in-law of Samuel Mayer, the chief rabbi of Hanover in northern Germany.

Just opening your door is not a mitzvah; it’s a start. What happens after the welcome is what really matters. It’s the critical difference between being tolerated and being valued – that difference is everything.

I know we have a long way to go, but for this congregation, situated in the city just a few miles from the Old Court House where the slave Dred Scott lost his case for freedom, I have hope that we are chipping away at the racism that plagues us.

In the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, the descendants of Noah come together to build a tower that would stretch so high it would reach God in the heavens.

Jewish law says we are to fast on Yom Kippur. This is based on the biblical law that on the Day of Atonement, “You shall afflict yourselves” (Lev. 23:27), which was interpreted as early as the return from the Babylonian exile as “fasting” (e.g., Isa.

When I was in first grade, a classmate asked me, “Are you Christmas or Hanukkian?” My response was, “I am more than Hanukkian. I am Jewish.”

Even at age 3, I'm told, I tugged on the pant leg of the temple president when he passed me by while walking around

I wore a button-down, tea-length peach dress with shoulder pads. My mother convinced me that it looked elegant, and that the matching peach tights really completed my look. Yes, this is admittedly one of the first things I remember about my own bat mitzvah.

I

Last Wednesday, the Washington Post wrote about the topics most clergy members discuss from the pulpit as a way to illustrate that the issues most associated with communities of faith - reproductive rights and LGBT rights/same-sex marriage, due much in part to

The events of my son’s bar mitzvah day don't begin to tell the story of how Max arrived at that moment. Nor do they tell the story of the special connection that he, and we, have developed with the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, and the gratitude we feel toward