Galilee Diary: New Grain
Driving across the Jezreel Valley these days, you can't miss the biblical echoes of the landscape. On Pesach we are to eat only cereal products made from the last year's harvest, baked with no leavening – and at the same time we are to clean out completely any remnants of any grain products from the old supply.
Celebrating 40 Years of Women on the Bimah
This month, we celebrate “40 Years of Women on the Bimah,” leading up the 40th anniversary of Rabbi Sally Priesand’s historic ordination as the first female rabbi in the United States.
An Historic First: Ordaining Our Cantors
Next month may mark the 40th anniversary of women in the American rabbinate, but another historic event is taking place this weekend: On Sunday, six graduates of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion wil
Women in the Rabbinate: Equal Leaders in Our Community
The Reform Movement at Its Best
This past weekend, my wife Helene and I had a chance to see the Reform Movement at its best and got to do so while also listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra play Mozart and Ravel.
"Men Can Be Rabbis?!"
“Who’s that guy?” I asked my mom.
“He’s the rabbi,” she answered. I stared up at my mom, with a blank gaze on my face.
When I was eight years old, my family joined a synagogue for the first time.
Counting Up and Counting Down
We are four weeks into the Counting of the Omer, the period of seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot.
Galilee Diary: Sustainability II
God placed in [the heavens] a tent for the sun, who is like a groom coming forth from his chamber, like a hero, eager to run his course. His rising-place is at one end of the heaven, and his circuit reaches the other; nothing escapes his heat.
Galilee Diary: Interfaith
I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms.
Galilee Diary: Return to the city of the dead
A man is nothing but a small plot of land,
A man is nothing but the image of the landscape of his birthplace,
Only what his ear recorded when it was still fresh,
Only what his eye took in before it had seen too much,
Whatever was encountered on the dew-covered path