Rabbi 360

Last week we marked the festival of Shavuot, the holiday when we celebrate the story of Sinai–the revelation of the Torah by God through Moses to the Israelites. This holiday affirms the foundational idea of covenant and the centrality of Torah and sacred text in defining our relationship with each other and to the divine.…

Today is a minor, minor holiday with a major, major meaning. Today is Pesach Sheni, but you wouldn’t know it unless you looked at a Jewish calendar. It is a holiday so minor that there is no observance. (Well, there is a minor omission from the traditional weekday morning service, but that’s it.) Pesach Sheni…

For the past few weeks I’ve been teaching a Judaism and Baking class to our TBH kids as part of our youth education program. This year we shook up our education program, and so rather than year-long classes based on grade, our kids can sign up for quarterly multi-age electives based on topic. I taught…

Last week I made a difficult decision, a strange decision, and a good decision. And they were all the same decision. For the past year and a half I have been participating in the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at our local hospital, Providence St. Peter. CPE is an accredited training program that trains chaplains–spiritual…

Sometimes when I teach about the origins of Judaism, I draw the distinction between “actual history” and “mythic history.” The mythic history is what we are reading right now in the Torah cycle: the stories of our ancestors, Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, who journey from Mesopotamia to Canaan. Their grandson Jacob moves the…

Do you remember the Highland Park shooting? I would not be surprised if you didn’t recall the details, considering that there are so many shootings that take place in our country on a regular basis. The Highland Park shooting, in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, took place this past Fourth of July during an…

I entered into these High Holidays with excitement, and also with some trepidation, with some curiosity. Because, I didn’t know what was going to happen tonight and the days to come. Years prior I knew what to expect, the hum of the sanctuary, the excitement of return, the convergence of all of us here in…

This Shabbat ushers in the new month of Elul, which in turn ushers in the High Holiday season. Elul is the month that precedes Rosh Hashanah and the new year, and so invites us to use these next four weeks as opportunities for reflection and preparation for the spiritual work of atonement and repentance we…

Tisha B’Av is a challenging holiday for me in a number of ways. According to Jewish tradition, Tisha B’Av (“the ninth of Av”) is a day of mourning in observance of the destruction of the ancient Temples in Jerusalem and other calamities that have struck the Jewish people over the centuries. It is observed by…