Comfort in the Unknown, Faith in the Other
When we celebrate a Bar Mitzvah in our synagogue community, we like to offer, in this weekly email a summary of the teaching offered by the young person in our community who celebrated becoming Bar Mitzvah. This past week it was Xander Segal, who, according to his mother Verna, is the fourth generation in his family to […]
The Sacredness of Our Democracy • Rising Antisemitism
I have long loved election day. The act of casting one’s vote is a truly sacred one to me. Never mind that in Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania just elected its second Jewish governor in the 21st century (who shares a high school alma mater with my wife, no less: suburban Philadelphia’s pluralistic Jewish secondary day school, Jack M. […]
The Bare Holiday Landscape Ahead of Us
The dust has settled. After 20 services over a period of 30 days, 2 services every three days for a month, we’ve finally reached a period of relative calm. And then the Phillies had to go and liven things back up for us again. In all seriousness, we find ourselves in the month of cheshvan, formally […]
Chatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit 2022
So here we are to celebrate our Chatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit. In some ways, it’s a funny name to extend to this honor, to the honor of recognizing two distinguished legacies of service to our synagogue community. It’s a name that goes back centuries to the distinguished community members who were given the honor of the final aliyah of […]
Hallelujah: Breaking Open
Yom Kippur 5783 Time for another song lyric. This one comes from a song by Jewish Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen that has been, as one writer put it, “repurposed and reinvented by other artists so many times, that it [has become] a latter-day secular hymn”—and not even really all that secular. The song’s title comes […]