A Teaching on Loving Thy Neighbor as Thyself from Our Bat Mitzvah
This past Shabbat, in the first Shabbat service held in our sanctuary in over a year, we celebrated the Bat Mitzvah ceremony of Sam G. It was the first of seven B’nei Mitzvah ceremonies we are celebrating at SHS over the course of the ten weeks. (Recall that last year we had to postpone several […]
Is This A Beginning?
This week, a Minneapolis jury reached a verdict of guilty on all counts in the murder of George Floyd—a father, son, brother, and human being. This verdict was momentous for a number of reasons. As the murder was captured on video for all the world to see, it seized our attention, revealing in particular brutality […]
Technology, Judaism, and SHS
If there is any constant to the last two millennia of Jewish peoplehood, one would have to say it is resilience. Many times over the last year we have invoked the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. as, in some ways, a paradigm for our current moment: displaced from our sanctuary we had to […]
Reimagining Hebrew School as an Immersive Shabbat Experience
This week, in lieu of a D’var Torah informed by this past Shabbat’s Torah discussion (though this past Shabbat featured an engaging conversation about one of the most challenging, tantalizing texts in our canon: Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs, love poetry traditionally read on the Shabbat of Passover because of its themes of spring, […]
God’s Vulnerability and Bringing Forth Sparks of Light from Egypt
This past weekend we held two Shacharit (morning prayer) services accompanied by Torah study sessions, one for Shabbat, as we do every week, and one on Sunday, which was the first day of Passover. (Recall that in Judaism “days” start in the evening; thus the Saturday night Seder kicked off the first “day” of Passover. The first […]