To Life: Seven Points of Guidance for The Synagogue Service-going Experience
Erev Rosh Hashanah, Society Hill Synagogue, 5784 Judaism is not a religion that is often closely associated with math; most of us rabbis got into this business precisely to avoid it, but I want to get into just a little bit of addition with you. Ready? Tonight’s service is approximately an hour and a half. […]
High Holidays: Making Your Soul a Vessel for Change
For those of you, like me, who love a podcast, or who are exploring the medium, I loved being interviewed on the latest Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It is titled, “High Holidays: Making Your Soul a Vessel for Change.” In it I share how you and […]
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 […]
Nose to the Grindstone / Head to The Stars: Cultivating a Relationship with the Beyond
Kol Nidre 5783 Philadelphia’s own Tariq Trotter, lead MC and singer of the hip hop band, The Roots, one of the more successful musical acts to come out of Philadelphia in recent memory and current house band of The Tonight Show, composed one of my favorite song lyrics. It’s a simple phrase from their song […]
L’Chayim: 18 Jewish Touchstones to Help Navigate the Years Ahead
Rosh Hashanah 5783 It’s been a rough year. Years? Decade? Century? We’re weary. How much longer is this pandemic going to last, we wonder? How many times do we have to turn on the news and encounter another attack on our democracy, or our personal autonomy? How many images of a planet on fire do […]