This past Tuesday evening our congregation celebrated Shavuot, with guests from Gishrei Shalom in Southington. It is it is a beautiful holiday; at once a harvest festival and the Season of Revelation hearkening back to the Israelites first hearing the words of our ancient covenant at Mt. Sinai. After seven weeks of counting the omer and, step by step, coming closer to this moment, we find that in the words of a past student of...Read more...
Nonetheless, endless numerical metrics have been used throughout my life to quantify my worth: SAT. GPA. IQ. AP. FICO. Salary. Tax bracket. Age. Weight. BMI. Numbers are dehumanizing. They paint in broad strokes, revealing little if anything of the humans they purport to define. Numbers know nothing of love, meaning,...Read more...
In his D’var Torah on the portion Bechukotai this week, renowned rabbi (and brilliant, prolific writer) David Wolpe reflects on the very first word: “im,” or if. “If contains all of life’s regrets,” he writes. “But even more, im is a word of possibility. God says, “IF you walk in My ways.” We hold the im in our own hands.
What he is pointing out here is that our lives are filled with uncertainty, as well...Read more...
I don’t know about you, but for me it’s been a long week. A long year even. As the saying goes, there’s always something. And stressful situations do not always wait for the previous ones to resolve themselves before showing up, uninvited. If we are lucky enough to have put out all the metaphorical fires, we might be tempted to sit back and pat ourselves on the back for a moment, but the feeling that we must be forgetting...Read more...
“Teach Us To Number Our Days, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom.”
(Proverbs 90:12)
In ancient days, our ancestors would offer their first barley sheaf of the season at the Temple in Jerusalem on the second day of Passover. From there, according to a commandment in the Torah, they would...Read more...
In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre premiered a play entitled Les mains sales, or The Dirty Hands, in which this famous (translated) quote was featured:
“You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs...Read more...
Blessed is God who spoke, and the world came to be.”
This is a line from our Shabbat morning liturgy which I’ve always loved. Now that TBD has begun holding services on the last Saturday morning of most months[1] we’ll all have the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with these words and the melody to which it’s set.
Why does my heart resonate to this opening...Read more...
And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game
Joni Mitchell may not be Jewish, but her 1968 lyrics to “The Circle Game” might as well be, and they...Read more...
As Jews, we know that structure can be a good friend. So can spontaneity. Ideally these elements combine to make our services engaging and our rituals and celebrations as resonant as they can be. With Passover on the horizon, a holiday that rests on structure and specificity even as it encourages new questions each year, this intertwining is something to be especially conscious of and grateful...Read more...
There is a moment for patients after we deliver the news of a frightening diagnosis, after they have taken in the realities we have laid before them, when they realize that there is one more tremendous hurdle ahead: to share that news with others. Sometimes that feels like the hardest part. How much do they have to disclose? Do they speak in euphemisms or share the harsh realities? It is as though saying a diagnosis aloud...Read more...
