The Relationship Between Prayer and Your Imagination
When the words of liturgy are taken too literally, the sacred power of prayer is often lost. In his latest book, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman offers a way worshipers can transcend the limitations imposed by language.
Why I Love the “Once-a-Year" Jews
I imagine how Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur services feel to shul regulars: a fashion-show of strangers, preening, talking, walking in and out, coming late, and leaving early.
How I Try to Create Jewish Memories for my Grandkids
What are your earliest memories of “doing Jewish”? I have a smattering of recollections from when I was 5, 6, and 7, though not much before that. Even from those years, I can only call up bits and pieces: moments, vignettes, colors, flavors.
How Baseball Can Help Us Fulfill the Call of the High Holidays
Two specific events produced more Jewish pride than anything else in the turbulent decade of the 1960s: Sandy Koufax’s refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur in 1965, and not quite two years later, the Six Day War in June
Do Your Spiritual Homework for the High Holidays
We cannot walk into the gym for just a few days a year and expect to be in shape. Students cannot step into school without reviewing the material and expect to ace the test, nor can lawyers walk into a courtroom without preparing arguments and wow the jury.
The Year the Library Became My Synagogue
I attended a small college in upstate New York, about five hours from my home, and I did not go home for Rosh HaShanah my freshman year. In terms of observing the holiday, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Chocolate Smooths Transitions into High Holidays
How Will You Reflect on This Year?
The 10 days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are a time for sincere reflection.
At Rosh HaShanah, Reform Jews Appeal for an International Response to the Syrian Refugee Crisis
In Jewish tradition, the entire month before Rosh HaShanah is devoted to a searching examination of our words and deeds over the past year. This examination, this accounting, is both personal and communal.
Return Again: A Poem for Yom Kippur
Return.
Again.
I have returned again
to this place of
Fullness,
this place of everythingness;
and I feel empty.
Hollow.
Again.
I fling my sins,
all bright copper
and colored feathers,
out into the heavens -
Which is separate from the earth,