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It is a truth universally acknowledged that it can be difficult to be Jewish at Christmas time. It has seeped into North American cultural consciousness so thoroughly that South Park even wrote a song about it, complete with trademark expletives.

Last year, my pre-school-aged daughter was acutely aware that her friends and their families would be celebrating Christmas and that she wasn’t going to be a part of it.

On Simchat Torah, I watch as the Torah scroll is carefully unfurled onto a series of long connected tables – the text so much more than designs scattered on parchment.

Questions are the lifeblood of learning and there is no better time to ask them then now.

On Simchat Torah, as we read the final portion of the Torah and immediately beginning again, what can the blessings to the Israelites teach us about our world today?

Every year, the season of reflection and renewal is culminated by the celebration of Simchat Torah (literally “the rejoicing of the Torah”).

I did not have a typical Reform Movement upbringing, and would say that the three years I lived on an island in Alaska are probably most emblematic of that.

Thanks to social media and electronic devices you can check in on Foursquare and read the Mishkan T'filah prayer book on a handheld device at the same time. Yet for all the modern inventions, the Torah remains unaffected.