A New Year, a New Opportunity for Jewish Learning
Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish new year, is a wonderful time to assess the past year and consider what we hope to achieve, spiritually speaking and otherwise, in the year to come.
The Rebranding of Judaism
Let’s talk about branding. There’s Apple, of course. Anything with an Apple logo on it is golden! You could take a regular computer, stick an Apple logo on it, and sell it for twice the price. How about Starbucks?
Galilee Diary: Sustainability
When the Holy One Blessed be He created the first humans, he showed them all the trees in the Garden of Eden, and said to them: See how wonderful and pleasant are my creations! Everything I created – I created for you.
Cause for Celebration in Israel: Tu B'Av, the Jewish Festival of Love
When I moved to Israel, it was easy for me to forgo some of the holidays that I grew up with in America that I knew had a distinctly non-Jewish origin. It was also a pleasant surprise to discover other holidays here that unite Israelis across the spectrum – such as Tu B’Av, also known as the festival of love.
Galilee Diary: All Our Children
We returned from the inspiring tour of the Galilee Jewish-Arab youth circus in the US to lurid headlines about a “lynch” in central Jerusalem, when a group of Jewish teenagers went from trading insults with Arab teens who happened to pass by, to beating them up, so badly that one was hospitalized in critical condition (in a similar event about a year ago, the victim did not survive).
Galilee Diary: Uncertainty Principle
The details of the lunar cycle have been understood for thousands of years.
Galilee Diary: One People
[The Eternal] will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Eternal your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Eternal your God will gather you, from there [God] will fetch you.
-Deuteronomy 30:3-4
Galilee Diary: Balancing act
Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid… -Micah 4:4
The Secret to Life After Death
“At times,” wrote Hans Zinnsser “the dead are closer to us than the living, and the wisdom and affection of the past stretch blessing hands over our lives, projecting a guardian care out of the shadows and helping us over hard places.” Last month we were are reminded of this truth by an extraordi