The Month of Av is Here - and This is What it Signifies
Rosh HaShanah, the new Jewish year arrives in two months... and they’re two months that will pass quickly. It is time to get ready.
My Big, Gay, Jewish Family
Take your false concerns for the children of LGBTQ parents elsewhere; we're doing just fine, thank you.
Comedy Helped My Catholic Family Embrace its Jewish Secret
I was born in 1961, baptized, confirmed and given First Communion. But when I was 9, my father began telling me bedtime stories about his narrow escape from the Nazis in Vienna, his entire family murdered – how my maternal grandmother was assassinated in my mother’s childhood home in Bremen, Germany, on Kristallnacht and how, by a miracle, my mother survived.
What Cantors Do to Get Families to Services… and Why
Once the High Holidays are over, I’m often left wondering what we can we do to get people back into the sanctuary before the next Rosh HaShanah rolls around.
Where We Find the Best Stress Relief for Teens
Teens today are coming of age at a time of intense competition. The pressures they feel to be successful at school, in sports, in pursuit of their passions, in their social lives and in romantic relationships, as daughters and sons, and as leaders – are at an all-time high.
The Sound of Shofar: Leading Us to Revelation and Freedom
Count off seven sabbath years — seven times seven years — so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. (Leviticus 25:8-10)
In this week's portion, the Jubilee year is established. Called yovel, our parashah explains how every forty-nine years — seven weeks of seven years — in the seventh month, on Yom Kippur, the shofar of freedom is to be sounded throughout the land for all its inhabitants. This iconic verse to proclaim freedom throughout the land is inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
Is Time Ours or Is It God's?
In Parashat Emor, the verses in Leviticus 23:1-44 name and describe the sacred times of the Jewish calendar: Shabbat, Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur, and the Pilgrimage Festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Time becomes a holy thing, and the "normalcy" of time — of one day being no different than any other — is forever differentiated by the weekly Sabbath and by these special festive days.
I’m Here for the Journey, Wherever It Takes Me
A journey is not one singular event, but a compilation of experiences that constitutes parts of a whole. Each piece is its own adventure, contributing to the whole.
Teaching Children about Respect (Kavod)
How to Raise Spiritually Healthy Jewish Kids
In Jewish Spiritual Parenting: Wisdom, Activities, Rituals and Prayers for Raising Children with Spiritual Balance and Emotional Wholeness (Jewish Lights), husband and wife team Rabbi Paul Kipnes and Michelle November, MSSW, draw on Jewish ethical and mystical teachings as well as their own experiences as parents of three children – Rachel, Daniel, and Noah – in creating a valuable resource that is intentional, inclusive, and well attuned to the realities of Jewish life today.