Editor’s Note: While this article is fully rooted in a Christian context, the analysis of the “nones” and “dones” aptly describes a phenomenon widespread in the next Gen Jewish world. And the prescriptions for how to draw such disaffected people back into spiritual community is completely relevant to synagogues that hope to be relevant today. […]
Pesach was the holiday that I think most informed and continues to inform why I’m still Jewish and why I chose to go to rabbinical school. “Care for the stranger”, zecher l’tziat mitzrayim, the commandment to remember that the very reason that we were taken out of the narrows of Egypt was so that we […]
In the late fall of 2016, I was making plans for the next phase of my rabbinical career. As fate would have it, the morning after Election Night, as Donald Trump crossed the 270-vote threshold in the electoral college, I was preparing to board a plane from my then-home in Oakland, California to the East […]
“I’m not that interested in ‘mass’ communications. I’m much more interested in what happens between this person and the one person watching. The space between the television set and that person who’s watching is very holy ground.” -Fred Rogers[1] When I was a child growing up in a largely secular Jewish home, I took tremendous […]
Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy last fall. Given how many congregations are needing to pivot to deal with the upsurge in the Covid/Delta variant, many planning a mix of on-line and in-person services for the coming holidays, we thought the spirit of innovation represented by this article was worth […]
Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California After fifteen months of pandemic and social distancing, our communities are reopening. So too, synagogues and Jewish community organizations, which have been operating primarily online for more than a year, are resuming in-person gatherings. As we reopen our buildings […]
Temple Beth Am in Miami is a large Reform congregation that owes much of its success to the vision of its founding rabbi, Rabbi Herbert Baumgard, z”l. A pioneering rabbi in many respects, Rabbi Baumgard’s lasting legacy is punctuated by his belief that in order to flourish and remain viable, Temple Beth Am needed an […]
Let’s review some key data: The Jewish community is dramatically more diverse than we once realized it was: One in every seven to eight Jews is a person of color; we have a sizeable LGBTQIA+ population; and the number of Jewish-adjacent individuals in our communities is growing. At the same time, religious affiliation is in […]
Editor’s Note: A longer version of this article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal on July 22,2020. Revolution is complex and not for the fainthearted. Most of us are not meant to be Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, yet the fate of the world rests upon the work of […]
When our entire world changed overnight a year ago, last March, we in the synagogue world had countless new challenges to address as the enormity of the pandemic came to light. This unprecedented time was clearly going to require innovative solutions and a very different kind of thinking. It quickly became clear that in order […]
