Cultivating Communities of Obligation: An Alternate Path to Commandedness

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum 0 Comments

I have distinct memories of my rabbinical school interview more than 20 years ago. I sailed smoothly through discussions about my Jewish background and why I wanted to go to rabbinical school, and then squirmed uncomfortably as I struggled to answer a theological question posed to me around the topic of commandedness. While my religious practice put me squarely inside the range of acceptable observance at JTS, I struggled mightily with the “v’tzivanu” (“commanded us”) language of blessings. I had (and still have) a hard time believing that the reason for me to do any of these things was because they were what God commanded; I have never had such a sense of clarity about God’s will that I feel certain that I know what […]

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Re-imagining Synagogue Worship

Rabbi Adam Kligfeld 3 Comments

It started as a thought-bubble that entered my consciousness as I shared an immersive, spiritually delicious, musically-uplifting and content-rich gathering with colleagues in one of those wonderfully odd underground spaces in Jerusalem in which it would almost be hard for an experience not to be uniquely memorable. The question in my mind was, “why can’t this moment, or at least a cousin of it, be brought to and experienced back home? At shul? In a good-old-fashioned American synagogue?” Heschel’s call to the American Jewish leadership to resurrect a moribund, utterly predictable, spiritually vacuous standard synagogue prayer experience is already over fifty years old. Start-ups and DIYers and pockets of inventiveness within all the movements have made meaningful strides. But it seemed that for me, and […]

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Synagogues: Re-Mixing the Program

Rabbi Ben Goldstein 0 Comments

I have spent the last twenty years working in synagogues in different capacities. First as a Hebrew school teacher and youth director, and the last eight years as a rabbi. I have witnessed firsthand the benefits and challenges that synagogues face today. I have seen the ability of community to help those who are suffering, and the struggle of even large synagogues to meet the needs of a daily minyan. While I am not a demographic expert, I believe that there is an iceberg dead ahead for synagogues in North America. At the core of the problem with synagogues is how the life of the synagogue is oriented. Most, if not all, North American synagogues revolve their weeks and calendars around Shabbat services. If you […]

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My Road to the “Open Dor”

Rabbi Lori Shapiro 0 Comments

The road to creating Open Temple is over two decades long.  As someone who didn’t grow up with any Jewish identity, an unaffiliated Jew on the “periphery,” countless hours, weeks and well, years, were spent trying to penetrate the world of Jewish life.  In the years of my nascent curiosity, when I walked up to the front door of any synagogue around the world, it was usually locked.  When I finally found a door to enter, I walked into the wrong section (my early journey was in the Orthodox world, years before I determined that denominational Judaism was a 19th century Jewish innovation, and that this diverse collective is Judaism).  Once I finally found the women’s section, I opened the prayerbook upside down and backwards.  […]

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Honeybees and the Art of Rabbinic Formation

Amalia Haas 0 Comments

In her five-year lifetime of service, a queen bee leaves her hive once. She flies away from her home to a drone congregation area, usually on the edge of a forest. Near the tips of the trees, she circles, mates with drones from hives in her region and thereby takes into herself the rich biological diversity of her species. Those encounters fundamentally shape her ability to contribute to and grow her home colony for the rest of her life. She will mother some full sisters; many more will be half-siblings, having the same mother but a different father. Some of these half-siblings have genes that make them excellent protectors of the hive; others better tolerate the drought and weather harbored in climate change; others excel […]

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Entering Paradise: Going Deeper into Covenantal Community

Rabbi David Baum 0 Comments

I will never forget my first Rosh Hashanah sermon nine years ago at my congregation, Shaarei Kodesh. I was fresh out of rabbinical school, all starry-eyed and wet-behind-the-ears, energetic and optimistic. For my very first High Holiday sermon, I wanted to present a compelling vision for our community. I spoke about a concept called “covenantal community,”which I had developed from congregation-based, community organizing experiences while in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary through the Seminary Leadership Project through JOIN for Justice. I began by speaking about social media’s troubling effect on our human connections. While social media platforms were not as ubiquitous in 2009 as they are today, people were beginning to glimpse their irresistible grasp over our ordinary lives. This is how I described […]

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Hope in Times of Decline

Robert Leventhal 0 Comments

A common complaint among today’s synagogue leaders concerns the significant decline in membership and attendance in recent years. It is no surprise that congregational leaders are searching for a “silver bullet” that will bring people in. Many leaders long for the “good old days” of the 1950’s, when many of their synagogues were being built. At that time, Jews wanted to belong to houses of worship like those of their Protestant neighbors. Families attended these congregations together, and kids were raised to feel obligated to carry on that affiliation. Today young families are less connected to religion. Many are distrustful of institutions and are not sure they should be burdened to maintain those they did not create – institutions with high clergy salaries, large buildings, […]

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Being Jewish and Owning Privilege

Rabbi Dev Noily 1 Comment

For as long as I can remember, pursuing justice has been a central part of Jewish communal life. But my understanding of how we pursue justice in the American Jewish community is shifting, especially around the relationship that white Jews have with historic and current structures of white supremacy. Maybe because my father and grandparents were immigrants and spoke with accents, I never quite felt “American”. Or maybe I felt like I was American – but I didn’t feel that American history was really my history, or that American culture is really my culture, or that the American story was my story. My story was somewhere across the sea, sung in a minor key, transmitted through recipes for apple cake and Shabbos candlesticks and tales […]

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I am a Rabbi, and I Was Arrested on Capitol Hill While Protesting For a Clean DREAM Act

Rabbi Barbara Penzner 0 Comments

I joined 100 Jewish community leaders from around the country last week in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building. Organized by Bend the Arc Jewish Action, we marched in together, many in Jewish ritual garb, sat down, and sang about building a world of compassion. When the U.S. Capitol Police warned us that we were breaking the law and would be charged with obstruction and “incommoding,” we had a ready response. We sang “We Shall Not Be Moved.” My own arrest was shown on MSNBC, reporting our action live to a million viewers and zooming in on the zip ties that the U.S. Capitol police put on my wrists.  It took the police forty minutes to move us all and we continued singing down […]

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It is Called “Covenantal Community”

Rabbi Sid Schwarz 0 Comments

We should appreciate David Cygielman for introducing the broad eJP audience to the notion of communal “thickness” in his 11/13/17 post. As was noted in the response by Rabbi Michael Holzman, this is not a new concept. Well before the David Brooks’ column in the New York Times, sociologists have sought ways to measure the depth of connection between the people who make up any given social system. The idea of thickness was first introduced into the lexicon of the social sciences by Clifford Geertz in his classic study, The Interpretation of Cultures, which was published in 1973. In my view, it is essential that those who care about the future health of the American body politic focus their attention on the nature of community. […]

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