Escaping Egypt, Engaging Jews

Rabbi Dan Horwitz 0 Comments

It’s the Saturday evening before Passover. You find yourself and a group of eight friends entering an airy, well-lit loft in a hip neighborhood in Metro Detroit. You’ve been given the objectives and your mission: to find all of the items to fill the Seder plate sitting empty on the large Passover table set in the middle of the room. You and your friends try a sip of horseradish infused vodka before the clock starts, which puts you in the mood not only for Passover, but for a challenge. That’s when you hear it: Click. The sound of being locked into a room with only 45 minutes to escape. Hundreds of young adults in Metro Detroit experienced this moment of excitement in the week leading […]

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You Got Rid of What?—Synagogues and Money

Rabbi Corey Helfand 4 Comments

A mentor and trusted colleague of mine from rabbinical school gave me one piece of advice before entering the pulpit: don’t change anything in the first year.  While I took his message to heart for just about everything, there was one change that had to happen, even if I had only been at my new pulpit for a month. The story went something like this.  On the High Holidays, it was the practice of the finance committee to stand at the door, waiting, until our congregants were just greeted and welcomed. And then this happened to anyone who had not yet paid one-third of their dues before the holidays, or those who were in arrears from the past year: The finance committee members would take […]

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Pittsburgh and the “Awe” of Safety

Rabbi Josh Lesser 0 Comments

In a shtetl outside Vitebsk, Belarus, there was a young, learned man. In the wake of increasing violence and with parental encouragement, he saved money to journey to the US. Uneasy, he set out for a port in Latvia. He arrived a day before the ship was leaving. Eager, yet anxious, he found a place to make his bed on the docks. When he awoke, he realized to his horror that his pack, his money, and his possessions had been stolen. Dejected, he cried out in prayer. As he wandered aimlessly, he felt alone and in despair. But then he saw a sign. He thought he must be dreaming and like the ladder that in Jacob’s dream; it was a way up and a way […]

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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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