Shavuot, or "the festival of weeks," is Erin Souza's favorite holiday, epitomizing for her Judaism's focus on study and intellectual examination. There's another reason the 24-year-old Souza is partial to the holiday, which begins Saturday night: She is a Jew by choice. Shavuot is the festival most closely associated with converts to the faith because the Book of Ruth is...
Israelis celebrate Shavuot more than any other Jewish community in the world. On erev Shavuot, religious, secular and traditional Jews from all over the country will join in the tens of thousands to study in various and incredibly diverse programs of Tikkun Leil Shavuot. What was once the inheritance of primarily the Orthodox has now become the inheritance of many...
New York Observing my kids playing, I notice how the same toy, no matter how many times they play with it, can reveal the most remarkable things. My daughter, with the vocabulary befitting a 1 1/2-year-old, will bring her ball over to me and point to a mark on it with a delighted grunt. "How remarkable!" I will say with...
The subject was parshah Kedoshim, the Levitical holiness code, and I was attending my local egalitarian minyan, listening to a lay leader speak about the Torah reading. He was addressing the sensitive topic of the prohibition against male-male sexual relations, sharing a personal story about a gay friend's coming out. "As a modern Conservative Jew," he said, "I didn't know...
Revelation is often considered the most intimate moment between God and the Jewish people. It is compared to a wedding, the culmination of a love affair, albeit a complicated one. But what if revelation were not a model for exclusive attachment but a narrative of universal relevance? How might that change our understanding of law-giving on Mount Sinai? Two midrashim...
Sivan 11, 5773
