Judaism

Torah

Blessing the People With Love and Joy

Local

Does Birthright Stifle Teen Travel?

Shavuot

Synagogues Celebrate New Arrivals

Torah

A Flood of Questions About How to Prioritize

NOAH, Genesis 6:9-11:32

By:

Rabbi Howard A. Addison

For centuries, our sages have debated the relative moral status of our sedra's title character. The Torah describes Noah as "wholehearted and righteous in his generation." Do these descriptors praise Noah -- or damn him? Some claim that maintaining one's moral compass during a depraved age represents high ethical achievement. Others state that Noah would have been dwarfed had he...

Music

'Idol' Worship

By:

Deborah Hirsch

If not for a friend in a secular choir who referred him to a Jewish choral gig, Robert Ross might still be singing Christian requiems instead of Jewish psalms. He'd always identified as Jewish, but hardly had any experience with the religion while growing up, much less the music. "There were vestiges of Jewish life in our household, but it...

Torah

The Directive? To Go Forward, to Begin Again

BERESHI, Genesis 1:1-6:8

By:

Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell

This is our time of beginning, again. On Rosh Hashanah, we ushered in a new year, 5771. For some of us, the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur proved a time of contemplation and reflection, and then, following Kol Nidre, we entered the Sabbath of Sabbaths. We joined Jews across the world in repeating prayers and songs of...

Learning

If Only the Scrolls Could Talk

By:

Bryan Schwartzman

The sun rose over Mount Sinai, illuminating the other-worldly landscape and imbuing the unusually thin parchment with a translucent glow. Reciting the Ten Commandments on the spot in Egypt that represents perhaps the best guess of where God, according to tradition, revealed the law to Moses amounted to a sort of homecoming for a 200-year-old Torah scroll, recalled Rabbi Marcia...

Torah

Power of the Outdoors, and All Those Huts

Sukkot

By:

Rabbi Joshua Runyan

RABBI JOSHUA RUNYAN No matter where you turn this week -- whether you're walking along a residential street in the center of Israel, traipsing through midtown Manhattan or strolling along the tree-lined streets of more than a few neighborhoods in suburban Philadelphia -- you're bound to come across a few sukkahs, those curious-looking booths for which the current festival gets...