Today (the 27th of Nisan on the Jewish calendar) is Yom HaShoah, or, more fully, Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve’laG’vurah / יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה / Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. The 27th of Nisan was chosen when this became a national holiday in the young state of Israel in 1953, because it was the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising…
This piece was written for Glacier Jewish Community ~ my end of week message for the Jewish community I serve in the Flathead Valley of Northwest Montana. This week we welcome the Hebrew month of Shvat. On the ‘טו, tet-vav (pronounced “tu”), 15th of this month, we celebrate the Jewish new year for the trees. Even in the bitter cold,…
As we enter the week of our family Thanksgiving rituals, we step into this week with all of ourselves. We hold all of our American identity and our Jewish identity and all of the ways that we identify ourselves. Identity can both entrap us and set us free. The process of identifying ourselves and where we align and identify with…
This Shabbat, we read the Torah portion entitled Chayei Sarah ~ Sarah’s life, though it begins with her death. Torah tells us that Sarah was 127 when she died, however given the length of biblical lives in Genesis (B’reishit), her age is unremarkable. The proximity of her death to the story of the binding of Isaac is read by our…