- Congregation Beth El–Keser Israel
85 Harrison Street, New Haven, CT 06515-1724 | P: 203.389.2108 | office@beki.org
85 Harrison Street, New Haven, CT 06515-1724 | P: 203.389.2108 | office@beki.org
…Shabbat Afternoon Schedule Change: The Shabbat Minha (Saturday Afternoon) services in February 2017 will be 1p – 1:35p in the Posener Beit Midrash, and (as in the summer) the evening service will not be held at BEKI on those four days. This early service time will allow participants to avoid the round-trip to the synagogue on what are the snowiest and coldest nights. Comments or questions to jjtilsen@beki.org . …
…Books of Moses verse by verse in 1994, and by 2007 had reached the end of Numbers, and concluded I Samuel at Passover 2015. Several other weekly and occasional study groups formed or were developed during these years. The Shabbat Shalom Learners’ Minyan (later renamed “Shabbat Shalom Torah Study”), initiated in the 1980s, continued to attract a diverse and loyal following. In 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 BEKI won Energy Star Awards and was designated…
…ve not yet been done. Is there someone out there who’d like to organize a film series? How about a book fair? A juried art exhibit. A children’s choir. A gardening club to landscape the new entrance. A scavenger hunt for adults. A congregational trip to Israel. There’s really no end to what we can do. I know that in the months and years ahead, under the leadership of our next president Donna Levine and those who follow her, BEKI will thrive and gr…
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…of this. Some traditional commentators see the biblical use of doublets or triplets simply as a form of emphasis by repetition. More modern scholars see them as evidences of different versions of one story, taken from different sources. The multiple versions were retained for some reason or for no reason when the many strands which form the Bible were drawn together. The traditional Jewish commentators and even modern scholars offer a variety of e…
…eaching. To my mind, it’s no coincidence that there are a disproportionate number of gay clergy. Half of my ordination class was gay or lesbian. The process of coming out of the closet, the work we’ve done to become whole and unashamedly ourselves is deeply spiritual. Perhaps this is the Torah that gay men and lesbians have heard and give the world – the lesson that we all, gay or not, must be honest about our lives. And it’s a lesson that is usef…
…in Job 41:14: “Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about.” Failure to maintain dental hygiene may result in hearing your dentist quote the verse, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it” (Psalm 81:11). Dear Rabbi, I can’t stand it. Whenever I come for food at a Bar Mitzva or Bat Mitzva or Wedding I have to stand in a long line. Can’t you do something about it? Signed, Tired of waiting in long lines. Dear Tired, Simp…
…ll time. When the Temple was destroyed, the central book of our Torah was stripped of its earthly referent and its specific, tangible meaning. And not VaYiqra alone, of course, but most of Bamidbar (Numbers), from which our additional reading comes; a large portion of Shemot (Exodus), and Devarim (Deuteronomy), as well. Our world was rent asunder, smashed into a thousand pieces. The parallel of Temple worship with the synagogue and prayer is more…
…y a tent spike through the head. But as they say, what goes around, comes around. In every resource that I have read, it says Deborah was a prophet. To add on to that, I’ve also read that she was the Prophet of War. Isn’t that cool? Having a woman as the Prophet of War? I think that means something, don’t you? I mean, the Sages or whoever wrote the Tanach — we won’t get into that now — had so many prophets. Miriam, Deborah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezeki…
…re to include everyone. As it is, if such a family may pick only a limited number of people to honor, everyone who does not receive an honor understands that the family was limited. However, if the family is essentially unlimited, by being able to call up more than one person at a time for an aliya, then anyone who is not called up has greater grounds to feel slighted. A second reason for wanting joint aliya is that one of the proposed honorees do…
