- 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
…selves – by abandoning our values and our traditions. The times we live in right now are very good. We are free and privileged. We are welcome in mainstream society. More than that: we have considerable impact on it. The danger is that we might intermarry and assimilate until there’s nothing left of Judaism to preserve. In the century just past, an extraordinary percentage of Nobel prizes were awarded to Jews, and Jews earned distinctions way out…
…ice of Jacob Where All People Can Be Safe – June 2012 Everyone is a Winner Right vs. Right The Bully Pulpit – July 2004 Our Hope Continues – Rosh HaShana 5762 – 2001 Out with the Old, In with the New – Yom Kippur Yizkor 5765 – 2004 Tribute to Our Civic Leaders Carl Goldfield, Ina Silverman, & Susan Voigt – May 2007 Seat Belt Optional – January 2016 Tilsen University – January 2017 Dear Rabbi: Answers, Advice and Helpful Household Hints Prayer & Sy…
…hei HaBesht (Tel Aviv: Devir) 5707/1947, 5735/1975, p. 35. A table of tale numbers and the corresponding page numbers in other editions is given at the back of the book by Ben-Amos and Mintz. 2. Violence is neither advocated nor condoned in these tales to any significant extent, whereas many tales strongly advocate the efficacy and advantages of nonviolence. The main exception to this generalization are a few of the first fifteen tales (pp. 39-51…
For today’s services, a number of congregants have added touches of beauty to the synagogue and the services. In my Devar Torah, I would like examine the place of beauty and art in the Sanctuary. The sanctuary is a place where we pray together, where we venerate the wisdom of the Torah, where we tell stories that celebrate our shared past. It is also a place where our spirits and our community can be invigorated, nourished, and rested. It is a sa…
…ll do it that way, too. But this procedure often created a dilemma: If the number of qaddishes was limited, there might still be some who did not get to say one; if there was no limit to the number of qaddishes added, the service became burdensomely long. So after careful scrutiny the rabbis allowed all mourners to say qaddish simultaneously. This rabbinic solution was adopted only after careful consideration, and after it was determined that mour…
…of all the people. Imagine if the parshah has told us, tribe by tribe, the number of people in each tribe, and separately, the number of males, 20 and up, who were fit for service. Would that kind of census send a different message to us, a message saying, “everyone counts”, including all the women? The second census, what I’ll call the redemption census, I find a strange one. It requires counting of all the male Levites who were at least a month…
…e Ely House, Center for Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT, and has curated a number of independent exhibitions. She studied at the Akademie fuer Angewante Kunst in Vienna, Austria, and received her MFA from San Jose State University. Anna Broell Bresnick has collaborated with dancers and musicians in the creation of installations for performances. These have included large sculptural str uctures, floor drawings and video. Broell Bresnick has taught…
…lis were killed. Baruch Goldstein has become a hero among some of Israel’s right-wing extremists. They set up a tombstone for him that reads, “Here lies the saint, Dr. Baruch Kappel Goldstein, blessed be the memory of the righteous and holy man, may the Lord avenge his blood, who devoted his soul to the Jews — He was killed as a martyr of God on Purim.” This view may remind some of us of the Muslim term jihad. I am told in secondary sources that j…
…nsgresses a prohibition, as Scripture states, “Do not add [to the required number of lashes]” — if the Torah warns not to add blows to a guilty person, how much more does this apply to an innocent person. Even to raise one’s hand against another, even if one doesn’t actually hit him or her, is called wicked, as Scripture states, “And he said to the wicked one, Why do you hit your neighbor?”7 Rabbenu Perez, in his decree, cites a responsum of Rabbi…
…, a very complex distribution network. The way it operates is by a certain number of power plants producing energy, usually by burning fossil fuels, and then feeding it into the massive grid of electrical power lines. I think this is quite similar to the societal structure of the monkeys and the medieval Jewish court system, in that the majority of interactions, or in this case, power transmissions, are local, but the network is able to transmit p…
