- 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
…d 1% at six months. People who study resilience point out that there are a number of factors that can predict how well someone will handle severe trauma. These come from studies of hospitalized survivors of motor vehicle accidents, combat veterans, people who lived through the Los Angeles riots, the Oklahoma City bombings and many other tragedies. While degree of exposure is the greatest predictor, other individual characteristics include a good t…
…y of Shabbat and weekday programs for children and youth expanded, and the number of minors grew from under 70 in 1994 to over 225 a decade later. A typical Shabbat morning includes simultaneous programs or services for children and youth, as well as youth participating in the main service and Shabbat Shalom Torah Study. In 2003, the congregation began a process of building renovations, aimed at improving accessibility, enhancing energy efficiency…
…d by the Good Book: “While the flesh was still between their teeth,” etc. (Numbers 11:33). Partly for that reason we are enjoined to wait a period of time after eating meat before eating dairy. But after some time, the “food” in your mouth (and stuck on or between your teeth) ceases to be “food.” Who would eat it? If your toothbrush is used at that point, it is not really in contact with “meat” or “dairy” and thus, strictly speaking, you would not…
…The other days of Creation are denoted, as you would expect, using ordinal numbers – second, third, and the like; but not the first day, Yom Ehad – Day One. Rashi teaches that “Day One” is to be understood as the Day of the One, the Day of God, and that God created everything in all its potential on that Day. From that day on, it follows that, as my daughter Sarah has recently begun quoting Martin Buber in the tag line to her email messages — To p…
…ou all. Please help us again, this time by passing along our thanks to the number of congregants who are away this weekend of Thanksgiving, giving thanks of their own elsewhere. The morning of the surgery I prayed and learned another prayerbook lesson, this time explicit. At my request, Marsha had brought me a copy of our Siddur, Sim Shalom. Uncharacteristically, I admit, I started from the beginning of the Shaharit, or morning, service. There I d…
…ah reading for Shavuot Second Day in Diaspora: Deuteronomy 14:22 – 16:17 & Numbers 28:26-31]. It begins with the commandment to tithe on a yearly basis, so as to provide for the needy among us, to take care of the Levites, to understand that our year’s bounty is not just a result of our great skill but also of God’s goodness, and to realize that our possessions are merely possessions- whose enjoyment comes from sharing them with others. The text g…
…, 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…
…d activities that have been flourishing for years. And we’ve initiated any number of new programs that you have suggested. There is energy in the air that encourages people to think, “We can do it.” Our attitude is, “Just say yes.” Last June we had a tribute dinner, honoring the rabbi and Miriam and raising a lot of money for the shul. A zillion people worked to make that happen. Prior to that, the last tribute dinner anyone could recall took plac…
…lieve that the book of Isaiah was written during the Babylonian exile by a number of people in addition to Isaiah. Isaiah himself was a prophet of the nation of Judah and was one of the first to leave a written record of his prophecies, or proclamations. The book of Isaiah is one of the longest in the Bible, containing sixty chapters. The sayings of Isaiah are contained in the first 39 chapters. Most of the rest, written around 550 BCE, were poems…
…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…
