- 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
…t did not observe in your sabbath years while you were dwelling upon it. A short while ago, in the 24 March 2000 edition of the New York Times, I noticed an article about a study on world ocean temperatures. (The chief author of the study is Sydney Levitus – one wonders if the family name got shortened somewhere along the way from Leviticus!) By excavating literally millions of data points from ships’ logs and other previously overlooked sources,…
…the steroids they gave me. Who knows? Maybe the steroids did help! And, I should mention, I have not remained free of negative feelings for the entire year since. A mixture of feelings, anger high on the list, did eventually creep in. I have spent time working on that, with good results. The main technique has been to acknowledge the feelings and let them pass. But let me return to the first days and tell you what else helped me with my feelings…
…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…
…d knows herself to be Jewish – and all this is true of my granddaughters – should we tell this child “No, not good enough! You aren’t really Jewish!”? With all the people born to Jewish mothers who reject or neglect Jewish study and practice, can we afford to reject children like Ariel and Zohar? And even if we can survive without accepting patrilineal descent – do we want to tell these children that two of the three major Jewish movements reject…
…, 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…
…anina Rostain, who, like Ruth, was relentless in her determination that we should go forward and that we could do this. We’d like to thank our daughters for inspiring us, either by their example in the case of Shoshana, Jessie, Liz and Johanna, or by their unspoken message to us that they are depending on us to inspire them as they grow into Jewish women, as in the case of Ariel, Mila, Rachel, Liora and Sarah. Thanks to Jake, Max, Tani, Aaron, Jos…
…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…
…u Simha, but rejects its conclusion: In any case, it appears to me that we should not accept the opinions of Sefer Aguda and Rabbenu Simha, and we should not force divorce on account of matters that were not found in the writings of any major jurist.26 Binyamin Zev, who supports the court’s power to force divorce in cases where the husband is clearly in the wrong and insists on continuing to beat his wife, points out that the fact that the Mishna…
…that Arab expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait is more than half the number of Palestinian Arabs who fled or were expelled from Israel in 1947-49. The “Jenin Massacre” (2002) turned out to be a hoax; while it was reported that hundreds or thousands had been massacred, the reality was that about 55 Arabs (including 5 or 10 civilians) died, along with 22 Israeli soldiers. The headline story in mid-August (2009) of the Swedish daily Aftonbladen…
…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…
