- 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
…y attributes in the introduction to the Amida prayer: Barukh ata Adonai, Elohenu vElohei avoteinu, Elohei Avraham, Elohei Yitshaq, vElohei Ya`aqov, ha-El ha-gadol ha-gibor ve-ha-nora. Blessed are You, Adonai, our God and God of our ancestors, God of Avraham, God of Yitshaq, and God of Ya`aqov, God the great, the mighty, and the awesome. We may ask, how does mention of the Divine attribute of nora add to the two preceding ones of gedula and gevura?…
…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…
…es me personally, as you probably know. My two granddaughters – Ariel and Zohar – are being brought up in a traditional Jewish home where kabbalat Shabbat happens every week, the Sh’ma is sung every night at bedtime, and the kitchen is kosher. But their mother is not Jewish. Are the girls Jewish? They certainly think so. But the Conservative movement and the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston don’t agree with them, so Ariel goes to the…
…, 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…
…ring 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, Joseph and Sam for their participation today, and to Steven Pincus for sharing Amy with us on countless Sunday mornings. Thanks also to Steve, Richard, Lenny, Domini…
…n this case in order to prevent the woman from violating another serious prohibition. Since, Isserlein argues, it is established that a man may strike his slaves in order to prevent them from committing a transgression, there is a principle that “whomever is the ward (tahat yado) of someone, and he sees that he is committing a transgression, he is permitted to strike him and chastise him in order to keep him from the transgression, and there is no…
…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…
…all very nice,” you may be saying, “but what do we do with the explicit prohibition in the Torah?” We are not the first generation to struggle with and even be offended by a text. In Deuteronomy (21: 18-21), we are told: When a man has a rebellious and disobedient son, who doesn’t listen to the voice of his father and the voice of his mother and that, when they chasten him, he does not listen to them – his father and mother will lay hold of him a…
…cities of Greece, and even twentieth century America? Surveying the large number of works in the BEKI collection entitled “Rabbi_,” the BEKI Art Committee began discussing how best to present this work in an exhibition. Among ourselves, we called this the “Rabbi Show,” although there is nothing in the artworks themselves to signify that these are rabbis, rather than ordinary men who have been given the honor of holding the Torah. As Jewish artist…
