“I Shall Not Fear”: Liturgy, Emotional Honesty, and Resilience

Tuesday May 3rd at 5:00 PM PT

Teacher: Rabbi Jan Uhrbach, JTS

Description: Can praying other people’s words help build and sustain resilience? Using particular familiar examples from our daily and Shabbat prayer, we’ll explore the unique ways in which a regular prayer practice grounded in traditional liturgy can help strengthen us and give us honest hope in challenging and distressing times.

Psalms of Hope, Psalms of Comfort Tuesday

Tuesday May 10^th at 5:00 PM

Teacher: Rabbi Cheryl Peretz, Ziegler

Description: Every Jewish prayer is an expression of lived experience in the moment in which it was written. Nowhere is this more evident than in the poetry of the Book of Psalms and the occasions for which the rabbis chose their individual use. In this session, we will examine selections from those Psalms used in our regular liturgy asking what the psalmist might have been living through and what their experience and expression has to say to us about comfort, resilience, and hope.

Resilience in the Face of the Crusades

Tuesday May 17^th at 5:00 PM

Teacher: Dr. Raymond Scheindlin, JTS

Description: When the crusaders marched across the Rhine in the eleventh century and decimated the region’s ancient and prosperous Jewish communities, there was little the Jews could do to resist. Some were forcibly baptised, some were killed, some committed suicide, some fled. Reflecting on the devastation, the survivors asked themselves why their generation had been chosen for such suffering, what it meant, and perhaps why they should even remain Jews. Their turmoil is recorded in chronicles and poems that deal with the emotional and intellectual upheaval of the times. The Hebrew Crusade literature that we will study is thus a monument of Jewish resilience in the face of disaster.

The Kabbalah of Lekhah Dodi

Tuesday May 24^th at 5:00 PM

Teacher: Rabbi Reuven Kimelman,  RA

Description: Lekhah Dodi was composed in Safed of the 1550’s by a Kabbalist (Shelomoh Alkabetz) for Kabbalists (such as Moshe Cordovero) to celebrate the kabbalistic meaning of the welcoming of the Sabbath bride. It operates on the four dimensions of kabbalistic reality simultaneously: space, time, human, and Divine. This session will show how all four axes coincide to crack the meaning of the refrain and the nine stanzas of Lekhah Dodi.