Over 60 days! If you’re reading this on August 1st, we are more than 65 days away from the new year, Rosh Hashanah. It’s a weird thing about the holidays. When talking about when the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur fell on any given years, most of us will say...
Praying for the Peace of Jerusalem and Israel On Shabbat and holy days, our Sephardic and Mizrachi sisters and brothers recite Psalm 122, a late Psalm, in which holy day pilgrims in Jerusalem reflect on what it might have been like for pilgrims of prior eras to be in Jerusalem....
T’shuvah: Time for a Tune-Up The buzz word during these days of preparation for the High Holy Days is the Hebrew word t’shuvah. Most translations render the word “repentance,” but that is, at best, a pallid attempt to convey the richness of the Hebrew original. The English “repentance” means “feeling...
Jewish Simplicity A lion can actually capture, kill, and eat a field mouse. However, it turns out that the energy to do that is greater than the caloric content of the mouse. So, if a lion spent the whole day hunting and eating field mice… it would slowly starve itself...
How to Experience G!d It is important to realize that G!d is to be experienced. It is equally important to understand that G!d cannot be captured in any one thing, nor reduced to a single moment or phenomenon. We sometimes think we can contain G!d in a thing, and thereby...
Torah: A Minute to Learn, a Lifetime to Master By Maayan Lev Shavuot commemorates when Moses received the Torah from G!d on Mt. Sinai. It’s a joyous holiday, but if you said that to a non-Jew, they would probably be very surprised at how we express that joy. The hallmark...
As the saying goes, spring has sprung. And, for many folks, with spring comes spring cleaning. Of course, with spring also comes Pesach (Passover). To me, that’s no coincidence. There is nothing quite like having to clean the house for Passover. The process of kashering the home for the holiday...
Light In The Darkness by Student Rabbi Maayan Lev Though the holiday itself does not start until the night of December 18, Hanukkah has officially begun! How do I know? Because my favorite radio station, KOST 103.5, has started playing solely Christmas music, which they will continue doing until shortly...
by Maayan Lev As a child, Sukkot was a very big holiday in my family. In fact, it may have been the biggest holiday of the year for us. This is because we had dinner in the sukkah together every night, usually inviting a different family to join us each...
What Am I Afraid Of?–Psalm 27 and the Use of the Month of Elul One of the ways that our tradition invites us to prepare for the High Holy Days is to recite and reflect upon Psalm 27 twice a day for the High Holy Day season, which leads into...
