My friends, our joy in observing the Chanukah holiday is diminished by the news from Australia this morning. My colleague, Rabbi Ahud Sela, wrote this note this morning from the LA Board of Rabbis. I wanted to share his words with our community. My words would be, we mourn and...
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...
Expressions of Peace: A Journey and Prayer through Jewish Texts (A Contemporary Piyyut,[1] first recited on March 13, 2022[2]) Rabbi J.B. Sacks Our tradition teaches: “The sword comes to the world because of a delay of justice and through perversion of justice.”[3] God cries out: “Oh, my suffering,...
The word faith is widely used as a synonym for “religion,” just as “spiritual” has become, for some, a replacement for “religious.” Thus we might refer to a Christian as a “member of the Christian faith.” A Jew is often described as belonging “to the Jewish faith.” Thus, “faith” and...
Due to the global pandemic, the Jewish values of piku’ach nefesh, saving endangered lives, and sh’mirat hanefesh, protecting our own lives, rightly predominated. As a result, we’ve held services and classes on Zoom. As it turned out, Zoom was quite a blessing, enabling us to meet with one another, to...
