Elliot Cosgrove is senior rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and author of For Such A Time as This: On Being Jewish Today.
Elliot Cosgrove
By Elliot Cosgrove
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Life American Judaism is ready for disruption – and Covid has accelerated the need for it.
Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan was 48 years old when the stock market crashed in October 1929. The toll of the Great Depression was felt acutely, but by no means uniquely, by American Jewry — and Kaplan, as founder of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ) was at the heart of it. The synagogue building…
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Community Which verse would the President quote?
As a rabbi watching President Trump standing, Bible in hand, in front of Washington DC’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, I wondered what scriptural verse the President could draw on for inspiration. We were, as we remain, in the midst of a national crisis. A double pandemic, Covid-19 and the virus of systemic racism. The moment…
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Community ‘What she lacked was the goodness of possibility:’ Parallels with Ruth in a pandemic
“I went away full and have returned empty” (Ruth 1:21) This Shavuot, when the Jewish people open up the book of Ruth, it will be Naomi’s cry that will resonate in our souls. There is a natural catastrophe, resulting in geographic displacement and economic insecurity. The deaths of Naomi’s husband and two sons are devastating,…
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Community The new Chancellor of JTS will take up a mantle of both tradition and innovation
This week, the Jewish Theological Seminary will celebrate its 126th (virtual) commencement exercises – the final of Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s tenure. With Eisen’s retirement date set for June 30, JTS will announce his successor in the weeks ahead, perhaps by way of a plume of white smoke from its newly renovated campus at 3080 Broadway….
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Community Graduations, camp and more is canceled. ‘What can we say that does not risk pablum or platitudes?’
“What happens to a dream deferred?” With this question, Langston Hughes began his poem “Harlem,” inquiring what happens to a person who discovers their long-sought dream to be unobtainable. Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Does it linger and fester? Or does it, as Hughes suggests in his allusion to the…
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Community ‘In all of the pain I am reminded why I became a rabbi in the first place’
“Like I told you, it’s an honor.” With these words, Jimmy Breslin concluded his famous New York Herald Tribune column after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. While every other journalist covered our nation in mourning, Breslin wrote about Clifton Pollard, the gravedigger who prepared President Kennedy’s grave. He made the small big, told…
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Life The Powerful Yom Kippur Lesson From The 1919 ‘Black Sox’ Scandal
With the arrival of the Jewish penitential day of Yom Kippur alongside baseball’s postseason, it is fitting that we also mark the 100th anniversary of baseball’s original sin — the “Black Sox” scandal. In October of 1919, eight White Sox players conspired to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. In the century since,…
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Life The Center Cannot Hold
…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. William Butler Yeats wrote those famous lines in 1919 – against the backdrop of the…
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