A few moments before starting to say Neilah, the haunting prayers that conclude the Yom Kippur service, Rabbi David Ingber asked an unusual question of the members of his congregation. What were they praying for? As three volunteers passed microphones into the pews, the room fell silent. Then, one person stood up. And another. And…
After 40 years in the same congregation and almost 50 since my ordination, I should know what to say in my High Holy Days sermons. It should be easy. But this year it’s not. Sure, I can readily address the perennial themes of High Holy Days preaching: repentance; Israel; Jewish identity versus American assimilation; life’s…
Robert J. Foley of Wilmington, N.C., sends me a copy of an open letter written by author and rabbi Rami Shapiro to Pope Francis. In it, Rabbi Shapiro hopes that “ruach ha-kodesh, the Holy Spirit, has called a new pope from the new world to lead the Catholic Church,” and Mr. Foley writes: “Rabbi Shapiro……
Remember how you used to buy music in the old days? You would go to a store and purchase a plastic disk that an expert had recorded, sequenced and curated for you. Its style, and thus, secondarily, yours, was carefully thought out by an array of musicians, producers, art directors and marketing men (generally, men)….
New Age Judaism gets a bad rap. It’s namby-pamby, critics say — indulgent, narcissistic. Maybe it’s not even Jewish. Never mind the fact that the Havurah movement, Jewish Renewal and Neo-Hasidism have significantly shaped mainstream Jewish prayer life (chances are, your mainline synagogue’s Friday night tunes were first sung by a hippie in Birkenstocks) as…
In today’s world, our lives revolve around technology and social media. Day in and day out, we text, Tweet, and see what other people are doing through a constant flutter of photos and status updates. We long to be connected to everything and everyone, feeling naked without our phones or compulsive checking of Facebook. But…
“Cookalein” is Yiddish for “a modest bungalow, usually in the Catskills” where mothers would cook for their vacationing families. It’s also the title of one of the more modest but moving works in “Will Eisner’s New York: From the Spirit to the Modern Graphic Novel,” which opened last week at Soho’s Museum of Comic and…
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