An Echo of Shofar

At the end of June, my husband and I took our daughter, Zohar, to Harrisburg. She was six months old at the time. We each put on a tallit (the baby’s was a black onesie screen-printed with an image of a tallit) and gathered in a tent on the Capitol steps along with rabbis, cantors...
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Who Stands With You?

Early one Friday morning in June, I stood with a group of hotel housekeepers who were about to do something very brave. Returning from a one-day strike, as a protest against unsafe working conditions, they feared retaliation. Juan Carlos was selected to be the first worker to punch the clock at 7 am, hoping that...
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Inescapable Face

“There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face of the Other is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all, and to whom I owe all. “ —Emmanuel Levinas Rabbi Joshua, the son of Levi, said: at...
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Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?

As my 8 month old son becomes more mobile and is more interested in engaging with his 2 ½ year old sister, the discussions about pushing and hitting have ramped up in my house. What’s most frustrating is that I know my daughter loves my son. She wakes up every morning wanting to know where...
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Crying Out Loud

A year ago exactly, we were preparing for our Human Trafficking Awareness Shabbat. The theme resonated so much–as it still does today–with the biblical narrative: Jewish bondage in Egypt. We never expected that a real life sex trafficking case would happen practically on our doorstep. It happened two blocks south of our synagogue, in the...
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Yovel Text Study: Return

The Jewish mystical tradition offers depictions of periodic cosmic rebirth, in which every 50,000 years, the entire universe returns to its original state. This can be seen as a more mythic, cosmic version of a the radical notion of land-return in our earthly yovel, the biblical commandment in which every fifty years, land would return...
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Encompassing the Truth in Four Directions

In college, I used to tutor inner city middle school students through an organization called Making Waves. Once during a staff training, I was placed in a group with two Latinx tutors and two black tutors; the other group consisted of five white tutors. When my group playfully accused the supervisors of dividing us up...
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A Shemoneh-Esreh for Israel

In 2016/5776, T’ruah gathered in front of the Israeli Consulate in New York City to celebrate Yom HaAtzma’ut. The core of the service was a series of 19 blessings for the State of Israel, modeled on the weekday Amidah that Jews traditionally recite three times a day. Each blessing was written by a rabbi, cantor, or...
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Not By Might: My Israel/Palestine

I am starting to write this from a cramped seat on an El Al flight to join the Center for Jewish NonViolence action from May 14-23 in the West Bank. I’ve been asked to drash Beha’alotecha in light of this trip, but, full disclosure, I have to write now because there won’t be enough time after...
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