Photo of the author, Rabbi Alicia Harris

Pesach: Cleanse the Spiritual Chametz this Pesach

This is the work before us this Pesach. We must abandon our worship of the false idol of correctness. We have to start with what we know. We know that all people need peace to survive. We know the liberation of Israelis is bound up with the liberation of Palestinians and vice versa. We know being traumatized is not a way to live. We also know that clinging to the crumbs of winning an argument only takes us further away from peace.
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Rabbi Sid Schwarz

Rabbi Sid Schwarz is a social entrepreneur, author and teacher. He created and directs the Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI), a program that trains rabbis to be visionary spiritual leaders.  He also created and directs the Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network which is building the capacity of emerging spiritual communities across the country. Both projects are...
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Gen Slosberg

Gen Slosberg

Gen Xia Ye Slosberg (夏夜) (she/her) is an organizer, researcher, and writer. She grew up in Guangzhou, China, and Orange County, California. She got her start in politics working on the 2016 Presidential campaign cycle, then contributed to a few other electoral campaigns in the 2018 cycle and sharpened her organizing skills while advocating for...
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The Stranger in our Story

We are creatures of story—it’s how we make sense of ourselves in the world. So it is with purpose that Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Torah, begins with our shared story. Our individual stories define our individual identities; our group story, delivered here by Moses, defines us as a People. What seems...
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Eish Zarah: The Feeling of Being Foreign

I had never been inside Perth Amboy’s quaint, two room art gallery on the outskirts of this heavily Hispanic town in Central New Jersey. What brought me inside at this moment, nearly four years after I moved to Perth Amboy to be the rabbi of Congregation Beth Mordecai, the remaining synagogue in town, was not...
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Of Migrants and Midwives

While we know the names of Shifra and Puah, the Egyptian midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh and saved Jewish baby boys, in Parashat VaYislach we meet an unnamed midwife who is present for the precarious birth of Benjamin. According to Genesis 35:16-19, while our migrant ancestors were on an arduous journey en route from Beth El...
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Where Have All The Flowers Gone

“Where have all the flowers gone.” For a host of reasons, I hate loving this song: especially at this time of year. I look forward to loving this song, when it will no longer speak to me. This song is about the cycle of life and death. Our life cycles are a normal part of...
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Yom Kippur at the Lincoln Memorial

I was having lunch with a dear rabbinic colleague. After inquiring into each other’s health and family, I said “I just read the Pope’s Encyclical. It is fantastic. Have you read it?” My friend looked at me quizzically and said, “I never read the Popes’ encyclicals.“ “Well, I never have either, but this is really...
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