Photo of the author, Yael Marans

Naso: The Burdens We Cannot See

For me, acknowledging what I cannot see lies at the heart of community building. It helps me feel connected to the humanity of people in my circles and in the broader world, as ultimately the invisible heaviness of experience is one of the things that I know to be true of being human.
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Photo of the author, Maetal Gerson

Chukat: Leading and Listening

Facing the climate change disaster means facing one another with respect and sincere empathy. Only then can we manage the amount of work it will take to fix that in which each of us has a stake.
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Ending the Occupation

 “Cry with a full throat without restraint; Raise your voice like a shofar!” -Isaiah 58:1  Our approach to ending the occupation is grounded in human rights and a belief that all Israelis and Palestinians are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of the Divine, and should be treated with dignity and compassion.  As rabbis and...
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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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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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