Resources for Responding to Israel-Gaza War

We offer these texts as starting points for rabbis and cantors to speak to their communities after this first full week of war. When we have no real answers to provide people in this painful time of uncertainty, the best we can do is offer teaching that orients and grounds us.
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Finding Refuge in Makom

A few weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy blasted through the Caribbean, the United States and Canada. In her wake, more than 100 people have died along with untold damage to public infrastructure and personal property. For days the images poured in of families evacuating their homes in search of higher altitudes, of empty streets overflowing with...
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Letting Our Hands Speak Our Truth

As a rabbi, I sometimes mark productivity by how my body feels at the end of the day, and most specifically, how my voice feels. If it was a day full of teaching, meetings, and conversations, my voice might be strained, and I’m probably pretty thirsty. If I didn’t feel it in my throat, it...
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The Audacious Yehudah

As a concerned young adult living in Bangkok, I tried to make sense of the brokenness around me by doing volunteer work with like-minded meditation practitioners. Following the social action trail, we found ourselves in one of the many refugee villages along the Laotian/Thai border that continued to exist in the decade after the fall...
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Doubled Justice, Single Planet

“Justice, justice you shall pursue.” (Deut.16:20) Perhaps no words from Torah are more famous, or more fully express the fundamental passion of Judaism for justice – justice for the poor, the widow, the orphan – for all those whom society might otherwise reject. Justice is even considered “more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Prov....
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Rabbi Jill Jacobs headshot

Taking Time: A Resource for Shabbat by Rabbi Jill Jacobs

God, according to the Torah, created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh. This doesn’t mean that the world was perfect at the end of the sixth day of creation. Rather, God models the necessity of taking just one day to experience the world as it is, while acknowledging our own limitations in perfecting it.
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The Fast of Inevitability

“This isn’t a marathon we’re in. It’s a sprint.” I was privileged to hear Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum say these words to a small group of rabbis last week, and it chilled my blood. It was the exact opposite of what I have been hearing from activists since November 9th, that we need to prepare and...
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Jewish Health Care

The old joke is told about a proud Jewish parent flying to Washington to attend their child’s inauguration as the first Jewish president of the United States. They strike up a conversation with the stranger sitting next to them on the airplane, who asks why they’re flying to D.C. “Well, my daughter Julie is a...
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