It’s time to register for our High Holy Day (HHD) choirs! I hope that you will lend your spirit and your voice to make our High Holy Day services beautiful and meaningful for all. Adult Choir is for any adult or experienced 11th/12th graders who are willing to make a weekly rehearsal commitment beginning in […]

Last Friday, the rabbis and I had the privilege of welcoming six beautiful souls to the Jewish people as they reached the conclusion of their conversion process. Each completed their own journey, some over the course of decades, to affirm their Jewish identity. There are another six or so who will also convert in mid-July. […]

Home. Take a moment and imagine home. Not the home you live in right now or even the home you might dream of for the future, but – home – your childhood home. Where would you sit again, if you could choose one spot? What color are the walls? What does it smell like? What […]

Chanukah rolled around about halfway through my year living in Jerusalem while a student at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement’s seminary. That year in Jerusalem, I would walk about 20 minutes from my apartment to school every day. One morning, as Chanukah approached, my brisk walks were unexpectedly scented […]

A few months ago, in the course of conversation with our summer intern, Student Rabbi Hannah Elkin, she mentioned that her Clinical Pastoral Education supervisor taught her that a preacher must always “preach from their scars, but not their wounds.” I stopped her, “wait, say that again?” “You must preach from your scars, and not […]

Like so many, I was thrust into parenthood largely unprepared. It’s amazing how the doctors and nurses at the hospital let you take babies home without an instruction manual. Despite my profound lack of knowing what I was doing, I can look back to a moment near the end of my time at HUC-JIR shortly […]

I had quite a few conversations last week about time. There was a conversation with my mom about whether or not she or I qualified as “old,” a conversation with a congregant about whether or not 5 years is a lot of time, and two conversations very similar in character, in which we discovered that […]

Being a Jewish clergy person is a pretty fantastic job. On almost any given day, I will encounter lots of different people, each experiencing a variety of different things, some of them incredibly happy and others tragically sad, some of them unique and exciting and others still, rather mundane. While it is difficult sometimes to […]

Sometimes one finds themselves in exactly the right place at the right time. Jewish custom might designate circumstances like these as bashert – meant to be. Some of us see such blessings as mere coincidence and others ascribe deeper meaning to moments that simply feel bashert, as an affirmation of the mystery of creation. I […]