This Passover I sang Dayenu the same way I’ve been singing it my whole life. This year, however, I sang in a new place, surrounded by new communities, participating in the World Union for Progressive Judaism’s FSU (Former Soviet Union) Pesach Project. From March 24-29th, I visited and engaged with Belarussian Jewish communities in Minsk, Mogilev, and Vitebsk. The program was started ten years ago to provide these underserved communities with leadership needed in order to hold Passover seders. Today, students help lead seders and educational programs in the communities they visit, though the program functions more as a cultural exchange, providing the communities and the students the opportunity to learn from each other’s traditions. Paired with a conference on…
Wow! It seems there are both no words to sum up this past week, and yet so many. My mind is still boggled, three days later, that I biked over 150 miles, from Metulla to just north of Cesarea. I just completed Ride for Reform: a five-day bike trip, riding six to eight hours a day. This year the path took us through the upper Golan, the Hula valley nature reserve, around the eastern side of the Kineret, and then across then Jezreel valley. However, this is not just a ride for simple enjoyment- before boarding the bus to go north, each of the participants raised at least $2,000 for the IMPJ, the Israeli Movement for Progressive Judaism. Having the…
Rabbis give sermons all the time, and our homiletics classes prepare us for this weekly activity. But it’s not all the time that rabbis deliver sermons in front of a room full of rabbis, cantors, and Jewish educators, and no amount of preparation makes us fully ready for such a powerful occasion. Every HUC-JIR rabbinical student has the privilege to address his or her campus community in what we call a Senior Sermon. This is an opportunity for students to demonstrate their rhetorical skill, to teach Torah, and to share their passions with their classmates and teachers. For many, it is considered a pinnacle experience of rabbinical school. I delivered my senior sermon during parashat Bereishit, in October 2012 in…
After spending every year ending my family’s Passover seders in Los Angeles by saying “Next year in Jerusalem!”, this year I finally have the opportunity to be in Israel, and I’m hoping to leave to spend Passover in Belarus, in the communities of Vitebsk (birthplace of Marc Chagall!) and Mogilev (probable birthplace of Irving Berlin), as well as Minsk. My fellow classmates and I will be spending this Passover participating in the FSU Pesach Project, through the World Union for Progressive Judaism. It’s a project in which HUC-JIR students have been participating in for 10 years. Together, cohorts of rabbinical, cantorial, and education students have traveled to congregations in the former Soviet Union. They’ve led seders, participated in concerts, taught songs and ran education programs for communities that for…
Avot 4:1-“Ben Zoma said: Who is wise? One who learns from all people, as it is said:‘From all those who taught me I gained understanding.’” (Psalms 119) Squeezing around a table designed for sixth graders at a Los Angeles Jewish day school, my classmates and I pored over this text at lunch on the first day of Kallah Bet, our second educational retreat as DeLet fellows. Our teacher challenged us to delve into this text in chavruta, pair learning, and to then share our responses with the larger group. Quickly, we engaged in discussing our teacher’s questions: What can we learn from other people that we cannot learn from text? What qualities must this “wise person” possess in order to…
I’m sitting in Cafe Hillel on Jaffa street about to get a goat cheese sandwich. Our program has ended and although not everyone has left for the airport I had some gifts to get and broke off on my own. As I observe the people around me, I could be in any city, the US or otherwise. The main difference is that everyone around me is presumably Jewish, this is the draw of Israel, the land where Jews rule, where we are the majority- finally! But what if I don’t want to be the majority? What if I like having non-Jews around me, like feeling special, more responsible for being a good person. We visited the Israel museum yesterday and…
“Controversial Title: A Panel Discussion on a current important issue, hosted by large LA-area synagogue” “Last chance to sign up for Awesome Retreat/Colloquium/Conference!” “Interested in [insert name of Jewish organization that wants rabbis to know about it/be participants/staff members for it]? Come hear more about us during lunch on Tuesday – lunch provided.” “Employment opportunity with Camp Ishkabibl in Somewhere, USA” The life of an HUC-JIR student is full of emails with subject titles like those above – opportunities to learn, to grow, to become involved with various institutions, and (most importantly for some) to receive free meals in exchange for said learning! The onslaught of emails could be overwhelming, but the myriad opportunities constantly pouring into my inbox has…
I’ll never forget the first time I heard the term “experiential education.” Dr. Gabe Goldman explained the concept as part of a program at the Western Hillel Organization conference. Goldman taught that all experiences have the potential to be educative. The educator can make the experience engaging and interactive by creating the right setting, and asking questions that encourage and empower students to construct their own ideas based on the experience. As Goldman, who is the Director of Experiential Education at American Jewish University, began to explain this concept, my first thought was, “My work has a name!” My second thought was, “I want to learn everything I can from this guy before the conference is over.” Imagine my thrill…
As a fifth year student in the rabbinical program, I have a unique vantage point to reflect on my time at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion. I came into HUC-JIR following a “non-traditional” path, although at this point so many of my classmates and colleagues have a diverse portfolio of skills, interests and passions that it is hard to determine “traditional” from “non-traditional.” I came into rabbinical school focused on pastoral care, with a particular passion for issues of end-of-life care, hospice and palliative care. I now know more about living, having accompanied people on their journey into the hereafter – into life eternal or however they have named it. It is not dissonant to say my…
It wasn’t so long ago that my Facebook Newsfeed was filled with predictions of Hurricane Sandy. Everyone on the East Coast was talking about it – how strange it was to have a hurricane set to hit so far north. When it was downgraded to a tropical storm, everyone breathed a sign of relief – and when it was labeled a hurricane again, everyone got nervous all over. People took pictures of empty shelves at the grocery store, posted statuses about weather updates with radar imaging – but all we could do from Jerusalem was watch and wait for the storm to hit. So we did. We watched as the storm tore through New Jersey and New York. We listened…