Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East by Zvi Zohar. Review by Tzvi Marx.
Articles
A Godless Jewish Humanist
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Fromm’s quest was to free the cultivation of spirituality and ethics from their theistic, authoritative moorings in the Hebrew Bible and forge them—with elements of Hasidic mystical relatedness and themes from Marxism, Christianity, and Buddhism—into a new ethical humanism.
Articles
Jewish Education During the Nazis as Spiritual Resistance
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“Somehow Nazism and Martin Buber worked together to give a lot of us a much deeper feeling for what Judaism offers.”
2014
High Holy Days in the Hospital
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“On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. Who shall live and who shall die, who shall perish by fire and who by water, who by Roman soldier and who by cancer…”
“No, that’s not how it goes,” I wearily chided myself from my hospital bed. I knew I was making up my own words. But alone in the wee hours of the morning, as the High Holidays approached, that was the best rendition of the Unetanah Tokef (the central prayer of the High Holiday service) that I could muster. And my brother Jeffrey later told me that spending the eve of Yom Kippur with me in the hospital was the most meaningful Yom Kippur of his life.
2014
Who Can Be Commanded?: Disability in Jewish Thought and Culture
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Recently two dear friends asked me to advise them about their pregnant daughter, who just discovered that her fetus has Noonan syndrome, a genetic condition that can result in heart defects, unusual facial features, short stature, and learning problems. The pregnant daughter wanted to keep the child, but her husband was afraid that the child would have a difficult life and was concerned about possible consequences for the rest of the family. My friends presented the possibility of abortion in this case as a Jewish legal question. May a person, they asked, decide over life and death? What is our responsibility to act on this, and where are the limits? My reply:
Though such children have a difficult path to follow, yet it is a life with many possibilities for fulfilment.
2014
Both Wilderness and Promised Land: How Torah Grows When Read Through LGBTQ Eyes
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B’reishit—in the beginning of the Torah, and the beginning of the world—there was God, a very queer God. Unlike other deities described in Iron Age texts, this God didn’t have a form or face or identifiable role in the natural world. In other Iron Age creation stories, deities are action heroes, creating order out of chaos by slaying monsters, other deities, and occasionally their parents. In Genesis, God brings order out of chaos simply by speaking. No blood, no pantheon, no rivals, no triumphs to portray on temple walls, nothing to visualize or imagine.
2014
Inspired by Moses: Disability and Inclusion in the Jewish Community
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I believe that Jewish communities must stop creating “special” programs that serve people with disabilities in segregated settings and instead support personalized efforts to enable people with disabilities to live full and meaningful Jewish lives of their own choosing.
2014
The Rabbi Who Visited Death Row
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Rabbi Chaim Richter and I met on death row during my second year of isolation in a maximum-security women’s prison in the Florida Everglades. I was the only woman on death row at the time. Having been wrongfully convicted in the murder of two police officers, I remained under sentence of death for five years until 1981, when the Supreme Court of Florida changed my sentence from death to life imprisonment. After twelve more years of imprisonment, I won my federal habeas corpus and the federal district court overturned my case. Rabbi Richter visited, counseled, and befriended me throughout those long years.
2014
God on Wheels: Disability and Jewish Feminist Theology
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At kiddush one day, I was welcoming a visitor to synagogue when she popped the question. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked as her eyes flicked from my face to my wheels. I’ve been asked this question in an astounding array of inappropriate venues; I didn’t flinch. “I have a disability,” I said, though it was plain she’d already noticed. A firm full stop followed that statement, though I knew full well I didn’t answer her question.
Articles
The Color of Judaism: A Cultural Reflection and Plea for the New Year
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No matter what I am wearing, what is covering my head, or what color my skin is, I am Jewish. But being Jewish does not take away the fact that I am a person of color either.
Editorials & Actions
Planting the Seed of Eternity
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Planting the Seed of Eternity: A Meditation on Rosh Hashanah & Our Planet
By Rabbi David Seidenberg
On Rosh Hashanah, after every time we hear the sound of the shofar, we
call out the words, Hayom harat olam. This expression is usually
translated as, “Today is the birthday of the world, or “Today the
world is born.” Even though that’s how people translate it, the Hebrew word harah or
harat actually means pregnancy, conception or gestation. Not birth,
but the process that leads to birth. Furthermore, olam can mean world, but it can also mean eternity, from
the root that means “hidden,” or more precisely, the infinite that is
hidden, that is beyond our limited perception.
Articles
High Holiday Repentance Workbook 2014 / 5775
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To acknowledge our own screw-ups is an important first step. But the High Holidays are not about getting ourselves to feel guilty, but rather engaging in a process of change. If we don’t make those changes internally and in our communities and in our society, all the breast-beating and self-criticism become an empty ritual.
Articles
The Joy of Yom Kippur: A Conversation Between Dovid Gottlieb and Michael Lerner
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Yom Kippur engages in honest, wrenching self-evaluation. Read Rabbis Dovid Gottlieb and Michael Lerner’s discussion of the twenty-five hour fast.
Articles
Blue, Texas
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I was eating two slices of Oscar Meyer bologna that I’d topped with a squiggle of yellow mustard and squeezed between two slices of white Wonder bread. But he held a bulging thing housed between two dense slices of dark bread, a sandwich that was both pungent and foreign, about as unreal as anything I could recall.
Editorials & Actions
Israeli Extremists Protest Marriage of a Jewish Woman Who Converted to Islam to Marry Her Arab Husband
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Demonstrators face off outside Jewish-Arab wedding
Some 200 right-wing protesters demonstrated against what they called ‘assimilation in the Holy Land.’ A counter-demonstration was held by the entrance to the hall. By Ilan Lior | Aug. 18, 2014 | 10:55 AM
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