Daily Inspirational Spiritual Message

 

Welcome to My Blog!

Welcome to My Blog!

This blog has one primary purpose – to help stop and hopefully reverse the attrition of Jews from the American Jewish community. Many others are trying to do this too; some are trying to make Jewish prayer services more interesting and others are focused on improving Jewish education. Those are laudable efforts that I agree with and will have more to say about them later. However, those efforts only reach those who are actively in the Jewish community at the present time. So many of our numbers are not in the Jewish community, never go to prayer services and never attend Jewish educational classes. In other words, current efforts are like preaching to the choir and not connecting at all to everyone else. So how do we reach them? My hope is to reach them through the books I am and will be writing. Perhaps this blog/website will also...

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The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Experience Needs to Change

Did you chant a Haftorah at your Bar or Bat Mitzvah? Do you remember what it was about? Have you chanted any others since then? Rabbi Joy Levitt, executive director of the JCC in Manhattan, believes that the heavy emphasis on teaching youngsters to chant a Haftorah on their...

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Bat Mitzvah History Shows How Judaism Can Change

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the first-ever Bat Mitzvah. Judith Kaplan, daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (founder of the Reconstructionist Movement), was invited to read from a chumash (a printed book of the Torah) – not a Torah scroll – on a Saturday morning on 86th Street...

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Raising Your Children in an Open Society

How do you balance your desire to have your children continue in your footsteps with the recognition that they have the right to live their own lives? This is the tension that every parent and every child struggles with, and therefore this memoir by Mary K. Bogot will speak...

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Pragmatism and Judaism

In an article entitled “Word of the Year” (www.FloridaJewishJournal.com, January 12, 2012, page 34), Rabbi Yaakov Thompson talked about the word “pragmatism” (which Merriam-Webster announced was the “word of the year”–most looked up word– for 2011) and Judaism. While noting that pragmatism is very apropos to American thinking in...

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The Problem With Prayer Services

“Can there be spirituality, ritual observance, without thought or moral reasoning? It can be done. It’s being done. Prayer recitation, the chanting of the tropes of the sacred texts, fluency with words and cantillation replaces religious inquiry. The ritual gesture turns surrogate for theological meaning. “For some, prayer is...

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The Truth About the Boycott Israel Movement

Norman Finkelstein, author and lecturer and one of Israel’s harshest critics, rocked the Boycott Israel Movement with a critique devastating in its candor. Finkelstein has been a supporter of the Boycott Israel Movement (officially it’s called the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The Movement is about to begin...

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