Rabbi's Corner

Chad Gadya. You may have wondered, then learned, then maybe forgotten, what exactly this favorite and somewhat harsh folksong is doing in the Passover seder, and how it relates to our Passover story.

Some like to answer that the song, which probably entered the Haggadah from Germany in the late Middle Ages, is included merely to entertain the children--and more specifically, to wake them up so that they can be taken home. It might be...Read more...

War would not be the subject of tonight's d'var Torah had Russia not started one. Though in our developing Torah story, warfare is on the Israelite horizon, at this point in our reading our ancestors are gathering amongst themselves in the common cause of building a portable sanctuary that is to be a physical home for God. The sanctuary or mishkan was a tangible symbol of God's centrality that regularly had to be assembled, disassembled, and...Read more...

Click here to read Rabbi Amy's Kol Nidre sermon, titled "Antisemitism is a form of Scapegoating."

Mystics are those who sense another kind of universe is present within the very
fabric of the everyday world we live in. They sense that there is more to life than meets the eye. Though it may not be the usual way we operate in the world, it’s likely that many if not most of us have had some kind of mystical experience.

But what does this other world that mystics detect look like? How does it operate?
How do we access it?...Read more...

On April 3 I attended a program sponsored by the JCRC at the Bender JCC in Rockville. The presenters were part of a group called Sharaka, which means partnership in Arabic. With the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020 (https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords/), four Arab nations (UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan) committed to pursuing peace with Israel and to ending radicalization throughout the Mideast. Through interfaith and...Read more...

We are just about midway between Purim and Passover, both holidays that celebrate redemption and yet describe redemption in starkly different ways. Besides sharing the paradigm that describes most Jewish holidays—They came to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat— it’s a good time to reflect on what else connects these two very different redemptions. That connection is the agency of the Jewish people. Like the moral of the opening story,...Read more...

This week we hear from our Israeli contact, Ken Zwiebel, who provides us with an update on daily life in Israel. You can contribute to ongoing efforts to support Ken's community at the link found on our 'We Stand with Israel' section on our home page.

Daily Life in Israel. March 2024

Israelis are desperate to go back to “normal” 5+ months after October 7th. For people living not-in-the-north, getting back...Read more...

December 28, 1956
 
On December 28, 1956, barely one week after the Montgomery Bus Boycott had ended and the busing system in Montgomery was finally integrated, sniper gunshots struck Rosa Jordan, a 22-year-old Black woman who was eight months pregnant, as she rode an integrated bus through a Black neighborhood.

From December 1, 1955, until December 20, 1956, Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted the city bus...Read more...