Skip to main content

Posts

3 Elul 5779: Prepare

It's beshert that today's Elul prompt is "prepare" because my intention today was to prepare the service outlines for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  I'm big into preparation, sort of.  I start planning for events - divrei Torah, essays for local newspapers, parties, services, lesson plans, concerts - weeks and months in advance. I brainstorm and research, come up with lots of ideas, and make long notes and lists.  Then I  promptly stop as soon as something more interesting or immediate comes my way. I figure that I have "plenty of time" before said event, so I can get back to finalizing my prepping soon enough.  The reality, though, is that because I am very expert at last-minute pulling together, all those deeply researched lists fall apart, and I usually do wind up doing that last-minute thing.  And that's a problem. Financially, I wind up spending more money than I should have needed to ordering things with overnight delivery. I spend ho
Recent posts

#blogexodus - Nisan 1, 5779 - Open to a new place and a new language

https://pixabay.com/photos/output-input-light-beam-sunlight-419280/ ...בְּצֵאת יִשְׂרָאֵל מִמִמִּרַָים , בֵּית יַעֲקֹב מֵעַם לֹעֵז   As Israel was leaving Egypt (also: a place of narrowness and despair), the house of Jacob from a people with a strange language ... (Psalm 114) A year ago I started to leave my own place of narrowness and despair, leaving behind a language that had become not only strange but physically and spiritual damaging. A series of coincidences suggested that there might be a door for me to walk through. Would I be able to open it all the way so I could actually get out? Would the door slam and hit me in the face? Would I have the courage to learn a new language?  Time will tell. 

Omer Day 8: Love without judgment

Omer Day 3: Finding Penny

Omer Day 2: Boundaries

Randi Buckley

Omer Day 1

For the March For Our Lives - March 24, 2018

Shabbat HaGadol Saturday, March 24, 2018 1. At heart is the question: what place should guns have in our culture? In our self-conception? This is not a new question. The Mishnah raises this question in the context of figuring out the religio-legal boundaries of the Shabbat. May one carry weapons on Shabbat from private to public domain? The Rabbis differ. One Rabbi, Eliezer, says that weapons are a man’s adornments. (“Man’s adornment” is intentional, the rabbis see weapons as gendered male.   This too is reflected in current discourse. Men are overwhelmingly the shooters.  Women, in domestic disputes, are overwhelmingly the victims of intimate gun violence.) “Sages,” the collective voice of the rest of the rabbis push back, saying that “they are nothing but shame,” and then, as a proof text, quoting this famous verse from Isaiah 2: And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: a nation shall not lift up sword against