I’m pretty sure I know the story of the Garden of Eden backwards and forwards. I’ve had it read to me since I was a kid. I’ve seen and listened to the soundtrack of Children of Eden, Stephen Schwartz’s musical version almost more than any other show. I even studied it from both the traditional […]
This Shabbat, we reach one of the several times in the Jewish calendar that our Reform community is a little “out of sync” with the rest of the Diaspora. While, for our co-religionists, Friday night to Saturday night will mark Shemini Atzeret, the eighth day of Sukkot, for us, Shabbat will be both Sehmini Atzeret […]
Sukkot is truly one of my favourite holidays, not just because of how meaningful and rich its imagery and rituals are, but also because I have so many great family memories surrounding it. Growing up, the day after Yom Kippur, exhausted from leading services all day, my dad would get us going on building our […]
Have you ever gotten a song stuck in your head? It’s a common experience and it happens because our brains seem perfectly designed to engage with music. Listening to and performing music activates multiple different regions of the brain in different ways, making a song easier to remember than anything spoken. That’s part of the […]
A good friend and colleague of mine, Rabbi Calvin Dox-DaCosta once shared with me his philosophy on pancakes. Pancakes are one of his favourite foods to cook and eat, but a strange and persistent part of making them is that the first pancake is always not-quite-so-great. The pan’s heat hasn’t yet reached equilibrium and the […]
Before there were all the electronic distractions on which we (myself, included) spend so much time, there was the Torah. For the rabbis, blessedly free from screens, the Torah was their place for exploring ideas and engaging their imagination. As such, they developed countless tools and tricks to interpret the Torah. For our purposes this […]