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I'm in hour three of cleaning my kitchen and there's still no end in sight.Crouching on my kitchen floor, refrigerator door open, food stuffs spoiling around me, I wonderIs this what the Israelites did? Did they throw out their moldy jars of pasta sauce and shriveled vegetables, so rotten I'm not sure what some of the things once were?I have taken my kitchen apart in a rather manic fashion.  Pots to scour sit on the countertops, cabinet doors are open, their...

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By: Rabbi Ari Weiss As we approach Berach and reflect and give thanks to God for the meal we recently consumed, let us pause for a moment and reflect on what a Jewish meal is. Having a meal according to the Jewish tradition is much richer and more complex then just consuming food. As William H. Gass [1]  has noted, as animals we desire only nourishment. However, in the process of eating, other things happen. The desire to have food is...

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Shabbat Candles May the festival lights we now kindle, Inspire us to use our powers To heal and not to harm, To help and not to hinder, To bless and not to curse, To serve You, O God of freedom.

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Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk outunder the Milky Way, feeling the riversof light, the fields of dark—freedom is daily, prose-bound, routineremembering. Putting together, inch by inchthe starry worlds. From all the lost collections."For Memory,"  A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far

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Our sages took some pains to ensure a Jewish calendar in which Pesach would always fall in the spring. (They were operating in a northern hemisphere context; I don’t think the challenges of antipodean Judaism ever occurred to them.) In the northern hemisphere, Pesach is inextricably connected with spring. As the earth shakes off the constrictions of winter, her frozen places thawing, so we remember our shaking-off the yoke of slavery to Pharaoh. As plant life and trees are “reborn” into...

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by Miriam Grossman May it be your will Our God and God of our ancestors that you lead us in peace and direct our steps (our marching, Rebellious, organized, queer dance-partying, prayerful steps) in peace and guide us in peace and support us in just peace (and in the tearing down of walls, and in the rising up of peoples), and cause us to reach our destination in life and joy and peace (all of us together, no one left behind)....

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Mah Nishtana: What's New? What significant change has occurred in your life since this time last year? Name one meaningful piece of news. ​Elijah's Cup is passed around as each guest speaks. A blessing or toast concludes the round. Avadim Hayinu: Our Slavery. Identify the problem. What enslaves you today? What's holding you back from being freer, happy, and creative? ​Use a blank note of paper - on one side write HOW AM I FREE and on the other side write...

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On Passover, the Jewish community asks ourselves, friends, family and neighbors, What makes this night different from all other nights?   Four Jewish racial justice leaders shared their answers.  "As Jews, we remember and we cannot let injustice happen again in this country. This is our moment to bend the moral arc and to move racial justice work forward through advocacy, activism, and engagement." -- Tiffany Harris "Our relative safety in American has allowed many of us to consider the fight for...

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By Rabbi Tamara Cohen We sit down for our seders this year at a powerful cultural moment when the voices of women and girls are rising – the collective activism of #metoo, Emma Gonzales’s six minutes of silence and 11-year-old African American Naomi Wadler’s speech at the March for Our Lives, and even the truth telling of Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels. All this makes the absence of women’s voices in the Passover Haggadah more glaring. Thirty years ago,...