Rabbi of Ohr HaTorah Synagogue, mostly online synagogue in Los Angeles
When I began to study Torah seriously as a college student, I was introduced to its spiritual depths. I found that the meanings of the holidays went beyond the agricultural and historical sources, and often had complex spiritual teachings woven in. I remember that, back in those days, I could find little spiritual or poetic meanings of Shemini Atzeret. It was blank, or more accurately, a cipher.
We lost e-mail contact with our son, Kayitz, when he and his Marine unit disembarked from their ship on Feb. 24. From just about the beginning of the Iraq War, though, we knew what he was going through.
At a recent Shabbat, a guest at our services asked the person staffing our welcome table, \”Is the rabbi here Jewish?\” What the person meant was, \”Is the rabbi a convert?\” Many have shared with me over the years, as our congregation has grown, that acquaintances of theirs have told them, on good authority, that Rabbi Finley \”is not really Jewish.\”