Darfur has become significant for Southern California synagogues largely due to Valley Beth Shalom\’s Jewish World Watch group, which has been holding Darfur awareness evenings since last fall at Conservative, Reform and now Orthodox shuls.
One week, I would ambitiously attempt to devour the entire \”Box Car Children\” series; another I would host a Judy Blume marathon and vigilantly try to sneak the purportedly trashy \”Deenie\” home in between my \”Sheila the Great\” and \”Blubber.\”
Despite its title and the food, the play at The Met Theatre employs culinary arts not as an end, but a means to explore the complex and emotional Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I have plenty of friends who keep more strictly kosher than I do, but even some of them make exceptions — like bouillabaisse in France or lobster in Maine. I deviate when I\’m the guest in someone\’s home, and the options are slim — my rationale being that it\’s better to not shame a host than to stick to my half-baked rules.
A quiet crisis is unfolding here. It\’s grabbing few headlines and it\’s rarely the stuff of public debate.
One of the signal contributions of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) over the many years has been its stream of publications reporting on and analyzing our community.
Inherently, I knew I would end up marrying a woman with a similar worldview. But only recently, after becoming engaged to an idealistic high school English teacher named Dena Stein, do I realize how our similarities, the big ones as well as the seemingly minute ones, make all the difference.
\”I felt we\’re a Jewish school,\” Rabbi Shlomo Goldberg told me last week. \”And being Jewish means you reach out to everyone who\’s a Jew and let them have a Jewish education.\” Danielle entered a kindergarten class of six, in a school of 200 students.
I understand tikkun olam, the repairing and healing of our world, as the central calling of our people. All of the prayer, teaching, outreach, pastoral work and congregational activities that I help facilitate lead me back to the notion that they are somehow helping to add the necessary energy into our global cosmos, which can facilitate the advent of a new and better time for all people. And I know that each of us is working, in our own way, to help better the world.
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