As we think about rewriting our personal narratives in the New Year, adding new pages and chapters, several new books inspire new visions, renewed creativity and new relationships between the calendar and a sense of holiness.
The focus on and radical identification with Israel, the substitution of relationship with Israel for relationship with Judaism or Jewishness, has bequeathed to the American Jewish community a blind spot of our own.
The Republican Party has a two-sided albatross around its neck, an unpopular president who is trying desperately to keep an unpopular war going past Election Day so that its disastrous ending can be on the next president\’s watch.
Is there a better day than the one when we abstain from all physical sustenance to reflect on the sanctity of the human body and honor the Torah\’s injunction that \”You shall guard your being\”?\n
This New Year, we will enter our synagogues to take the measure of our souls, to account for our actions, to seek forgiveness, to face the fact that God wants something better from us. Is it so unfair to want, in return, something better from God?\n
As singles, trying on different slippers and hoping for a perfect fit, we have assayed to squeeze ourselves into many an improper shoe during the past year, blistering ourselves and others in the process, becoming callused as we try to move our lives forward.
\”I was born and raised in the West Bank,\” said Fadil Bayyari. \”I\’ve been in the U.S. for 36 years and northwest Arkansas for 27…. I respect other peoples\’ ways of life, other peoples\’ religion.\”
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