J Street has lined up plenty of high-profile speakers for its first major conference. But the new and controversial self-described \”pro-Israel, pro-peace\” lobby is looking to add one more prominent name to the guest list.
I met Rabbi Yitzhak Dovid Grossman three weeks ago in a beautiful apartment across from the Western Wall. We stood at the window and looked out at some 5,000 kids preparing to say the penitential Selichot service. He turned and spoke his first words to me: “Is that not the scene of the Mashiach?!”
When the 39-year-old filmmaker Spike Jonze began visiting the author and illustrator Maurice Sendak at his rural Connecticut farmhouse years ago, Sendak often spoke of how his Jewish immigrant relatives inspired the toothy monsters in his children’s classic, “Where the Wild Things Are.”
We stood near a gleaming pond nestled within a circle of age-old, giant Sequoia trees. The mighty croak of a bullfrog called out from the reeds, as if answering our ancient call to attention from the shofar.
Hebrew letters, when decoded, are magical. So it was especially powerful when my adult b’nai mitzvah Hebrew class was working on the letter Bet and opened the Torah to this week’s portion to find that it’s the first letter of Torah.
