Under a banner of balloons arranged as a rainbow flag, Juval Porat, 32, stands on the bimah at Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC) on a warm June evening. In front of a packed sanctuary, Rabbi Lisa Edwards presents him for the first time as the Reform synagogue’s new cantor.
I cannot say that I have ever rejected God. There were some years in which I was not interested, and that, perhaps, is the greatest rejection of all (much more than hostility or lack of faith). But then the world seemed too small, too confined, far too senseless without Him; to me, He is the all-embracing, all-encompassing being, the great Mystery, the transcending reality that is above, beyond and behind all that exists.
Some Jews just don’t follow rules. Rosh Hashanah is a time for self-reflection and deep humility —a time when we are supposed to look at what we did wrong, not what others did wrong — but on the first Day of Judgment, my lunchtime crowd followed another script.
Anti-Israel activists are now putting all their energy into their Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS). Their goal is to portray Israel and Israelis as pariahs that should be excluded from all international spheres — diplomatic, political, economic, social and cultural.
Twenty-one years ago, Francis Fukuyama, a Japanese American professor at Harvard University, published his famous essay “The End of History.” His thesis was brilliant. Fukuyama argued that the fall of the communist bloc was not just another event in human history but signaled a major turning point. Liberal democracy had won. From now on, it would spread unchallenged by other ideologies. Conflicts between nations would no longer be cloaked in ideology. They would be local and, therefore, solvable. Armed struggles would become a thing of the past, yesterday’s news. We had entered a new age, boring in the positive sense. History as we knew it, with its bloodbaths, had come to an end.
As a young Jewish boy in 1960s Glasgow, Scotland, I accompanied my father and my two elder brothers every Yom Kippur to the shul he had founded. We always sat in the first row, and to this day I still feel the awesome intensity of prayer, the deep anguish of my father’s generation as they dwelt on their sins and looked for redemption.
On May 11, 1946, a 15-year-old boy named Jacob Garfein, one of the first Holocaust child survivors to arrive in New York, attended a Mother’s Day celebration in honor of Mrs. David M. Levy, chairman and benefactor of the national women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal drive. The New York Times note read: “Jacob, a red-cheeked, red-headed boy who lost his mother, father and sister in German concentration camps — two of them in a crematorium — and who recalls how he had to help bury 15 to 18 corpses a day in [Bergen-]Belsen, gave the flowers in a simple tribute of thanks from the Jewish children who are still alive in Europe.”
Temple Ramat Zion approached Rosh Hashanah with rejuvenated optimism this year. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Conservative synagogue recently hired a new rabbi, Ahud Sela, and a new education director, Rabbi Helene Kornsgold.
Thirty-nine years ago, Dov Indig, a young soldier in the Israel Defense Force tank corps, sat on guard duty in the Golan Heights. Joining him was a reserve soldier, many years older than Dov. During their four hours of guard duty, they engaged in a deep conversation about religion. It must have been a fascinating exchange; Dov came from Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, a Hesder yeshiva where students combine Torah study and military service in combat units, and the reservist came from a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, the epitome of secular Zionism.
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