Raise your hand if you’ve heard the following: On Friday evening, we cover the challah until after we’ve blessed the wine because we don’t want the challah to be embarrassed that it comes second! I bet there are a good many hands in the air right now. Okay, you can put your hand down. For those who have and who haven’t heard that explanation before, most of us have wondered why we cover the challah before we begin our meal. The story of why we cover the challah is a lot like the story about the congregation whose congregants would bow before going up on the bimah. There is an old tale about a synagogue who had a chandelier that was hung too low above the bimah. It was so low that, every time a congregant came up to open the ark or remove a Torah, each person would have to duck to avoid it. Years later, the synagogue was renovated and the chandelier was raised, but people kept ducking — a person would come up for an honor and bow before going up on the bimah. A generation passed and … [Read more...]
American Judaism
What a Couple of "Wise" Guys Began and What it Means to Us With Rabbi Max Miller Explore how fist fights, Sunday Shabbat, Social Justice, and Zionism have led to what we call Reform Judaism. RSVP below. … [Read more...]
Shabbat Service-Chapel
7:30pm-8:45pm … [Read more...]
BBC Book Club
Rabbi, why do some people write G-d and others write God?
Across the board from clergy to congregants, you will see a variety of ways that people spell God. My personal practice is to write out the name, G-o-d, God. Although, when I was in the 3rd grade, I remember a teacher took off points from an assignment because I “spelled God’s name incorrectly,” when I wrote G-d. When I asked my rabbi at the time about it, he said that there was no need for me to write G-d, I could write G-o-d, though he didn’t think the elementary school teacher needed to be taking off points for such things! There is no law that prohibits the writing of God’s name in Hebrew or in English. However, there is a law that prohibits the erasure of God’s name in the Hebrew. Deut. 12:3 reads, “Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site.” Rashi comments on the obliteration of their names and says that from this text we learn that blotting out God’s name is … [Read more...]
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