In Denver, I was based in the community’s nominally Jewish hospital and spent half of my time there delivering pastoral care to a wide variety of people and families.One of the areas in which I was called to specialize came as a result a need identified...

This particular Passover observance, while it may be dominated by the external expressions inspired by time-bound practices, has presented us with an opportunity to recalculate our future by recalibrating our reason for being.Most of us, myself included,...

The Schon Wirtschafter family's ongoing "tradition", as long as we live in a pandemic. The 1st Seder on the Zoom: https://youtu.be/gS9iiGJxbWo The response, Far from the Home I Zoom: https://youtu.be/YMWDOcg7EE4 Starring and created by: Marnina,...

The “Sarajevo Haggadah,” handwritten and illustrated in 14th century Spain, was probably part of the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The details of how and when it arrived in Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, are not known. But it...

A few years ago, Bob Hoffman was getting new siding on his house. He was sitting on his living room couch just under where a Hoffman family heirloom – an antique seder plate – was hanging on the wall. Workers outside were banging on the exterior wall...

Around this time last year, Daniel Movitz was preparing to celebrate Passover at his apartment in Clayton, using a seder kit he received from Chabad, the Jewish outreach organization. Like Jews around the world, Movitz was alone physically but held a...

The Passover holiday has always been awe-inspiring for me. To think that millions of Jews across the world gather with family and, in other years, with friends on the same night(s) around a seder plate with the same symbols to recount the same story of...

Remember when we used to congregate together in our synagogues, at the Jewish Community Center, at restaurants, in movie theaters and in other such meeting places? Remember when people wearing masks were usually about to commit a crime rather than protect...

Growing up, our family almost always hosted a Passover seder using the Maxwell House haggadah. I found it funny that a coffee company published a haggadah, but it wouldn’t have been a seder without its odd phrases woven throughout the story.I always...

This week’s parshah, Kee Teesa, contains one of the ugliest transgressions in the long history of the Jewish people: Chet HaEgel, the sin of the forging and worshipping the Golden Calf.Quite honestly, if I had my druthers, and the chutzpah to do so,...

There is a psalm for every day of the week, known as Shir Shel Yom.  Wednesday’s is Psalm 94, and it tells us, “For the law shall return to righteousness, and all those of upright heart shall follow it.” Implicit is the reality that the...

In Parashat Mishpatim, which we will read this coming Shabbat, we find ourselves situated between a mountain (Mount Sinai) and a Mishkan (the portable desert Tabernacle). The juxtaposition of the other-worldly grandeur of the Sinaitic revelation and the...