Reflecting on her experience of Zooming into the three separate, concurrent celebrations of young women celebrating becoming bat mitzvah, Dr. Sarah Benor uses the occasion to find the less hidden blessings of technology and cacophony. Following the service in a liturgical round allows for an unexpected abundance of blessings.

Using the experience of the returning Judeans under Cyrus the Great, Dr. Joshua Garroway uses the narrative of the Second Temple to highlight dueling sentiments: those who want the reconstruction of what they had before and those who look toward future change as possibility. What will we choose when we think about the post-Covid world?

Rabbi Norman Cohen has been teaching students to find meaning in foundational Jewish texts for decades. In this essay he teases out some of the resonances of one word from the old-new vocabulary of this time.

A teacher of education, leadership and congregational transformation for decades, Rabbi Samuel K. Joseph, PH.D., offers a description of the attitudes and states of mind of a number of some HUC-JIR students in this extraordinary time.

One of the most eminent modern Jewish historians, Michael Meyer, Ph.D., reflects here on one of the key themes of the COVID-19 pandemic: isolation, offering a number of historical insights and parallels. Seen in this context, we may feel less alone in our isolation.

Michal Muszkat-Barkan, Ph.D. offers a reflection on a ubiquitous feature of our COVID-19 reality: electronic learning and teaching. As with so many other aspects of this crisis, core questions of meaning and intention are brought to the fore in the face of sever challenges.

Documents found in the Cairo Genizah provide powerful lessons about the importance of community, charity and compassion during earlier periods of Jewish experience. Historian Jennifer Grayson, Ph.D. investigates this treasure trove of Jewish life and practice. As a range of fascinating letters, records and receipts from the past show, Jewish communities have a long history of responding to communal and personal crises.

Jewish tradition offers a way of facing up to the scandal of human frailty and morality. COVID-19 has brought this reality into stark relief in recent months, and so the consciousness that there is no novelty in tragedy may provide a degree of comfort and perspective, even in trying times. Scholar of the Ancient Near East Kristine Henriksen Garroway, Ph.D. offers a way to reach across the centuries and find the most acute, the most contemporary human reality.

Lauren Applebaum, Ed.D. and Sivan Zakai, Ph.D. reflect on this inflection point in the oldest of dynamics: that which links one generation to another, teachers to children. They ask: what challenges and what beauty might be found?

In a fascinating history of the response by Isaac Mayer Wise to a tragic series of Yellow Fever outbreaks in the 19th century, this article shows us how deeply and generously American Jews extended their care to those who became ill and were affected by earlier pandemics in American history. Tracing individual and communal responses to regional and national healthy crises, Rabbi Gary P. Zola, Ph.D., shows just how much we have inherited from the founder of institutional Reform Judaism in the U. S.