In this reflection on some of the core questions of our existence which have been thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic, David Adelson offers a perspective informed by theological concepts, spiritual insights, and personal testimony. The novelty of our COVID-19 universe is seen in terms of the perennial and the unchanging.

Cantor Benjie Schiller reflects on the multiple lessons learned while teaching cantoral students and leading her own congregation in prayer and song. The gift of sound—and the fundamental role it plays in fostering spirit and community—is made more precious when singing alone, in virtual silence, while in isolation.

Employing the traditional account of the establishment of Yavneh as a center of Jewish learning and self-governance in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbi Haim Rechnitzer, Ph.D., offers a trenchant critique and a clarion call to Reform Jewish leaders to grasp the enormity of our own current Yavneh moment.

Employing a historian’s sensibility, Joshua Holo, Ph.D. frames contemporary Reform theological responses to this current moment. Unprecedented as it is, this time is also profoundly precedented. Such awareness has been a source of comfort and creativity for millennia.

COVID-19 has impacted not only the way we move within the dimension of space, but also our profound experience of the dimension of time. Joseph A. Skloot, Rabbi, Ph.D., considers this new reality through the prism of two of the twentieth century’s most significant thinkers.

While the pandemic has impacted all, some sectors of society have been disproportionately exposed to its ravages. Jan D. Katzew, Rabbi, Ph.D., considers what our current moment reveals about attitudes to the old, and what Jewish tradition can offer in this crucial conversation.

Often mentioned but rarely analyzed, the issue of leadership has become a staple of management jargon in recent decades. COVID-19 has brought the presence and absence of leadership into sharp relief. Michael Zeldin, Ph.D., is one of Jewish Education’s most renowned academics, and Lesley Litman, Ed.D., one of its modest revered practitioners. Together, they offer a Jewish vocabulary for the development of leadership practices.

Doyen of scholars and inspiration to practitioners in the praying communities around and beyond the North American Jewish community, Rabbi Larry Hoffman, Ph.D., ventures into the area of theology. He argues that in this crisis time, the need for robust theological grappling has never been greater.

How to be passionate and moderate is a perennial challenge made more acute by the extreme circumstances of these days. Rabbi Michael Marmur, Ph.D., argues that in order to be equal to the enormity of the challenge, Reform Judaism will have to redouble its efforts to proceed with seriousness of purpose and resoluteness of spirit.

Rabbi Rachel Adler, Ph.D., is a theologian, striving to view profound questions of meaning through prisms of tradition. In this essay she turns to two psalms from the Hebrew Bible not included in liturgies of encouragement and comfort. She argues that Judaism in all its complexity offers articulations of deep anxiety, uncertainty and anger of which we may have need in these challenging times.