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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.
Inspired by a Hebrew essay on dualism penned a century ago by the famed poet Chayim Nachman Bialik, Lisa Grant considers this COVID-19 moment from the perspective of ambivalences, ambiguities, dialectic tensions and diametric opposites. Leaning heavily on kabbalistic traditions, she suggests that this extreme time may force or encourage us to consider the extremes in our own personalities, communities and societies. She asks the provocative question: as we begin to re-emerge into our previous lives, can we avoid simply falling back into our tired old dichotomies?
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?
In this careful and thought-provoking study of Jewish responses to biblical and rabbinic tragedies, Dr. Sarason traces a clear path for liberal Jews as they seek to acknowledge and confront the perilous and anxious experiences of the ongoing pandemic while showing the possibilities of Reform Judaism to offer comfort and tools for moving forward even in sorrow.
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.
This is a record of reading a particular Rabbinic text with Rabbinic students early in the current crisis. It highlights the interwoven nature of the classic and the contemporary, the ancient and the actual. Rabbi Dvora Weisberg, Ph.D., expertly provides the thread to hold these dimensions together.
Recent years have seen the eruption of a fierce debate about the nature of truth, authority and verifiability. During these last months, this issue has taken on direct existential urgency. Scholar of the Jewish legal tradition Rabbi Mark Washofsky, Ph.D., offers insights gleaned from within the classical normative texts of that tradition as they relate to a question of life and death – should we listen to the advice of scientific experts?
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.
In the year of mourning the tragic loss of her father, Wendy Zierler, Ph.D., began a practice of translating and teaching one Hebrew poem a week to the minyan with whom she recited Kaddish. When her mother died, almost a full year later, her practice continued, bringing comfort while she grieved her parents. The pandemic and its stay-at-home orders curtailed the way in which Kaddish was shared, but not the essential practice of choosing the weekly poems and finding the myriad ways they provided shape during an uncertain time.
William Cutter, Rabbi, Ph.D., has pioneered work on the nexus between health and Jewish texts for decades. In this essay he draws upon modern Hebrew literature as he considers the power of language to impart truth and to conceal it. Where illness strikes, Truth is often at a premium.
Rooted in her personal experience of COVID-19 and her expertise in prayer and spirituality, Merri Lovinger Arian offers this reflection based on Scriptural passages featuring centrally in Jewish liturgy.
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.
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.
