by Avis Dimond Miller From Moment, October 1997Reprinted With Permission It’s been said that 90 percent of life is just showing up. A news article in the Washington Post told about how a wealthy person in Japan, afraid of the embarrassment of a small turnout, can rent a cast of hundreds from an agency to …
Richard A. Marker December 2002 Three years ago, I penned an article for Sh’ma calling for the transformation of the synagogue as we have known it in post-War [WWII, that is] America. The article posited the impossibility of any one synagogue effectively delivering service in all of the areas it arrogates to itself. By attempting …
Continue reading “Synagogue Transformation Revisited and some thoughts on “k’dushah””
Richard A. Marker February 2003 Introduction Several years ago, shortly after moving to New York, I was invited to serve on the young leadership boards of 2 different national Jewish organizations. I was both surprised and flattered. After all, by that time I had been active in the Jewish community for over 30 years, having …
Continue reading “The Personnel Crisis in Jewish Life: A contrarian perspective and new approaches”
by Jill Menkes Kushner From Reform Judaism, Winter 1995 Reprinted With Permission Temple has become a place to ask questions about God; to think; to wonder; to explore feelings that seem out of place in the everyday world. My rediscovery of Judaism has been and continues to be much like an archeological expedition, a slow …
Stephen A. Karol From CCAR Journal: A Reform Jewish Quarterly, Winter 1997 Reprinted with Permission “This 44 year old… patient of mine since 1983 is known to have hyper-cholesterolemia treated with Pravachol 20 mg. per day. He has a positive family history for hypertension. He has a stressful occupation but otherwise has no risk factors …
by Sherry Israel From The Reconstructionist, Spring 1995 Reprinted with permission. In any discussion of community and contemporary American Jewry, it is essential that we pay attention to the wide context in which we live. Too often, we seem to forget that the complex realities of Jewish life today did not arise in a vacuum, …
Continue reading “Ethnicity, Geography and Jewish Community”
The search for spirituality transcends the empowerment of women and Jews by choice, of course. It is inextricably linked to larger demographic changes that began to be felt in the 1960s when the first phalanx of baby-boomers came of age. Those same men and women are now in their forties, and are but one of …
By 1950, American Jews had settled down into two competing visions of what Judaism ought to be. Intermarriage between Germans and Russians veiled the divide to some extent, as did the very vastness of the eastern European numbers which overflowed into the German temples, despite their organ music, strange decorum, and other trappings of a …
It helps to have some dates in mind, but dates are arbitrary. Dating by decades is at least convenient, however, starting with our own and looking backward. Also helpful is the Bible’s generational calculus. There too we find “generations,” the generation of the flood, as the Rabbis put it, or the generation of the dispersion, …
by Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman From the Synagogue 2000 Library Our long-term goal is the spiritualization of the North American synagogue. Whatever kind of congregation we attend, whatever our movement or ideological allegiance, we all have this in common: we are on a Jewish quest for a better tomorrow, and to judge by all the …
Continue reading “From Ethnic to Spiritual: A Tale of Four Generations”