How To Pray While The World Burns
January 4, 2024
Go outside.Find a patch of grass, sand, dirt.Sit, kneel, place a hand or justA finger to the soft earth.Feel it pulse back. Open your palms
Go outside.Find a patch of grass, sand, dirt.Sit, kneel, place a hand or justA finger to the soft earth.Feel it pulse back. Open your palms
By the Department for Thriving Communities The Department for Thriving Communities is pleased to share this basic guide to improve safety in our congregations. The resources
Back in 2017, Rabbi Shelley Barnathan met with 100 prospective members individually over coffee to ask some central questions about what they wanted in a new Reconstructionist synagogue in Philadelphia’s western suburbs.
She had just completed rabbinical school after leaving a 32-year career as a language arts teacher. A child of Holocaust survivors, she wanted to realize a childhood dream that wasn’t accessible in her Modern Orthodox community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IY61A6W38U Rabbinical student Talia Werber reads her poem about, partially, how the lights of Hanukkah can inspire and sustain us through a winter of darkness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66kUyaRbF5M Focusing intention on courage of all kinds, Rabbi Shelly Barnathan chants Mi Shebeirach, asking for all of us to experience the renewal of body
Members of Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Ill. — one of the movement’s oldest congregations, and one where the conversation about Israel had long proved polarizing — have shown that such respectful engagement is possible, maybe even necessary.
Over the past two months, the congregation has leaned into Reconstructionist values by emphasizing the community’s voice over the rabbi’s and embracing complexity and nuance. Following a process that lasted for about three weeks, entailing thousands of emails, two board meetings and feedback from more than 200 members, the congregation adopted a statement steeped in Jewish values, that declared “All parties must stop the killing to create the conditions for lasting peace.”
Every week, Rabbi Alex Weissman, director of Mekhinah, and cultural and spiritual life at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, emails members of the college community with
We all need more light in our lives. So this year, as you kindle your Hanukkiah, hold the intention to bring light to your day and to our world.
Reconstructing Judaism and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association unequivocally condemn the shooting of three Palestinian students in an alleged hate crime in Vermont over Thanksgiving weekend.
Serving as central organization of the Reconstructionist movement
Training the next generation of groundbreaking rabbis
Modeling respectful conversations on pressing Jewish issues
Curating original, Jewish rituals, and convening Jewish creatives
