Ritualwell’s executive editor, Deborah Glanzberg-Krainin, sat down to talk with rabbis Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Ph.D., and Sue Levi Elwell, Ph.D., editors of the newly published anthology Chapters of the Heart: Jewish Women Sharing the Torah of our Lives. The following is an edited version of the conversation.
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DG-K: Tell me about the genesis of this project.
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The biblical response to contagion: Self-quarantine voluntarily, even if you personally have nothing to gain from doing so, for the good of the community.
The fundamental flaw is not the arrogance of the claim, troublesome as it is, but that the claim requires that there was a Divine chooser who made a choice.
Halakhah is in the doing, and our ability to pass that practice down to the next Jewish generation depends on whether or not we can give it the significance it had for the lives of our ancestors.
The sense of peoplehood is the awareness that an individual has of being a
member of a group that is known, both by its own members and by outsiders,
as a people. (Mordecai Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew)
The Reconstructionist Network
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
