First Person

By Samantha Brody “You should be a rabbi!” For the last several years, this has been the immediate response to my Jewish experience. I grew up in my synagogue’s Hebrew School and spent most of my free time bouncing between the sanctuary and the youth lounge. While most people dreaded going to Hebrew School, to me, it was a place where I could see my closest friends. Learning Hebrew, prayers, and Jewish history ...

One of the greatest Jewish women in modern history, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, co-wrote a reflection with Rabbi Lauren Holzblatt of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C. a few years back. It was about the heroic and visionary women of Passover and how their stories still inspire. “Retelling the heroic stories of Yocheved, Shifra, Puah, Miriam, and Batya reminds our daughters that with vision a...

By Rabbi Perry Raphael Rank Rabbi Perry Raphael Rank is Senior Rabbi at Midway Jewish Center in Syosset, New York Way back when you were sitting in some Hebrew School classroom, one of your teachers may have told you that God wrote the Torah. Or alternatively, the teacher may have claimed that God dictated the Torah to Moses, who then wrote it down himself. You may or may not have questioned that tidbit of knowledg...

Sarah Hurwitz’s book "Here All Along" chronicles her journey of reconnecting with Judaism. When author and former White House speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz was growing up, she did what many Jewish children do—went to services at her local synagogue twice a year, enjoyed seders with family and friends, and attended Hebrew school as she worked her way to the big day: her Bat Mitzvah. But when the day finally came and went,...

By Zelene Lovitt Zelene Lovitt When my mother was 9 years old, she contracted polio. That may be a benign sentence to read in 2019, but it was earth shattering at the time. Not only did polio impact her life, but it had a ripple effect on my own. Polio eventually brought me into the world of inclusion and ultimately gave me a mission to help people with physical, mental and emotional difficulties. A spinal tap g...

By Jared Rogers Upon arriving at the University of Pennsylvania, I was terrified of not finding authentic communities to call my own. Before college, I lived and breathed Conservative Judaism; I was a student at Schechter Long Island, a counselor at Ramah Nyack and an officer on USY’s International Executive Board. Unsurprisingly, I fell in love with the Conservative Jewish Community (CJC) at Penn. CJC provided me...

By Rabbi Deborah Silver, Shir Chadash, New Orleans, Louisiana When we consider the centrality of Torah to our tradition—whether in the sense of the scroll in the Ark or our expanded use of the term to embrace the Tanakh and all of the literature of the teachers who came before us—it is interesting to consider the way we memorialize in community the time that Torah was given to us. In contrast to the Seder and the me...