Big Tent Judaism

Reinventing Judaism

The Jewish community is built upon a foundation of rituals. Lighting candles, the prayers we say, telling the story of our liberation from slavery on Passover – these are elements of our religion that have not changed in hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But they have been “reinvented” time and again. Prayers have been put to new tunes and stories have come to include references to modern day events. Is all this “reinvention” a good thing, asked Meredith Jacobs in the Baltimore Jewish Times? Or should we just leave things alone? “After all, what’s so wrong with the way we’ve been doing things?”

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Post-Passover Thoughts

The blog post below comes from a participant in The Mothers Circle, and is in response to the question “Have you found time for adult practice while supporting the religious practice of your children?”

Especially at Easter and Christmas, my friends ask me what I’m doing to celebrate “my” holidays. The answer, I’m sincerely sorry to say, is not much. We celebrate the nuts and bolts of the big Christian holidays at my parent’s house, but that’s it. The only time my kids and spouse have been to a church was when our congregation held our High Holiday services in one last year. The problem, however, is not my family. All of them would be more than happy to join me once in awhile at “my” church…and therein lies the problem. I can’t find one. I was baptized Lutheran out of deference to my grandparents, raised by more or less agnostic parents, converted to Catholicism in college, and promptly became the world’s worst convert. (Long story there, involving–of course–a guy I was dating at the time.) I hadn’t been to church for several years before I even met my husband, and that was 14 years ago.

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Writing a New Chapter in Jewish History

We often argue that Judaism is not a completely static entity. While there certainly are elements of the religion that have remained unchanged since its earliest days, other areas have grown and changed along the way. And we, as a community, must find ways to tether our past with the inevitable changes that occur over time. J.J Goldberg, a columnist for the Forward newspaper, recently attended a bar mitzvah that represented to him just what kind of accommodations we can make that will help define the future of the Jewish community.

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