It was a hot day this week when we all gathered to welcome Dawn Mankow into the Jewish faith. I’m no longer surprised when people want to become Jewish. After all, we have a good product to offer. Yet, I never take it for granted. Some of the best-known rabbis and educators through Jewish history have been converts or children of converts, which the Talmud refers to as benei gerrim. Even though this term sometimes can be used [...]

Dear Friends, I just returned from the Maine Conference for Jewish Life, a project of the Center for Small-Town Jewish Life at Colby University. The idea of the conference is to draw interested Jews and friends from the surrounding areas and urban centers to the small town of Waterville to experience superior Jewish learning and joyous celebration. For those who are living far from one another, it is an opportunity to gain access to the Jewish world’s finest scholars and [...]

As I’m writing this message, President Trump is wrapping up his trip to Saudi Arabia before flying (directly!) from Riyadh to Tel Aviv. The timing is most interesting — the President arriving in Tel Aviv on May 22, the same day that Israel celebrates a Jubilee—50 years since the unification of Jerusalem after the Six-Day War, which started on the 26th of Iyar (June 5, 1967). I was born into this reality, that even though Jerusalem has not [...]

More than 100 people celebrated the holiday of freedom with us this year — two Seders at our shul and two additional model Seders, one for the Greenport Ecumenical Ministries (GEM) and another at San Simeon By The Sound. Passover doesn’t mean only to pass over, but to pass over to our children the knowledge and, most importantly, the feeling, that freedom is a constant work. Real freedom means to keep an order. Even free-spirit creativity [...]

Dear members and friends, It was nice to come back to Greenport, to budding trees and bushes. With Purim behind us and Passover ahead, it’s time for us to get ready for spring — to take off the Purim masks and begin clearing out the rising agent in our leavened selves. It’s time to remember how long the road to freedom can be and how hard it often is to navigate. Passover is a holiday [...]

Dear members and friends, Shalom from Israel! The day after I finished a 10-day interfaith pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I was sitting with friends, watching the evening news report of President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s meeting in Washington D.C. It’s always comforting to see a display of friendship between an American president and an Israeli prime minister. Of course, many people were surprised to hear that the two-state solution, supported by many administrations, is not [...]

Dear members and friends, Let me begin my message this month by wishing our new president success in keeping America great. The atmosphere in which President Trump begins his term is challenging. The various camps in America clearly represent different views of social arrangement, but it is crucial to find the middle ground that brings us together. This seems to be lacking. So what is that middle that we are looking for? Last month, I ended my message [...]

All I was hoping for was an enjoyable post-High Holidays trip, driving through seven mostly Eastern European countries in three weeks. (Yes, I do find it relaxing.) The idea was to visit the countries, and to see some of the lesser-known sites. I was traveling with a WWII veteran, who is half a century ahead of me. That, of course, is our own gabbai, Stanley Rubin. But instead, what began as an innocent vacation [...]

Dear Members and Friends, It was wonderful to see so many of you on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; it always feels like an extended family reunion. After several months of preparation and excitement, then a few days of long and intense prayers, and one long fast day, comes the moment of the last blast of the shofar, telling us that we worked hard, now we can sit and eat! As we read in [...]