The first time I looked at a page of Talmud, my initial thought was, “what have I gotten myself into?” This was the first day of my second semester of rabbinical school, not much more than a year after I…
Draw close those cast out Rabbi Adina Allen Rosh Hashanah 5779 In the Torah reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah Aliyah Sarah demands, “Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not…
The Binding of Isaac, or the Akeda, is a complicated story, one that raises a lot of questions about what it means to be a person of faith, about God’s goodness, and whether Abraham did the right thing. And one…
As I stood at the intersection of 4th and Water Streets on August 12, 2018, I thought, I can’t believe I’m here again, trying to be a faithful presence in the midst of chaos. One of the streets of this…
#TorahForTheResistance is a campaign by young rabbinical and religious students about Jewish resistance to Trump through the lens of faith, Judaism, and spirituality. Read more here. Buried beneath my conscious experience of life, a dull but continual fear churns within me. It…
We’re facing a humanitarian and moral crisis right now because of our country’s immigration policies. Don’t be fooled by the executive order that the president signed on Wednesday. The administration claims that the order ends the family separation policy, but…
After the Exodus, Torah was revealed at Sinai, and our ancestors had to figure out how their lives would be different after their liberation from Mitzrayim. The Vision for Black Lives policy platform is similarly a revelation, a vision of…
This year, we must think carefully about Tu BiShvat’s call. We must think about all of those in our sightlines who are being prevented from planting their roots, the ones who are being denied the most essential human experience of…
Willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice is, indeed, a Jewish sensibility. However, it is a sensibility that is carefully limited.
Welcome to the Queer Mikveh Project, a documentary film and project asking why mikveh, a Jewish ritual of water immersion, is not more accessible to queer and trans people. The project aims to reframe who gets to do mikveh and…