Tonight starts Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, the final round of Jewish holidays — for this month, anyway! Here’s a little mix that I stumbled into putting together, song by song. This morning at synagogue I was getting ready for Shemini Atzeret, which starts tonight, looking ahead in the prayerbook — you know, like peeking [...]

Earlier this week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs wrote about  Sukkot and social justice and asked, “Does place matter?“ As I write this blog post, I am preparing to teach at Occupy Wall Street on Monday. Following a successful Kol Nidrei service, a Jewish contingent there has constructed a sukkah — the temporary hut in which Jews traditionally eat — [...]

Happy Sukkot! This year, I managed to snag a great etrog — my brother-in-law, who’s a rabbinical student, picked it out. He knows all about the intricate system of bumps and blemishes, and what each of them means for me, spiritually, in the coming year. I’m clueless. But I’m okay with that. I like surprises. [...]

“We live, each of us, to preserve our fragment, in a state of perpetual regret and longing for a place we only know existed because we remember a keyhole, a tile, the way the threshold was worn under an open door.” – Nicole Krauss Thousands of years ago, after our first exile in Babylonia, the [...]

Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the author of Where Justice Dwells: A Hands-On-Guide for Doing Social Justice in Your Jewish Community. My initial venture into Jewish social justice came my first year of rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Determined to learn something about Harlem — the neighborhood that bounded my school to the north [...]

Was it just me, or did this year’s Yom Kippur seem a lot less, well, dire than usual? It started Friday night. Usually, Shabbat is a time of eating and plentifulness where we stuff our faces through three colossal meals crammed into one 24-hour span, but when it overlaps with Yom Kippur, there’s fasting all [...]

So I need to tell you, it’s really weird being called onto a jury the day before Yom Kippur. When I tell people, they’ve mostly been quick to freak out about the religious rules about it — mostly, that I’ll be in court until an hour before the holiday starts, and apparently you’re supposed to [...]

This week God may be judging you based on your sins, but here at MJL we are judging you based on your family photos. Specifically, your Jewish holiday photos. Do you have some classics of your kids making matzah balls with Bubbe? Lighting Shabbat candles? Doing tashlikh? Beating the willow? Dancing with the Torah? Do [...]

Earlier this week, Stuart Nadler blogged for Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning‘s Author Blog about casting off one’s sins and the stories that didn’t make it. They were small, felt, ringed in blue. We wore them to meals, to all of them, and of course, to services on Fridays and Saturdays. You were given two at [...]

I’ve been going to synagogue every morning this week, which is rare for me. I used to skip synagogue all the time because I slept too late, and then it was because my kids were up too early. I never got to see them any other time because of this full-time-job thing (you know, the [...]