Jul 2013
On a beautiful July evening, about 80 people from the Los Angeles Wexner mishpacha gathered for an evening of learning and sharing at the home of dual Wexner Heritage Alumni Dana (LA/Bank of America) and Evan (LA 05) Schlessinger. We were blessed to engage in a very intimate discussion with Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, the leader of B’Nei David, a vibrant Modern Orthodox shul in Los Angeles, and Rabbi David Woznica
Jul 2013
Here’s the advice I received before starting my position last year as the Senior Jewish Educator at Hillel at UCLA: “Forget about your own passions and interests, at least at first. If you think you’re going to get to campus and it’s going to be the “Aaron Lerner show” – that you’re going to dazzle them with your openness and ability to talk about sex, drugs and rock and roll,
"Jerusalem has greatly sinned, therefore she is become a mockery. All who admired her despise her, for they have seen her disgraced; and she can only sigh and shrink back." --Eicha (Lamentations) 1:8 The first 9 days of Av are seen in traditional Judaism as days of, if not mourning, then solemnity. We do not feast, we do not celebrate; we are once again living through the days leading
Jul 2013
(Pictured) The migrash (field) at Camp Ramah Nyack, a K-8 Jewish Day Camp in Rockland County New York All it takes is twenty minutes on Friday afternoon. Twenty fantastic minutes. Twenty minutes that my mind and soul yearn for and my body aches for all year long. For twenty minutes my neshama (soul) feels complete, as the physical motions of my body are overtaken by the intense and deep emotions
(Pictured) Eden, Randy and Caroline Gold’s daughter, who was diagnosed with ML4 at 18 months We had been sitting in a conference room together, me and 24 medical researchers from 16 universities and various departments at the National Institutes of Health, for two extraordinary days. As an accountant, I was in over my head, but as a father and board member, nothing could keep me from my responsibility to my
“ are meeting their mates at a point in life when they have been away from religion for a long time. And while they may not mean to misrepresent themselves, they may not realize that someday they will want to return to faith.” - From Til Faith Do Us Part I know that many of you will want to judge couples who find themselves in interfaith conflict after years
As Pesach approached this year, I prepared to view myself, as Jewish tradition demands, as though I had been delivered from Egypt. This year in particular, I tried to imagine my freedom as a bundle of different rights, all immediately restored to me in one moment of miraculous liberation. Of all of them, which would I run to exercise first? Which right, once I asserted it, would instantiate my freedom?
On this Independence Day, it seems, we might consider what “union” might look like in the twenty-first century by revisiting a troubling period in American Jewish History. Isaac Mayer Wise served as president of the November 1885 Pittsburgh Conference, where eight pillars of “progressive religion” formally separated their movement from traditional American Jews. While Wise was well-known for offering compromises and seeking the middle-ground, this would no longer do for
A friend recently challenged me, amid a conversation on religion’s relevance to spirituality, to remember a time where I felt a moment of spiritual transcendence. Without a second thought, I knew exactly, remembering a moment several months ago where my senses heightened, my mind seamlessly suspended rational thought, and my heart opened to receive a sudden deluge of connection to something infinite. Something divine. The only problem? It hadn’t been
How might we engage middle school students in regular reflection on leading a life of meaning and purpose that avoids didactic methods and elicits a wide range of viewpoints and approaches? This was one of the guiding questions that we used to develop the “My Search for Meaning” program at Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School. Hausner, a K-8 pluralistic day school situated in the heart of Silicon Valley emphasizes engaged