KoREH News

The Greatest Purim Mitzvah Is Empathy   As you’re reading this, Purim is nearly here. For many of us, the holiday of Purim holds a special place in our Jewish lives and in our memories. It is a holiday that takes a frightening premise (the near genocide of the Jews of Shushan) and reinvents it as a festival of merriment, revelry, and communal celebration. It’s one of the things I like best about this holiday, and an important piece of...Read more...

The Wisdom of a New Start   Yose ben Yoezer used to say: let your house be a gathering space for the wise; sit in the very dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst. ~ Mishnah Avot 1:4   Over the past six years, one of my primary missions has been to build our religious school into the kind of community that brings together learners of all ages and interests, a place where curiosity is rewarded and wisdom...Read more...

Spreading Learning Far and Wide Learning has always been fundamental to Jewish life and cultural expression. So much so that Jewish learning has been described as both “a tree of life” (Proverbs 3:18) and “like a warming fire” (Jeremiah 23:29), as something that nourishes and sustains us, and at the same time ignites our passions and fuels us forward.   In our own learning at our Kol Rinah Education Hub (KoREH), we have seen our...Read more...

This time of year, our tradition steeps us in tales of journeys and adventure, family and community, and, most critically, of spiritual self-discovery. From the moment we emerge from the High Holidays and start the cycle of Torah anew, we read each week the Torah tales of our ancestors going out into the world and discovering something new about themselves and the nature of their place in this universe. What’s more, is how incredibly those...Read more...

Experiencing Our Learning Anew   “Don’t count the days; make the days count,” or so the saying goes. We are coming to the end of a huge communal counting in the Jewish calendar, the Omer, which enumerates seven weeks (49 total days) between the second night of Passover and the start of Shavuot. What fascinates me every year is how hard it is to say a couple of lines of blessing and count the day each evening. The words are simple,...Read more...