הוֹד֣וּ לַיהֹוָ֣ה כִּי־ט֑וֹב כִּ֖י לְעוֹלָ֣ם חַסְדּֽוֹ׃Praise God, for God is goodness. God’s steadfast love is everlasting(Psalm 118:1)Early next week, we will chant Hallel–psalms of praise–as we celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, when we commemorate Moses receiving the Torah from God at Mt. Sinai. I love this idea of God gifting our ancestors with Torah, and I cherish bringing the wisdom of our tradition into our daily lives, as well as embracing the blessing and the responsibility of passing it down to the next generation. And I know for some of us, such a literal understanding is not as connective, and our Shavuot observance can embrace that outlook. We can celebrate Torah in the broader sense, embracing the wisdom of our texts and traditions, the Jewish learning and knowledge passed down for thousands of years, the words and pages that bind our people together even in our varying views and disagreements. I [...]

Last Thursday, Rabbi Yoshi and I led our last weekday morning service of the year with the fifth and sixth graders in Wise School. Since all of the students already participated as klei kodesh (service leaders) and/or darshan (Torah teacher), Rabbi and I opened up the time after prayer for the students to ask questions. Some of them were silly, some of them were serious, and many of them had questions about the symbolism of numbers in our tradition, perhaps in an attempt to connect their Jewish and secular studies and also as a means of finding symmetry and balance at the end of a long, creative, and—certainly at times—exhausting semester. It was fun to explore their questions and comforting to reassure them about the beauty and meaning behind numbers as they appear in our texts and rituals. After this discussion and throughout my entire weekend, I took special notice of the numbers that [...]

Yesterday, I played the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack in the car with Ruby for the first time. I was pleased to discover that she enjoyed the melodies, immediately singing along to every “lai lai lai,” and the lyrics led to many interesting questions and conversations. In the first song, “Tradition,” the people of Anatevka ask their rabbi: “Is there a blessing for the Czar?” (and he hilariously replies with “May God bless and keep the Czar – far away from us!”). Ruby wondered aloud: “What’s a Czar?” And after explaining the joke to her, she said to me, “Ima, I think there is a Jewish blessing for everything.” How wise our children are, and how true—our tradition teaches us from our earliest years to open our eyes to the blessings all around us, even during difficult times. On Friday, we will mark the beginning of this new month, Rosh Chodesh Sivan, and [...]