CBB Voices blog highlighted at Shabbat services! We celebrated a special "blog post Shabbat" this past Friday, January 22. During the sermon portion of the service, Allan Morton, Judy Karin, and Phoebe Light (pictured here) read posts they've published on the CBB Voices blog. Editor Monica Steiner introduced the panel by describing this blog project [...]
Phoebe Light: Shabbat in the Time of Corona My relationship with Jewish life had always been, up until a couple of years ago, off-and-on. Jewish summer camp a couple of times. A Birthright trip. A year playing guitar at Hillel in college. Even a three-year stint living in Israel, not that I ever really explored [...]
Bryan Gindoff: A Silver Lining My wife, Verna, converted to Judaism this year and that has been hugely important to my own practice of Judaism. But Covid (with Zoom) is running a close second. A classic in the genre of every cloud having a silver lining. Covid has propelled us into celebrating online Shabbats with [...]
Daniel Sulzberg: Smile Now From a global pandemic, climate change, systemic racism, and other challenges there is no doubt that 2020 has been a stressful year filled with change. From a Jewish standpoint, I found myself asking why would God let these kinds of things happen? Maybe it’s the world’s way of saying that [...]
Rabbi Steve Cohen: Two Abrahams Shabbat Shalom! This evening I am thinking of our two great Abrahams. First, Abraham the father of the Jewish people, who lived about 4,000 years ago and whom we meet once again in this week’s Torah portion. And also Abraham Lincoln, who 150 years ago led the United States through [...]
Elizabeth Mason: Ruth Bader Ginsberg Our tradition espouses an inspiring concept. It is as follows: supposedly those among us who pass from this life just prior to Rosh HaShanah are those who have purposely been detained by the Divine Hand. This is because our world has needed their influence until the very end of the [...]
Gary Linker: What the Pandemic Brought Home To Me As a fairly typical baby boomer who grew up in a secular Jewish home in the Midwest, I learned about social justice and the need to give back at a fairly young age. As a teenager I attended many conferences on civil rights and became a very [...]
Rabbi Steve Cohen: Yom Kippur Sermon 2020 - Helplessly Hoping Six long months ago, in late March, my sister sent me a link to a video of an Italian teen choir from Rome, singing a song from our youth, “Helplessly Hoping.” [See bottom of this post to view the video -- Ed]. I had never seen anything like it. First one young woman, Irene, singing on her own, in her apartment. She was then joined [...]
Rabbi Malka Drucker: A Different Four Questions My father wasn’t a religious man. I don’t know what he believed, only what he behaved. Along with suggesting that I not take everything so seriously, he advised, “What happens, honey, isn’t important; it’s how you deal with it. When I had a heart attack at 54, it [...]
Susan Rakov: Getting Ready for the High Holy Days at Home One year, I was sick in bed during Yom Kippur. I didn’t try to watch a whole day of services on my computer, but I did tune in for the livestream of Kol Nidre. I could see the bimah, the rabbis and the cantor, [...]