The Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards — which sets halachic policy for the Conservative movement — has voted unanimously to provide the approximately 1,600 Conservative rabbis with guidelines on performing same-sex marriages.
I saw the blinking light on my answering machine and listened to the frantic voice of my girlfriend, Debbie, as I put the groceries away.
\”Heeeeeelp! Jason says he doesn\’t want to do his bar mitzvah anymore. We\’ve got the date and the place, I\’ve hired the DJ and he\’s already begun to prepare. He\’s making me crazy. What should I do? Call me.\”
Wow, what a bummer, I thought to myself.
On Sept. 1, my husband, Larry, and I will move our son, Gabriel, into his dormitory room at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., where he will begin his freshman year.
Q. Why do we have a haggadah on Passover? A. So we can seder [say the] right words.
It\’s a terrible joke, but it suggests why seders have gone from righteous to rote, from dynamic to deadly boring. Everything is too much by the book, the haggadah, to be exact, in the worst possible way, says David Arnow, in \”Creating Lively Passover Seders: A Sourcebook of Engaging Tales, Texts & Activities.\” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2004, www.livelyseders.com).
Arnow says that seders are supposed to be living, vibrant, creative — with room for spontaneous discussion and new ideas that reinvent what freedom means to the current generation, which gathers to commemorate a liberation that occurred thousands of years ago.
\”Finding Each Other in Judaism: Meditations on the Rites of Passage From Birth to Immortality\” by Harold M. Schulweis. (UAHC Press, $12.95)
\”Finding Each Other in Judaism\” distills decades of those quiet, private moments when a curious, wounded or concerned congregant asks the rabbi: \”What do I do now?\”
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