Is there a better day than the one when we abstain from all physical sustenance to reflect on the sanctity of the human body and honor the Torah\’s injunction that \”You shall guard your being\”?\n
The High Holidays provide some of the greatest frissons one can experience in a synagogue. And the music is, indeed, a big part of those rising chills.
How do you sum up 100 years of history? That\’s the task of historian Florie Brizel, who was hired by Sinai two years ago to write the history of the shul. She just completed \”Sinai Temple: A Centennial History,\” a narrative that runs more than 200 pages.
We arrived early for the Purim carnival last Sunday. The giant bounce house still lay in a wrinkled, uninflated wad on a corner of the parking lot. The only children around were, like our son, middle school volunteers, corralling the puppies for the puppy-petting booth, lining up bottles for the ring toss.
It was a nippy, star-filled Friday night, and we were on our way to a bar mitzvah. We — Julius, my husband of 50 years; our son, David; and I — had traveled from the Valley to Santa Maria for the celebration.
\”We\’re so busy fighting over the form of where women sit in shul that I think we\’ve lost the substance. There was a time that women were the pillars of the Orthodox community,\” Luchins said. \”We\’ve lost on that issue, big.\”
Women form slightly more than 11 percent of the RA\’s membership today, with both JTS and the University of Judaism (UJ) ordaining them as rabbis.
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