Bylined opinion and news columns published by United Hebrew Congregation Terre Haute.
As we begin the Hebrew month of Nisan and prepare to celebrate Passover, never before has a discussion about plagues and a deep cleaning of our homes felt more relevant.
These strange and challenging times of COVID-19 would seem to take precedence over holidays. But there is so much we can learn from the seder, both in ritual and narrative.
We ask the Four Questions in Ma Nishtana: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
As I was thinking about a topic for this month, the title of one of my favorite novels came to mind, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Coronavirus is our modern-day cholera or plague. To say the least, we live in interesting times.
And these times call for creative ways to stay connected. We have begun to make those connections by purchasing a Zoom videoconferencing account for our Temple community.
Since I began as your student rabbi this past September, these monthly columns for my beloved congregants at United Hebrew Congregation have offered a breath of fresh air from the arduous papers assigned in rabbinical school.
But most importantly, this space has served as an outlet to express precepts our tradition teaches in relation to our everyday lives. I have found deep joy in the hope that my words might provide comfort, significance or an opportunity for learning.
Lately, however, I have struggled to compose thoughts that might bring meaning to your lives and the lives of your loved ones, amidst the challenges we all face daily during this pandemic.
During my first semester in graduate school, I took a class on religion and politics. My professor practiced the Muslim faith. The morning after the 2016 presidential elections, he shared with the class that his six-year-old daughter had asked him over breakfast, “Daddy, today at school, should I tell people I’m not Muslim if they ask me?”
During a discussion on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness as part of a new social and racial justice program at The Temple in Atlanta, a woman described what she taught her children about “the protocol for being pulled over as a black person by the police.”
I am not a parent, and I do not judge any of these mothers and fathers for the way they answered their children’s questions or instructed them on how to behave in specific instances.