The New York Times had a lovely article about how some couples prefer private vows. If you have a subscription, you can read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/style/private-vows-weddings.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Here are a few ways my couples have chosen to say private vows: Sometimes, they want to say their vows during the ceremony, but just to each other. If […]
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Here’s what I wrote for the last Jewish New Year. It works for the Gregorian New Year as well. Well, another new year is upon us. And, as I do every year, I wonder “what’s so new about it?” The world continues to turn on its axis. The sun continues to rise each day (although
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Sunday, September 15, 2024 is the 61st anniversary of the racist bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young girls. Three of them were fourteen years old – just my age. They’d be 75 now if they’d been allowed to live. You’d think we’d be better than this by now, but it
Shavuos/Shavuot is one of the three festivals of ingathering, some of our most ancient holidays. On these holidays – Succos/Sukkot, Pesakh and Shavuos/Shavuot, Israelites brought offerings to the Temple to support the priests. Those who had no animals, fruit or grain to bring could buy sacrificial animals at the Temple. (In the Christian Bible, the
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Counting the Omer – the 50 days between Pesakh and Shavuos – never made a lick of sense to me. How much the less so the holiday called “The thirty-third day of counting the days between Pesakh and Shavuos” – L’g B’Omer. (The Hebrew letters lamed – the “L” sound – and gimmel – the
April 4th is a Jewish holiday. It’s the yortseit (death anniversary) of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was assassinated on that date in 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an activist not only on behalf of the civil rights movement, but was also an activist for peace and for workers’ rights. He
With Purim over, it’s time for me to start updating Tri-Valley Cultural Jews’ Secular Humanistic Passover Haggadah for our community seder April 27. It has always been pretty easy to include references to current events that can be informed by the Pesakh story, but this year, I’ve got a problem. For many years, our haggadah,
Purim is one of those holidays where we don’t tell the whole story. (https://secularjewishweddings.com/why-do-we-tell-only-half-the-story/) But it is more than that we don’t tell the whole story. It’s that we don’t see the whole people. The book of Esther, on which the holiday is based, is a historical fiction, written about 400 years after the events
Chanukah, Purim, Pesakh – all our stories end happy. But do they, really? Let’s take a look at what happens after “they lived happily ever after.” Let’s look at the real stories of Jewish holidays and find out why we tell only half the story. We tell the story of chanukah, the retaking of the
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Happy chanukah (conventional), happy khanukah (my preferred), a freylikhn khanike (Yiddishist) from the Seid-Gates garage door. Let’s all figure out how we can bring more light to the world, tonight and every night. Here are some ideas for your candle-lighting dedications this year: 1st night – this candle is dedicated to the one life we
