The Bare Holiday Landscape Ahead of Us
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar The dust has settled. After 20 services over a period of 30 days, 2 services every three days for a month, we’ve finally reached a period of relative calm. And then the Phillies had to go and liven things back up for us again. In all seriousness, we find ourselves in […]
Hatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit 2022
By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar So here we are to celebrate our Chatan Torah and Kallat Bereshit. In some ways, it’s a funny name to extend to this honor, to the honor of recognizing two distinguished legacies of service to our synagogue community. It’s a name that goes back centuries to the distinguished community members who were given the […]
Hallelujah: Breaking Open
Yom Kippur 5783 By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar Time for another song lyric. This one comes from a song by Jewish Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen that has been, as one writer put it, “repurposed and reinvented by other artists so many times, that it [has become] a latter-day secular hymn”—and not even really all that secular. […]
Nose to the Grindstone / Head to The Stars: Cultivating a Relationship with the Beyond
Kol Nidre 5783 By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar Philadelphia’s own Tariq Trotter, lead MC and singer of the hip hop band, The Roots, one of the more successful musical acts to come out of Philadelphia in recent memory and current house band of The Tonight Show, composed one of my favorite song lyrics. It’s a simple […]
L’Hayim: 18 Jewish Touchstones to Help Navigate the Years Ahead
Rosh Hashanah 5783 By Rabbi Nathan Kamesar It’s been a rough year. Years? Decade? Century? We’re weary. How much longer is this pandemic going to last, we wonder? How many times do we have to turn on the news and encounter another attack on our democracy, or our personal autonomy? How many images of a […]