Jewish Institute for Lifelong Learning & Innovation

We are now in the Hebrew month of Elul. Elul is considered an auspicious month for Jewish weddings because its letters are an anagram for Ani LeDodi VeDodi Li, which means “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

We are now in the Hebrew month of Elul, the last month of the Jewish civil calendar. This is a month when we prepare spiritually and culturally for the year that is about to begin. At JILLI, we hope you will join us in growing spiritually and in Jewish learning.…

I wrote this prayer for the world thinking of a few kabbalistic concepts. I thought about how the kabbalah imagines the world was created by the breaking of vessels that God made to organize God’s energies, and about the emanations that constitute the Tree of Life.

This past Shabbat was the 9th day of the Hebrew month called Av, the day in which we mourn the destruction of both the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, in the years 586 BCE and 70 CE.

Every year I spend a week at the beach. It’s a ritual that I cherish because after a week I feel renewed and refreshed, without fail, every time I go.

We are fortunate to have secured space in a church in Arlington for High Holidays services. I am excited to usher 5783 with prayer and meditation, together with all of you.

I enjoy communal prayer in Hebrew because it allows me to translate what I am saying in Hebrew with an interpretation that feels correct and appropriate for the moment in which I am living.

On Tuesday, May 17, the National Council of Jewish Women organized the Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice in Washington, DC.  More than a thousand Jews from the whole country came and participated in this rally.

During one of my son’s basketball tournaments, I sat by a parent of an opposing team’s player. He asked me where our team was from, I asked the same. He told me that his child’s team had not been playing together for long, and that they were starting to grow

Now is the time, in the Jewish calendar, when we count the Omer. During 49 days, from the second day of Pessah until the holiday of Shavuot, we will say a blessing and count the passage of another day.