Almost Forty Days
How long does it take to return? That depends… It’s been almost forty days since I set my sights on teshuvah. Even before the first of the month of Elul, when we […]
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New Jonah: Our Scales of Justice
For anyone who’s still casting-about to find the right adaptation of Jonah for this year’s Yom Kippur — or for anyone who won’t be at Yom Kippur minha / afternoon […]
For Earth’s Sake: Days of Awe 5783
New from Bayit’s Liturgical Arts Working Group comes this offering of new liturgy, poetry, and art for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — this year crafted with a focus on […]
Mad at Alan Lew
I’m mad at Alan Lew. I know he died in 2009, and I hope his memory blesses us all, but I’m mad anyway. Rabbi Alan Lew is author of the […]
Parsha Shoftim, Capital Pride, and Building our Bayit
This week’s parsha, Shoftim, describes four main forms of communal leadership and presents many different leadership dilemmas. The four types of leadership are: judges, responsible for resolving disputes fairly; monarchs […]
A Week with the Bayit Board
I load my car with my guitar, my computer, tallit and tefillin, giant note pads and brightly-colored markers, a pair of shofarot, and drive north — for a while. This […]
Quotes for the Reverse Omer
A glimpse of R. Jennifer Singer’s Reverse Omer Quotes calendar. From Rabbi Jennifer Singer, a founding builder at Bayit who is now part of our Liturgical Arts Working Group, comes […]
Allyship and Rebuilding the Temple
In this month when we mourn the destruction of the Temple, we recall King David’s description of Jerusalem, in its glory, as כְּ֝עִ֗יר שֶׁחֻבְּרָה־לָּ֥הּ יַחְדָּֽו – a city that is […]
A Tisha b’Av of Hope
Many Jewish professionals I know secretly (a few, not so secretly) prefer to take off Tisha b’Av for any number of reasons. It’s too sad. It’s mere nostalgia that never can build […]
Hymn for the Hurting – for Tisha b’Av 5782
Here’s a liturgical rendering of the amazing Amanda Gorman‘s “Hymn for the Hurting” (2022), which she wrote after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, set to the mournful trope of […]