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By R. Haim Ovadia Maybe we really are all Sephardic!  After all, those who call themselves Sephardic are not just those from the Iberian peninsula (Sepharad was the Hebrew name for Spain), but most of the Jews of the Mediterranean world reaching east to India — and they were the ancestors of Ashkenazim. Many terms […]

by Rabbi Daniel Bouskila For centuries, Sephardic-Mizrahi Jews of Arab lands lived in relatively peaceful coexistence with their Arab-Muslim neighbors. While never perfect, life for Jews in Arab lands was not characterized by the horrible persecutions, pogroms or expulsions regularly experienced by Jews living under Christian rule in Europe. Indeed, the Golden Age of Spain […]

Every once in a while, our deepest intuitions about things – intuitions we often doubt because they seem fragile in a materialistic world – actually get confirmed by science. About a month ago, I was in Provo, Utah, with a couple of colleagues for an interfaith conference. By chance, at breakfast in the Faculty Guest […]

As we observe our Jewish community today, we are struck by the impact of two distinct energies that emanate from different camps.

I was not born – I was removed from my mother dead. It was the doctor who breathed life into me. So began a life filled with pain and trauma…

Every day in class, as we sang together and analyzed Jewish music and trends, I felt part of a people and tradition stretching back thousands of years…And yet, although I’d learned so much, I realized that for me, something was missing.

It was on the MS Volendam that I realized how much I had absorbed from my six years of rabbinic education. Like the medical doctor of an earlier time who made house calls with a medical bag in tow, I had taken a small suitcase of books with me, as well as the short sermons and other material I had pre-prepared in file folders before boarding the ship in Vancouver, Canada for the High Holy Days.

As a Chaplain, the topics of aging and death are something I deal with on a daily basis. This experience became even more personal for me, when my own mother recently passed away after struggling with cancer.

There is a general rule in synagogue music: the less frequent the holiday, the greater the desire to preserve its melodies. The High Holy Days have benefitted from this tendency. A handful of venerated Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur tunes are treated as if they came from Moses himself.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, now on exhibit at the California Science Center, are one of the most important archeological discoveries for understanding Judaism in antiquity. Found in caves at a site called Qumran near the Dead Sea, they were written by a sect of Judaism known as the Essenes, who lived there from the 2nd century BCE to the war with Rome about 200 years later.