I am an aspiring rabbi. I decided one day I wanted to intepret the Torah for my family on Shabbat. Since January 2009, the writing has never stopped. I invite you to see what I write weekly and let me know what you think by leaving a comment!
Friday, March 13, 2009
Mitch's Brotherhood Sermon
Look at commment for a truly moving sermon from a congregant of B'Nai Shalom Westborough,MA.
Do you remember Michael J Fox in the movie Back to the Future? As I was writing this week’s Drash I kept coming back to Back to the Future. That got me thinking. We are always inviting people back. “Y’all Come Back Now Y’hear” – from the Beverly Hillbillies, Welcome Back Kotter, okay for anyone under thirty I just lost you.
We invite people back – come back and become a member of the temple, come back to your high school reunion, your college reunion. The truth is we can’t ever go back. And I don’t think any of us would ever truly want to go back. We were younger then. We didn’t know what we know now, so even if we went back it wouldn’t be the same. So I challenge myself, as I look to bring men back into the brotherhood, or back to temple or back to worship, to bring men to the brotherhood and more than that to bring men here in the present and move them towards the future.
Tonight I invite all of us to be present to be here and to look towards the future of men in our synagogue. I hope to provoke some thought about some of the tensions and struggles that are facing men and boys as they take their place in the Jewish community. I don’t profess to have any answers, I do hope that I can be a catalyst for some thought and action.
Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce, who for twenty years was a faculty member in the Human Relations Department of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, and taught at the University of San Francisco, the University of Connecticut, and St. John's University, where he earned his doctorate in counselor psychology said in a recent High Holiday, “If we hope to foster a healthy society, then we need to find a way to invite boys and men back into the mainstream. If men’s spiritual needs are being ignored, then we need to find out what they are and what we need to do to meet them.”
I don’t want to invite them ‘back’, I want to invite them to come here and towards the future of the mainstream.
Rabbi Pearce continued…”There are a number of questions we need to answer in order to engage men in Jewish life. How do we help fathers and sons talk about God, faith, and Torah as easily as they do about football or golf? How do we get the message across that men who are drawn to faith are not sissies? How come fathers are present at soccer games but not at temple? How do we put an end to fathers’ drive-by-Judaism—dropping children off and then going for a run, tennis, bike ride, or breakfast?”
“Men of bygone eras instructed their sons in manliness—how to be men, how to offer sacrifices and connect with the deity, how to influence the forces of nature: insure that rains arrive on schedule and crops mature in due season. Men were visible and present; men were mentors who taught boys about being men.”
My experience is that men and women get uncomfortable, sort of squirmy, when a man talks about masculinity. I am not sure why. One insight comes from Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, author of Searching for My Brothers: Jewish Men in a Gentile World (1999), where he recognizes and challenges us. He said: ”We haven’t figured out how to reenfranchise (men) without disenfranchising (women).”
It has taken millennia for women to achieve parity with men. However, whether you consider patriarchal society to be a positive or a negative, the role that men play today in fathering, religion, and civic responsibility raises some serious concerns. And the balance of leadership that we see in many liberal temples is either on one side skewed heavily towards a preponderance of female leadership or on the other extremely balanced.
Look at us here at Congregation B’nai Shalom – two male rabbis, two female cantorial soloists. I don’t know if we have taken great care to balance the genders in leadership roles or if it has just turned out that way. And I don’t know what underlies that effort. What I do know I glean from the surface at least is, based on the current information on our website, we have 19 board members, 9 Men and 10 Women. We have 18 committees and there are 9 men and 11 women in leadership roles of those committees (some committees in fact have co-chairs sometimes one male and one female). Yet we do have disenfranchised men. Why does a congregation of 400 families have only 2 dozen members of the brotherhood? How can we increase those numbers?
Let’s take a step back. What do we expect of men? Old stereotypes of men are as strong, protector, defenders and providers for their family, for the village, for the community. We looked to men to lead, to make decisions; we saw the resolute man who didn’t cry, who wasn’t emotional; The hunter.
We taught our boys that men don’t cry. Men accepted an emotional distance from each other and had to constantly prove themselves. And when men struggled with this model they had nothing to fall back on – no tools to handle emotions and feelings. That often would manifest itself in anger, and violence and addictions.
Over the last decade books like “The Men they Will Become” and “Raising Cain” have talked about tensions raising boys and pressures in education and development. We have heard in the news that girls and boys learn differently, or do they? We have heard that children need male role models in their lives, yet the number of single parent families, especially with women as the primary care giver, is at an all time high.
Boys have very few male role models in their lives. Pre-schools are predominately staffed by women; elementary schools rarely have more than one or two male teachers or staff. Cub scouts tend to have leadership dominated by den mothers, while men take on more leadership roles at the Boy Scout levels. Even religious schools see more women teachers and leaders and madrochim than we see men in those roles. Many dads leave for work before their kids get out of bed for school, and those same dads come home late enough that family time is often spent asleep.
I mean no disrespect to women and I recognize that they too are working and putting in long hours, and in some cases men or women have chosen to stay home too and I respect that choice and know the pressures and challenges that takes. My hats off to all of you.
I am not suggesting that women are playing any small role – women are as important a force in a boy’s life as the man is, but women are not men…they can talk about what men do, but they aren’t men…boys have to see men be men – I don’t mean the stereotypical machismo man…not at all…I mean a man who is able to express his masculinity.
For the last two years I have been part of an international men’s group. I spent some serious time in leadership roles training men, coaching men, and working with men to help them be the man they always wanted to be. That is a powerful thing, when you achieve it. When you even get close to it. What is the man you always wanted to be? Have you ever thought of that? Successful? Sure. Respected? Yes. And most often what I hear is – to be a better parent or spouse. To be more involved with family. To find a way to balance work and family. I believe masculinity is at its core…being a better father, son, or parent…
What I found most interesting about this men’s organization is that as I looked around, of the nearly 1,000 members in the US and Canada nearly half identified themselves as Jews. Not many identified themselves as practicing Jews. I think Jewish men, at least form my experience aren’t comfortable in what I call a gentile world of relationships were cajoling and hurling insults at each other is considered a sign of affection – I know I never understood it as that and still find it hard in various political circles to engage in that kind of digging humor.
Men don’t have a place where they can talk openly and emotionally about what troubles them, about their concerns and their worries; A place where they can talk with other men, as men in a masculine and fully vulnerable way. Some might say a place “without the Venus energy”. I think that is part of it – what it really is is a place where a man can take off all the masks he wears every day and just be there – vulnerable – emotional- strong – silly - and know he won’t be judged – and the only place to do that for men is with other men.
As much as our spouses tell us they want us to talk about how we feel, in reality, when we truly get deeply to the core emotionally, it is scary. In the graphic novel come movie “300” about the 300 Spartan men who defended Sparta from the 10s of thousands of Persians, we were able to get a glimpse into masculinity – not machismo. It wasn’t braggadocios, it was intense. When the Captain’s son is killed the father moans and wails in a way that only men really comprehend. And we rarely have a place where we can feel like that or be like that unless it is men together.
Here we are tonight as the Brotherhood. Our meetings and our activities barely scratch the surface of what men need to be reenfranchised about masculinity or Judaism or worship or this congregation. But we try. We have monthly programs and breakfasts, we have been hosting the end of year Barbque, and this year (on March 28th) we will sponsor the first annual Brisket Cookoff – yes that’s a shameless plug. And we can do more – we must help men and boys take their place in Judaism and in the community that is this congregation. And we have to do it together within the container that is our Jewish community.
What are the trends? According to recent statistics from a number of sources, synagogues and churches are recognizing similar trends: The typical U.S. Congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male across all age categories. •On any given Sunday almost 25 percent of married, churchgoing women will worship without their husbands. • Midweek activities often draw 70 to 80 percent female participants. At Temple Emanu-El, nineteen women and two men attended a recent Elul retreat. • The majority of church employees are women. • As many as 90 percent of the boys who are being raised in church will, by their 20th birthdays, abandon it, never to return.
“Liberal Jews are witnessing these experiences too. Over the years, the ratio of women-to-men candidates at Hebrew Union College has grown as increasing numbers of women have entered the rabbinate. For many years, rabbinical students wondered when women would outnumber the men. That tipping point finally occurred in 2005 when 71% of the newly admitted students were female. In the same year, 66% of the new students at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary were women. The cantorate has already become an almost exclusively female calling. The ratio is not any different in other constituencies of the Reform Movement. For example, in 2005, 88% of the ninth grade teenagers who participated in the Union for Reform Judaism’s Young Leadership Camp program were female. The numbers are similar at the URJ summer camps for children where girls vastly outnumber boys. “
Again, according to Rabbi Pearce, “Though the top leadership is often male, women constitute the backbone of most churches and synagogues, representing an ever increasing percentage of the membership and even more of the volunteer force. The claim is that men want an authentic faith experience but find matriarchal church services to be boring and irrelevant. They want to be challenged, but they're only challenged to be good husbands and fathers.
What do we do to challenge them to be Jews.
In June of last year the Boston Globe ran an article by Michael Paulson, “'Where have all the men gone?' As the role of women increases in Judaism, questions swirl about a gender imbalance.”
In this article Paulson states… “The evidence is everywhere. At Temple Sinai in Sharon, nine of the 11 members of this year's confirmation class were girls. At Temple Beth David in Canton, last Saturday's Torah study drew 11 women and no men. At Temple Isaiah in Lexington, the executive board for the last year had eight women and one man. And at the Prozdor, an intensive supplementary high school program at Hebrew College in Newton, 59 percent of the students are female.”
"After bar mitzvah, the boys just drop out," said Sylvia Barack Fishman, a professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University and the coauthor of a study on "Gender Imbalance in American Jewish Life," which was publicly released last week.
"American Jewish boys and men have fewer connections to Jews and Judaism in almost every venue and in every age, from school-age children through the adult years," the study declares. "Contemporary liberal American Judaism, although supposedly egalitarian, is visibly and substantially feminized."
“As with so much about gender, everything about this subject is highly controversial. Some Jewish leaders dispute the statistics, citing contradictory evidence, or pointing to the continuing presence of men at the helm of the biggest community organizations and synagogues. Others question whether a preponderance of women is a problem, or just progress. No one is clear whether the trend, which has only emerged in the last few years, is a temporary phenomenon or a sea change.”
“But scholars and rabbis say they are concerned that diminished participation by men in Judaism threatens the health of the Jewish community.”
“The umbrella group of Reform synagogue brotherhoods - organizations that have lost thousands of members over the last several decades - has renamed itself Men of Reform Judaism and published a men's Passover Haggadah intended for use at all-male Seders.” I spoke to them last year and they were interested in the work I do with men – perhaps we will have a chance to see that evolve here and across the country.
As I said before, tonight I don’t have any answers. I hope I have provoked some thought. I hope I have helped you think about making this topic an ongoing conversation. Most importantly I hope that we all recognize the importance of both men and women in Judaism and at Congregation B’nai Shalom. That through our willingness to embrace men as men we will bring men to the Temple, and bring men to the future Judaism for themselves and their sons. Through our involvement as a Brotherhood, we model for our sons’ the values that we cherish. Together we bring those values to Congregation B’nai Shalom and work as part of this congregation to see what its values are. Together, men and women, all of us want Congregation B’nai Shalom to be a place where we want to come to worship and to be part of a community.
When Ulysses returns home in the Odyssey he doesn’t come back to what was there before. My colleague, Zen Master and Orthodox Jew, Norman Fischer in his most recent book Sailing Home – where he uses the Odyssey as a metaphor for returning home - reminds us that coming back to home and expecting it to be what it was negates the journey we took to get there. Our lives are journeys and to Jews the journey is uniquely important. For me often the journey is more important than the destination. Let us not negate the journeys that our brothers have taken when we invite them back – let’s celebrate those journeys and invite them to join us here as we journey together as one community towards the future.
To close I want to quote rabbi Pearce one more time. “In the story of the Binding of Isaac, we read “Va-yelchu sh’neihem yachdav—“The two of them walked together.” Even though the beginning of the narrative has them starting off together, at the end of the narrative each returns alone. The only way that a son can reach maturity and individuality in order to go off on his own and take his rightful place in society is to begin walking to the mountain summit hand-in-hand with his father; a contemporary man cannot bypass the synagogue to get there.”
Thank you.
Mitch Gordon Articles/publications cited include: Rabbi Stephen Pearce, High Holiday sermon and a quote by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, as well as the Boston Globe article cited in this sermon.
Thank you Mitch! Wow, what a sermon! The question is how do we bring men back into Judiasm? Things like sports tend to get in the way which bums me out. I wish kid's sports games were not so late because I once had a basketball game at 2:00 and I did commuinity service and went to temple all before 2!
Sermon –
ReplyDeleteMarch 13
Do you remember Michael J Fox in the movie Back to the Future? As I was writing this week’s Drash I kept coming back to Back to the Future. That got me thinking. We are always inviting people back. “Y’all Come Back Now Y’hear” – from the Beverly Hillbillies, Welcome Back Kotter, okay for anyone under thirty I just lost you.
We invite people back – come back and become a member of the temple, come back to your high school reunion, your college reunion. The truth is we can’t ever go back. And I don’t think any of us would ever truly want to go back. We were younger then. We didn’t know what we know now, so even if we went back it wouldn’t be the same. So I challenge myself, as I look to bring men back into the brotherhood, or back to temple or back to worship, to bring men to the brotherhood and more than that to bring men here in the present and move them towards the future.
Tonight I invite all of us to be present to be here and to look towards the future of men in our synagogue. I hope to provoke some thought about some of the tensions and struggles that are facing men and boys as they take their place in the Jewish community. I don’t profess to have any answers, I do hope that I can be a catalyst for some thought and action.
Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce, who for twenty years was a faculty member in the Human Relations Department of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, and taught at the University of San Francisco, the University of Connecticut, and St. John's University, where he earned his doctorate in counselor psychology said in a recent High Holiday, “If we hope to foster a healthy society, then we need to find a way to invite boys and men back into the mainstream. If men’s spiritual needs are being ignored, then we need to find out what they are and what we need to do to meet them.”
I don’t want to invite them ‘back’, I want to invite them to come here and towards the future of the mainstream.
Rabbi Pearce continued…”There are a number of questions we need to answer in order to engage men in Jewish life. How do we help fathers and sons talk about God, faith, and Torah as easily as they do about football or golf? How do we get the message across that men who are drawn to faith are not sissies? How come fathers are present at soccer games but not at temple? How do we put an end to fathers’ drive-by-Judaism—dropping children off and then going for a run, tennis, bike ride, or breakfast?”
“Men of bygone eras instructed their sons in manliness—how to be men, how to offer sacrifices and connect with the deity, how to influence the forces of nature: insure that rains arrive on schedule and crops mature in due season. Men were visible and present; men were mentors who taught boys about being men.”
My experience is that men and women get uncomfortable, sort of squirmy, when a man talks about masculinity. I am not sure why. One insight comes from Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, author of Searching for My Brothers: Jewish Men in a Gentile World (1999), where he recognizes and challenges us. He said: ”We haven’t figured out how to reenfranchise (men) without disenfranchising (women).”
It has taken millennia for women to achieve parity with men. However, whether you consider patriarchal society to be a positive or a negative, the role that men play today in fathering, religion, and civic responsibility raises some serious concerns. And the balance of leadership that we see in many liberal temples is either on one side skewed heavily towards a preponderance of female leadership or on the other extremely balanced.
Look at us here at Congregation B’nai Shalom – two male rabbis, two female cantorial soloists. I don’t know if we have taken great care to balance the genders in leadership roles or if it has just turned out that way. And I don’t know what underlies that effort. What I do know I glean from the surface at least is, based on the current information on our website, we have 19 board members, 9 Men and 10 Women. We have 18 committees and there are 9 men and 11 women in leadership roles of those committees (some committees in fact have co-chairs sometimes one male and one female). Yet we do have disenfranchised men. Why does a congregation of 400 families have only 2 dozen members of the brotherhood? How can we increase those numbers?
Let’s take a step back. What do we expect of men? Old stereotypes of men are as strong, protector, defenders and providers for their family, for the village, for the community. We looked to men to lead, to make decisions; we saw the resolute man who didn’t cry, who wasn’t emotional; The hunter.
We taught our boys that men don’t cry. Men accepted an emotional distance from each other and had to constantly prove themselves. And when men struggled with this model they had nothing to fall back on – no tools to handle emotions and feelings. That often would manifest itself in anger, and violence and addictions.
Over the last decade books like “The Men they Will Become” and “Raising Cain” have talked about tensions raising boys and pressures in education and development. We have heard in the news that girls and boys learn differently, or do they? We have heard that children need male role models in their lives, yet the number of single parent families, especially with women as the primary care giver, is at an all time high.
Boys have very few male role models in their lives. Pre-schools are predominately staffed by women; elementary schools rarely have more than one or two male teachers or staff. Cub scouts tend to have leadership dominated by den mothers, while men take on more leadership roles at the Boy Scout levels. Even religious schools see more women teachers and leaders and madrochim than we see men in those roles. Many dads leave for work before their kids get out of bed for school, and those same dads come home late enough that family time is often spent asleep.
I mean no disrespect to women and I recognize that they too are working and putting in long hours, and in some cases men or women have chosen to stay home too and I respect that choice and know the pressures and challenges that takes. My hats off to all of you.
I am not suggesting that women are playing any small role – women are as important a force in a boy’s life as the man is, but women are not men…they can talk about what men do, but they aren’t men…boys have to see men be men – I don’t mean the stereotypical machismo man…not at all…I mean a man who is able to express his masculinity.
For the last two years I have been part of an international men’s group. I spent some serious time in leadership roles training men, coaching men, and working with men to help them be the man they always wanted to be. That is a powerful thing, when you achieve it. When you even get close to it. What is the man you always wanted to be? Have you ever thought of that? Successful? Sure. Respected? Yes. And most often what I hear is – to be a better parent or spouse. To be more involved with family. To find a way to balance work and family. I believe masculinity is at its core…being a better father, son, or parent…
What I found most interesting about this men’s organization is that as I looked around, of the nearly 1,000 members in the US and Canada nearly half identified themselves as Jews. Not many identified themselves as practicing Jews. I think Jewish men, at least form my experience aren’t comfortable in what I call a gentile world of relationships were cajoling and hurling insults at each other is considered a sign of affection – I know I never understood it as that and still find it hard in various political circles to engage in that kind of digging humor.
Men don’t have a place where they can talk openly and emotionally about what troubles them, about their concerns and their worries; A place where they can talk with other men, as men in a masculine and fully vulnerable way. Some might say a place “without the Venus energy”. I think that is part of it – what it really is is a place where a man can take off all the masks he wears every day and just be there – vulnerable – emotional- strong – silly - and know he won’t be judged – and the only place to do that for men is with other men.
As much as our spouses tell us they want us to talk about how we feel, in reality, when we truly get deeply to the core emotionally, it is scary. In the graphic novel come movie “300” about the 300 Spartan men who defended Sparta from the 10s of thousands of Persians, we were able to get a glimpse into masculinity – not machismo. It wasn’t braggadocios, it was intense. When the Captain’s son is killed the father moans and wails in a way that only men really comprehend. And we rarely have a place where we can feel like that or be like that unless it is men together.
Here we are tonight as the Brotherhood. Our meetings and our activities barely scratch the surface of what men need to be reenfranchised about masculinity or Judaism or worship or this congregation. But we try. We have monthly programs and breakfasts, we have been hosting the end of year Barbque, and this year (on March 28th) we will sponsor the first annual Brisket Cookoff – yes that’s a shameless plug. And we can do more – we must help men and boys take their place in Judaism and in the community that is this congregation. And we have to do it together within the container that is our Jewish community.
What are the trends?
According to recent statistics from a number of sources, synagogues and churches are recognizing similar trends:
The typical U.S. Congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male across all age categories.
•On any given Sunday almost 25 percent of married, churchgoing women will worship without their husbands.
• Midweek activities often draw 70 to 80 percent female participants. At Temple Emanu-El, nineteen women and two men attended a recent Elul retreat.
• The majority of church employees are women.
• As many as 90 percent of the boys who are being raised in church will, by their 20th birthdays, abandon it, never to return.
“Liberal Jews are witnessing these experiences too. Over the years, the ratio of women-to-men candidates at Hebrew Union College has grown as increasing numbers of women have entered the rabbinate. For many years, rabbinical students wondered when women would outnumber the men. That tipping point finally occurred in 2005 when 71% of the newly admitted students were female. In the same year, 66% of the new students at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary were women. The cantorate has already become an almost exclusively female calling. The ratio is not any different in other constituencies of the Reform Movement. For example, in 2005, 88% of the ninth grade teenagers who participated in the Union for Reform Judaism’s Young Leadership Camp program were female. The numbers are similar at the URJ summer camps for children where girls vastly outnumber boys. “
Again, according to Rabbi Pearce, “Though the top leadership is often male, women constitute the backbone of most churches and synagogues, representing an ever increasing percentage of the membership and even more of the volunteer force. The claim is that men want an authentic faith experience but find matriarchal church services to be boring and irrelevant. They want to be challenged, but they're only challenged to be good husbands and fathers.
What do we do to challenge them to be Jews.
In June of last year the Boston Globe ran an article by Michael Paulson, “'Where have all the men gone?' As the role of women increases in Judaism, questions swirl about a gender imbalance.”
In this article Paulson states… “The evidence is everywhere. At Temple Sinai in Sharon, nine of the 11 members of this year's confirmation class were girls. At Temple Beth David in Canton, last Saturday's Torah study drew 11 women and no men. At Temple Isaiah in Lexington, the executive board for the last year had eight women and one man. And at the Prozdor, an intensive supplementary high school program at Hebrew College in Newton, 59 percent of the students are female.”
"After bar mitzvah, the boys just drop out," said Sylvia Barack Fishman, a professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University and the coauthor of a study on "Gender Imbalance in American Jewish Life," which was publicly released last week.
"American Jewish boys and men have fewer connections to Jews and Judaism in almost every venue and in every age, from school-age children through the adult years," the study declares. "Contemporary liberal American Judaism, although supposedly egalitarian, is visibly and substantially feminized."
“As with so much about gender, everything about this subject is highly controversial. Some Jewish leaders dispute the statistics, citing contradictory evidence, or pointing to the continuing presence of men at the helm of the biggest community organizations and synagogues. Others question whether a preponderance of women is a problem, or just progress. No one is clear whether the trend, which has only emerged in the last few years, is a temporary phenomenon or a sea change.”
“But scholars and rabbis say they are concerned that diminished participation by men in Judaism threatens the health of the Jewish community.”
“The umbrella group of Reform synagogue brotherhoods - organizations that have lost thousands of members over the last several decades - has renamed itself Men of Reform Judaism and published a men's Passover Haggadah intended for use at all-male Seders.” I spoke to them last year and they were interested in the work I do with men – perhaps we will have a chance to see that evolve here and across the country.
As I said before, tonight I don’t have any answers. I hope I have provoked some thought. I hope I have helped you think about making this topic an ongoing conversation. Most importantly I hope that we all recognize the importance of both men and women in Judaism and at Congregation B’nai Shalom. That through our willingness to embrace men as men we will bring men to the Temple, and bring men to the future Judaism for themselves and their sons. Through our involvement as a Brotherhood, we model for our sons’ the values that we cherish. Together we bring those values to Congregation B’nai Shalom and work as part of this congregation to see what its values are. Together, men and women, all of us want Congregation B’nai Shalom to be a place where we want to come to worship and to be part of a community.
When Ulysses returns home in the Odyssey he doesn’t come back to what was there before. My colleague, Zen Master and Orthodox Jew, Norman Fischer in his most recent book Sailing Home – where he uses the Odyssey as a metaphor for returning home - reminds us that coming back to home and expecting it to be what it was negates the journey we took to get there. Our lives are journeys and to Jews the journey is uniquely important. For me often the journey is more important than the destination. Let us not negate the journeys that our brothers have taken when we invite them back – let’s celebrate those journeys and invite them to join us here as we journey together as one community towards the future.
To close I want to quote rabbi Pearce one more time. “In the story of the Binding of Isaac, we read “Va-yelchu sh’neihem yachdav—“The two of them walked together.” Even though the beginning of the narrative has them starting off together, at the end of the narrative each returns alone. The only way that a son can reach maturity and individuality in order to go off on his own and take his rightful place in society is to begin walking to the mountain summit hand-in-hand with his father; a contemporary man cannot bypass the synagogue to get there.”
Thank you.
Mitch Gordon
Articles/publications cited include: Rabbi Stephen Pearce, High Holiday sermon and a quote by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, as well as the Boston Globe article cited in this sermon.
Thank you Mitch! Wow, what a sermon! The question is how do we bring men back into Judiasm? Things like sports tend to get in the way which bums me out. I wish kid's sports games were not so late because I once had a basketball game at 2:00 and I did commuinity service and went to temple all before 2!
ReplyDelete