http://beyondthenear.net/blog Mon, 04 Oct 2010 03:50:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Today I helped bring four people into the covenant and holy congregation of Israel. Two were a couple, Bill and Barb, Bill in his 70s, Barb in her 60s, who are very active members in the synagogue, and very keen on learning and increasing their knowledge and observance, and who will ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2010/10/04/beit-din/ Rabbi Rami posed these questions. Good blog fodder, I figured. 1. Do you think your faith is the one true faith, or do you believe that there are many paths to Truth? I believe that Judaism is the True Faith for Jews. For a whole variety of reasons, some cultural and historical, ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2010/09/20/6-questions-for-people-of-faith/ Ok, so I have something Jewish to write about. Or, you know, semi-Jewish. Or not Jewish... Jewish related. Depending on how you define what is or is not "Jewish." I'm talking about the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding. This was the subject of a d'var Torah I gave last week at my shul. ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2010/08/15/hamavdil-bein-halachic-vnon-halachic/ My good friend Rabbi Josh Gutoff wrote a lovely insightful post about Tisha B'Av over at his blog frost and clouds. We moderns think and speak about historical time, understanding the difference between “then” and “now”; modernity itself is a product of the development of what we call history. And ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2010/07/20/tisha-bav/ This is a post I started writing years ago. It is again relevant to my current theological work, so I'm going to try to finish it. After I wrote about 1, 0, ∞ in response to something Getzel said about Buddhism, I was talking to Jason and he said, basically: "Yeah that's ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2010/04/15/the-meaning-of-1-1-0-%e2%88%9e-cont/ I've been wanting to post about this here for a while... might as well use the momentum. I remember a Saturday afternoon in Jerusalem last year spent with my friend Paul (Yankele) from Yeshiva. We sat in the living room of some classmates and talked for hours. The subject of much ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2010/04/15/shabbat/ The kids I think of as my baby cousins are the ones who, about 15 years ago I realized, didn't know who Mr. Hooper was. At 28 and a half years old, it is getting more and more difficult to deny the fact that I am, in fact, an adult... ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2010/04/15/whose-internet-is-it-anyway/ So here I am. What does that mean? Remember when I was 15 (maybe you don't, but I do) and I first had that crazy thought that maybe I wanted to go to rabbinical school? Remember how the second I began to show an interest in Judaism, people started to assume, without ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2009/10/19/responsibility/ There's a lot to write about but for now I'll stick with what I was talking about before, which is davenning. Jeremiah asked some really good questions about what kind of work I believe davenning takes and what exactly it is that I mean by davenning in the first place. ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2009/09/27/the-work-it-takes/ While I'm restoring my iPod in an attempt to get it to be less annoying, I may as well write something. There are some great things going on at my shul. Great people with great projects and great innovations and the like. All of the people in charge, I believe, are ... http://beyondthenear.net/blog/2009/09/22/the-davenning-experience/