This is the first part of reflections/assignments for a Theodicy course in my rabbinical program. Introduction – Why study theodicy? Theodicy is a very difficult subject. Religion generally attempts to explain the mechanics of human existence through a transcendental explanation. Articles of faith can be as simple as “the coconuts fall from the tree because
In Bausman, Pennsylvania, just outside the town of Lancaster, there is a tiny little lamb tombstone with no name on it. The record of this is almost lost to time; there’s a small line about it in David Brenner’s The Jews of Lancaster, Pennsylvania: A Story with Two Beginnings. An infant was the first burial
During COVID, Zoom services became all the rage. Let me just share, both my rabbi and I hate Zoom. Being a Conservative congregation, I think we were both glad that the teshuvah from the Rabbinical Assembly indicates that now we’re out of the pandemic, we no longer have any obligation to touch things which are
If you look around Maine right now, everyone is on fire for Graham Platner, an oysterman, harbormaster, veteran, and all around earthy everyman, to displace Susan Collins as our Senator. The problem is, the guy is a bucket of unqualified. He dropped out of GWU. He’s never held an elected office. And now, we find
I can’t tell you how much I miss cron. A 50 year old technology rendered somewhat unreliable when running in cloud hosted instances. Everything that approximates it in the cloud is either expensive, over-engineered, or unreliable. Plus, if you, like I do for an industry non-profit, have a raft of legacy jobs that expect to
I wrote a bit for our May synagogue bulletin that engendered a large amount of correspondence from members of the congregation. I said:May is Mental Health Awareness Month, on top of Jewish American Heritage Month and a raft of others. I am not reluctant to talk about my struggles with mental health. After military experiences,
This is a very difficult thing for me to write, because I don’t know how to feel about it. I don’t want to be a pulpit rabbi. I don’t want to be a congregational rabbi. I would happily pinch hit for others who are. I can come by and read Torah or haftarah, lead a
Maybe our blog is turning into a code blog? Nah. All of my creative writing is bent towards rabbinical school these days, is all, and I absolutely don’t want to write about politics or everything since October 7th. For the longest time, I’ve been using FluentValidation as my go-to for complex validation on objects. Somehow,
For talent acquisition and maintainability reasons, I’m moving off of React and on to Blazor Web Assembly for one of my Software as a Service (SaaS) projects. It’s taking off faster than I expected, but my plate is always full, and it’s faster for me to code natively in C# as much as possible in
All signs point to “feh.” A few friends on social media have been reminiscing about their experiences working for McGovern or participating in student protests during the Vietnam War. Most of the folks I know who were in the anti-war movement, and this included in some capacity my parents, grew out of radical activism, if
Writer, President of Bangor's Congregation Beth Israel, retired soldier, programmer, father, musician, Heeb, living in the woods of Maine with three ladies and a dog. Brian is also a rabbinical student with the Pluralistic Rabbinical Seminary.
Director of Education for Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor, Maine, runs joint religious school with our sister congregation, special educator and former school board member, mother to Avi and Nezzie.
