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,
I don’t know what my point is with this post, so bear with me. Last night, one of my amazing peers in my rabbinical seminary cohort did a great presentation on the ethics of the Reform movement during our Ethics course. It prompted me to do my own reflection on family history and how we’ve
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
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
So, a week or two ago, I wrote an opinion piece for the Bangor Daily News. To make a long story short, there’s a white supremacist, former Marine, and general goober, who when he’s not busy pressing cider for an AirBnB, dreams of opening a training camp for some imaginary race war. As I said
I asked friends on social media what their favorite midrash is. Mine remains Abraham smashing the idols in his father’s shop. He smashed all but one, and handed the stick to the biggest one. He told his father that they fought for a woman’s offering, and that one prevailed. Terah, his father, said, “but they’re
I finished my MBA in 2006. I had been the equivalent of “mid-level management” in the Army since the late 1990s. I’ve done Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt. I’ve done SCRUM training so I can lead Agile teams. In addition to leading and training troops during wartime, I spent the last six years
I count among my friends, and I don’t apologize if one of them is reading this, many progressives. They’re the first to be the right kind of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. When tragedy strikes, they will rapidly adjust their social media profiles to put up the appropriate supportive overlay. They put “hate has no home here”
FROM WIKIPEDIA: Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel’s day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi
I’m not going to name names or even provide a context for this post, aside that recently, I received some “criticism” of another human being that involved a whole lot of insult or inference and conjecture. There is a need, in this world, for constructive criticism. However, one of the things I love about Jewish
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.
