Sh'ma Journal: A Journal of Jewish Ideas

A Journal of Jewish Ideas

This month’s conversation:

This month's conversation:

Covenants

NiSh’ma

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Pro-Choice Covenant
Emily Goldberg
May 22, 2013
Do I Have Something Yet? And If So, What?
Gail Labovitz
May 20, 2013
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Inside the Current Issue:
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Updating the Covenant
Laurie Zimmerman
Several years ago, a sex offender contacted me about becoming a member of the congregation where I serve as the rabbi. Having been convicted of soliciting a teenage boy over ... MORE »
Sneaking Into Our Busy Lives
Asher Lopatin
I recently attended the funeral of Jonylah Watkins, a 6-month-old girl gunned down in March by a gang member in Chicago. Throughout the funeral, I heard people shout out, “Thank ... MORE »
Covenant Without the Will of God
Sheila Peltz Weinberg
I understand “covenant” as traditional Jewish language for interdependence, responsibility, and the fact that our actions have consequences. “Covenant” is a way of saying that our lives have meaning as ... MORE »
Breaking the Gender Covenant
Joy Ladin
Gender is a covenant I have broken: a covenant with others and a covenant with myself. “Did anyone ever teach you to be true to yourself?” a therapist once asked me. ... MORE »
The Covenant of Money
Toba Spitzer
As peak moments go, the Israelites’ encounter with God at Mount Sinai ranks high on the biblical narrative scale. In their encounter with the power that freed them from slavery, ... MORE »
Covenantal Communities for Jews in Flux
Margie Klein & Julie Aronowitz
Lamented as the least-engaged age group in Jewish life, 20- and 30-somethings are notorious for our dismally low rates of synagogue membership and, more broadly, of any form of religious ... MORE »
The Stories We Tell: Clergy-Community Covenants
Shawn Israel Zevit
Our identity as spiritual leaders, like the collective identities of our sacred communities, is directly connected to the story we tell about ourselves and the story others tell about us. ... MORE »
Where You Go, I Will Go
Ruth Abusch-Magder
Any marriage between two people, no matter their reasons for getting married, no matter their age or their genders, creates a covenant — a sacred commitment to connect two lives. ... MORE »
The Power to Name
Elianna Yolkut
In the beginning of the book of Genesis, we are told, “And God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky and ... MORE »
Welcoming Daughters
No’a Gorlin
Many years ago, I gave birth to a son whose entrance into the covenant of our faith and peoplehood was clear. The brit milah is an ancient and clearly defined ... MORE »
Engaging a Covenant: From Salami on Rye to a Life of Torah
Gershon Burstyn
Growing up, I was under the illusion that I knew something about being Jewish. My parents were Holocaust survivors from Europe, and relatives and neighbors surrounded our life with thick ... MORE »
Viewing the World with Clear-sighted Uncertainty
Sam Berrin Shonkoff
People often end up being in relation to their relationships with their partners more than they’re actually in relation to the partners themselves,” my girlfriend observed recently. This perspective on ... MORE »
A Narrative of Theological Change: Honoring the Thought of David Hartman
Noam Zohar
How can we retain a religious worldview focused on a deep relationship with a personal God without subscribing to superstitions and crass assertions about divine providence? How can we make ... MORE »
Renewing the Covenant: David Ellenson & Eugene Borowitz in Conversation
David Ellenson, Eugene Borowitz
Dr. Eugene Borowitz was and is my teacher, as he has been for hundreds of rabbis and thousands of others for more than 50 years. He has shaped how we ... MORE »
American Civil Religion: The ‘Covenant’ of Religious Liberty
Eric Michael Mazur
In recent years, some members of the American Jewish community have decried their religious freedom, suggesting that Judaism is healthiest when its adherents are oppressed — a “nothing succeeds like ... MORE »
Asking More of Ourselves
Elliott Tepperman
I had a painful wake-up call in Ghana last summer on an American Jewish World Service trip with fellow rabbis. At a center for children rescued from slavery, a boy ... MORE »
A Covenant for the Earth
Aharon Ariel Lavi
Is global warming a revisiting of the conditions that led to the biblical flood? There are several interesting similarities between the flood of Noah’s generation and the warming in ours. ... MORE »
NiSh’ma – Covenants
Ari Lev Fornari, Rabbi Jennifer E. Krause, Rabbi Michael S. Siegel, Rabbi Shira Z. Shazeer
“You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don’t even know you can get there isn’t a small miracle, then I don’t ... MORE »
Presidential Choices: Principle or Pragmatism?
Marc Gopin
Lincoln, the film, is a tour de force of American constitutional history as well as an amazing portrayal of the intricacies of presidential decision-making. The film takes the viewer into ... MORE »
Covenants
general
How do you understand the concept of covenant in your personal spiritual life? And, what is the content of “covenant” in your self-understanding as a Jew? How has this changed ... MORE »

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Ari Lev Fornari, Rabbi Jennifer E. Krause, Rabbi Michael S. Siegel, Rabbi Shira Z. Shazeer
“You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don’t even know you can get there isn’t a small miracle, then I don’t ... MORE »

Ethics Column
Presidential Choices: Principle or Pragmatism?
Marc Gopin
Lincoln, the film, is a tour de force of American constitutional history as well as an amazing portrayal of the intricacies of presidential decision-making. The film takes the viewer into ... MORE »
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Books/Plays/Film

Further Reading
Click here for discounted rates on books mentioned in this month's issue of Sh'ma! ... MORE »