The Fruits of Rosh Hashanah

By Rabbi Jill Maderer

L’shanah tovah umetukah. We wish each other a good and sweet new year. Typically, we celebrate our hope for a sweet new year by eating apples and honey. But a lesser known tradition identifies a different symbolic fruit for Rosh Hashanah: pomegranates. As delicious as apples and honey are (and I love apple cake!), they are too easy!

Pomegrantes are hard. They require work, perseverance and patience. For every bite of sweetness, we have to suck off the fruit while careful not to swallow the seed. So maybe pomegranates are the more realistic symbol for the new year.  Anyone have a recipe for pomegranate cake?  (Feel free to share High Holy recipes here!) May we do the hard work of life, and may its sweetness be the fruit of our labor. L’shanah tovah umetukah.

High Holy Day Obligations

By Rabbi William Kuhn

Apples and honey are perfect symbols for the beginning of the Jewish New Year, because the sweetness of the apples is intensified by the honey taste and texture, as we pray that our year will be equally as sweet.  Perhaps a more realistic flavor combination would be to pair a tart apple like a McIntosh or a Granny Smith with the honey, as it reflects a more Jewish attitude about life in general.  We know that life is never cloyingly sweet all the time, and it would be naïve for us to pray that our New Year would taste like a big bright Red Delicious apple 100% of the time.  We know that life is complex and filled with challenges, and there is plenty of tartness.  But during our High Holy Days we hope that whatever bitterness may lie ahead for us may be softened and diminished by the sweetness that we hold within our hearts.

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Welcoming You to the High Holy Days

Rabbi Jill L. Maderer

At last night’s “Taste of the New Year,” Philadelphia’s wine-tasting and synagogue-matching program for young adults, I met many people who are seeking a congregation.  If you are a young adult (22-40), missed the event but would like an invitation to High Holy Day services (“High Holy Day tickets”) at RS, please contact our Membership Director Catherine Fischer.  Thank you to Deborah Gordon Klehr, Ivy and Matt Olesh for representing RS and inviting so many new-comers to High Holy Day services this year!  We were proud that Deborah was interviewed on KYW during the event!   We look forward to joining together on Rosh Hashanah to celebrate the new year and on Yom Kippur to experience the depths of spiritual connection.  L’shanah tova–a sweet new year.

Revelation in an Age of Self-Revelation

by Rabbi Jill Maderer
     How much do you want to reveal? How much do you want to know? A current debate about social networking gets to the heart about what relationships mean to us.
     The skeptics: Revealing our daily experiences on a newsfeed is self-centered. When we write on a Facebook wall, we are only thinking about what we want to express—we aren’t asking “how was your day?” True, the readers can respond with a comment. But, argue the skeptics, the moment of posting is a self-centered, one-way dialogue. Their second problem, they call “connection without cognition.” Social networks allow us to connect with many circles of friends in a short amount of time, but what is the nature of that connection? And is a relationship built on 140-character tweets, a friendship?Continue reading

Welcoming is Not Only a Jewish Thing: We Are Obligated to Do It

By Catherine Fischer, Director of Programming and Membership

The Torah, our Jewish guide to living, teaches over and over again, more times than any other mitzvah (commandment), that we are supposed to welcome the stranger (aka a person whom we do not know).  Being welcoming, showing compassion and doing acts of loving kindness are just some of the mitzvot that Jews are instructed to adhere to.

Congregation Rodeph Shalom works hard to live up to our obligation.  Our rabbis, staff, president, lay leadership and every congregant of RS share in this responsibility.  We work together to assess and reassess our efforts so that everyone who walks through our doors is personally welcomed.  Our goal is that no one will ever come into this building and leave unnoticed and unappreciated.

As the High Holy Days approach, we carry our welcome with us.  Many are used to buying High Holy Day tickets to attend services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  At Rodeph Shalom, we try to distill the notion of purchasing tickets as we don’t see that as the role of a synagogue.  Rather, we invite our prospective members to come as our guests and become acquainted with our community.  We hope that once they have a chance to get to know us and begin building relationships and memories here, they will want to be part of our community.  Being part of a community is analogous to being part of a family.  A family does not purchase tickets to attend Thanksgiving; however, there is a healthy give and take and a sense of responsibility that one has for another. Continue reading