Counting the Omer: Counting Our Blessings

Last week, I had the privilege of having lunch with 2 different past presidents of our congregation, one on the occasion of his 90th birthday, and the other one younger than that.  But each one told me the same thing.  They each said they feel so blessed to have had such a good and meaningful life, and that each day they get up and thank God for their blessings.  They count each day as precious.  This is the real meaning of counting the omer.  Let us treasure the time we have and resolve to use it well, counting each day as a spiritual journey toward blessing.  –Rabbi Bill KuhnContinue reading

Counting the Omer: Courage Over Fear

crossing_of_red_sea___pastels_by_pawlis-d4b3hspWe all feel fear.  The question is, do we act on it?  When, in their escape from slavery, the Israelites are stuck between the Sea of Reeds before them and the Egyptian chariots behind them, what’s Moses’ message?  Don’t be afraid. Rabbi Alan Lew, of blessed memory, notes that perhaps the Israelites didn’t really need to be afraid: The Pharaoh sent 600 chariots, while the Israelites numbered more than a million.  Why would such an enormous group be afraid of an army of so few?  His answer is that they are not responding to what was really there, nor even to what they saw.  Rather they were responding to a phantom.  They were responding to a fear-inducing product of their own imagination.  So when Moses says “Don’t be afraid” he means “don’t panic” or “move forward” or “Don’t spend your life anxious about the things that seem scary or the demons you imagine.”  Continue reading

Counting the Omer: From Self to Soul

passing throughFor our 9th day of counting the omer, and our week focused on givurah, “strength,” we turn to the inspiring words that Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell delivered this Shabbat, when we marked her retirement from the Union for Reform Judaism.

“From Self to Soul: Passover, Passages, Passing through, and Counting”

We are here tonight, this Friday, April 18th, 18 Nisan 5774. On Monday night, many of us gathered around seder tables, and, with others, we engaged in a very ancient ritual of remembering and recounting stories from our past, both our collective past and some of our own journeys. We retold how the passages of our lives have shaped us, burnished us, formed us.Continue reading

Counting the Omer: What’s Left is Love

loveA story is told of a rabbi who lay on his deathbed, smiling.  “Why” his students asked, “just moments away from death, are you smiling?”

“Because,” the rabbi replied, “For the first time, I understand the words of Vahavta: You shall love the Eternal with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul.  Now on my deathbed, I see that when all else is stripped away, what’s left is love.”

The Song of Songs, the biblical scroll traditionally read on Passover, teaches: “Love is as strong as death” (8:6).

In our counting of the omer during this week focused on loving-kindness, may try to strip away ego, distraction, all else but love.Continue reading

Counting the Omer: Destiny and Free Will

When we consider the meaning of our actions and of our days, many wonder: Destiny or free will?  Judaism says both!

A story is told about Rabbi Akiva’s daughter.  When she was born, astrologers told Rabbi Akiva that on her wedding day, she would be killed by a poisonous snake and die.  Years pass and the evening before the daughter’s wedding day arrives.  Exhausted after the rehearsal dinner, she climbs into bed, pulls her hairpin from her head, and sticks it in the wall for the next day.

The next morning, as Rabbi Akiva’s daughter is getting ready for her wedding, she pulls her hairpin from the wall and sees a poisonous snake impaled on the end!  She shrieks as she realizes how close the snakeContinue reading

Counting the Omer: The Interconnectedness of all Things

Our counting of the Omer deepens the journey from Passover to Shavuot.  Join us each day with a teaching, blessing and announcement of the count. We begin with a week inspired by hesed, loving-kindness.

In New American Haggadah, Nathaniel Deutsch comments that a small act of love can lead all the way to God.  “As Franz Rosenzweig explains in The Star of Redemption, his masterpiece of Jewish theology, ‘there is no act of neighborly love that falls in the void…because of the unbroken interconnectedness of all objects.’  In this way, the commandment to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ (Lev. 19:18) is intimately and profoundly linked to the commandment to ‘love the Eternal your God with all you heart, all your soul, and all your might” (Deut. 6:5).

When was the last time you experienced the interconnectedness of all objects?

Baruch Ata Adonai, Elohenu Melech ha-olam asher kidishanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu al s’firat ha’omer.  Blessed are You, Eternal our God, Ruler of the universe, who makes us holy with sacred actions and enjoins us to count the omer.

Hayom yom echad la’omer.  Today is the 1st day of the omer.

Have a sweet Pesach!  Rabbis Kuhn, Maderer, Freedman and Cantor Frankel

Counting Up to Sinai: The Omer

Do you ever feel so focused on what is to come, that you miss what is before you?  When my family joins together for a meal, we laugh, we share, and we usually spend some time… talking about the next meal.  This readiness to discuss the next meal grows, not only from a stereotypically Jewish obsession with food; but also from a tendency to be in the next moment as much as we are in the present moment.  In its deep wisdom, Judaism does connect us to the lessons of the past and the hopes for the future, but Judaism also roots us firmly in the present.

In this present moment in Jewish time, we enter the season that begins with the second day of the festival of Pesach and continues until the festival of Shavuot.  This period is called the Omer, a term describing the measure of grain connected with the harvest of our agricultural biblical roots.  During this period of the Omer, there is a Jewish tradition to count, day by day, as a way to anticipate the revelation of Torah at Mount Sinai, which Shavuot celebrates.Continue reading

One in Five Jews Say They Have No Religion: Applying Pew’s Lessons to the Future of Rodeph Shalom

Add your voice to the discussion: “Pew’s Findings on Jews in America: Hearing the Voices of Our Community” on Wed., Feb. 26 @ 7:00 pm at RS, with a panel featuring Pew Study director Alan Cooperman.

How does Jacob find meaning?  How do you find meaning in our Jewish community?  And how about the person who is connected to no Jewish organization, but might be on a quest for meaning?   How do we listen to what it is that person seeks?Continue reading

Would You Stop for Beauty?

On a cold January morning during rush hour, at a Washington, DC metro station, a man wearing blue jeans, a tee-shirt and a baseball cap takes out his violin and begins to play.  Although the scene looks much like any street performance, it’s actually a stunt.  This is not just any street musician. This is master violinist, Joshua Bell.

A few years ago, The Washington Post invited Joshua Bell to participate in a social experiment.  They wondered: what would commuters do if they encountered exquisite music during their rush to get to work?  Without realizing that they were listening to a one-time child prodigy whose intricate music was being played on an expensive violin, and who just the evening prior had commanded on average $100 a seat at the symphony hall, would people stop for beauty?Continue reading

Doing and Understanding the Meaning of Our Lives

Delivered by Rabbi Bill Kuhn this past Shabbat.

I am glad to see that you’ve all survived the 3rd great blizzard of 2014.  I am sure all of us were faced with challenges of some sort or another, but it is good to gather together here in this sacred and safe place to enjoy the warmth of the spirit of our congregational family.

I have always been amazed  by what happens to people when faced with a common threat.  During a big snowstorm, people will help each other.  You may not even say hello to a neighbor normally, but during a snowstorm, you’re shoveling their walk and checking on them to see if they’re ok.  TV stations suspend their regular programming to bring you live coverage of the snowstorm and to report on how people all over the region are faring.  They show film of young strapping men getting out of their cars to lend a hand to a total stranger whose car is stuck in a snow bank.  A common threat can transform us from competitive, closed uncaring people into kind, compassionate loving mensches.

I believe we feel this same phenomenon when we come here to share Shabbat services every Friday night.  We do feel under a common threat.  Not from a snowstorm, but from a spiritual storm – a life storm. Continue reading

First Plant the Sapling: Tu B’shvat and Our Spiritual Intention

Are you in automatic-drive?  Do you sometimes recognize a void where intention should exist?  This quest is at the root of our congregation’s Jewish Meditation offerings, Fridays 5-5:30 pm, Saturdays 9-9:10am and monthly 2nd Wednesdays 6:00-7:00 pm.
The other day, as I was driving east on Spring Garden Street from RS to a congregant’s home at 2nd and Locust Streets, I automatically turned into the right turn lane to prepare to turn off onto 6th Street.  Why did I start to turn at the wrong place?  I knew it wasn’t 2nd Street, but I am used to driving to my in-laws’ on 6th, so that’s where my car automatically goes. Does your car ever just go somewhere?Continue reading