The Jewels of Elul is back with this year's theme, The Art of Beginning...Again. Twenty Nine inspired contributors will share a personal story, about how deal with change. It will include pieces by Noah Alper founder of Noah’s Bagels, African-American Rabbi, actress Noa Tishby, Rabbi’s  David Wolpe and Rabbi Naomi Levy, Imam Jihad Turk, Jeremy Ben Ami, Eli Broad, a prisoner in a penitentiary, a Lost Boy of Sudan and medical student Nofrat Frenkel, arrested for wearing a Tallit at the wall. Additionally, Natan Sharansky, Author Alan Lightman, Boxer Yurie Foreman, producer Mia Goldman and Rabbi’s Billy Dreskin, Abraham Twerski and Shlomo Riskin will be writing Jewels this year!

This year, let's move beyond wasteful seder conversation dedicated solely to nostalgia, boredom and pediatrics. Let's go around the table and ask, "What question might keep us up in productive conversation all night long, if necessary?" We'd better have one; we no longer have a tamid to atone for us, if we don't.

Our institutions should follow the example of the Temple. They should be enlivening not deadening, to those who, like the priest, work in them.

That is not what boards of Jewish institutions report. Meetings are often desultory at best, litigious at worst - even downright nasty. They can be life-depleting, not life-enhancing. Committee assignments are like life sentences. Volunteers are hard to find.

But that is not the Jewish way. Jewish organizational life should be like the handwashing that characterized the original Jewish institution, the Temple.

It is somewhat surprising that researchers have paid so little attention to how people experience divorce in congregations. Studies that do address the relationship between religion and divorce are largely quantitative, measuring divorce numbers. Rarely do these reports consider the personal impact and how (or if) communities support those affected by divorce.

According to the March 2009 report, How Spiritual Are America’s Jew?, spirituality is one of the gateways into meaningful Jewish life, a gateway that the Jewish community has neglected.  The authors of the report, Steven Cohen and Lawrence Hoffman, find that Jews lack the language to talk about God.  Without language to describe spiritual experiences, those experiences are fleeting. 

If you have already turned 40, you know it is no ordinary birthday; if you are not yet 40, pray God you will get there, but, perhaps, with appropriate trepidation.

Join the conversation on Synablog

(*and avoid the pitfalls of quick-fix religious consumerism)

by Jeffrey K. Salkin

From Reform Judaism, Fall 1995
Reprinted with Permission.

Everywhere you go in the Reform movement, the word on people's lips is spirituality. It is the religious buzz word of our age.

The search for spirituality transcends the empowerment of women and Jews by choice, of course. It is inextricably linked to larger demographic changes that began to be felt in the 1960s when the first phalanx of baby-boomers came of age. Those same men and women are now in their forties, and are but one of three cohorts who stand out as altogether novel.

By 1950, American Jews had settled down into two competing visions of what Judaism ought to be. Intermarriage between Germans and Russians veiled the divide to some extent, as did the very vastness of the eastern European numbers which overflowed into the German temples, despite their organ music, strange decorum, and other trappings of a liturgy laundered of its traditionalism. But Jews had to join some ``place of worship'' after all, as Eisenhower himself made clear, in a decade that was to rival even the 1830s in its reclamation of religion as a grand American spiritual pastime.

What the German founders never did appreciate was the positive pull of peoplehood on the Jewish psyche. How could they? When they arrived here, their claim to belonging was precisely the fact that they were not a people at all; they were a religion. That claim had been implicit in the Enlightenment all along. Even Moses Mendelssohn had known that.