Posts by Rabbi George Gittleman

1. As liberal Jews who value religious autonomy, how are the concepts of “covenant” (בְּרִית) and...Read more...

What does it mean to be a slave?  What does it mean to be free?  Pesakh could be summed up as a dialectic, a dialogue between these two poles of existence — from degradation to redemption; from slavery to freedom.

Slavery.  What does it mean to be a slave?  We make a mistake if we answer this literally. Thinking about it in literal terms just distances us from the story. After all, we are not and have...Read more...

Thanks to the coincidence of the calendar, Martin Luther King, Jr.  Day always coincides with our reading of the book of Exodus.  No doubt, Dr. King preached the Exodus story many times in his ministry and in his fight for equality, and dignity for all people.  As Michael Waltzer points out in his exceptional book, Exodus And Revolution, the Exodus story is the archetype of revolution in the west, quoted by Martin Luther...Read more...

Hope is one of those essential elements like air, water, love… It’s very hard to be fully human without hope. There is lots of hope in the narrative of Hanukkah: the victory of the few against the many, light in a dark time – even in the darkest of times, as during the Shoah, there is the light of hope.

For years I resisted the connection between Hanukkah and the Shoah: “does everything have to be defined by the...Read more...

The place was packed and tense before the meeting even started. To make things worse, the air conditioning wasn’t working and it was rapidly getting as sticky and humid as a locker room.  Usually getting a seat at a meeting of the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights is not a problem, but not last Thursday; the local Jewish Community was out in force and the North Coast Coalition for Palestine had brought in a number of...Read more...

I am writing this blog from the porch of my room in Ein Hod, an artists’ colony in the Carmel Mountains overlooking the Mediterranean; two days here, Shabbat with Levi in Harduf (see last blog), and then back to Sonoma County!

Since my last blog, I spent a week at Ulpan Or (Hebrew language intensive) in Tel Aviv, and a week at Ulpan Or in Jerusalem, as well as 3 days at the beach – in Tel Aviv – with Levi: Ezeh Kef/What...Read more...

In Praise of Leira

Leira, we have lived a lot of life together, almost all of it in this community. I believe Dianne found you at Simcha Sunday, a few months before I arrived. You were the new Choir Director. And, it was Dianne who also suggested that we might try leading services together.

This may sound natural to those of you who have prayed with Leira these last 16 years, but in fact at first, Leira was quite frightened of...Read more...

I just came home from teaching at the Sunday night meditation group at Shomrei Torah hosted and often lead by Sheila Katz & David Rubinstein. They have been faithfully holding the meditation space at Shomrei Torah for years. Thank you David & Sheila!

My focus for the evening was “Loving Kindness” or as the Buddhists call it: “Metta”. Metta is a meditation practice where you wish people – yourself, loved ones, folks...Read more...

Last month, I gave two talks on the Jewish American Experience as a “Lunch & Learn” and also for the “Rebbe’s Tisch”.  I started with an overview of American Jewish history, and then made some general observations about the exceptional nature of our experience here; we have never been as safe, as free or as prosperous as we are in America today: Ein ayin harah!

This unprecedented prosperity did not come all at...Read more...

The recent eruption of the “Occupy” movements and their focus (if you could call it that) on economic justice has gotten me thinking about how tzedek, the Hebrew word for justice, applies to economics. Of course, Judaism is not monolithic on this or hardly any subject. Nevertheless, there are some basic and fairly accessible principles worth mentioning.

Rabbi Michael Robinson (z”l) used to say that the Torah has a Socialist...Read more...

One of my favorites stories about the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism is about his morning prayer practice. Apparently he would daven Shacharit (pray the morning service) much longer than his followers and they became accustomed to waiting for him to finish. One morning one of the group suggested that...Read more...

It’s been almost three weeks since Laura and I returned from our trip to Israel and many folks in the congregation have asked me when I was going to write about the trip. I am not sure why, but this trip/experience has been particularly hard for me to “blog” about. Below you will find my best attempt at a partial expression of my most recent Israel experience.

We arrived late Thursday afternoon and went from Ben Gurion Airport...Read more...

Not long ago I watched the movie, “127 Hours”. It’s about an extreme outdoor athlete who, while out on a solo hike in the Arizona Desert, gets trapped in a canyon, his arm pinned by a boulder that fell while he was descending.  It took him 127 hours to free himself.  He did it by cutting his arm off at the elbow with a dull, Swiss Army knife!

Today, Obama called on renewed peace talks between the Palestinians and...Read more...

“My heart is in the east, while I am on the edge of the west” wrote the famous medieval poet, rabbi and philosopher, Yehudah Halevi. His words, his longing, his life, reflect the ancient and profound connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. Israeli independence? That was beyond Yehuda Halevi’s wildest dreams! All he hoped for was “to see the ruined shrine” (the Temple in Jerusalem), to quench the longing of his...Read more...

With Pesakh just days away, my mind turns to the epic tale of our Exodus from Egypt.  The moment that always gets me is that pregnant pause before the seas split; one can only imagine what was going through our ancient ancestors’ minds. Surely some thought death was about to be their reward for this first taste of freedom.  Others turned to Moses for deliverance and, at least according to the Midrash, some took things in their own...Read more...