It’s hard not to feel despair when the weather drops 30-40 degrees overnight and we are confronted by a continuous stream of depressing news at home and abroad. Pick your special interest: public health, climate, gun control, antisemitism, Israel-Palestine… To say there’s a lot to be sad and anxious about seems beyond cliché at this Read More
Category: Hagim/Holidays
Looking Back on the 5783 High Holiday Days of Awe
We did it! Our small but mighty kehilah made it through another round of High Holy Days of Awe. Thank you to everyone who lent a hand in this year’s celebrations. From those who organized and participated in leading services to those who organized meals, those who rolled the Torah into place and those who Read More
Meet Our Guest Spiritual Leader for the 5783/2022 High Holy Days
The KSS Board of Directors is proud to announce our Guest Spiritual Leader for the 5783/2022 High Holy Days. Elya Zissel Piazza (they/them) is a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) while also completing their dissertation in Jewish studies from UC Berkeley. Elya is passionate about community building through teaching and learning, song, ritual, Read More
The Season of Endings and Beginnings
Born from a seed, the tree bears seed. The land spends itself to create what will thrive next spring. Fruit swells to bursting. Humans, animals, and birds harvest the grains, nuts, and berries of the land. Plants begin to fade, their life concentrated on a single point: the new kernel, pulsing with stored-up life. We Read More
Passover Greetings and Love for Nisan
Before I launch in, how about we sit together for three breaths. Yaaah-waaaahhhhh.Yaaha-wwwaaaahh.Yahhh-wvaaaaahhh. There’s a lot going on. In the world. In our state. In our community. In our individual lives. In Seasons of Our Joy, (not yet Rabbi) Arthur Waskow names three themes that are interwoven throughout the month of Nisan and the Passover season: “the Read More
Community Chanukah Message 5782
Juggling Hanukkah and the American winter holidays always seems to me like the perfectreflection of the challenge of being Jewish in America: walking in two worlds, not totally in syncwith everything around me. This year, with Hanukkah coming on the heels of AmericanThanksgiving and still in this time of Covid reality and persistent questions about Read More
High Holiday Homecoming: Welcoming Spiritual Leader Alana Krivo-Kaufman
“We are at a moment of reckoning after a year in which the interconnected pandemics of COVID, of racism and state-violence and of climate catastrophe ask each of us individually and collectively — how will we meet this moment?”
Thoughts for a Happy Secular-Jewish New Year
This weekend, I finally picked up Jonathan Safran Foer’s We Are the Weather which was included in my swag bag from the Jewish Farmer Network Gathering last winter. His writing in the nearly 70 page introduction is at once informative and prophetic; a call for action to mitigate the climate crisis and an analysis of the cultural Read More
Thoughts on Chanukah and Wobbles from Cheryl
This year, while placing candles in my Chanukah menorah, I dropped a couple, and they broke. I could still use them, but they were a bit wobbly. My menorah has one or two candle holders which are slightly larger than the rest, and any candles I place in them are also a little wobbly. But Read More
Chanukah – 8 Days for Climate Change
Chanukah begins tonight at sundown. Many take this time to celebrate possibilities – that a small army can defeat a larger one and that right will overcome might. But it is also a time for Jews to imagine a brighter world brought about through energy conservation. As we live through and work to halt climate Read More