An Interview with Kehilla Staff Member Maya Joshua
by Bill Lazarus Maya Joshua, Kehilla’s Programs and Communications Manager since the turn of the year, has ties to both Israel and the United States as well as to her mom’s political activism and her dad’s secular pragmatism. “I’m lucky that I have two homes,” Maya says. “I feel thoroughly American as well as Israeli.” […]
LECH L’CHA | A Dvar Torah about End-of-Life Decision Making
Lech L’cha | a Dvar Torah about End-of-Life Decision Making By Amy Shutkin In modern conversational Hebrew, the name of this week’s Torah portion, Lech L’cha, translates roughly into “Get out of here!” There are many potential connotations to this ubiquitous phrase. So here’s a “trigger warning:” this dvar Torah lives where Lech L’cha meets […]
Wear Your Pronouns! – Another Way to Help Everyone Feel Welcome at Kehilla
Compiled for use at Kehilla Community Synagogue You’ll notice a new addition next to our name tag station. We now have pronoun stickers that you can add to your name tag. If people sometimes or often use the wrong pronouns for you, we hope the stickers will help others to learn and respect your […]
Growing My Activist Voice
A message from Hazzan Shulamit During the past week, I’ve had several opportunities to be more visible as an activist clergy person in the public realm, and I thought it might be meaningful to share a little of my experience with all of you. For over 12 years, I’ve been watching how Rabbi Burt, Rabbi […]
Growing My Activist Voice
A message from Hazzan Shulamit During the past week, I’ve had several opportunities to be more visible as an activist clergy person in the public realm, and I thought it might be meaningful to share a little of my experience with all of you. For over 12 years, I’ve been watching how Rabbi Burt, Rabbi […]
A Note of Introduction from Kehilla School’s New Director from Rabbi Gray Myrseth
I am delighted to be joining the Kehilla community as School Director! Having grown up in the Bay Area and spent the last five years in rabbinical school in Boston, I am also very happy to return to the West Coast. I was recently rereading one of my favorite pieces of midrash, or rabbinic expansion […]
Bar/Bat Mitzvah Class Group Poem
The students in the Bar/Bat Mitzvah Program recently had a workshop about spirituality with Rabbi Burt, Helen Stoltzfus, and Susan Schulman. One of the activities was to create a group poem inspired by a story about the Ba’al Shem Tov. We thought the results were beautiful and wanted to share the finished poems with the […]
Kehilla Activist Invokes Art to Spur Societal Transformation and Economic Justice
by Bill Lazarus Greeting cards might seem to be the last place to create new consciousness. Hallmark, after all, largely dominates the field, and typically speaks to a suburban, white-picket-fence mindset tied to traditional values, while leaving so many people, perhaps most people, feeling varying degrees of alienation. But for Kehilla member and activist Eveline […]
The January Leadership Retreat: Pointing Towards Renewing Our Future
by The Leadership Planning Team: Malka Stover-Kemp, Marcie Rubel, Anna Martin, Joel Kreisberg, Rabbi Dev Noily and Michael Saxe-Taller During the first weekend of February, a group of almost 70 Kehilla members gathered for the first Leadership Retreat. With the four stated goals of making connections, creating a shared narrative, better understanding leadership, and envisioning […]
