Wednesday, September 28, 2011

[Shefa] Check out Ani Ma’amin, I believe | Ani Ma'amin | Jewish Journal

 
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[Shefa] Check out Repentance, Prayer, and Tzedakah - Schechter Institute - Jewish Ide

 
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Re: [Shefa] Best sources of Jewish e-books?

 

Dear Robert and Hevreh,

I've purchased happily digital library materials DVDs and downloads in the past from eBookshuk  -  http://www.publishersrow.com/ebookshuk/

The eBooks are available for purchase individually, in bundles and in a Judaic Digital Library subscription online. Prices vary on the size of included materials:

I wrote to Alex Gendler, the President, and received the following information regarding the Library subscription costs:

"We have three packages:
1.       Torah: Interactive Bookshelf - $29 per year
2.       Torah: Interactive Bookshelf  (25 year subscription) - $149
3.       Full subscription to JDL -$89 per year"

I "cut and paste" all that I need or want, including preparing hand-outs for participant activities including the newest JPS TaNaKH texts for my teaching and preparation of educational presentations.

Here is the home page for all of the eBook Shuk packages and offerings:
http://www.publishersrow.com/ebookshuk/default.asp?home=t&o=1317186000000

   Special Bundles
The War against Israel
Hispania Judaica
International Critical Commentaries (ICC): Tanakh (Hebrew Bible)
Jews, Jesus, and the Origin of Christianity: a Jewish Perspective
Judaic Digital Library
Judaic Scholar Digital Reference Library II
Master a Masikhta
New! Hebrew Bible: Scholar's Digital Library 1.2
S.R. Driver - U. Cassuto Collection
Torah: Student Bookshelf

Acknowledgement: Please note that if you list DOV in the code area at the top of the page, eBookshuk will make a small contribution to my Foundation For Family Education, Inc. 501c3. I thank you in advance for helping to keep my website online and available.

Please feel free to share this with anyone who is interested in accessibility to digital Judaica reference and study materials online for download purchase or online library.

To one and all,  כתיבה וחתימה טובה

Dov

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 3:10 PM, RobertK <judaismfaqs@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

What are the best sources of Jewish e-books?

I recently bought an Android tablet (Galaxy Tab), and have downloaded several books for use on it, including some freely available Jewish docs I found on the internet.

But outside of some books available in Kindle format on Amazon, I haven't yet found too many sources of Jewish e-books in English, or English-Hebrew. Any recommendations?

Also, are there any services from Siddur Sim Shalom available for download? (any format: EPub, Kindle, RTF, PDF, etc.)

Shalom,

Robert Kaiser




--
Rabbi Barry Dov Lerner
'1969 MHL   1970 Rabbi JTSA  1995 DD JTSA
President, Foundation For Family Education, Inc.

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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

[Shefa] Rosh HaShannah 5772: "A Loving Call"

 

Rosh HaShannah 5772: "A Loving Call"
(c) Rabbi Menachem Creditor
 
On Rosh HaShannah, after hearing the Shofar each of the three times during Musaf, we recite these words:

"May the words of our lips be pleasing to You, God, who listens, discerns, considers, and attends to the sound of our shofar blast. Lovingly accept our offering..."

God "listens, discerns, considers, and attends to the sound of our shofar blast"? This vision is of a God who needs, listens, and loves, a God Who is not content to be Alone.  The very title Melech/King, used throughout Yamim Nora'im points to this as well.  We do not believe in a gendered definition of God (nor do we deal particularly well with authority) but this title implies relationship, for what is a ruler without subjects?  And we wish it to be this way, which is why we plead "May the words of our lips be pleasing... lovingly accept our offering." As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschelz"l taught, "Judaism shows it to be a need to be needed by God."

Our communities call each of us to stretch and support their vulnerable futures. Our country is struggling to emerge from a contraction that affects many, many citizens.  The State of Israel is enduring an unparalleled moment of uncertainty.  The world is aching for a better year. 

I believe each of these calls us to lovingly offer what we can, to "avert the severity of the decree" through introspection and repentance, learning and Tzedakah - to commit our hands to the aspirational dreams our hearts express.

The shofar is jolt to the human soul, but it is also a piercing cry to God, who "attends" and "lovingly accepts" that which we offer.  With every word, spoken and unspoken, may we bring our deepest dreams just a bit closer to reality. 

The world is about to begin again.  Thank God.

May this be a healthy, safe, year for you and those you love.  

May it be a good year for our community, for Israel, and for the entire world.


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Congregation Netivot Shalom  || Bay Area Masorti ||  ShefaNetwork 
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[Shefa] PJ Library, United Synagogue Launch ReadNY!

 

 

PJ Library, United Synagogue Launch ReadNY!

 

Thanks to generous support from the Susser Family Trust, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism is pleased to announce the launch of ReadNY!, an innovative new partnership with PJ Library® Through ReadNY! participating synagogues will receive matching grants to support the launch and growth of PJ Library in their communities. PJ Library is the award-winning education and outreach program of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, which partners with local Jewish organizations to send a monthly gift of high-quality Jewish books and music to families raising Jewish children from 6 months to 8 years old.


“PJ Library is a unique way to reach out and engage families with young children by providing one of the basics of a Jewish home -- books,” said Rabbi Steven Wernick, United Synagogue’s executive vice president and CEO. “United Synagogue can leverage the work of PJ Library by helping families deepen their connections to their kehillot [sacred communities] and experience the practice, prayer, and learning that define us as Conservative Jews.”


As of September 2011, more than 84,000 children in more than 150 diverse communities throughout North America are receiving the gift of PJ Library. ReadNY! will make an additional 6,000 subscriptions available to families throughout the New York metropolitan area through about 35 United Synagogue-affiliated kehillot.


Kehillot located within a geographic area designated by funders in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester will be eligible to apply for matching grants of up to $39,000 over five years. These funds can be used to launch a PJ Library program, or can be used by kehillot already offering PJ Library to expand the number of subscriptions available to families raising Jewish children in their community. The majority of PJ Library subscriptions costs are underwritten by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life. ReadNY! Grants through ReadNY! provide a one-to-one match for the remaining cost of each PJ Library subscription to be matched by the participating kehillot and by local funders.


ReadNY! marks the first time that PJ Library has partnered with a denominational movement to grow the program’s reach. Working in partnership with United Synagogue affords the opportunity to bring together a cohort of kehillot committed to working together around shared goals. “We are excited to work with United Synagogue to reach thousands of families and empower synagogues to connect with those families through the invaluable gift of Jewish books,” PJ Library founder Harold Grinspoon said.


This new project also fits United Synagogue’s goal of building strategic organizational partnerships that increase the impact of United Synagogue’s services. PJ Library will provide participating kehillot with ongoing training and resources for building successful PJ Library programs and reaching out to young families.  United Synagogue will provide the kehillot with resources about prayer, community-building and leadership development and an opportunity for a unique family trip to Israel.


Selected kehillot will be ready to sign up families after January 1, 2012. For more information about this project, email United Synagogue’s chief kehilla officer, Kathy Elias, at elias@uscj.org.

 

 

 

 

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Movement in an effort to bring a renewed and revitalized perspective to
Conservative Jews.

We belong to the Conservative Movement and commit ourselves to working
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Monday, September 26, 2011

[Shefa] Rosh Hashana e-Shiur from the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem

 

Rosh Hashana E-Shiur

The Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem


The Conservative Yeshiva is pleased to bring you this E-Shiur, "Zohar on the Holidays of Tishrei" by Dr. Shaiya Rothberg.

The E-shiur can be downloaded in pdf and printed out, for your convenience. The sources in the original (Hebrew and Aramaic) with translation into English can be downloaded here.


We hope this E-Shiur contributes to your High Holiday learning!


On behalf of all at the Conservative Yeshiva, we wish you Shana Tova.


Rabbi Shmuel (Richard) Lewis, Rosh Yeshiva 

Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb, Director


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Movement in an effort to bring a renewed and revitalized perspective to
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Sunday, September 25, 2011

[Shefa] Best sources of Jewish e-books?

 

What are the best sources of Jewish e-books?

I recently bought an Android tablet (Galaxy Tab), and have downloaded several books for use on it, including some freely available Jewish docs I found on the internet.

But outside of some books available in Kindle format on Amazon, I haven't yet found too many sources of Jewish e-books in English, or English-Hebrew. Any recommendations?

Also, are there any services from Siddur Sim Shalom available for download? (any format: EPub, Kindle, RTF, PDF, etc.)

Shalom,

Robert Kaiser

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Friday, September 23, 2011

[Shefa] a Letter to the Wall Street Journal

 

I believe Tevi Troy's "The White House's Advice for Your Rabbi" (Sept. 23) was inaccurate. Rabbis have not been pressured to talk politics from the pulpit by the White House during the upcoming Holiday season.  Jewish tradition teaches Jews to "Pray for the welfare of the government, without which people would tear each other apart." It isn't political to talk about the needs of our society, which has been the thrust of the White House's message. We must be engaged in our country's welfare.  It is a Jewish communal obligation as well as a central obligation of citizenship.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Congregation Netivot Shalom
Berkeley, CA


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Rabbi Menachem Creditor
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[Shefa] Dr. Alex Sinclair in JPost: "Israel engagement is Israel’s responsibility too"

 

Israel engagement is Israel's responsibility too
By ALEX SINCLAIR
23/09/2011

Dr. Alex Sinclair is the Director of Programs in Israel Education for the Jewish Theological Seminary. He directs Kesher Hadash, the semester-in- Israel program of JTS's Davidson School of Education.

Most Israel engagement programs are rooted in one core underlying assumption: that American Jewish identity and life are in some way incomplete without, or at the very least can be enriched by, a relationship with Israel and Israelis. According to this assumption, the problem of Israel engagement is located entirely within the American Jewish context, and it is there that the worldwide Jewish community's efforts must be directed in order to fix the problem. American Jews are brought to Israel in order to be inspired and become connected; Israelis are sent to the United States in order to educate and inspire young Americans at summer camps; and educational researchers probe the extent to which Americans do or don't feel connected to Israel.

I certainly agree – wholeheartedly! – that engagement with Israel and Israelis has the potential to enrich American Jewish identity. However, that's only half the story, and our exclusive focus on that single assumption explains much of the malaise in Israel engagement, and in the relationship between American Jewry and Israel.

The other half of the story is that the responsibility for Israel engagement lies not only with American Jewry, but also with Israeli Jewry.

Let me highlight the problem with the following vignette. A senior Israeli academic recently bemoaned to me the disconnect between American Jews and Israel. "Why do you think American Jews don't feel connected to Israel?," she asked me. "Is it their lack of Jewish education, the fact that they don't speak Hebrew, they prefer to assimilate and be American, not Jewish... why don't they want to have a relationship with this country?" 

At no point in the conversation did she pause to wonder if perhaps Israel played some part in the disconnect. There was no soul-searching along the lines of "what is it about us that has led them to disconnect?"

In this professor's eyes, the problem of Israel engagement was entirely an American issue. Her attitude is not unique – it is shared by most of those who educate, research and write about Israel engagement. The singlelocation assumption is one of the main reasons that rabbinical, cantorial and education students who spend extended periods of time in Israel often end up feeling ambivalent toward it. They are expected to buy into this assumption, and to go back to the US and "sell Israel" to their communities, whose members are not engaging with Israel as much as they "should be." But while they are here, they experience moments of disconnection, and the single-location approach offers no conceptual foundation for integrating that disconnect into their approach to Israel engagement.

EVEN THE best recent thinking about Israel engagement does not go far enough. The felicitous phrase "hugging and wrestling," coined by my colleague Robbie Gringras, still assumes that the primary location of the problem is with American Jews, and how they relate to Israel. The notion of hugging and wrestling has been an important contribution to the field; but now we need to go further, and broaden the horizons of what we mean by Israel engagement in the first place.

Israel engagement must change from being a single-location problem to being a dual-location problem.

We need to develop a second core assumption in Israel engagement: it's not only American Jews' responsibility that they don't relate to Israel; it's also Israel's responsibility. Note the "not only... also" construction: this position is not a denial of the problematic elements of American Jewish identity and education, nor of the responsibility of the American Jewish community to do more to inspire its congregants to take on Jewish rituals, learn Jewish texts, speak Hebrew and explore Israeli culture. This position's new claim is, though, that Israel engagement must also be rooted in the consideration of Israel's part in the disconnect.

There are at least three major areas of Israeli identity, society and culture that play their part in the disconnect between Israel and American Jews: egalitarianism, universalism and meaning- oriented Judaism.

Firstly, Israeli Judaism is much less egalitarian than American Judaism, and that causes many liberal American Jews, especially, ironically, the more committed ones, to feel disconnected from Israel. Until now, Israel engagement, rooted as it is in the single-location approach, has had no response to this problem. Our responses are usually limited to having American Jews try to just accept that Israel is a more traditional society, and brush aside their egalitarian commitments.

Instead, the Israel engagement agenda needs to turn to Israelis, and open the conversation about Jewish egalitarianism. This doesn't mean that Israelis need to change, and here American Jews may need to lower their expectations: Israeli Judaism, for all kinds of reasons, is not going to suddenly change. But Israelis do have to understand just how core the principle of egalitarianism is to the current generation of young American Jewish leaders, and just how much Israelis' dismissal of Jewish egalitarianism is not just a slap in the face, but a blow to the soul. Israeli society needs a process of political and social education that will advocate respect for women rabbis, genuine and open curiosity about egalitarian Judaism, and a willingness to seek compromises for American Jews in a variety of Jewish religious sites.

I AM under no illusions about the enormous barriers to these processes of political and social education in both the secular and religious communities. Nevertheless, anyone concerned with Jewish peoplehood and Israel engagement must put American Jews and Israelis in conversation together in order to raise these issues. This is the innovation that is offered by seeing Israel engagement as a duallocation issue: the egalitarian issue, rather than being gently side-stepped, or embarrassingly swept under the table, instead becomes a front-and-center component of activities and programs.

The second area of disconnect between American Jews and Israeli society is universalism. Some commentators argue that American Judaism has swung too far in a universalist direction. Others claim that Israeli Judaism has swung too far towards particularism, nationalism and tribalism. The dual-location approach sees the problem as two-fold: both an overlyuniversalist American Jewishness and an overly- tribalist Israeli Jewishness. Israel engagement that flows out of the dual-location approach will ask both groups, in conversation together, to reflect critically about each community's place on this spectrum.

Thirdly, liberal American Jews are used to seeing Judaism as a source of spiritual, existential, or cultural meaning. Now, to be sure, this is a double-edged sword. For every committed Jew whose life is invested in meaning through engagement with Judaism, there is another (or more) who drifts from Jewish engagement because "I don't find it personally meaningful."

In Israel, Judaism is less often seen as a source of personal meaning; observant Israeli Jews tend to observe Jewish law for other theological and sociological reasons, and, while there has in the past decade been an awakening of various Jewish renewal movements amongst so-called secular Jews, there is still a long way to go. Israelis can learn a lot from American Jews about meaning-oriented Judaism; and American Jews can be enriched by such a conversation too, especially by Israelis' insistence that personal meaning can be achieved along with, and through, commitment to the Jewish collective.

These three issues – egalitarianism, universalism and meaning-oriented Judaism – are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other important conversations to be had between Israelis and American Jews. Israeli and American Jewish educational and communal leaders must re-imagine Israel engagement so that it pushes American Jews and Israelis together, each asking how they might enrich, and be enriched by, the other. A dual-location approach, in which each side may "influence and be influenced," may yet help us figure out the Israel engagement puzzle, and reduce the disconnect – in both directions – between young American Jewish leaders and Israel.





---
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Congregation Netivot Shalom  || Bay Area Masorti ||  ShefaNetwork 
Rabbis for Women of the Wall  ||  menachemcreditor.org 
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