Join our wonderful Rabbi Michelle Robinson on May 15, 2021.

From May 15th, 2021.

From May 8th, 2021

Madeline always loved to sing.  As a teenager, she had a gorgeous voice, a two-and-a-half octave range, and the kind of creative artistry that made people swoon.  She and her friends would sing along to Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Judy Garland, and she took the stage at every wedding and bar mitzvah she could.  In high school, won an adult talent contest at the Adams Theater in Newark. On her way out, comedian Joey Adams told her that she “had a very good voice and…should pursue it.”

That dream was tempting....but Madeline’s family was struggling. 

From May 1, 2021

We’ve known this for a while, but suddenly the realization that you only live once has taken on a fierce urgency.  The acronym YOLO, you only live once, was popularized by the rapper Drake in 2013, but as we are emerging from the pandemic YOLO has a new energy as a call to action.  Last week New York Times writer Kevin Roose authored a piece entitled “Welcome to the YOLO economy” about how many millennial workers, as they emerge from the pandemic, want to make real changes to their lives because you only live once.

From April 24th, 2021.

I want to tell you a story about a magic spoon.  The story comes from a different time and place, the 1870s in a town in Romania called Stefanesti, where there was an illustrious Hasidic dynasty.  The most famous of these Hasidic masters was Rabbi Avrohom Mattisyou Friedman, who became the Second Shtefaneshter Rebbe in 1869 and continued for 64 years.  He was considered a hidden tzaddik who could effect miracles.  The most famous of these miracle stories concerns a Hasid who comes to see the Rebbe because his daughter had typhus.  She was desperately ill.  She had very little time left.  Rebbe, only a miracle can save her.  What happens next is told in a history of this Hasidic dynasty:

From April 17th, 2021.

From April 10, 2021