Investing in Queer & Trans Torah
We have heard from y’all time and time again that the most powerful, connected moments of learning happen when we are able to show up with our whole selves, and…
Hot Off the Shtender
Olam Hadash: Towards a Jewish Theology of Abolition
This piece is an excerpt from R’ Ari Lev’s Yom Kippur sermon at Kol Tzedek Last week a grand jury in Louiseville, KY exonerated all three officers in the case…
Open Our Hearts Through Torah
In the bet midrash, in meetings, and in conversations with SVARA-niks and community members, week after week, I hear a refrain: We are holding so much grief. But it is…
Steeping the Divine Into the Space Between Comrades
I can conjure up many different memories that have to do with the High Holidays. I remember being a kid and choosing the overflow room to sit with my friends…
Practicing Freedom in the Bet Midrash
Throughout this pandemic, in my learning, in my teaching, and beyond, I keep returning over and over to the same anchoring questions: What does it mean to be a yeshiva…
I Saw Him and I Stood on His Grave: Expanding Our Tradition’s Justice Map
by Benay Lappe
The Talmud’s goal is to teach us how to tell more liberatory stories, and to help us become the people that we need to become to then live those stories…
Did You See My Alps? And Other Questions We’re Asked in Heaven
by Benay Lappe
Every year around this time, as Elul approaches, I begin to think about the weeks and months ahead, and how I’ll make use of this year’s High Holidays to do…
The Book of You & The Book of the World
At Queer Talmud Camp this year, campers had access to a virtual portal which included all the information they’d need for camp. In it, one could read these words, under…
Staying Whole in the Face of Unbelievable Brokenness
There is no question we are living through a crash. We are undoubtedly living through many crashes. The collapse of public education; the murder of George Flloyd and Breonna Taylor;…
The Plurality of Mourning
Nachamu Nachamu ami, “comfort, comfort my people,”— the opening words of the Haftorah from the book of Isaiah, which we will read this Shabbat, ring particularly poignant this year. What…
A Tapestry of Individual Actions & Collective Power
Origin stories are powerful. They give names to our ancestors. They lift up voices, honor the courage and power of individual actions, and let us find heroes in our past.…
Expanding Our Canon
What counts as Torah? Who decides? What makes it into the canon, and what remains on the outside, seen as merely a “folk tradition”? These are the questions at the…