What could our observances of the Yamim Nora’im, the High Holy Days, possibly have to do with a school in a fishing village on the coast of Ghana? The Jewish New Year celebrates the birthday of the world, harat olam, the beginning of all. This summer, I traveled with American Jewish World Service’s Young Rabbis’ …
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Rabbi Zoe Klein recently traveled with AJWS on a Young Rabbis’ Delegation (YRD) to Ghana. Below is a sermon she delivered last Shabbat, August 12, 2011, at Temple Isaiah of Los Angeles, where she is the senior rabbi. This week’s Torah portion [Parshat Va’etchanan] includes the words Shema Yisrael, And in the Torah, as many …
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I signed up for the Global Circle trip to Ghana with some reluctance. Couldn’t I just write a check to AJWS and take a vacation to Hawaii instead? Or if I wanted to do something for people in need, couldn’t I start somewhere a little closer to home? Who would I be helping by spending …
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I am uncomfortable. I am hot, sweaty and tired. I have been continuously carrying 45 lb blocks for about 10 minutes, fairly certain this is the first time I have ever carried cement blocks in my entire life. While I am used to seeing huge cement mixers on the side of the highway, here I …
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Traveling to the developing world for the first time has aroused a mix of emotions for me. As I sit in my light-flickering room in the rather hot, however charming lodge in Winneba, a small town of Ghana, I’m beginning to decompress my feelings about what I’ve seen and experienced: I visited a slum and …
Read MoreSitting in the dusty courtyard of Challenging Heights, in Sangor, Ghana, surrounded by children rescued from slavery, I realized I was not truly present. It was 2012, and I was on an AJWS rabbinical delegation intended to inspire American clergy to deepen our commitment to global justice by connecting with people in the Global South whom we seek to help.
Read MoreWasteland, jungle, impoverished, malnourished, unhygienic, militant and crowded. Those were some of the words I had associated with Africa before I visited for the first time. The images were etched in my mind from the media, from documentaries and from the atrocities that we all read about daily in the newspaper.
Read MoreParshat Tazria-Metzora lays out the biblical prescriptions regarding menstruation, a topic more steeped in critique and apology than almost any other area in Jewish law. Contemporary readers seeking to reconcile the Torah’s approach to menstruation with their own sensibilities typically run up against a few uncomfortable facts. First, the text discusses this natural bodily process …
Read MoreParshat Tazria-Metzora lays out the biblical prescriptions regarding menstruation, a topic more steeped in critique and apology than almost any other area in Jewish law. Contemporary readers seeking to reconcile the Torah’s approach to menstruation with their own sensibilities typically run up against a few uncomfortable facts. First, the text discusses this natural bodily process …
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