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I know I owe questions to some people. I'm not ignoring you.
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Last night was class #10 (of 30 for the year), and evaluation night. They wanted the forms back that night, so I had to write comments quickly. I hope I was sufficiently diplomatic about the first course ( Read more... )

Monday night's class was on sin. We had a lot of good discussion. This entry is part summary and part my own thoughts.
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One of the two classes I'm taking through the Melton program is a basic theology/text class with an excellent rabbi. Last week's topic was creation, and I wanted to jot down a few things that he taught about before I forget about them.
Two words are used in Hebrew to convey separation. One is "kadosh ( Read more... )

Today is (or perhaps was, by the time this gets posted) Tisha b'Av, the day on which both temples were destroyed (first in 586BCE by the Babylonians, and then in 70CE by the Romans). Other bad stuff happened in later years too. It is a national day of mourning for the Jewish people.
For a couple months (since it came up in torah study) I've been ( Read more... )

Online, searchable bible, talmud, and others... as a Firefox extension (Hebrew only). Nifty! (And the keyboard for typing Hebrew can be used other ways, too, which solves another problem I sometimes have.) Thank you jducoeur. (I have a CD library with search in ( Read more... )

At the tikkun on Shavuot (well, I did say I had more coming on this topic :-) ), my rabbi asked the question: what in torah do we, as individual Reform Jews, accept as binding? All of it? If not, how do we decide what is binding and what isn't?
There was a lively discussion. As regular readers of my journal know ( Read more... )

On Shavuot we read the Aseret HaDibrot, the ten utterances (or ten commandments, or ten words -- take your pick of translations), from the book of Exodus. My rabbi asked at the tikkun: which is the most important? (Actually, he asked us to rank them, but he didn't give us the several days necessary for that discussion. :-) )
These ten fall into ( Read more... )

Sunday night I attended the first in a short series of classes my rabbi is teaching on the (theological) problem of evil. This is not a summary of the class (I wasn't taking notes anyway); this is a ramble prompted by the class.
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