Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, N.Y. He is the author of “Cain v. Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama.” (The Jewish Publication Society 2020)
Dan Ornstein
By Dan Ornstein
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Community In the face of evil, choose life
One recent morning when my laptop suddenly died, I scurried to the comfort of our family computer to make a few online purchases. Some days earlier, a new credit card had mysteriously arrived in the mail for me, three years before the expiration date of my old one. This move by the card company, I…
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Community The story of the Shma, our intergenerational oath
A near-universal faith refrain of Jewish prayer — one whose familiarity spans a vast continuum of Jewish commitments, perspectives and people — is Deuteronomy 6:4: Shma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Eḥad. Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. This verse and three other biblical passages were developed by the early rabbinic…
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Community The song of the grass blades
One fortuitous outcome of COVID has been my expanded opportunity to walk and hike, since so much entertainment is closed and outdoor interactions are safest. Living in upstate New York, I’ve been blessed to live near stunningly beautiful wooded areas, streams, and mountains in state parks and on private lands run by local conservancies. Most…
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Community ‘The moveable God of our ancestors’
In the past few months since the beginning of the pandemic, I have several times snuck into our empty, darkened synagogue where I serve as a rabbi. It isn’t exactly sneaking: staff are permitted to enter the building to retrieve work necessities from our offices, as long as we sign in, tell our executive director…
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Community An obituary for God
A few weeks ago, the New York Times marked the horrible milestone of 100,000 Americans’ deaths from COVID by printing the identities of 1,000 of the dead. It filled every inch of the front page with nothing but their names. Each name was accompanied by the person’s age and what I call a “microbituary”: a…
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Community ‘Queen of the broken English:’ remembering my bubby
The photos of my bar mitzvah that arrived recently in the mail from my parents coincided with the forty-fifth anniversary of that celebration. Metaphors, perhaps, for an adolescence I would prefer to forget, the pictures are blurry and poorly composed. Miraculously, I can identify nearly every one of my classmates from middle school, along with…
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Community A Jew Among The Jesuits
The Chattahoochee River flows south 430 miles, from its source in the Blue Ridge Mountains to Florida’s Lake Seminole, passing on its way near the extreme northwestern edge of Atlanta, Georgia. For nearly a week, recently, I sat looking over the river, fondly nicknamed the Hooch by Georgians, from the porch of Ignatius House, a…
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