After 50 years, pioneering female rabbi is still practicing peace — and protesting
Lynn Gottlieb — one of the first women ordained as a rabbi in the U.S. reflects on her activist career — with no regrets
renewal
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Opinion Learning Torah From My Kidney — by Donating It to My Dad
In the Hebrew Bible, the word “kidneys” is mentioned over a dozen times to metaphorically describe one’s emotional and moral choices. With a literal translation, Psalms 138:13 reads: “It was you who created my kidneys; You fashioned me in my mother’s womb. I praise You, for I am awesomely, wondrously made; your work is wonderful;…
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News Marc Gafni Defends Return to Spotlight as Backlash Gathers Steam
Marc Gafni, a once-promising Jewish leader dogged by allegations of sexual improprieties stretching back years, has returned to the public eye as a leader of a California think tank. But his stunning re-emergence, trumpeted in a recent New York Times article, has elicited a new wave of condemnations from Jewish leaders. Rabbi David Ingber, an…
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Forward 50 2015 Mendy Reiner
It’s a rare group of people who can say they saved another person’s life. But dozens of Jews, most of them ultra-Orthodox, are saving lives every year by committing a profound act of altruism — becoming a live kidney donor to a stranger. That’s thanks to Mendy Reiner, 38, a soft-spoken ultra-Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn….
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News How We Crunched the Numbers on Kidney Donation
Here’s how we arrived at our estimate that . Last year, the United Network for Organ Sharing recorded 180 people who donated their kidney without specifying a recipient. UNOS does not include Renewal donors in this pool. Instead, UNOS included Renewal’s donors among the 1,273 people who directed their kidney to an “unrelated” person. But…
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Opinion When Reb Zalman Hummed ‘Home on the Range’
I first met Zalman Schachter (not yet-Shalomi) in 1971 in Warwick, N.Y., at Kutz, a Reform Jewish camp where my wife, Elana, and I spent our first married summer as teachers and counselors. Our friend, newly ordained rabbi, Larry Kushner, had hired me along with a few other rabbinical students to work with him and…
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Life When Reb Zalman Met the Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama speaks during a visit to Germany. / Getty Images It was, and will always remain, one of the most mysteriously significant experiences of my life. In 1990, eight of us travelled to Dharmsala, India at the invitation of his Holiness the Dalai Lama under the auspices of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. The…
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News Reb Zalman Married Counter Culture to Hasidic Judaism
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the important Jewish innovators in postwar America, inspiration to a generation and ecumenical spiritualist, died on July 3 aged 89. A tireless organizer and spiritual architect, Schachter-Shalomi single-handedly created a new form of Jewish practice and spirituality known as Jewish Renewal, founded on the idea of Gaia consciousness: the notion…
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