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JANUARY 2022 PROGRAMS
CSP
The Walnut Street Synagogue is pleased to be a partner congregation of the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program!
Finding God in Nature and Torah: Exploring Psalm 19
Sunday, January 30, 8:00 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Do we find God in the beauty and majesty of the natural world or in the power and delight of Torah? Do we discover a different kind of God in each place? What is the book of Psalms’ attitude towards nature worship? In this session, we’ll do an extremely close literary and theological reading of Psalm 19 (“The heavens declare the glory of God”), part of Pesukei DeZimra for Shabbat and Yom Tov, and ask how it works with and subverts ideas about God from the ancient Near East. Rabbi Shai Held–theologian, scholar, and educator–is President and Dean at Hadar. He has taught both theology and Halakhah at the Jewish Theological Seminary and also served as Director of Education at Harvard Hillel. A 2011 recipient of the prestigious Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, Rabbi Held has been named multiple times to Newsweek’s list of the 50 most influential rabbis in America. He holds a doctorate in religion from Harvard; his main academic interests are in modern Jewish and Christian thought, in biblical theology, and in the history of Zionism. Rabbi Held’s first book, Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence, was published by Indiana University Press in 2013; The Heart of Torah, a collection of essays on the Torah in two volumes, was published by JPS in 2017.
Program video
Praying Anew: Unlocking Meaning in the Words of the Siddur
Part 1 – New Ways to Understand the Siddur: The Literary Method of Interpretation – Thursday, January 6, 3:30 pm EST
Part 2 – Resurrection Revisited: A Closer Look at the Blessing of Giving Life to the Dead – Thursday, January 13, 3:30 pm EST
Part 3 – The Mourners Kaddish: A New Interpretation – Thursday, January 20, 3:30 pm EST
Part 4 – The Non-Cognitive Aspects of Prayer – Thursday, January 27, 3:30 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Part 1 – Explore the literary approach to Jewish liturgy using the case study of the first paragraph of the Amidah. Our prayers quote or reference biblical sources all the time. By comparing the text of the prayer to the sources it draws from, you can unlock new meanings for the prayer book. Why do we say “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to say “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”? Why do we call God “great, mighty, and awesome”? Why not more adjectives? Why those? What do they mean?
Part 2 – In this session, we will open up the second blessing of the Amidah – said in all formal Jewish prayer services – to explore different possibilities of meaning. Which biblical and midrashic texts stand behind this blessing, and how can they open up our field of vision around this controversial prayer?
Part 3 – Join us as we explore the essence of the Kaddish, perhaps the most misunderstood prayer in Judaism. We will move on an interpretive journey that has implications for all prayers we say. Along the way we will encounter the power of the Kaddish, a poignant depiction of God’s relationship with us, and what people can offer the Divine.
Part 4 – What are the parts of the prayer experience which are not encapsulated by the words of the siddur/prayerbook? In what ways are the words designed to conjure up an experience which isn’t contained within the plain meanings of the words? How does the volume of prayer change the experience? Join us on a journey beyond the words of the siddur and into a more holistic prayer experience.
Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is President and CEO of the Hadar Institute. Elie has previously worked as a journalist, banker, and corporate fraud investigator. A graduate of Harvard College, he completed his doctorate in liturgy at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was also ordained. A Wexner Graduate Fellow and Dorot Fellow, Elie is a co-founder of the independent minyan Kehilat Hadar and has been named multiple times to Newsweek’s list of the top 50 rabbis in America. This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video – Part 1
Program video – Part 2
Program video – Part 3
The Torah of Music
Part 1 – Introduction to the Torah of Music – Wednesday, January 5, 8:00 pm EST
Part 2 – From Psalm to Song: Uncovering the Hidden Melodies of Our Texts – Wednesday, January 12, 8:00 pm EST
Part 3 – Singing through the Sea, Lamenting at the River: Song Narratives in Tanakh – Wednesday, January 19, 8:00 pm EST
Part 4 – Music as Midrash: A Collaborative Workshop – Wednesday, January 26, 8:00 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Part 1 – Imagine all the books from the traditional Jewish library are opened to pages containing their most musical passages. Drawing from his award-winning anthology, The Torah of Music, Joey Weisenberg leads a millennia-spanning tour of songful wisdom, offering a glimpse of the rich musical dreamscape of the ancient sages and telling the story of music’s essential role in the spiritual practice of Jewish life today and throughout history.
Part 2 – Ancient Jewish prayer-songs and poetry, such as the Psalms, are often rollercoaster-like expressions of the human soul that vary as widely in their thematic consistency as they do in their poetic structures. This class will explore how we can draw out coherent ideas from the Psalms and other ancient texts and fit them into contemporary musical meters and song structures.
Part 3 – How has music expressed both power and joy, and suffering and loss, throughout the Jewish people’s narrative? Where do we see our own experiences embedded within these stories? In this text-based class, we’ll explore two key Biblical narratives centering the outpouring of song.
Part 4 – How does the modality of music itself unearth new layers in text? We’ll explore the ways music shifts, sharpens, and complicates our relationship to the sources explored in this series and beyond, collaboratively creating new melodies and telling new stories of our own.
Joey Weisenberg (Parts 1 and 2) is the founder and co-director of Hadar’s Rising Song Institute. He is a mandolinist, guitarist, singer, and percussionist who has performed and recorded in a wide variety of musical styles. Joey has worked as the Music Director at Brooklyn’s oldest synagogue, the Kane Street Synagogue, and visits shuls and communities around the world as a musician-in-residence, in which he teaches his popular ‘Spontaneous Jewish Choir” workshops. He is the author of Building Singing Communities (2011) and award-winning The Torah of Music (2017), both published by the Hadar Institute.
Deborah Sacks Mintz (Parts 3 and 4) is the Community Singing Consultant of Hadar’s Rising Song Institute, serving as a resource to communities across North America and beyond who seek to deepen their practice of empowered song and connective prayer. A ba’al tefila and educator, Deborah has served innovative institutions around the country, including Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, the Brandeis Collegiate Institute in Los Angeles, and B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan. In addition to composing new Jewish music, Deborah can be found regularly performing and recording with a wide range of musicians, including as a featured vocalist and harmony singer in Joey Weisenberg’s Hadar Ensemble. A Wexner Graduate Fellow, Deborah is pursuing rabbinic ordination at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video – Part 1
Program video – Part 2
Program video – Part 3
Program video – Part 4
Dirshuni: A Taste of Israeli Women’s Midrash
Part 1 – The Kiss of Death: Reflection on Miriam – Tuesday, January 11, 3:30 pm EST
Part 2 – From the Flood to the Rainbow When Destruction leads us into Covenant – Tuesday, January 18, 3:30 pm EST
Part 3 – For Love is as Fierce as Death: Modern Women’s Midrash as a Tool for Reading our Most Difficult Texts – Tuesday, January 25, 3:30 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Tamar Biala, editor of the modern midrashic work, Dirshuni, has written breathtakingly beautiful midrashim that function as commentaries on the Torah, Israeli society, feminism, and so much more. This series will explore three of her midrashim. You can join for any or all. No Hebrew background is needed. We will be studying in English translation with Rabbi Avi Killip.
Part 1 – In this, our first session, will explore Tamar Biala’s midrash about the death of Miriam. The midrash invites us to explore themes of isolation, illness, death, and holiness. Let’s read this midrash together and unpack what it has to offer us in this moment.
Part 2 – The first crisis and covenant are inextricably linked. Through studying a Midrash from Tamar Biala, we will examine the biblical flood narrative to discover multiple models of coping after catastrophe, and how disaster changes our relationship to God.
Part 3 – The #metoo movement offered an unprecedented wave of written and oral testimony from women about their painful experiences of sexual assault and harassment. We cannot deny that our Torah also contains many similarly troubling and hurtful narratives. How should we approach these hard moments in our canon? Can midrash serve as a tool to engage with our harshest texts? In this class, we will study a modern midrash from the book Dirshuni that offers one approach to hearing, and maybe even healing from our most difficult texts. Together, we will ask how this approach may offer us guidance as we bear witness to so much pain in our world.
Rabbi Avi Killip is the Executive Vice President at Hadar. A graduate of Hebrew College Rabbinical School, Avi also holds Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree from Brandeis University. She was a Wexner Graduate Fellow and a Schusterman Fellowship. Avi teaches as part of Hadar’s Faculty and is host of the Responsa Radio podcast. Avi lives in Riverdale, NY with her husband and three young children. This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video – Part 1
Program video – Part 2
Program video – Part 3
Speaking Up: The Audacity of Prayer
Sunday, January 23, 8:00 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
How do we cultivate the ability to speak up when the moment demands? What leads to positive and constructive outcomes from speaking up? We’ll take a close look at the biblical character Chana, who is known as being the model for our “silent amidah,” but actually is an incredible model for the power of speaking up. Through Talmud and Midrash, we’ll draw lessons for our own interpersonal practice and prayer and explore the relationship between the two.
Rabbi Aviva Richman is a Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar and has been on the faculty since 2010. A graduate of Oberlin College, she studied in the Pardes Kollel and the Drisha Scholars’ Circle and was ordained by Rabbi Danny Landes. She completed a doctorate in Talmud at NYU. Interests include Talmud, Halakhah, Midrash and gender, and also a healthy dose of niggunim. This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video
Autonomy, Community, and Everything in Between:
Halakhic Sources on Aiding Others in Transgression (“Lifnei Iver”)
Sunday, January 16, 8:00 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Community Scholar Program)
What is my responsibility to avoid participating in other people’s misdeeds? May I sell cigarettes to an addicted smoker? What, if any, culpability do I have for purchasing products made with unethical business practices? And how are these questions affected by our attitudes towards autonomy and community? In this class, we will trace the history of the halakhic concept “lifnei iver,” which deals with if, when, and how a person is allowed to participate in someone else’s violation. Beginning with the Bible and continuing into the 21st century, we will trace a wide range of differing legal views and seek to understand they line up with our own values and concerns.
Rabbi Micha’el Rosenberg is faculty at Hadar. He received rabbinic ordination both from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and from his teacher, Rav Elisha Ancselovits. He also holds a PhD in Talmud and Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Micha’el has served as associate professor of rabbinics at Hebrew College, and as the rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center in Washington Heights. He is the author of Signs of Virginity: Testing Virgins and Making Men in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2018), and with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, he is the co-author of Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law (Ktav, 2017). This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video
Pride and Privilege: How Do We Sensitively Navigate and Appreciate Having More Than Others?
Sunday, January 9, 8:00 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Community Scholar Program)
One of the enduring truths of human society is that the pie of privilege is not equally distributed. Some of us have economic privilege, some of us racial privilege, some of us social capital, some of us happy partnerships and families, and some of us all of the above and more. We should, of course, feel grateful for what we have, and hopefully we do. But on the other hand, the unequal distribution of privilege often makes us and other people uncomfortable, resentful, or worse. The Covid-19 era has intensified many of these disparities and social media has made it ever easier to put our good fortune on display or experience the pain of watching others succeed where we have not. In this class, we’ll explore some Torah-guided approaches to thinking about and navigating enduring inequality sanely and sensitively. Dena Weiss is Rosh Beit Midrash and Senior Faculty at Hadar, where she teaches Talmud, Midrash and Hasidut. Dena earned a BA in Religious Studies from New York University and an MA in Theology from Harvard Divinity School. She has studied and taught in a variety of Jewish educational settings including Drisha, Midreshet Lindenbaum, and Pardes. She currently serves as the editor-in-chief of the Mima’amakim journal of Jewish religious art. This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video
What to Do When You Don’t Know: Talmudic Stories of Rabbinic Ignorance
Tuesday, January 4, 3:30 pm EST
(online in partnership with the Orange County Community Scholar Program)
Despite our best efforts, life is filled with situations in which we are supposed to know what to do…but don’t. Perhaps surprisingly, our sages were not immune to this reality and often had to confront their own ignorance. What should we do in this scenario? More broadly, what can we learn from ignorance? In this opening session of our 21st Annual One Month Scholar Series we will explore four Talmudic narratives in which our sages didn’t have the answers in order to shed light on these questions. Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is President and CEO of the Hadar Institute. Elie has previously worked as a journalist, banker, and corporate fraud investigator. A graduate of Harvard College, he completed his doctorate in liturgy at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was also ordained. A Wexner Graduate Fellow and Dorot Fellow, Elie is a co-founder of the independent minyan Kehilat Hadar and has been named multiple times to Newsweek’s list of the top 50 rabbis in America. This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video
COMMUNITY PROGRAMS
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Thursday, January 27, 7:30 pm EST
(online program presented by the Lappin Foundation)
The Walnut Street Synagogue is pleased to be a co-sponsor of the International Holocaust Day program, presented by the Lappin Foundation, on Thursday, January 27 at 7:30 pm. We are on the threshold of history when the time will soon come that there will be no Holocaust survivors to share their first-hand testimony. The torch is being passed to us to keep the stories, memories and lessons of the Holocaust alive and relevant. Please join us for the commemoration to hear Michael Gruenbaum, who was one of the few child survivors of Terezin.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Event flyer)
Convening on Texas Incident: What You Need to Know
Tuesday, January 18, 5:00 pm EST (online program presented by the Combined Jewish Philanthropies)
Join with the community on Tuesday afternoon for a discussion of the incident at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas this past Shabbat. Speakers from CJP, FBI Boston Field Office, JCRC Boston, ADL Boston Office, and the U. S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, will talk about what happened, security initiatives in Greater Boston, and what everyone can do to help ensure our community’s safety.
Program video
Synagogue Council of Massachusetts Annual Gala
Thursday, January 13, 7:30 pm EST (online)
Join the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts online for their Annual Gala. Extraordinary educators in our community will be honored. The featured speaker will be Dr. Susannah Heschel, Chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Her topic will be “The Curriculum: From Hasidism to Racism – What to Teach, How to Teach – Transforming Teaching into Inspiration – From Textbooks to Text People.”
COMMUNITY PROJECTS
2022 March of the Living for High School Juniors and Seniors
The New England Friends of March of the Living is promising a $2,000 Scholarship to every qualified Massachusetts high school junior or senior who wishes to participate in the 2022 Jewish Heritage Trip to Poland and Israel (April 24 to May 8, 2022). March of the Living teaches about roots of prejudice — and growing hatred and antisemitism needs to be fought. Space is limited. Registration is now underway.
2022 March of the Living flyer
More information and registration
Yad Chessed
Sponsor meals for those in our community who are struggling with economic hardship and isolation and help to support other needs through Yad Chessed. Yad Chessed serves as a safety net for Jewish individuals and families and is rooted in the Jewish values of kindness (chessed) and charity (tzedakah). They are committed to helping those in need navigate a path toward financial stability while preserving their privacy and dignity. Questions can be directed to info@yadchessed.org.
Support Yad Chessed