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Jan 8, 2025, 9:42 PM

Reclaiming weekday tefillah

Is weekday prayer an afterthought outside of Orthodox Judaism? Should it be? I never really stopped to reflect much on the role of weekday tefillah in modern Jewish spiritual practice until I started leading traditional prayer at my Conservative synagogue last year. Until then, I...

Sep 30, 2024, 4:12 AM

Everybody Wants This (except me)

OK I’m going to be the mitnagged who craps all over this romcom involving a young hot rabbi (Adam Brody) who dates a shiksa (Kristen Bell) that everyone is fawning over at the moment. It’s not that I hate the show that much… I more...

Sep 18, 2024, 9:26 PM

Your psalm: An Elul return

In recovering from COVID, I learned from a dear friend and mentor who asked for my Hebrew name and age: you have a psalm. Well, we all have a psalm, every year. When praying for someone to recover from illness, you recite the Psalm numbered...

May 9, 2024, 10:30 AM

“Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Parshat Kedoshim packs a real punch, but this line is maybe the punchiest, and some phrasing of this concept appears in other places in the five books (Ex. 22:20, Ex. 23:9, Deut. 10:19)....

Apr 18, 2024, 7:55 AM

Last Bigots Standing

This morning as I was getting my eight year old son ready for school, I told him I needed to talk to him about something. “Remember that conversation we had before, about being careful how you talk about Israel to other kids at school?” I...

Apr 3, 2024, 10:33 PM

The Torah’s Icarus Moment

The story of Nadab and Abihu reminds me of the Icarus myth in Greek mythology. From Wikipedia: “Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings for himself and his son, made of metal feather held to a leather frame by beeswax. Before trying to escape the island,...

Mar 5, 2024, 11:05 PM

Unity and Rebuke

A belated kavanah on last week’s portion, Ki Tissa. The quoted commentary is from Artscroll Interlinear Chumash. And a prefatory note: in this post I critique a letter signed onto by many admired (by me!) Jewish Atlantans. None of this is intended as a personal...

Nov 1, 2023, 6:08 PM

The music of silence

The below is adapted from a kavanah I gave at an evening prayer service on Thursday, October 12, 2023 at Ahavath Achim synagogue. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence...

Oct 28, 2023, 1:19 AM

Humanity nourishes your Jewish soul

Last night I was honored to participate in the intown community vigil–organized by Ma’alot and other Jewish artists, rabbis, and community leaders. It lifted a weight, cleared the fog around my soul, and restored some faith. Everything still feels horrible. Families wait in unbearable agony...

Aug 12, 2023, 5:16 AM

Scrolling bystanders, part 5: The True Judge

This is installment #5 in the “scrolling bystander” series: Introduction (2017); Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 (2023). It’s easy enough to comprehend that negative speech is like a bag of feathers in the wind (see Intro). You can never get those feathers back in the bag....

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About Me

B. Shira Levine writes about Jewish spirituality and observance, parenting, intersectionality, and the U.S. and Atlanta Jewish communities. Views are her own and not those of her employer, synagogues, or any other organization.

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