WORDS THAT BREATHE

On Yom Kippur morning, Matt, Alli, and Charlie Seigel took the bimah at Congregation Or Ami to tell their family's story — a childhood taunt on a ballfield, a mother's grief that led her home, and a Jewish star a daughter once took off and chose to put back on.

A Yom Kippur sermon on what a rabbi's toddler granddaughter taught him about presence, honest words, boundaries, and holiness in ordinary moments.

A blessing for rabbis, cantors, educators, and every Jewish professional and volunteer who carried their community through the High Holy Days.

A pre-Yom Kippur prayer by Rabbi Paul Kipnes for the volunteers, staff, clergy, and teams who carry a congregation through the High Holy Days.

A nine-year-old gives away the foul ball he dreamed of catching — a Rosh Hashanah story about kindness, empathy, and what holds our broken world together.

Rabbi Paul Kipnes draws on the Talmudic tale of Honi the Circle Maker and the memory of Judy Friedman for a Rosh Hashanah lesson on planting chesed and hope.

A blessing for rabbis, cantors, educators, and every synagogue professional and volunteer who carries their community into the High Holy Days of 5787.

If Kol Nidre is really an Aramaic legal formula, why do we keep singing it?

How to find hope when the world feels hopeless.

How my chiropractor prepared me for Rosh Hashana.

How to respond when life out there is so full of stress that we often want to pull back, circle the wagons, and just take care of ourselves.

Sermon: That Time My wife was spit on... in Jerusalem... by a Jew. AKA: Rejecting Tribalism, Embracing Discomfort

How I found faith that got me through these tumultuous years.

A guided meditation on the notion that we are not alone, created to respond to the pervasive isolation people have been feeling in the Covid-19 pandemic.

May we be written for a good year in the Book of Life! And perhaps that will happen if we go back to basics. If we go back to kindergarten and be our best selves.

Transform the High Holy Day Appeal now and your synagogue just might nurture a greater culture of giving. Then, defying the prognosticators of the decline of the synagogue, yours might find itself with the funding to forge ahead, fashioning a future filled with hope and excitement. Here's how Congregation Or Ami did it.

Synagogue Dues are Dead, so what’s the price point at which quitting the temple becomes unnecessary or nearly impossible? How Congregation Or Ami transformed our funding model.

Drive Thru Judaism, a series of poignant experiences that, kept people safely in their cars, while providing poignant Jewish experiences uplifted our quarantined congregation, banishing loneliness and bringing spiritual sustenance to a community in quarantine.

The new normal of distanced coronavirus kehilla tefillah (communal prayer) offers new ways to enhance your Home High Holy Days. Consider these 3 previously banned behaviors to warm up your worship. They just might enhance your experience. Just please think twice before sharing them with your clergy. They might not be completely kosher.

A year after the Borderline shooting and the SoCal fires, we reflect on the first person experiences, and explore Torah's insistence that we take action in the face of danger, including mass shootings and changes in climate.