I want to begin with a thought experiment. You know this scenario even if you've never lived it: the fire has jumped the ridge, or the storm has turned, and suddenly someone—a sheriff's deputy, a fire fighter, a neighbor—tells you that you have ten minutes. Six hundred seconds to walk through your own house and decide, out of everything you've spent a lifetime accumulating, what comes with you and what you leave behind.

When I sit with students to prepare for b'nei mitzvah, I ask them a series of three questions. The first is, "What do you like about being Jewish?" The answers usually include “being part of something larger than themselves or on tactile things like food, family, and holiday celebrations. The second is, "What do you find difficult about being Jewish?" Before October 7th, the answer was usually fasting-- or fear of fasting-- on Yom Kippur. Nowadays their concerns have shifted

Yom Kippur Morning, 5785, Oct 12, 2024 Rabbi Daniel Gropper, DD - Community Synagogue of Rye This past Spring, a congregant came to see...