At the end of January, not long after returning from viewing an exhibit of 42 black-and-white photographs by Gordon Parks (1912-2006) at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, I had the opportunity to share my enthusiasm for Parks’ work with my …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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5/7/15
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“SHE: What happened to Psalm 88? Why did you skip it?
“HE: I don’t think you could take it tonight. I am not sure I could. No: I am sure I could not.
“SHE: Please read it, for me ... I need that kind the most.” …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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4/23/15
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Alan Metnick’s photography exhibit, “Silence and Stones/Captured by Memory,” continues at gallery (401) at the Dwares JCC through Thursday, April 16. If you haven’t had a chance to visit, it is a must-see. If you’ve already been there, …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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4/13/15
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H. Philip West Jr., executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island from 1988 to 2006, is a prophet in our midst. Like such Biblical prophets as Amos or Isaiah or Jeremiah, West is not so much a “foreteller” …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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3/26/15
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Howard Jacobson (b. 1942), the well-respected British author, begins his speech at the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem in the fall of 2013 with three succinct and depressing sentences: “The question is rhetorical. When will Jews …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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3/12/15
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For many years, an essential part of my Monday morning ritual had been reading Dr. Stanley M. Aronson’s wise and erudite words on the op-ed page of The Providence Journal. In his well over 1,000 weekly columns, his topics ranged far and wide from …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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2/26/15
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Last Jan. 15 my wife Sandy received a nine-page email from Tom Cohen, rabbi of Paris’ Kehilat Gesher, La synagogue franco-americaine de Paris.
The email wound up in my wife’s inbox because Rabbi Cohen is a first cousin of our …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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2/13/15
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Throughout the Jewish world, Shabbat Shemot is the Sabbath on which the opening chapters of Exodus, verses overflowing with action and mystery, are read in our synagogues. I am particularly drawn to the first 15 verses of the …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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1/30/15
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“In 1971, I met a boy who changed my life forever. I was ten and he was twelve, when for a few indelible months, we roomed together in a British-style boarding school perched on an alpine meadow high above Geneva.”
So begins a personal …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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1/16/15
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Israel’s new president, Reuven Rivlin, is certainly not a leftist; nor is he a liberal or a centrist. By most accounts, he is a reliably right-wing politician. He is not in favor of the “two-state solution;” he prefers some form of …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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1/2/15
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