It is hard to feel like the world we are in is soft, even when we are surrounded by people we love. It is hard to feel as though we are in a place of shade when the darkness threatens to be an unyielding night. It is hard for us to suspend our disbelief that the walls surrounding us are safe and reliable enough to risk joy. Yet, the text we read on Shabbat Chol Hamoed Sukkot urges us not to dispose of these feelings and these recognitions of hardness, but to understand that even when the sukkah as the Ananei Kavod feels unreachable, sometimes the sukkah as a crag in the rock can be exactly the cradle that we need.

Read 70 Faces...

We are pleased to introduce you to our new Master in Jewish Education, Pardes Teacher Fellowship, and Certificate in Jewish Spiritual Education students. "It’s exciting to witness the diverse perspectives and wisdom each graduate educator brings as they continue their journey as Jewish educational leaders,” said Susan Morrel, senior advisor of the MJED Program, about this year’s graduate level students. “We are also very excited to welcome students to our new graduate certificate program. These students are serving as educators in synagogue settings across the nation and are thereby playing such an important role in our national Jewish community,” added Hebrew College Vice President Susie Tanchel.

Learn more...

I was blessed to study Torah in the company of trees. At the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College poring over mishnayot and midrashim, my study partners and I would regularly lift our eyes from the text to look out the giant wall of windows at the small woodland outside the beit midrash. We marked each passing semester by green summer foliage in Elul, Red maples’ crimson on Sukkot, the Black birch leaves blanketing the ground in yellow by Hannukah. At Tu Bishvat, the branches were still bare, but little tufts of baby leaves would begin to bud after Purim, opening into a new riot of green as we prepared for our season of liberation, and the giving of the Torah.

Read more...

The book of Kohelet, which we read during Sukkot, teaches that the wise and the foolish, the kind and the wicked, the joyful and the morose all eventually come to the same end. All of human experience is on display in Kohelet; the title character famously, and rather cynically, says there’s nothing new under the sun. Good behavior carries no reward, nor is bad behavior necessarily punished. But a person’s ability to enjoy the pleasures at hand is a gift from God. 

Watch Naomi's short teaching...