On my first day of work, war broke out between Israel and Iran, thrusting our country into a strange new security situation which was unlike any I had ever lived through before, despite having spent over a decade in Tel Aviv before rabbinical school. I didn’t know what to do, but we improvised. Unable to host a Bar Mitzvah at the synagogue due to the lack of a proper shelter, we began making provisions to host it at the young man’s grandparents home with a smaller guest list. The community’s president and I wrapped up a sefer torah in tallitot and brought it over before Shabbat between sirens. What I learned my first week on the job was the simple truth that no matter what happens in this world, I always know the answer to the following question: what are you doing on Saturday?

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As the days grow darker and winter settles on New England, Hebrew College’s Soul Sounds series invites the community into an evening of warmth, light, and nostalgia, “Hidden Light: Hanukkah Melodies Lost and Found”. Hebrew College Artist-in-Residence Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer, who programs the Soul Sounds series, drew inspiration from Hanukkah as a holiday of bodily experience, when the darkening days “draw out the other senses”: the smell of frying latkes and the air of winter, the sound of spinning dreidels and spitting oil, the feeling of bundled warmth, the memory of childhood excitement. This sensibility shaped Meyer’s approach to the concert, an exploration of seasonal music to celebrate the rich textures of Jewish life across time and place.

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Some decades ago, when I was in seventh grade, I got into a polite disagreement with my science teacher, Mr. Carter. He was a patient man, as he would have to be to teach class after class of pre-adolescents. But I tried his patience that day when I foolishly insisted that he had graded me unfairly on a quiz. The questions were about the difference between physical changes and chemical changes. He had taught us the rule of thumb that if a substance is fundamentally something else after the change, then it had undergone a chemical change. But if it were essentially the same, the change was a physical one. On the quiz in question, I claimed that a boiled egg had undergone only a physical change, since it was still an egg. Mr. Carter kindly explained to me that, while it was true that the boiled egg was still an egg, it wasn’t the same thing, and therefore the change was chemical. I was not a very science-y child.

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As part of an ongoing dialogue between Jewish and Evangelical leaders, the Miller Center’s Rev. Rob Schenck and the National Council of Synagogues’ president and Tamid of Hebrew College Adult Learning instructor, Rabbi Lenny Gordon, convened a group of some twenty scholars, congregational clergy, and institutional representatives last month for a structured discussion on sacred text. Participants attended presentations, engaged in general discussion, and joined small groups to share selected texts and discuss their interpretations. This exercise was part of a jointly sponsored program, “A New Jewish-Evangelical Dialogue”, which aims to explore innovative approaches to Jewish-Christian relations, both within and between these two significant religious communities.

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