Adult Education Blog

Join us the last Wednesday of the month at 10:30 on Zoom to discuss our next Book Club pick. This month we are reading The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride.

Continuing from our conversations the last two weeks, we will look at ways Social Media can be used for good and for bad in Jewish communal settings.

Relevant excerpt from a contemporary study/commentary on the Book of Kings

The Ethics of Social Media by Rabbi Marina Yergin

What to Memes Tells Us About Jewish Identity?

Miriam Anzovin is the Talmud Master of the 21st Century

On the first Thursday of June, we will meet at 10:30 am via Zoom to discuss May's reading: On Her Own by Lihi Lapid.

Watching her Russian immigrant mother, Irina, struggle to put food on the table, Nina, a beautiful and restless teenager, vows her life will be different. When a strapping...Read more...

On April 7th, we will look at Rabbi Avital Hochstein's Talmudic Exploration of the mitzvah of visiting the sick. 

On April 14th, we will segue the conversation to how this mitzvah has looked in practice over the centuries.

On April 21st, we will discuss the possibility and set parameters for a Bikur Cholim committee at Ner Shalom!

After discussing music as prophecy from the Hadar materials, we moved on to discussing the range of Jewish music, what makes music Jewish or Spiritual, and what our Torah songs are. Playlists reflective of our class can be found on YouTube or Spotify.

Our final session will be in person so that we can SING!

We will begin this course by discussion Joey Weisenberg's Source Sheet and discussion questions from Hadar's Project Zug.

In later weeks, we will also be sharing our own favorite Jewish music or other songs that make our souls rise. The last session of our class will be in person, to sing together synchronously.

For the fourth session of this course, we are looking at the emergence of Reform Jewish political action.

Timeline of Reform Judaism (note: the Religious Action Center is founded in 1961)

A More Sociologically-Oriented History/Timeline

Why Advocacy is Central to Reform Judaism

Seeking "The Jewish Vote" goes back to 1868

A Critique of Reform Judaism's Political Involvement

About the...Read more...

For our first of five sessions on the topic of Money and Power, we used the source sheets and questions from Rabbi Avi Strausberg's guided lesson in the Project Zug booklet from Hadar.  We navigated questions on power and accountability, and on how to separate a person's deeds from their work (can a bigot write good books, can a lascivious man be a good rabbi or president, can we learn something useful from someone we don't...Read more...

We will be discussing Last Summer at the Golden Hotel by Elyssa Friedland.

The story revolves around a hotel in the Catskills and the two multigenerational families who own the once popular but now fading summer resort. Long buried secrets, intergenerational tensions emerge as a sell out...Read more...

Join us on Zoom at 10:30 the last Wednesday of every month. This month we are reading and discussing our next Book Club choice, The Thread Collectors by Shaunna Edwards and Alyson Richman.

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On April 26th at 10:30 via Zoom we will meet to discuss The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman.

"Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report....Read more...

This month, we are studying Jewish sexual ethics through a Reform Lens. Using the book Sacred Encounter: Jewish Perspectives on Sexuality by the CCAR Press, and it's study guide (though in an abbreviated form), we are looking at the issues of Marriage, LGBTQIA inclusion, Healthy Relationships, Modesty in the Modern World, and Sexual Desire.

While folks are certainly welcomed to try to read along with me, Sacred Encounter is a bit dry...Read more...