Rabbi Gordon’s Blog Page

I don’t usually address You this way.  I don’t mean it like I’m starting a letter.  I mean, Dear One.   You Who are tender and compassionate toward Your creatures.  You Who are precious Yourself.  You Who may have created us, humans, in Your image so you wouldn’t be alone — but like all children, […]

My Facebook profile picture since March 23 has been this: (Note that this “hoodie” — we just called them sweatshirts when I was a kid, or hooded sweatshirts — is from the Women’s Rabbinic Network conference in 2001.) As of today, I’ve switched it back to something else.  George Zimmerman is being “welcomed” to the […]

I know.  This isn’t news.  I’ve even thought about it with my own children, two of whom are young black men. But my heart is in my throat because Trayvon Martin could be my son.  And while we talk about race and color and perception and prejudice and difference and history — and our common […]

Last summer my tall oldest son, who was almost 13 and muscular from soccer playing, was stopped by the State Police while he was walking home from the Brunswick Library with his backpack on. He’s an avid reader and we’ve judged him old enough to walk carefully along the busy road we live on, where there are […]

For me, Tikkun Olam is inextricably intertwined with sustaining the world entire.  It always has been, though I didn’t know those words for it.  I was always out in nature and also trying to see the biggest picture.  When I was at Camp Swig in California in the summer of 1974, in my first intensive Hebrew summer camp session, […]

Studying Mishnah Gittin 5:8 with Rabbi Tzvi Blanchard of CLAL.  In English, he insisted, because we’ll be teaching it in English if we ever teach it (except to my amazing Advanced Adult Hebrew Class on Sunday mornings!) and also because it allows us to see the text through other eyes than whatever was presented to us in rabbinical school. […]