Rabbi Daniel Brenner

As the artillery fire continues to rain down on Israel and Lebanon, I’ve been reading Etgar Keret’s short story collection The Nimrod Flip Out.Keret has been heralded as the leader of the next generation of Israeli writers, and the stories reflect a post-modern, post-zionist attitude. Oddly funny, the stories often mine the Jewish tradition of fantasy tales and bring up new gems. One other item worth mentioning is a blog post by the Orthodox Anarchist. http://www.orthodoxanarchist.com/2006/07/to-live-and-die-in-jlm-anarchy-jewish.php He reflects on the…

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The best part of the latest report is that Reb Blog has been read in 64 countries! Only 73% of readers are U.S. based. The countries include such places as: Norway, Turkey, Estonia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, India, Chile, Mali and Iran. It is great to see that folks are stopping by.

This week I’ve been working on a new project that weds the best of religious documentary film to more traditional topics in education – like, for example, figuring out what films on Buddhism or Hinduism to watch alongside reading Hesse’s Siddhartha, or what films on Judaism to watch while reading Elie Weisel’s Night or Islam & Reading Lolita in Teheran. I’d love to hear folks ideas about curricula – and we do have a budget to pay teachers $500 to…

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Holmes, NY – I’m writing tonight from the summer intensive program of Face to Face/Faith to Faith, the program for college and high school students Auburn runs each summer. The youth are from Belfast, Capetown, Jerusalem and various places across the U.S. Each year that I come (this is my fourth) the program gets better – mainly because we see kids go from being participants to leaders- in -training to counselors. Over time, you see how much impact a program…

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Levine’s Judaica recently featured the book I co-authored – EMBRACING LIFE AND FACING DEATH in their catalog – thanks to everyone at Levine’s! You can check it out here. They have one of the largest catalog’s of Judaica I know of – a full line of inflatable matzoh balls.

The event I worked on with Auburn Media – starring MC Cokie Roberts is now online. Here’s the video link Cokie talked about her mother (the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and a resident of Bourbon Street) and she was both funny and articulate about the way that the media distorts religious voices. Best of all, this lo-tech video captures the crowd laughter and overall energy of the room. She comes on after Macky Alston’s intro.

Last week we had our faculty development seminar up at Auburn (which I enjoyed leading with Lucinda Mosher.) We had faculty from ten seminaries participating, and looking at the question: “What do we teach about the ‘religious other’ and why?” In addition to sharing ideas on how we teach, we went together to the Lotus Fire Zen Temple to speak with Sensei Shugen Arnold, shared a morning with Muslim physician and lay religious leader Dr. Faiz Khan, and went to…

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Dear Rabbi:As you know, Thursday evening we usher in the holiday of Shavuot. And, as you know, in addition to marking the anniversary of the giving of our Torah, Shavuot also marks the time when farmers used to bring the first fruits of their crop to the Temple as bikurim (offerings).MAZON has long been proud of a religious and cultural heritage that emphasizes the continued importance of symbolic bikurim. Though the Temple no longer stands, today we act as a…

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