One Man’s Quest to Teach Science to Clergy By Daniel S. Brenner “If I started talking about science from the pulpit” a seasoned Methodist minister sitting to my left said, “my wife would shoot a spitball from the choir!” At a time when folks are dressing creationism in a lab coat and attempting to sneak it into public school classrooms I’m sitting with a group of established and emerging religious leaders in a class at Auburn Theological Seminary in New…
KADOSH BARUCH HU Open my lips, I whisper, closing my eyes to look for you. But all I see is the inside of my eyelids, screen of the 19 inch black and white television of my childhood, the knob stuck on a channel that doesn’t come in. And yet, I turn to you. Not turning really, but I back-float and you hover above me, I am staring out the window of the train at the seagulls and the passing mounds…
Consumer Review: Lifesmart Antiqua 5 Person Plug and Play Spa with 20 Jet You may be asking: Why would a rabbi review a hot tub? Well after dislocating a disc when I lifted a large rock in our front garden (yes, I, like the Biblical Moses, have issues with rocks) I got crazy about the idea about buying a hot tub. My wife got a nice little teaching award that came with a check and off we went in search…
By Rabbi Daniel Brenner A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a shivah minyan at the home of a friend who had just lost his father. My friend, a typical southern born Jew, had gone to a nominally Christian private school during the day and received a minimal Jewish education at his Reform Temple one afternoon a week. So when it came time for him to read the kaddish, he could recite the prayer pretty well, but had…
Faster, Rabbi! Drill! Drill! is the one-man-show I wrote and performed during my last year of rabbinical school – 1997. It was performed at the Goldman Theater of the 14th Street Y in New York City, Poet’s House of the University of Pennsylvania, and at a number of rabbinical conferences of CLAL. Prelude Right before I entered rabbinical school, I had a dream. I’m in a large suburban synagogue. The kind of synagogue with a gift shop which carries little…
The Rabbi of Pinsk and the Wise Wagon Driver The Rabbi of Pinsk was a man of moderate wealth, and he had enough money to hire a servant to drive his horse and buggy to Pichniev. The servant was a very poor man, who dressed only in rags, his feet wrapped with burlap because he had traded his shoes for food during a moment of destitution. He was hungry, and the rabbi noticed that he had nothing to eat for…
Author’s note: Top Ten Jewish Folktales is a writing project that I’ve been working on to retell my favorite classic Jewish folktales.Enjoy! The Holy Ark One Shabbat, Rabbi Levi saw a poor and hungry man weeping in the back row of the synagogue. That afternoon, the Rabbi had lunch with a very rich man. They drank, and then the rich man said: “Rabbi, I have to be honest. I buy many things but I use them and am not satisfied….
Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner April 25, 2012 Twenty-two years ago, as a bright-eyed college graduate, I was deciding between studying in a Yeshiva around the corner from my cousins’ house in Crown Heights or going to Suburban Philadelphia, where I knew absolutely no one, but I could study with Art Green at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I wish that I could say that I wanted to study with Art because of his scholarship in chassdiut. Or that I was enamored…
By Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner At a conference on a ridiculously sunny spring day at NYU I met a Jewish guy in his thirties planning on getting hitched this summer. When he heard that I was the director of a project focused on the lives of boys and men in the Jewish community, he expressed his frustration that he could not find anything out there on men and pre-nuptial mikvah. I remember having the same experience – Eighteen years ago,…