Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Category: Freedom

Four stages of Redemption – Why the Freedom story for African Americans is incomplete

January 22, 2015 /
This posting is a version of the sermon I gave last Friday, for MLK Weekend

It is appropriate that tonight is a Torah Shabbat where we find ourselves in the early chapters of Sh’mot – the 2nd book of the Torah – Exodus.  We find our ancestors have become slaves in Egypt, and we begin the narrative that will lead to our redemption. And this is Martin Luther King Jr Weekend.  Martin Luther King Jr – an inspiring leader and orator who drew heavily on the freedom narrative in the Torah to point the way forward for this country.
And while we remember and celebrate his legacy, and can clearly look back and see the progress that has been made since he led the fight for civil rights for African Americans, recent events continue to remind us that their freedom story is incomplete.  Just this week, major highways around Boston were shut down during the morning commute by those protesting to keep reminding us that Black Lives Matter and there is a systemic set of problems that have not been satisfactorily addressed in our country where our African American brother and sisters are concerned. The picture is more complicated and nuanced than in MLK’s time. ‘How can it be’, we ask, ‘that we can live in an era where a person of color is President of the USA, and yet such inculcated and systemic racism continues to be present in our society?’
Let’s take a look at this week’s parsha, and the midrashim that our Rabbis spun from this text to reflect on what freedom and redemption truly look like, as these insights can inform our understanding of why there is more work to be done in our society today.
Let’s begin with a core text that becomes the basis for the 4 cups of wine at a Passover Seder:
Exodus 6:6-7:
6 “Say, therefore, to the Children of Israel, ‘I am the Eternal, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.
7 ‘Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the Eternal your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
The Midrash on these two verses gives us the historical background:
“There are four expressions of redemption: I will bring you out—I will deliver you—I will redeem you and I will take you. These correspond to the four decrees which Pharaoh issued regarding them. The Sages accordingly ordained four cups to be drunk on the eve of Passover to correspond with these four expressions, in order to fulfill the verse: I will lift up the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord (Psalm 116:13).”
The Jerusalem Talmud expands on this:
“Why do we have four cups of wine? R. Yochanan said in the name of Rabbi Benayah, this refers to four stages in the redemption. . . “I will bring you out from under the burdens of Egypt.” Even if God had left us in Egypt to be slaves, God would have ceased the burdensome yoke. For this alone we would have been grateful to Him and therefore we drink the first cup. “I will deliver you from their slavery.” We drink the cup of salvation for God delivered us completely from serving them. “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm . . . .” Because God confused them and crushed them on our behalf so that they could no longer afflict us, we drink the third cup. “I will take you . . . .” The greatest aspect of the redemption is that God brought us near and granted us also spiritual redemption. For this we raise the fourth cup.
What these Rabbis are teaching us is that true freedom does not happen in a single act. True freedom is never simply the removal of one kind of enslavement or limitation. We can look back at the Torah narrative and see that our ultimate state of freedom was represented by first escaping from slavery in Egypt. But then we began a period of wandering. We received Revelation and we are presented with a whole system of laws, practices and ethical principles that provide the scaffolding for a society that can better ensure the redemptive possibilities for all, albeit through the limited lens of society at that time (where slaves were still permitted, and women were not equal to men).
Finally, we are able to enter the Promised Land. This is the place where we have the ability for true self-realization, where no other group determine what is possible for us.
We can highlight a similar set of steps when we pull back the lens of history and look at the longer perspective. Jews took a giant leap in the redemptive journey when the era of Enlightenment in Europe brought us the status of full citizens. However, as our history cruelly demonstrated to us, this alone could not secure our sense of freedom while a society continued to view us as ‘other’. Theodore Herzl understood this, and the world via the United Nations was finally willing to accept this after the Holocaust. And so the State of Israel came into being. Whether we choose to make it our home or not, its existence – even the troubled existence that it continues to have with its neighbors – provides a place of ultimate self-realization for us as a people.
And what of the African-American experience in the US? We see that significant stages of redemption have come into being. Freed from slavery. But then subject to Jim Crow laws. Civil rights granted, but other socio-economic and cultural factors continuing to make a less systematic but still present kind of segregation a reality in the lives of many.  Why is this still so?
There is one step in that ancient midrash that I skipped over – the step where God confuses and crushes Pharaoh and his army so that they can no longer oppress us. Hitler was defeated. The Jewish people won the war of Independence that had to be fought right after the modern State of Israel was declared. Is this step inevitable? Is the only way to truly arrive at redemption to overthrow those who were once the oppressors? No-one wants to see any kind of literal war in this country again. Having just returned from a vacation in Charleston and Savannah, I have a new awareness of the devastation wrought by America’s civil war. I hear fear expressed in voices that wonder whether peaceful protest might inflame some to literally fight back against our police forces; fears that might not be entirely unfounded given what has already transpired in recent weeks, even if only by the hand of one or two unstable and violent individuals. But I reject the inevitability or even the necessity as loudly as MLK Jr himself rejected violence as a means to accomplishing his ends.
Nevertheless, we have a real challenge that we, as a society, must be willing to confront. I look at the realities for many members of our African American communities and I recognize that those realities have been created by a complex set of systemic issues and remnants of a history of oppression that continues to leave its mark. Attempts that were made to rebalance society by providing additional points of entry into schools, colleges, the workplace, and the voting booth have actually been undone in recent years by many local and state legislative bodies. The Supreme Court itself has contributed to the undoing of some of these systems, however blunt and clumsy they might have been, that helped to level the playing field just a bit. This is not right. We must not, through our actions or through our silence, be contributors to the hand of Pharaoh that continues to shape the lives of African Americans in our country.
How can we do our part? There are many civil rights organizations who are leading the way at this time that we can work with and support. But there is no better place for us to start than our Reform movement’s very own Religious Action Center. Get on their mailing list. Respond to their calls for advocacy and action. They work with broad coalitions of organizations to help get legislation passed in Washington that can provide the system-wide structures through which change for the better can come. For example, right now you can sign up to support their call for the ‘End Racial Profiling Act’. The End Racial Profiling Act would legally prohibit racial profiling, ensure specialized instruction in federal law enforcement training, condition state and local governments’ receipt of federal funds on the successful adoption of anti-racial profiling policies, award Justice Department grants to state and local governments that best implement practices that defeat racial profiling, and position the U.S. Attorney General as watchdog to assess such practices.
At the end of February we will be taking our 10th grade Confirmation Class on our annual trip to learn with the Religious Action Center in Washington D.C. They will learn how their own powers of advocacy and action can be informed by Jewish values, and how to assess whether legislation being voted on by our politicians brings us closer to a vision of the kind of society we want to live in, or further from it. They end their trip with a visit to the offices of our Congressional and State legislators, to lobby on those issues that they most care about, on behalf of the membership of the approximately 900 Reform congregations in North America.
Don’t just leave this work to our teens. The journey to freedom is not complete until we can say of others, as we can say of ourselves that we have been brought out, delivered, redeemed and taken to a place where we have the potential for full self-realization within the society in which we live.  In 1958 as he stood before the American Jewish Congress, MLK said these words:
My people were brought to America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born out of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid us of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility. 

Friends… we have work to do.

#BlogExodus, Nisan 9: Springtime as Freedom-time

April 1, 2012 /

I’ve missed a few days of #BlogExodus blogging, but the great thing about a project that involves many people, is that you can read lots of other great blogs on each and every day of this month of Nisan/lead-up to Pesach project.  You can track them all on Twitter by searching for #BlogExodus, but here are just a small selection from the past few days:
On ‘Cleaning’ check out this procrastinator’s musings.
On ‘Slavery’, a reminder that it is still real today, and not just a symbolic matter.
On ‘Freedom’, check out The Huffington Post.
The 7th of Nisan focused on ‘Redemption’ – take a look at a more personal reflection here.
The 8th of Nisan turned to themes of ‘Courage and Faith’ – here is a thoughtful reflection on bullying

And so now we’ve reached the 9th of Nisan and our theme today is ‘Spring’.  The following is my Passover message for our local weekly newspaper consortium, Hersam-Acorn, in print in several local towns this coming week:

Is it mere coincidence that the Jewish festival of Passover, beginning this Friday eve, April 6th, falls in the early weeks of Springtime? The answer is ‘no’, both from a historical perspective but also from a symbolic perspective.  Historically, several scholars suggest that there was a pre-existing Springtime celebration before the Jewish people assigned Passover and the re-telling of the exodus from Egypt to this time in the calendar.  In fact, we see hints of this earlier celebration embedded in the Exodus story itself.  Exodus, chapter five begins: ‘And afterward Moses and Aaron came, and said to Pharaoh: ‘Thus says the Eternal, the God of Israel: Let My people go, that they may hold a feast for Me in the wilderness.’   Spring is the season of new flowers and buds appearing in nature, and it is the lambing season. The centrality of the sacrifice of a lamb just before the tenth and final plague that led to the Hebrew slaves being allowed to go free may well have been related to an earlier celebration where a first-born of the new flock was offered up in thanksgiving.

Today we do not sacrifice animals as part of the Passover celebration; instead a shankbone is placed as one of the symbols on a Seder plate that takes center stage in the home-based ceremony held in Jewish homes all over the world to mark the beginning of the holiday.  Another symbol of fertility and new life is also found on this plate – an egg (a Spring time symbol shared by our Christian neighbors at Easter).

But Spring time remains deeply symbolic as a time not only of new birth, but struggles for freedom from oppression over the centuries, new hope and new possibilities.  We may be most familiar with the recent waves of unrest and uprisings against dictatorial leaders in the Middle East, dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’.  These movements did not literally begin during Springtime, but commentators quickly adopted the phrase that can be traced back to the 1800s.  Ben Zimmer, author of www.visualthesaurus.com, finds the earliest usage with a German philosopher, Ludwig Borne, in 1818.  Referring to several European revolutions in the mid-1800s, in French the phrase used was printemps des peuples (springtime of the peoples) and, in English, ‘The People’s Springtime’.

What is common to both the current socio-political changes, the European revolutions, and the Biblical Exodus is that the journey from slavery to freedom is never straightforward.  We are much more certain about what we are seeking freedom from but it usually takes a lot longer to know what we will do with our freedom.  For the Hebrews it took forty years of wandering in the wilderness but, along the journey they created a covenant with God that provided them with laws and structures for creating a new society in a new land, where time and again they were reminded not to oppress others, because they had once been slaves in Egypt.  This is a message that we all need to hear, year after year, precisely because it is so easy to forget the greater purpose of freedom once we have the power to choose our own path.

This Springtime, in the weeks following Passover, the Jewish community is joining together with Christian, Muslim, and Hindu brothers and sisters for an ‘Interfaith Spring’ on Sunday, April 29th.  Together we will both celebrate and remember our obligation to care for our natural world, joining to clean up the Greater Bridgeport area.  We begin with a BBQ at Rodeph Shalom at 1 p.m., taking interfaith groups to work in cleaning up the city for the afternoon, and returning at 4.30 for more music and celebration.  To join us, please email  rabbivictor@rodephsholom.com


In every generation – Maggid 2.0 at our Seder

April 24, 2011 /

This year we tried something a little different at our Seder.  We were so pleased with the result that I wanted to share it here – an idea to store away for next year.  It won’t work for everyone – certainly not for Jews who do not use additional power or technology on the festivals – but that still leaves a lot of Jews who might want to try something new.

We began our Seder fairly conventionally, following our Haggadah through the festival candle-lighting, first cup of wine, and so on, through to Yachatz – the breaking of the matzah.  But when we arrived at the heart of the haggadah (and the longest section) – Maggid – telling the story, we put down the haggadah.  First, we performed what has become a family ritual over the years – the Passover story in rap, with costumes and movement.  That story in its entirety, from Moses’ birth to the crossing of the Sea, is rather difficult to find in a traditional haggadah, but we like to cover the basics.

What we do find in the haggadah is a confusing mix of conversations from generations ago – Rabbis talking all through the night, fantasies about multiplications of plagues, four questions (some of which are never answered in the text of the haggadah), four children who respond to the whole Seder experience in different ways, and so on.  Its a rather strange hodge-podge if you think about it.  I’ve always regarded it as something of a ‘teacher’s manual’ – it gives you ideas of how to engage in the storytelling, but it doesn’t work so well as the storytelling itself.

If it is the case that, ‘in every generation’ we must have an experience that gets us back in touch with what it means to experience slavery and what it means to seek and gain freedom, then how might we tell that story today?  This year, we used visuals and video to help us access that story in ways that deeply tapped into our own experiences and understanding, challenging us, moving us, and inspiring us.
We began with a video of a new song out of Israel, entitled ‘Out of Egypt’, by Alma Zohar.
She reminds us:
Chorus:
Don’t you know that each day and in every age,
one and all must see himself as though having escaped Egypt
So he won’t forget how he fled, how he was beaten, bled, left dead
How he called out to the heavens 

The song concludes:
There’s always war in Africa
What luck that it’s so far away
We don’t have to see or hear the screams


The video can be viewed here.  
This was how we began to think about Avadim Hayinu – we were slaves, but now we are free.  If the spiritual message here is to remember in order to empathize, in order to be moved to action when we remember what slavery was like, we cannot simply ritually recite the words, but must look at the world we live in today.  Zohar’s video powerfully engages us.  The words at the end of the youtube tell us:

Since 2003, an estimated 10,000 immigrants from various African countries have crossed into Israel.
Some 600 refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan have been granted temporary resident status to be renewed every year, though not official refugee status. Another 2000 refugees from the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia have been granted temporary resident status on humanitarian grounds.
In 2007, Israel deported 48 refugees back to Egypt after they succeeded in crossing the border, of which twenty were deported back to Sudan by Egyptian authorities.

An Israeli looking for something more from her people and her country.
From here, we looked at the ‘Pharaohs of today’.  These are included in the video of the powerpoint presentation below.  As we followed the slides, the storytelling took us from reflecting on some of the worst dictators and their oppression of their people, to a call on each of us to reflect and discuss how we use our power.  The image of the scallion and the staff represent enslavement and freedom-fighting – that which we do to others, and that which we do to ourselves.  Why the scallion?  Because it is a Sephardi Jewish tradition to take a scallion and beat the person next to you with it when telling the story of enslavement and hard labor in the Pesach story.
Just as each of us has the ability to use our power to oppress or to free, so each of us contains something of each of the four children.  A small selection of the images used to illustrate these children in haggadot over the ages gave us an entree to discussing what these had to teach us.
Then we moved to the moment of freedom.  With several artist’s renderings of the crossing of the Sea, we pondered whether the experience was one that was awesome, fantastical, celebratory… its not so easy to leave behind the known for the unknown, however bad it might have been.  The emotions that accompany us are complex.
Finally, many of our guests brought their own image of freedom.  The range was diverse – abstract, specific, political, inspiring, peaceful, spiritual… each image birthed a story or description – just a minute or two each, to enable us to engage with the deeper meaning and experience of freedom.
All of these sections are reflected in the video below:
One contribution was in the form of a video:

In truth, time did not allow us to discuss each section equally fully – we could easily have been like the Rabbis of old, up all night, to really do justice to this much material.  But we certainly had one of the more meaningful experiences of engaging with the Passover story that I can remember.

We closed out the section with a couple of videos that have done the rounds this year and in past years – The Fountainheads ‘Dayenu’, and Michelle Citrin’s wonderful ’20 things to do with Matzah’.

Our Seder is conducted in our living room space and not seated at tables, so the logistics of this way of doing Maggid were relatively simple – a laptop plugged into a projector pointing at the wall.  It might easily have been done by plugging into a flat-screen TV.

But even a ‘low-tech’ version of this mode – photocopies or photos of images passed around a table – would achieve a similar result; like the chalk pictures on the pavement in the movie ‘Mary Poppins’, they provide a portal and, when we jump right in, these images offer a different way of accessing the journey from slavery to freedom.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

Hanukkah: Shining a Light on Freedom of Religion

December 3, 2010 /
Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, falls on December 1st this year.  The Festival of Lights, originating in the celebration of the victory of the Maccabees over the Syrian Greek Empire and the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BCE, has come to symbolize many eternal and universal themes over the centuries, particularly themes of hope and creating light in dark times.  In American life today, it is not unusual for these eternal and universal messages to be blended with contemporary concerns.  
So, for example, a Jewish environmental group (www.coejl.org) launched a CFL light bulb campaign a few years ago, re-reading the ancient story of the miracle of the little jar of oil found in the desecrated Temple by the Maccabees that lasted for eight nights instead of the expected one.  

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism draws lines of connection between the themes of Hanukkah and many contemporary social issues, urging us to use some of our time and resources to go beyond the donut-, latke-eating, and present-giving norms, and see the festival as inspiration to make a difference on issues of economic justice, and children’s issues, among others (http://rac.org/pubs/holidayguides/).
This year, a press release about another connection between the Festival and contemporary issues caught my attention.  In the time of the Maccabees, there had been many years of cultural assimilation, with Jews in the land of Israel absorbing and incorporating aspects of Syrian-Greek culture.  The rebellion came when there was a shift in Syrian-Greek perspective, and traditional Jewish practices and rituals became forbidden.  The Maccabees were fighting to restore their freedom to practice their religion.  While the story is more complicated than that, the theme remains all too relevant today.
This November, former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, launched a global education program ‘Face to Faith.’  In a press release from his Faith Foundation, he explained: “Face to Faith connects students aged 11-16 from different schools in 15 countries across the world via video-conferencing and a secure website. The program aims to break down stereotypes and broaden horizons by engaging students of different cultures, religions and beliefs in discussing global issues from different perspectives.”  A number of schools across the USA are already involved.  But I was also encouraged and moved to learn that Mr. Blair is launching the program in Israel on the first night of Hanukkah at an event at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, along with their Muslim counterparts from the El Gazali School in Um el Fahm.
What an inspiring message for us all this year at Hanukkah!  The respect for religious freedom necessitates our interacting with each other and learning about each other.  Every Spring for the past three years, I’ve been involved in a program that brings Jewish, Christian and Muslim teens together to learn more about each other.  This coming year, on April 3rd, the Council of Churches Bridge Building Ministry will be running their Annual Youth Conference (contact info@ccgb.org to learn more).
As we light the candles each night of Hanukkah this year, think of another faith group that you wish to know more about.  Commit to reading something online (www.beliefnet.com is a wonderful resource), find a local class, visit another place of worship, invite a faith speaker into your community, or organize an interfaith dialogue program between members of your community and that of another faith.
May the light of your faith shine brightly and contribute to a more tolerant, compassionate, and loving world.
Happy Hanukkah!

This article was published this week in several local town newspapers in Fairfield County by the Hersam Acorn consortium.

The journey toward freedom – a Passover Message

March 29, 2010 /

The following was published last week as the Editorial by the Hersam-Acorn consortium of weekly, local newspapers.  I share it here with those who haven’t seen one of those local papers, and those who live outside the Fairfield County area.  In addition to occasional, festival-related editorials, I also have a monthly column that appears in several of the consortium’s papers in the second week of each month, called ‘Raise it Up’. (Past articles can be found by searching under ‘Gurevitz’ here).
Wishing you all a very Happy Pesach!


Passover and the journey to freedom

With the arrival of spring, new buds appearing on the trees, and new life emerging from out of the ground, the Jewish holiday of Passover approaches, this year, beginning on the eve of March 29. The Festival celebrates the great freedom story of the Bible — the journey from slavery in Egypt toward freedom for the Hebrews.
Freedom is a concept; often expressed as a goal to which we all aspire and to which we dedicate efforts to helping others achieve, too. But the biblical freedom story is a little more complicated. The Hebrews had been enslaved for 400 years — the journey toward freedom only began when they cried out.
We cannot be free until we notice the ways in which we are enslaved. A sudden act can dramatically change our circumstances, just as the splitting of the Sea of Reeds in the biblical story. We think we are free in that moment, haven shaken ourselves from our old ways and the things that we thought were holding us back.
But the biblical freedom story doesn’t end when the Hebrews escape Pharaoh’s army, singing and dancing in celebration on the other side of the shore. In fact, they spend another 40 years wandering in the wilderness. Furthermore, in Jewish communities, where the biblical books from Genesis through to Deuteronomy are read from start to finish in an annual cycle, Deuteronomy ends with the death of Moses, but the people are still in the wilderness.
Why so much time spent on the 40 years of wanderings in the wilderness? Does this not seem a rather anti-climatic end to this ancient freedom story that has inspired freedom movements for centuries since?
It seems that what we have here is some ancient wisdom that each of us, in any generation and in any moment, can draw upon to guide us in our own lives. Wandering in the wilderness is a pretty good metaphor for how life can seem to many of us, particularly at certain moments in our lives. The story teaches us that freedom is not something achieved in a moment.
Perhaps physical freedom can be achieved this way — emerging from behind bars, or getting the ‘all clear’ at a medical check-up, for example. But spiritual freedom, emotional freedom, and psychological freedom are a journey. There are times when we stop and encamp at a nourishing oasis, and life unfolds in a way that is trouble-free. But there are times when we are trudging through desert sands, wondering exactly where we are headed.
The biblical Exodus story and the message of Passover coming, as it does, just as the new buds and spring flowers are emerging from the winter, reminds us that freedom is a journey rather than a destination.
There are times when the winds blow, the rains and snow falls, and we feel battered by all the elements of life. But the sun will shine again, and even when we’re not sure where we are headed, taking each next step with an awareness of what we want to leave behind and what we want to embrace more of in our lives, means that we can claim the freedom journey as our own.
Happy Passover.

Women who inspire: in honor of Rosh Hodesh Nisan

March 16, 2010 /

I grew up in a modern Orthodox synagogue in NW London.  The Jewish world that I was exposed to there was not one that I could continue to live in.  While I made my spiritual home in the progressive Jewish community, I am a firm believer in a pluralist Jewish community where a diversity of paths are followed.  Even while recognizing that we all place some boundaries around our concepts of Judaism, in most cases there is little to be gained when one path seeks to infringe on the religious expressions of another, or seeks to deny their validity within Klal Yisrael (the community of the Jewish people).

As I was re-entering Jewish life as a young adult, within the context of a progressive Jewish community, I did spend some time with Jewish women who remained affiliated with modern Orthodox communities who were intent on making change happen from within – seeking to have monthly women-only prayer services where women would be able to read from Torah, seeking an answer to the problem of agunot (women denied a religious divorce from their husbands which prevents them from remarrying), and seeking opportunities for serious Jewish study for women.  I admired their patience and determination, even as I was challenging the halachic foundations upon which limits were imposed on their ability to make change.

Today is Rosh Hodesh Nisan and we are less than two weeks away from Pesach – our festival of liberation and freedom.  The Exodus story begins with brave women who worked within the system to transform it – Yocheved, mother of Moses, and his sister, Miriam, and Shifrah and Puah, the midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh’s command to kill all the Jewish baby boys.  In their honor and memory, I share two youtube videos below that highlight the wisdom, determination, and bravery of women who today are helping to transform modern Orthodox Judaism from within.

First, a follow-up on the series of blogs we posted in December, in solidarity with Women of the Wall.  Over 100 women and 50 men were at their Rosh Hodesh morning service at the Western Wall this morning.  More and more Israelis are joining them each month.  This month they sang, and even danced in the women’s section before, as is necessary under the current Israeli Supreme Court ruling, they moved on to Robinson’s Arch for their Torah service.  Ultra-Orthodox men continue to shout abuse from the men’s side of the mechitza, and this time chairs were thrown, as evidenced in this clip.  Thankfully, no-one was hurt, and police did intervene to remove the men responsible for the violence.

Second, Sara Hurwitz speaks at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance Conference (JOFA) in New York City.  Sara has been the focus of much ire in the Orthodox community, along with Rabbi Avi Weiss of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, NY, when he gave her the title ‘Rabba’ to replace the previous title, ‘Maharat’, which had been an indication of Sara’s completion of the same course of study undertaken by Rabbis, and her position as a member of the clergy team at the Hebrew Institute.  Due to an inordinate amount of pressure and protest from some Orthodox bodies, the ‘Rabba’ title has been retracted.  But Sara Hurwitz remains on the clergy team and, as you will see from this edited video of her presentation at the conference, she continues to inspire and present herself with great dignity, and continued optimism for the future of women’s learning and leadership within the Orthodox Jewish community.
Yasher Kochech! – May you have strength!
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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