As we move on through our journey, may we continue to reach out and reach within, to accomplish our goals of keeping traditions, making new ones, and finding Love and Peace.

Happy 60th Anniversary JRC!

There is an irony about giving a D’var on Bereshit, the beginning of our Torah, the majesty of creation, at the beginning of a war.  But here we are at this time.  Except for wars, I like the beginning of things, the promise of things to come.

There is an irony about giving a D’var on Bereshit, the beginning of our Torah, the majesty of creation, at the beginning of a war.  But here we are at this time.  Except for wars, I like the beginning of things, the promise of things to come.

When I read D’varim, I like to picture the crowd of people standing on the banks of the Jordan River, listening to Moses tell the story of their community. Maybe he didn’t get every detail correct – or maybe there was, as there so often is, no correct version of the story because everyone had a unique vantage point for the battles and negotiations Moses describes.

I became a judge, in 1999, the first out lesbian on the bench in Illinois… Yet the LGBTQ community still had ways to go towards equal rights. In the first month I was on the bench, I was the first in my class… to be assigned a Saturday rotation in the Cook County Marriage Court…

This D’var Torah on Parshat Beha’alotecha was delivered to the JRC Board of Directors during their Board Retreat on 6/15/22 by Immediate Past President Elliot Frolichstein-Appel. At this moment of transition for JRC and all of us serving on its board, this week’s...