Rabbi Menachem Creditor
The Wisdom of Chovav
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Bechukotai
Guiding well is complicated. Sometimes the best guides share their wisdom, and sometimes they provide space for trial and error on the path towards understanding. Which pedagogy do we seekers desire? And what kind of impact does a teacher's choice have on our abilities to successfully traverse...
Spiritual Authority in a Participatory Congregation
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Life Reflections
In a world of individual empowerment, what is the place for authority? Is there one? Should there be? Inherited faith traditions locate the source of religious authority in text, the heavens, or a religious leader. Something tangible and limited. That is likely not the way our communities...
Kisses and Memory
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Life Reflections
Yom HaShoah VeHagevurah 5768: "Kisses and Memory" Rabbi Menachem Creditor There are days in which the simplest things carry incalculable meaning. Today is one such day. Yom HaShoah VeHagevurah, our Day of Holocaust and Heroism, amplifies every experience of life to a heightened place. A...
Tazria/Metzora 5768/2008: “Human Boundaries and Inclusion”
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Metzora
© Rabbi Menachem Creditor Every year the weeks leading up to Pesach include the Torah portions Tazria and Metzora, which enumerate many rules regarding ritual fitness surrounding such bodily experiences as skin ailments and childbirth. The rules for the ‘Metzora’, the person afflicted by a...
What Does it Mean?
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Life Reflections
Rabbi Menachem Creditor in memory of Scott Silberman, z"l In Dara Horn's work of spiritual fiction "The World to Come", she portrays Marc Chagall and the enigmatic Yiddish poet Der Nister (The Hidden One) as teachers at a Ukranian school for Jewish orphans. Der Nister sees a blue painting...
One Rabbi's Reflection
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Life Reflections
Rabbi's Reflection © Rabbi Menachem Creditor I love being a rabbi. At any given moment, a thousand urgent things can happen. And sometimes I can do some reading. In any interaction, what was casual conversation can explode with profundity. And sometimes heavy conversations are lightened...
VaYigash 5768/2007: "Closer, Come Closer"
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Vayigash
An often overlooked message of the Joseph stories is the theology implicit in the way he explains the story to his brothers upon disclosing his identity. Joseph says: "Then Joseph said to his brothers, "Come forward to me." And when they came forward, he said, "I am your brother Joseph, he...
My God Doesn't Take
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Life Reflections
Rabbi Menachem Creditor I cringe every time I recite "The Lord gives, the Lord takes, blessed be the Name of God," in the Book of Job. And I recite it often, at funerals and in mourning rituals. When my mentor Rabbi Neil Gillman challenged a class of almost-rabbis to translate the Hebrew phrase...
Toward A Hopeful Judaism
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Life Reflections
Toward A Hopeful Judaism Rabbi Menachem Creditor Potholes are rarely celebrated. Their appearances in the road as I drove with my wife to the hospital for the birth of our first child were cause only for gripped belly and gritted teeth as my imagination translated each opening of the path into a...
Legacy and Family: A Hadran for Harry Potter
Posted by Rabbi Menachem Creditor | Tags: Life Reflections
[note: this piece is deeply inspired by J.K. Rowling's final installment of the Harry Potter series. There will be no 'spoilers', but the emotionality of completing the book just now compels its own 'Hadran', its own traditional commitment to return and relearn its lessons.] Legacy and Family:...
