we had no compulsion to try to be what we’re not. The freedom to say about a program, “That worked one year, it doesn’t work now,” is incredibly liberating.

God is sometimes “mighty” only as a reflection of God’s inaction. This is a subversive, but Rabbinically authentic, understanding of “great, mighty, and awesome” that acknowledges in some way the disconnect between the active God of Moses’s phrase and the hidden God in our current world.

melodies offer an opportunity for surprise and renewal, because the words are experienced in a new musical context.

Although sitting in straight rows may seem “unfriendly,” it actually opens the possibility of transcending the human social dynamics that are always present in a room of worshipers. In that formation the sounds of prayer, not the faces of the worshipers, are elevated in importance.

Reuven Kimelman, professor of classical rabbinic literature at Brandeis, writes about prayer: “[T]he meaning of the liturgy exists not so much in the liturgical text per se as in the interaction between the liturgical text and the biblical intertext. Meaning, in the mind of the reader, takes place between texts rather than within them.”

The meetings were designed around a culture of action and accountability. We agreed that if we made a decision in a meeting, we would carry it out, and we held each other accountable over e-mail in the following days.

in the twenty-first century—a Judaism that has been undersold and watered down. It is a Judaism where those who know its beauty are often unable or unwilling to connect to the larger Jewish community, and those on the front lines of the welcome wagon to Judaism have little skill or facility with Jewish texts to elucidate their beauty to others.

My long battle to pretend that prayer wasn’t powerful and God couldn’t play a real role in my life was lost.

people seemed to daven as if they meant it. They exuded this sense that something could happen in prayer.