Sublime

For centuries, people believed that saying Kaddish would shorten the amount of time the deceased spent in Gehenna (hell) before ascending to Gan Eden (heaven).

With its dedicated volunteer culture, focus on inspiring traditional davening, high-level Torah study, and egalitarian, universal outlook, Kehilat Hadar attempts to live out a world of Empowered Judaism.

Torah is relational. We bring who we are to the text and the text offers back something of meaning to us.

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.

a Judaism that trusts in the power of communal prayer and refuses to settle for mediocre attempts at connecting to God.

as Jews we have a responsibility to work across the borders of faith and be a blessing to humanity as a whole, seeking neither recognition nor reward.

A world without convenient categories is a world that calls on people to take more ownership of the type of Judaism they want to practice in the world.

Remembering Jeremiah, the sages formulated a third way: to sustain their faith through institutions that (unlike the Temple) could be established anywhere – the synagogue, the school, the house of study and the home. In the meanwhile they would practise what today would be called active citizenship in the countries of their dispersion.

we have to distinguish between the social space of Kiddush and the prayer space of a service.