Our November service focused on the theme of time – how we pass it, how it passes us, how we live in it or only to the side watching it. Our liturgy is downloadable here.

For our torah study we discussed the how nursing and breast milk were understood across the ancient Near East and how we see echoes of that in the story of Sarah and Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael. This we pulled from an article in The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, which you can read or download here.

Also, from that research, it turns out that these wonderful figurines of women holding their breasts, which appear in the thousands all across what has the kingdom of Judah, may well have been a symbol to assert and encourage Hebrew ethnic/tribal identity after the return from the period of exile in Babylon. How fun would it be to re-adopt these a our Jewish iconography on tshirts and jewelry and protest flags?