We met on Saturday, May 13 for our shabbat morning service, in a stunningly beautiful time of the year here in the mid-Atlantic, and in the shadow of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba. You can download our liturgy here. As has become our custom, our psalms alternated between the praising the beauty of the … Continue reading Fringes May 2023: Roots that hold fervently to this dark earth

Amazing news, Fringe Dwellers - I'm one of 36 Jewish poets accepted to the first-ever summer conference for Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. I'll be spending 5 days studying, writing, and talking Jewish poetry with Jewish poets in Asheville, NC in late June. Faculty includes Rodger Kamenetz, Ilya Kaminsky, Jacqueline Osherow, and Alicia Ostriker. … Continue reading Send Elliott to Yetzirah!

Maggid: The Story We Tell Elliott batTzedek This is the story we tell, this year, in this community, about the story we tell: We were a small tribe, extended family, really, in a small part of a small land. Drought came. We followed the rumors of food and water, immigrated to where a family member … Continue reading Maggid: The Story We Tell

We gathered to hold a space for two emotional realities: the constant shock of delight that is the coming of spring, and the fear and grief we all hold as we face climate disaster. Our psalms moved back and forth - reciting the glory of forsythia in bloom, facing the terror of a world under … Continue reading Fringes March 2023: one day something very old happened again

We met for our 16th Anniversary - 16 years as a feminist, non-zionist havurah! Our liturgy was a combination of honoring trees and differing/overlapping/even contradictory images of divinity. We were formed to take seriously a question posed by theologian Rachel Adler: "If you don't mean the words you are saying when you pray, what are … Continue reading February 2023: I say “tulips”

Our January service called us into winter's opportunity to be quiet, calm, and inward-focused. Our liturgy called us into connection with the earth and the natural world and, as always, held space for joy and for sorrow. Find the liturgy slide deck here. Our music, some sung live and some recorded, included: Batya Levine's "We … Continue reading January 2023: listen, listen, listen to my heart’s song

We met, as is our December practice, to pray within a space that honors, rather than fears, the dark time of our year. Since our founding we've believed that all people are chosen and all land is sacred, and so we've centered our own natural cycles here in the NE US. We're also an actively … Continue reading December 2022: the beauty of darkness is how it lets you see

While our usual November theme is "time," this year the theme morphed a bit in honor of today's parsha, "Vayera." It opens with Abraham throwing open his tent to welcome guests, a model of hospitality which makes time for guests and community. Our morning's liturgy revolved around the challenge of making time for one another, … Continue reading Fringes November 2022: community, too, is a cathedral in time

Our community met on the shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Our service launched from questions posed in the Unetanneh Tokef - who by fire and who by water - as we pray in full acknowledgement of the destruction being caused by global warming. Acknowledging the brokenness of our world, our liturgy held the … Continue reading Fringes October 2022

We met for our shabbat morning service on Saturday, 09/10. Our theme was seasonal - this moment of great turning of the seasons and of the Jewish year. You can read our liturgy here. Our torah talk topic was the wave of book banning across the nation - we learned about the "Moms for Liberty" … Continue reading Fringes September 2022