Author: Joel Stanley

I have a favorite ritual at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and it has nothing to do with synagogue, seeing family or even eating special foods. For the last eight years, I’ve participated in Reboot’s 10Q, an online platform for participants to answer one question per day in their...

I returned a couple weeks ago from leading Shalhevet, a two-week journey through Poland and Israel to educate Bay Area high school juniors and seniors on “the history, heritage and future of the Jewish people.” A more intimate trip than March of the Living, which gathers thousands of teenagers from...

The rabbis of Jewish tradition liked a good pun. So when it came to Purim, the great Jewish holiday of jokes and merrymaking, they decided to play around with its name. Oddly enough though they claimed that the holiday is deeply connected to Yom Kippur. “Yom,” in Hebrew, means “Day,”...

We are about to celebrate Simchat Torah, the Jewish holiday when we complete the annual cycle of reading the Torah and start all over again. “In the beginning God created…” Famously, the first chapter of the Torah says that God created the human being “in His own image.” That means we...