Jewish Home Blessing - Jewish Doorways

  In that spirit, it’s no surprise that some of us more deeply experience spirituality outdoors in nature than indoors in houses of worship.  Mountains, oceans, dazzling sunsets and star-studded skies evoke wonder, awe and transcendence.  Despite Torah’s detailed instructions to build a house of God, we still seek temples of sky and cathedrals of towering trees – which is why Frank Lloyd Wright’s most well-known structures seamlessly glide between the human and natural, open to vistas and seeming to leap out of landscapes.  What’s more, Judaism’s holiest temple isn’t a place of space at all but rather, as  Abraham Joshua Heschel  famously taught, a “ palace in time ” we call Shabbat – a day of grandeur designed precisely not to build anything at all. The ancient Tent of Meeting is long past into history, but places to meet holiness still abound.  They are our physical prayer spaces, our synagogues of sky, our temples of tall trees, and our Sh...

  by Rabbi David Evan Markus Ask 100 American Jews where they feel most Jewish, and three answers are most likely to emerge: synagogue, home, and Israel.  Synagogue is a communal space for ritual expression of Jewish identity.  Home is a private space that we sometimes open for others to join our celebrations of Jewish space and time.  Israel is an ancestral portal for collective history, yearning and building a dynamic society unique on earth.  All of these make sense.  But our Jewish  sense of place  can (and must) be more than synagogue, home and Israel.  That’s part of what The Jewish Studio is about, and here’s why. Except for the most traditional Jewish neighborhoods, the modern ethic of separating the spiritual and secular tends to divide space into the publicly Jewish and everything else.  Spaces that aren’t overtly Jewish (e.g. synagogue, Jewish Community Center, kosher restaurant,  mikveh ) thus become secular, implyi...