Julie Pelc Adler
S Blog: Our Rabbinic Intermarriage
BY: JULIE PELC ADLER
There was a time, early in our relationship, when my husband and I made jokes about our peculiar form of intermarriage: he preferred diet Pepsi and I, diet Coke. We laughed about the 24-pack of cans of each variety in our pantry, acknowledging that we’d save money if we could just agree [...]
S Blog: The Kallah’s Tisch: What’s a bride and a rabbi to do?
BY: JULIE PELC ADLER
In October 2009, I married my husband in a profoundly Jewish, non-kiddushin, Brit Ahuvim wedding ceremony. We spent hours negotiating the language of the liturgy, the Hebrew of the shtar brit (the document of our marriage) and choosing the clergy/facilitators/effectors of our halakhic contract. He was clear from the beginning [...]
S Blog: Google has become a Verb – On the Ethical Consumption of Intellectual Resources
BY: JULIE PELC ADLER
We are blessed (I think) to live in an age of an endless supply of information on any given subject. “To google” something means to know, somewhat definitively, an overabundance of perspectives on a topic. In the Information Age, there is no down time from the possibility of knowing.
It’s possible to research [...]
Sh’ma Blog: To complicate that which seems simple and to simplify that which seems complicated
BY: JULIE PELC ADLER
When I was the director of Santa Monica College Hillel, my husband, Ami, and I (both rabbis: he, Conservative, and I, Reform) co-led a popular lunch-and-learn we called “Ask the Rabbis Adler”.
The program was an opportunity for the students to ask us anything: no holds barred. Aside from the expected questions about [...]
Sh’ma Blog: Being “reformed”
BY: JULIE PELC ADLER
“I’m reformed,” I hear one student tell another by means of explaining his lack of Jewish observance. I cringe, thinking of the years of theological evolution and volumes of critical scholarship underlying the progressive movement of Reform Judaism, none of which inform this young man’s Jewish choices.
I remember my own upbringing [...]
Sh’ma Blog: Where is Hope?
BY: JULIE PELC ADLER
Sh’ma’s subtitle, “A Journal of Jewish Responsibility”, reminds us that it’s a Jewish obligation to care what goes on in the world around us. In a socio-cultural milieu wherein individualism is an ever-increasingly powerful god and our concern for others is dictated mainly by how it affects us, the belief that [...]
Sh’ma Blog: On Illness, the Akedah, and Struggle
“Why should we want to have anything to do with the God portrayed in this story?” he challenges, left hand folded limply in his lap. We sit at his sunny kitchen table: my cane tucked under my chair and his wheelchair parked slightly askew beside me. I breathe into the heavy silences, laden [...]
