S Blog: The Heretical Blessings of Torah

BY: JUAN MEJIA
Most of my rabbinical activity is dedicated to teaching people who did not grow up with a clearly defined Jewish identity or who are converting to the Jewish people from without.  In this capacity,  I had always found it very challenging to teach Tanach to this crowd.  It was easy to teach them [...]

S Blog: Therapeutic Dialectic

BY: JUAN MEJIA

In the tendentious and acrimonious debates that polarize us today, Western culture, in general, and Western Jewish culture, in particular, have forgotten their roots. For it was these two cultures (Greek and Jewish) that discovered one of the most precious legacies to human kind, which have aided their progress and has been [...]

S Blog: Cultural Consumerism and the Antidote of Web-Fueled Global Judaism

BY: JUAN MEJIA
Consumerism, when speaking of manufactured goods, usually implies their creation in a massive scale in Third World countries to be sold in the First World.  This guarantees low prices but also runs the risk of providing low quality and, often, leading to the exploitation of the people who [...]

Sh’ma Blog: Confessions of a First Time American Jewish Voter

BY: JUAN MEJIA
My American soul is still in its infancy.  I have been living in this wonderful country for only six years.  This coming April I will celebrate one year of becoming a citizen. As far as being and feeling American, I am just but a baby.  I came to this [...]

Sh’ma Blog: The Paradoxes of Authenticity: A Latino-Jewish Casebook

BY: JUAN MEJIA
My Jewish journey started in the most unusual of places: an Anti-Semitic quip at a family Christmas dinner.  Fueled by the festive mirth, one of my family members of my traditional Colombian Catholic family made a rather mild anti-Semitic comment in the presence of my grandfather.  His response astonished all of us: “We [...]

Sh’ma Blog: “Towards a Perpetual Peace”

BY: JUAN MEJIA
One of the most difficult texts I had to encounter as a Philosophy undergrad in my native Colombia was Immanuel Kant´s “Towards a Perpetual Peace”:  the Prussian philosopher´s master plan for a cosmopolitan league of republics that would, in time, guarantee universal understanding, hospitality and friendship.  As with [...]

Sh’ma Blog: The Power of the Global Pushke

BY: JUAN MEJIA

Rabbi Yehuda Hannasi said in Pirke Avot:  “Be careful in performing a light mitzvah as a weighty one, for you know not the reward of each mitzvah.” In the area of philanthropy we could render his thought thusly: “Be mindful of small gifts as well as of big gifts, [...]