Temple Talks
21 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsWelcome to Temple Talks, the podcast of Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.
Join the conversation with Rabbi Zimmerman, Rabbi Klein, Rabbi Hartman, Rabbi Moss, and Cantor Abelson.
Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.
We welcome questions and comments directed to [email protected]
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Episodes
#20: From Decoding To Comprehending (Dae Selcer & Rabbi Jason Klein)
March 08, 2022 19:22 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Klein In thinking of my own Jewish education, I first learned to read Hebrew, and only much later got to a point where I could speak with any similar fluency to what I read. It took years in the making and maybe that's because it should have been flipped over—speaking before reading. Dae Selcer Exactly. And in fact, one of the real science-based practices is moving from speech to print, and that's actually the...
#19: Broken Swastikas: The Shared Burden of History (Rabbi Joseph Edelheit & Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman)
February 23, 2022 06:56 - 27 minutes - 25.3 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Zimmerman We wanted to talk today about the swastika that you just sent to temple. And I opened it up recently and I guess I didn't expect my reaction to be so visceral. Not only is it a swastika, but there's wheat hanging out of it. It looks so innocent and yet it isn't. So tell us the story of the swastikas, how you worked so hard to get them removed, and the whole St. Cloud story around the swastikas. Rabbi...
#18: Be Our Guest! (Chef Yotam Ottolenghi & Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman)
February 08, 2022 15:40 - 28 minutes - 26.2 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Zimmerman I am a rabbi who cooks and I love being involved in your cookbooks. They're amazing because of the food and the rose water and all the beautiful tastes and smells that come from every one of your recipes. Now I’m wondering—we've gone through COVID. How has that changed the reality of food and gathering around food? What, what for you is essential about bringing people around the table in the time that ...
#17: The Artsiest Pomegranate (David Harris & Rabbi Tobias Moss)
January 26, 2022 02:40 - 43 minutes - 40.2 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Moss: What is your midrash—your interpretation, expansion, understanding, digging up and finding some gold—of the word Rimon and what it means for the organization today? David Harris: Well, Rimon is the Hebrew word for pomegranate. It is one of our most ancient symbols. And of course, what is the pomegranate famous for? Its seeds! And the seeds have been interpreted in many different ways. For some, they are th...
#16: Fellowship for the Future (Reverend Elijah McDavid III & Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman)
January 13, 2022 04:36 - 30 minutes - 27.7 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Zimmerman: So talk to me about the art of preaching, where you learned it, who are your role models and how you continue to work on it? Reverend McDavid: I'm grateful that I had old-school parents who took me to church every Sunday. I grew up in one of those houses where it just wasn't optional. Right. We may have missed church one Sunday a year. And so I was always hearing it: the amazing artistry that is the ...
#15: The Mussar Movement In Minneapolis (Julie Dean & Rabbi Tobias Divack Moss)
August 12, 2021 08:48 - 38 minutes - 53.2 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Moss What is Mussar? Julie Dean It’s no secret that character has become a huge topic of conversation in this country. How are we living? What are our values? How do we treat one another? Character is this very important topic of how we’re choosing to show up in the world. In the Jewish world we used to refer to it as being a mensch, you know as simple as that. Am I living my values? Mussar is a Jew...
#14: Reconstructing & Rewriting Judaism (Rabbi Rebecca Hornstein & Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman)
July 14, 2021 01:25 - 32 minutes - 44.3 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Zimmerman You’ve really taken up this artform of sofrut, Jewish scribal arts. How did you get into it? How did this intense passion emerge? Rabbi Hornstein Sofrut has been a powerful spiritual practice for me, as art too has always been. There’s something that happens when you’re doing something creative in that you become a vessel for and partner with the divine in a more embodied way. You get in that weir...
#13: Leading Behind the Scenes (Sandra Divack Moss & Rabbi Tobias Divack Moss)
June 23, 2021 15:35 - 41 minutes - 57.4 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Sandy Divack Moss At that time, the value proposition was that each generation had as much to gain from the other. It wasn’t about doing for the elderly. Of course, there was a lot of doing for the elderly, but there was also mutual learning. In my parents’ generation of American Jewish life, the focus was on assimilation. So my peers had so much to learn from the previous generation about how to live a Jewish life...
#12: Scientific and Religious Awe (Dr. Lawrence Rudnick & Rabbi Sim Glaser)
June 02, 2021 04:57 - 53 minutes - 48.9 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Dr. Rudnick Should there be limits on what we should do or study? Are there questions we should not investigate or ask? What are you going to say when I tell you I know why this is true? Let’s say science could tell you, from an evolutionary standpoint, why there is yetzer hara (evil inclination) and yetzer hatov (good inclination). Is that going to diminish it for you? Rabbi Glaser I read the Yuval Harari books, Sa...
#11 Appetite for Change (Michelle Horovitz and Rabbi Hartman)
May 11, 2021 16:43 - 29 minutes - 40.8 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Hartman Michelle, my understanding is that Appetite for Change really brings together your passions for cooking, food, and social justice. Tell us about how AFC and Breaking Bread got started. Michele Horovitz At the time, I wanted to use food as an organizing tool. To learn about what interventions or programs might be helpful, we really felt that we had to ask the community. I was able to partner with LaTash...
#10 Shared Exploration of Catholicism & Judaism (Michael O’Connell & Rabbi Zimmerman)
April 27, 2021 20:33 - 47 minutes - 43.5 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Michael O’Connell I‘m grateful to be with you and my friends from Temple, and I say that in a very heartfelt way. I’ve had almost a thirty-year history with Temple. It’s framed who I am, certainly humanly from the opportunity to meet so many incredible people, but also spiritually. I cannot possibly think of myself as a Christian unless I at the same time understand that whatever that means, it is fundamentally rooted...
#9 Movements & Moments (Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Ph.D., & Rabbi Klein)
April 13, 2021 14:05 - 31 minutes - 43.3 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Klein Sometimes when people think about ma’asim, the behaving part of Judaism, we think about lighting 4-inch tall white Shabbat candles on a Friday evening. And sometimes we think about getting out there and saying black lives matter. So maybe you could talk a bit more about Jewish behaving, and the resilience work you’ve been doing. Rabbi Waxman At the end of the day, it’s not about thoughts and prayers. It ...
#8 A Chinese-Jewish Perspective (Congregant Interview by Rafi Forbush)
March 31, 2021 03:04 - 22 minutes - 30.8 MBTemple Talks is honored to hand the microphone to Rafi Forbush, founder of the Multiracial Jewish Association of Minnesota (mjamn.org), in conversation with a Temple Israel congregant with Chinese heritage. In the context of the horrors of the Atlanta-area spa shootings and the ongoing anti-Asian and anti-Pacific Islander racist incidents, they discuss the history and present reality of AAPI, and Asian American Jews in particular. We hope their discussion prompts our listeners to rec...
#7: Evolution of Jewish Sacred Music (Jayson Rodovsky & Cantor Barry Abelson)
March 16, 2021 23:56 - 27 minutes - 25.9 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Cantor Abelson We’re going to look at some of the changing faces of Jewish music since I’ve been here, and from Jayson’s perspective, some of the new music coming out of the URJ and Transcontinental Music. When I first got here, 35 years ago, the closing anthem was God in His Holy Temple, accompanied by organ and a choir of professional singers—very different than what we have today. At Passover, we sang Mendelssohn’...
#6: A Cantor’s Torah (Cantor Sarah Sager & Rabbi Jennifer Hartman)
March 02, 2021 17:39 - 39 minutes - 36.8 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Hartman I remember when you were dreaming up this women’s commentary on the Torah, back in the early 90s when I was just a girl. And now that book sits in this and so many other congregations, with your preface written in it. Cantor Sager Yes, my involvement with The Torah: A Women’s Commentary was probably the proudest moment of my career. I received an invitation from Region 3 of what was then the National Fe...
#5: Advocating for Adolescents During COVID-19 (Dr. Gail Bernstein & Rabbi Zimmerman)
February 16, 2021 13:17 - 38 minutes - 35 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Zimmerman Would you please talk about what parents can do in terms of having rituals while everyone is mostly at home, and how parents can help provide some sense of structure and support? Dr. Bernstein Sure, I'd be happy to. So in terms of helping the kids in adolescence during quarantine, you mentioned this, and I'm going to second it, that having a structure and a routine to their day is really important. T...
#4: Early Childhood Education During COVID-19 (Alicia Stoller & Rabbi Jason Klein)
February 16, 2021 12:51 - 42 minutes - 38.9 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Alicia Stoller You know, it’s true that especially younger children are very much in the moment, but I think that sometimes causes us to not revisit thing with children because we feel that if we missed the moment, we missed our opportunity. But actually, we can go back to things with kids and there’s something really powerful—even with really young children—about a grownup stepping back and saying, “you know, when th...
#3: A Rabbi and A Physicist... (Dr. Lawrence Rudnick & Rabbi Sim Glaser)
February 02, 2021 16:47 - 52 minutes - 95.9 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Glaser When you were just talking about different kinds of sound that we can’t understand, or can’t hear but others animals can, that always piques an interest in me. It is similar with colors right, infrared and so on. And you know as I’ve studied Kabbalah the last fifteen years, it seems that the mystics, the Kabbalists, seem to be interested in dimensions other than those which are perceived. Third, and fourt...
#2: When Rabbis Bless Congress (Howard Mortman & Rabbi Tobias Divack Moss)
January 19, 2021 14:48 - 42 minutes - 77.4 MBAn excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Moss Has the Jewish leadership of Congressional prayers increased over time? Or did we have a heyday where we were more frequent? After that first Jewish prayer in 1860, was it a long time until we got back? Howard Mortman That’s a great question. If you look at just the raw numbers, rabbis give prayers in Congress about seven times a year since World War Two. Now, I will throw in immediately that this year is differ...
#1: Pragmatic Path, Prophetic Voice (Rev. DeWayne Davis & Rabbi Zimmerman)
January 05, 2021 16:13 - 1 hour - 111 MBAn edited excerpt from this week’s Temple Talks follows below. Rabbi Zimmerman: So you talk about your work in DC, and I know that one of the interactions we’ve had over the years is a conversation about Reverend Barber’s work and the Poor People’s Campaign. In so many ways, people bifurcate what happens inside the synagogue or the church—the prayer that happens there—and the work on the street. I think something that Reverend Barber does so beautifully is say, no, no, no! They...
Welcome to Temple Talks
December 24, 2020 04:23 - 3 minutes - 6.45 MBWelcome to Temple Talks, a new podcast from Temple Israel in Minneapolis, where Jewish wisdom meets our ever-changing world. Join us as we talk with our favorite partners and thought leaders, from around town and around the world. We hope these talks will inspire you, challenge you, and give us all new ideas about Judaism, religious life, and social justice. Join us for services, learning, and community at TempleIsrael.com.