URJ Biennial

[cellio]

I didn't go to the biennial URJ gathering (5000+ Reform Jews, lots of panels and stuff). But the velveteenrabbi did, and she's been posting some interesting reports. If you liked my reports from the Sh'liach K'hilah program, you may like these too.

Day 1:

• The beginning
• Are dietary laws kosher for Reform Jews?
• Creating meaningful worship in small congregations
• Ruth Messinger

Day 2 (I haven't read these yet but want to be able to find them again after Shabbat):

• Integrating social justice throughout the congregation
• What does it mean to be good?
• Innocence project and Rabbi Eugene Borowitz
• Worship
• How can Reform Jews encounter God?
• Plenary: Robert Reich
• Plenary: Robert Heller and Rabbi Michael Melchior

The convention runs through the weekend, so I assume she'll have another flurry of posts after Shabbat.

Ok, there's a lot more interesting-sounding stuff here than I would have expected. When the regional version of this conference was in Pittsburgh I looked at the program and it seemed, err, underwhelming. Either they save the good stuff for the national conferences or the Velveteen Rabbi is better at making the convention sound good than they are. :-) (Note: I didn't review the advance program for this one since I knew I wasn't going anyway.)

Comments

[magid.livejournal.com]

I don't know enough about the 'yoga davening' to say much towards your questions. The article mentioned fitting positions with themes in the davening, though I don't really understand how that would work. Not a surprise, though, since I'd find davening while trying to do complicated poses a recipe for neither one being done to my satisfaction.

I am a traditionalist myself; I find it hard to have the same feelings about a prayer someone made up yesterday or last year as I do about other prayer. Even the prayer for Israel resonates with me more, having been written by people steeped in knowledge about prayer (and now being decades old).

I've read some of the articles now, and I'm finding them interesting. My first reaction to seeing the title about meaningful worship in small congregations was that I'd think it easier to have meaningful worship in a smaller congregation, given that there are fewer opinions as to what works :-)