Join us for Shabbat and the installation ritual on Friday, October 9 and on Saturday, October 10 for learning, a musical celebration, and havdalah (please RSVP for Saturday afternoon/evening activities).
Dear Friends,
This is my first letter to you as Senior Rabbi of Temple Micah. I generally focus my sermons and public writing on big ideas and enduring questions. In fact, one of the things that first attracted me to Micah was its commitment to intellectual inquiry, reflection, and taking Judaism seriously.
But big ideas start with the personal.
Here I think of Martin Buber, whose most famous book, I and Thou, poetically shows how transcendence can be found in “the bond of being, a bond with being.” Not coincidentally, Buber’s mother left his family when he was three, and he was subsequently raised by his paternal grandparents. Reading Buber in light of this knowledge offers a deeper understanding of why genuine meeting, relationship, became such a central theme for him.
Big ideas grow from our day-to-day lives.
So in this first letter, I want to share a glimpse of the day-to-day life of my Jewish upbringing. In doing so, I also want to invite you, through conversations within the Micah community, to share the stories that have made you who you are. That is part of what a synagogue is for: connecting with one another through the sharing of our stories.
In the months and years ahead I’ll use the Vine to address some of the heavy questions we in this community—American Jews living through unprecedented times—are facing. But for now, a snapshot of the person sharing those thoughts.
My earliest Jewish memories are of Shabbat at home, around our dining room table on the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island, where I grew up alongside two younger brothers. Looking back, I’ve come to think of my upbringing as one of being raised in a shtetl—not because we feared pogroms (God forbid!), but because it felt very much like a village where everyone knew each other.
You might run into your friend’s father while biking along Blackstone Boulevard (and he might call your parents later to tell them you weren’t wearing a helmet) or see your third-grade teacher on an errand to Davis Deli, the local kosher butcher and the only one in town.
Most of the families we knew belonged, like us, to the local Conservative synagogue, and sent their children to the Jewish day school next door. Down the street, just past Brown University’s football stadium, was the Jewish Community Center.
At the time, I knew nothing about why we celebrated Shabbat the way we did: with friends around the table, special “Shabbat chicken,” those delicious boxed brownies that just so happen to be pareve, Hebrew and Zionist songs, and Birkat HaMazon, the traditional prayer after the meal. Like the proverbial fish in water, I took for granted that this was what Friday nights were like, that the week naturally moved into such a holy, wholesome evening.
When dinner talk turned to topics like the Gulf War or Bill and Hillary, the conversation easily found its way back to the latest with Ross and Rachel (from Friends), the genius of Jordan and Pippen, grunge fashion, or who in the neighborhood had a Nintendo. That was just the rhythm of things. Lightness felt possible.
I might be overly romanticizing those Shabbat evenings, but even so, I think things really were easier then, in that golden patch during the 1990s: pre-smartphone, pre-social media, pre-algorithm, before every disagreement followed us home.
While shtetl life was religiously Conservative, I summered as a Reform Jew. My father grew up just outside Chicago—in Park Forest, a planned postwar suburb—and had spent many summers at a Reform Jewish camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. As an adult, he volunteered there as a doctor, so that’s where my brothers and I went to camp. L’dor va dor. From generation to generation.
It was there that I was first introduced to the thrilling blend of prayer and guitar, and to a Judaism that felt less insular, less concerned with whether I was wearing a head covering, and overall more modern and aesthetically alive.
My father’s sister grew up at the same camp but as an adult became frum, Orthodox. When I was younger, she once told me that everything she learned there was a lie.
“Like, what’d they lie about?” I asked her.
“They told us that Moses didn’t really talk to God,” she told me.
“So he did?” I questioned.
“He did!” she replied emphatically.
There was an appeal to her certainty, and years later I would flirt with that world. But today I see that my aunt hasn’t escaped modernity; she’s simply chosen a different response to it. Orthodoxy is not some untouched “Ur-Judaism,” preserved from a world before modernity. It, too, took shape in response to modern life—and the certainty that once appealed to me has become far less compelling.
Looking back, I realize that I was exposed to several different Jewish worlds before I had the language to understand how different they were: the Conservative Judaism of home and synagogue, the Reform Judaism of camp, and the Orthodox world personified by my aunt. These were not abstract categories to me. They were people I loved, places where I felt at home, and ways of making Jewish life real. I didn’t yet know what to do with the differences between them, but I could feel them. Perhaps that is where my interest in Jewish disagreement began.
I’m drawn to the conversations our differences make possible. My life has been enriched by encountering Jews and Jewish communities whose practices and convictions differ from my own. I’m drawn to the grand and minute Jewish arguments passed down through the millennia, the larger intellectual disagreements of the ages, and ultimately to the feeling that Judaism is still being worked out in real time. This is what I love about
Reform Judaism: it gives me a home without closing the conversation. As we know very well at Temple Micah, Reform is not only a name, it’s a verb. And perhaps that is one of the best descriptions of Judaism itself—a tradition that survives by continuing to change.
“Judaisms. Plural.” Rabbi Zemel always says, quoting his teacher, Jacob Neusner. Pharisees and Sadducees. Karaites and their rabbinic opponents. Maimonides and those who denounced his books. Kabbalists, rationalists, Hasidim and the Mitnagdim, Zionists and those who thought it was all a dream. The Jewish world we’ve inherited was molded, like wet clay, through disagreements for the sake of heaven, with constant reshaping.
Jewish continuity, in other words, is not synonymous with sameness. Judaism has survived by carrying its arguments forward without allowing disagreement to end the relationship. I’m grateful for this inheritance and hope that our current internal disagreements don’t prove this pattern wrong.
Ultimately, and at our best, a Judaism that grows not despite but because of difference and disagreement can help us see more clearly who we are, and what is uniquely ours to contribute to the Jewish conversation. Of course, disagreements can also become divisions, and divisions can pull a community apart. I hope we can keep disagreeing without losing sight of the fact that we belong to one another.
I look forward to all the good, hard, and challenging work ahead. I know that serving as Senior Rabbi of Temple Micah will enrich me, especially because this is a community that understands Judaism not as a finished inheritance, but as something we continue to shape, and hand forward. I hope to bring my questions to that work, and I hope you’ll bring yours.
In gratitude,
Rabbi Joshua Beraha
This article originally appeared in the Sep/Oct/Nov 2026 issue of the Vine.