Jews are kind of notorious for not liking to talk about God. I don’t mean rabbis and cantors – we have to be comfortable with God, or at least comfortable talking about God. But the average “Jew in the pew” normally prefers to talk about almost anything else. And of course the Jews not in the pews – in New England we call them “the Jews in woods” – have often either found a connection to the Divine through some non-Jewish spiritual practice (Yoga, Buddhism, almost any kind of

This has been a tough year. Tough for the world at large and for many specific countries; tough for inhabitants of the United States, tough for inhabitants of Israel and across the Middle East. Tough for Jews, tough for immigrants and refugees, tough for both the liberal and the conservative branches of the political spectrum. Extremely tough for the environment. And personally tough, for many members of this congregation. Rebbe Nachman of Breslav famously counselled, “It is