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Souper Bowl Cook-Off
Be part of the excitement at the 18th Annual Columbus Souper Bowl Cook-Off on February 7, 2026! Your ticket gives you access to unlimited tastings of incredible soups, the chance to vote for Best Soup in Columbus, and an afternoon filled with community energy and delicious fun. Every ticket helps fuel the Beth Tikvah Jewish Camp Fund, ensuring more kids can experience the magic of Jewish summer camp.
Rabbi's Blog
Pause for Poetry: “From Open Closed Open”
February 3, 2026
Moses saw the face of God just once and then
forgot. He didn’t want to see the desert,
not even the Promised Land, only the face of God.
In the fury of his longing he struck the rock,
climbed Mount Sinai and came down again, broke
the Tablets of Law, made a golden calf, searched through
fire and smoke, but he could remember only
the strong hand of God and His outstretched arm,
not His face. Moses was like a man who tries to recall
the face of someone he loved, but tries in vain.
He composed a police sketch of God’s face
And the face of the burning bush and the face of Pharaoh’s daughter
Leaning over him, a baby in the ark of bulrushes.
He sent that picture to all the tribes of Israel,
Up and down the desert, but no one had seen,
No one knew. Only at the end of his life,
On Mount Nebo, did Moses see and die, kissing
the face of God.
Seeing God’s face is an eternal yearning expressed throughout our sacred texts. The Psalmist cries out, “Don’t hide your face from me,” on numerous occasions. We might begin to ask ourselves, what does it actually mean to see God’s face? We read in Exodus 33:11, “Adonai would speak to Moses face to face as one person speaks to another.” Several verses later, Moses asks God to behold God’s presence, but God responds, “You cannot see my face, for a human being may not see me and live.” At the end of the Torah, in Deuteronomy, we learn there would never be another prophet who would know God face to face like Moses did. In the book of Numbers, the words the Priests use to bless people hope that God would lift God’s face as part of the blessing. These words are quite paradoxical. They reflect God’s mystery but behold the desire we each have to feel accepted by God and to ultimately feel God’s blessing.
In Amichai’s poem, I am drawn to the metaphor of the police sketch. In this contemporary metaphor, Moses is trying to reach out to others to see if anyone had the experience he had. Would anyone recognize the blessing he felt? He draws in some of the most sacred moments in his life. He felt the blessing of love by Pharaoh’s daughter as a baby floating in the Nile. He beheld the flames of the burning bush, a moment when he felt the intimacy of God’s call to him. After sending the sketches to every tribe, we might feel Moses is disheartened when no one recognizes God’s face. Why would that be? Is it because no one had actually seen God’s face before? Is it because no one had a relationship with God? Perhaps it is because every person might see the face of God differently. When God introduces Godself to Moses and asks God’s name, God responds, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. While we do not typically translate these words, it can be loosely translated as, “I will be what I will be.”
So many of us struggle with a belief in God or with creating a relationship with God. We wonder what God looks like, and if we cannot see God, then we might question God’s existence. We do know that love exists, and the wind exists. Perhaps, then, the relationship we create with God is unique to each of us and changes based on how we feel or what we need on a given day or in a given moment. If we need God to teach us, God teaches. If we need God to guide us, God guides. If we need God to comfort us, God comforts.
Each of us is a sketch artist. Sometimes we sketch with paper and pencil; other times, we paint pictures with our words. What is the face of God you would sketch? Perhaps it is staring back at you in the mirror.
Rabbi Rick Kellner
Rabbi Karen’s MLK Reflections
February 1, 2026
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I was invited to speak at the annual B.R.E.A.D. (Building Responsibility Equity and Dignity) network and clergy retreat in honor of the holiday and Dr. King’s legacy. They invited four people who were new to the organization and represented the broad reach of B.R.E.A.D’s network: Rev. Raymond Austin of New Faith Baptist Church, myself, Fadi Suleiman of Noor Islamic Cultural Center, and Paisha Thomas, a ministry student at First Unitarian Universalist.
We were all asked to discuss our denomination’s spiritual and historic commitment to the work of social justice, and how our denomination’s connection to the broader interfaith community has helped inspire our fight for justice and efforts to build and use the power of people in that fight.
With social justice already at the forefront of many of our minds, please find below some of the remarks I shared with our B.R.E.A.D. community about Reform Judaism’s historic commitment to civil rights and social justice:
The Reform Movement is a progressive Jewish denomination that believes we are bound by the moral and ethical strictures of our scripture. Torah tells us 36 times in various ways that we must protect the rights of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan – metonyms for those who are most vulnerable in our society. We see ourselves as inheritors of the prophetic tradition of calling both ourselves and those in power to do what is right. The words of Isaiah 58 reverberate through our tradition:
“…Then, when you call, Adonai will answer. If you remove the chains of oppression, the menacing hand, the malicious word. If you offer compassion to the hungry, and satisfy the suffering, then shall your light shine through the darkness.”
We believe that to bring light, we must be light. Reform Judaism thus has been invested in the work of Social Justice since our first platform, written in 1885, where we declare: “we deem it our duty to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.” As a denomination of Judaism founded in the United States, our roots here in Ohio, we have always seen this call as outward facing, a call to be partners in creating a more just society for all.
We created the Commission on Social Action for Reform Judaism, which later became the Religious Action Center (or RAC for short) to help coordinate and guide our efforts. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was drafted in the conference room of their Washington DC office. So was the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Many Reform rabbis were deeply involved in the fight for Civil Rights, but Dr. King called on them to move from words to action, when, in 1964, Dr. King approached the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform Rabbinic professional leadership organization, and asked them to join with him as creative witnesses to their joint convictions of equality and racial justice in St. Augustine, Florida. Seventeen rabbis from all over the country heeded his call and were arrested for praying and eating with integrated groups.
In their letter written from jail on June 19, 1964, they explain why they came to St. Augustine in this way:
[…] We came to St. Augustine mainly because we could not stay away. We could not say no to Martin Luther King, whom we always respected and admired and whose loyal friends we hope we shall be in the days to come. We could not pass by the opportunity to achieve a moral goal by moral means – a rare modern privilege – which has been the glory of the non-violent struggle for civil rights.
We came because we could not stand quietly by our brother’s blood. We had done that too many times before. We have been vocal in our exhortation of others but the idleness of our hands too often revealed an inner silence; silence at a time when silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time. We came in the hope that the God of us all would accept our small involvement as partial atonement for the many things we wish we had done before and often.
We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria. We came because we know that second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.
“The greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.” These words are ringing through history, through time and space, to us today. We cannot lose faith in our ability to act, even when it’s hard, when it’s scary, and when it’s dangerous; we must rise.
Two days after the rabbis in St. Augustine wrote their letter, James Charney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, volunteers and activists taking part in Mississippi’s Freedom summer, were abducted and brutally killed by the Klu Klux Klan. James Charney was a black man, an activist with the Congress of Racial Equality. Michael Schwerner was a coordinator for the same organization. Andrew Goodman was a volunteer. He and Michael Schwerner were Jewish, like half of the volunteers who came to support the Freedom Summer from across the nation.
It is not always safe or easy to do what is right in the face of thuggish injustice.
We must do it anyway.
Three years later, in 1967, the Klan firebombed the synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, because of the work they and their rabbi were doing to support civil rights. At three in the morning on Shabbat, January 9, 2026, that synagogue was destroyed again by an antisemitic act of arson.
Acts like this seek to scare us and isolate us, but I have faith. I have faith that we are God’s partners in the work of healing what is broken in our world, in our nation, in our state, and in our city. I have faith that this is holy work. Not only are we God’s partners, but we are also yours too. We will not be scared into silence because we know that when we work together, we bend the arc of the universe toward justice.
Earlier, I mentioned the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism. For decades, they have helped to shape and coordinate the justice work of the Reform Movement across the United States because collective action is powerful. As a result, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1982, the Voting Rights Extension, the Japanese American Redress Act, the Civil Rights Restoration Act, the Fair Housing Act Amendments of 1988, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991 were all drafted in their conference room.
In 2015, the Reform rabbis of Ohio came together to form the second state-based branch of the Religious Action center here in Ohio. With RAC-OH, Reform Jewish congregations across the state have partnered with allies to contact 250,000 voters to encourage them to vote for fair voting districts. We mobilized more than 436,000 voters to enshrine and expand reproductive freedom. We were part of a coalition to help pass the Targeted Community Alternatives to Prison Program; we lobbied for a fairer probation system, helping to pass Senate Bill 66. Our participation in each of these campaigns has been guided and informed by our Jewish values.
Here in Columbus, Congregation Beth Tikvah has been part of B.R.E.A.D. for several years, and together, we have accomplished meaningful change. As Jews, we know we cannot do this alone. We’re a tiny percentage of the population, and we know too well that injustice impacts us all but does not impact us all equally. As we continue together in this holy work, may we continue to be inspired by Dr. King, by each other, and by the words of our prophets:
You have been told, Mortal, what is good,
And what God requires of you:
Only to do justice,
Love kindness,
And walk humbly with your God
(Micah 6:8).
Rabbi Karen Martin
The Work of Remembering
January 30, 2026
Earlier this week, on January 27, the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This day was selected by the United Nations because it marks the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by Soviet troops. 2005 is the first year it was commemorated. On the 27th of Nisan in the Jewish calendar (about two weeks after the end of Passover), we observe Yom HaShoah v’haGevurah, Holocaust Day of Remembrance and Heroism. This day was established by the Knesset in 1951, and it marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. Lastly, each year on November 9 we observe Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when Germans destroyed Jewish shops and burned synagogues and books. It was a pogrom on a mass scale.
Earlier this week, Rabbi Jeff Salkin posed the question in his blog Martini Judaism: why do we have three dates to the remember the Holocaust? He suggests that we need all three because they serve different purposes.
Kristallnacht reminds us of the normalization of cruelty. Yom HaShoah v’haGevurah is necessary because the Warsaw Ghetto uprising teaches us about the importance of resilience and the willingness to stand up and fight even if we may lose our battles.
Rabbi Salkin writes, “they fought to assert that even in a world collapsing into barbarism, Jews still possessed agency and dignity. They would not go like sheep to the slaughter.” International Holocaust Remembrance Day – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – was the day the world bore witness to the atrocities occurring.
In Germany, where U.S. soldiers liberated camps, General Eisenhower said, “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.'” He commanded his soldiers to capture what they saw so the world would know the capacity of human beings to perpetrate evil towards one another. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is for the world to remember. Rabbi Salkin explains this day forces us to ask how the world could stand by and do nothing?
When I go into public schools to teach about antisemitism, I share the famous words of Elie Wiesel: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.” Wiesel’s words serve as a reminder to every generation that when evil goes unchecked, it can lead to mass murder. It is also a prophetic call on us to act.
Once again, we are encountering the widespread normalization of antisemitism and hate. It seems that hardly a week goes by before we see another vicious antisemitic attack. Springing to action can feel overwhelming and it can’t be the responsibility of Jews alone to remember and hold the world accountable. Our allies are critical to the sacred task of planting seeds that will bear the fruit of love and compassion.
I recently visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial. Each time I enter, something unique stands out to me. This time, I captured the prayer that Rabbi Leo Baeck offered in Germany on Yom Kippur in 1938: “Our history is the history of the grandeur of the human soul and the dignity of human life. In this day of sorrow and pain, surrounded by infamy and shame, we will turn our eyes to the days of old. From generation to generation, God redeemed our fathers, and He will redeem us and our children in the days to come. We stand before our God… we bow to Him, and we stand upright… before man.”
Rabbi Baeck’s words remind us of the powerful connection between God and humanity. To stand upright before God and to stand upright before a fellow human being is to behold the beauty of one’s face and to see their soul in all their humanity. Recognizing the dignity of human life is core to who we are as Jews. To see each soul as created in the image of God is to recognize our holiness.
Why do we need three days to remember the Holocaust? Because the Holocaust is not one story. It is millions upon millions of stories. It is acts of heroism, the memory of the victims, and every story that is filled with sorrow and miraculousness.
May the memory of the righteous always be for a blessing and may we always be grateful for those who resisted and those who risked their lives and stood up in the face of evil to protect their neighbors and strangers.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rick Kellner
What Have We Done?
January 28, 2026
As we awaited the arrival of a historic snowstorm on Saturday evening, news was spreading of the death of Alex Pretti, who was killed filming federal immigration officials. In the moments before he was killed, Pretti ran to protect a woman who was also protesting. Alex Pretti was a nurse who cared for veterans at the VA hospital.
While watching the video of the shooting with horror, I could not help but think of the moment in the Torah when we read about Cain killing Abel. In Genesis 4:10, we read that God speaks to Cain and says, “What have you done? Hark, your brothers blood cries out to Me from the ground!”
“What have you done?” Torah commentator Malbim explains that this question indicates that God informed Cain that he had free will and that his deeds were attributable to him. It feels as if the Torah is asking this question of all of us now.
What have we done… that we have come to these moments in which Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed because they tried to protect fellow human beings.
What have we done…that such profound darkness has settled over us so that we can no longer behold the dignity of other human beings.
What have we done…that people are no longer questioning the morality of their orders.
What have we done?
All I could think about in these last few days is that Alex Pretti’s blood is calling out to us. The word for blood in the Torah appears in the plural. The rabbis note that this is not typical and wonder about its meaning. Nearly every commentator explains that the words appearing in the plural indicates that all the generations that came after Abel were also crying out. Another commentary indicates that there were so many blows given to Abel, that it was unclear when his soul departed. In this moment, not only do we have Alex Pretti’s lost descendants crying out, but we have countless people across our country and our world crying out that things are completely askew here. The videos of Alex’s death show at least ten shots fired; do we know when his soul departed?
Thousands march in the frigid temperatures in Minneapolis because they are concerned for their neighbors. These raids are not just about people in the U.S. who are undocumented. U.S. citizens are being held as well. We cannot continue down the road we are on.
Tonight, we have planned an interfaith gathering as part of Faith250, a series of interfaith discussion opportunities designed to explore important texts in our nation’s history. Our first session will focus on Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” which will lead us to conversations about immigrants and the treatment of immigrants in our country. If you have not already planned to join us, I hope you will consider doing so.
We continue to grieve as a nation over the loss of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. May their memories always be for a blessing.
L’shalom,
Rabbi Rick Kellner
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