A Coat of Many Colors: Conversations about Jewish Practice From Synagogue to Home, by Rabbi Tom Samuels, Unaffiliated

From Synagogue to Home: I am an ordained rabbi through the Jewish Spiritual Learning Institute. 

I grew-up in a Conserva-dox, lay-led Chavurah in Toronto, and went to a Religious-Zionist yeshiva for high school. Afterwards, I moved to Israel and served as a tank gunner in the IDF’s Hesder Yeshiva program. 

I do not identify with ANY singular Jewish denomination, institution, theology, pedagogy, and the like. 

At the core of my Jewish identity, what continues to inform who I am as a Jew and as a rabbi, is the Talmudic concept of Chidush, from the Hebrew root chadash, meaning “new.”

My session will explore the idea of relocating the North American model for “doing Jewish religion” from

the synagogue building to the home. In response to the destruction of the Second Temple, a new

Judaism emerged called Rabbinic Judaism. The ancient rabbis established a new locus of Jewish identity

and connection to the home, and specifically, to the Shulchan, the Shabbat table. Using the model of

the Hassidic Tish (or Botteh, or what Chabad-Lubavitch call the Farbrengen), we will experience the

seamless tapestry of Torah learning, Tefillah (prayer), singing, and eating that could be replicated by

Jewish communities, with or without a local synagogue, throughout North America.