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            Rapping with Rapp




            By Rabbi Hillel Goldberg

            This article appeared in the July 5, 2013 Intermountain Jewish News


            If a woman converts to Judaism while pregnant, is her child born Jewish? Or does the
            child need a conversion of its own?


            Is it always permitted to perform surgery — a bris — on Shabbos?


            Why is a candle lit at the Havdalah ceremony after Shabbos?


            Why is no candle lit at the Havdalah ceremony after a Jewish holiday, such as Passover?

            I apologize for the mixed metaphor. Rapping does not imply humor and rap music

            (to the extent I understand it at all) is typically ominous, not hilarious. Yet, rapping
            does connote something out of the ordinary, something that makes you sit up and pay
            attention.


            As in, Rabbi Dani Rapp.

            Don’t ask me to repeat one of his jokes, which are so smoothly interwoven into his

            lectures that, as they say, you have to be there. 

            I did chuckle, however, in a way that might be communicable when he got up in shul

            the other night — mind you, 11 months after he had last been there — and began,
            “Picking up where we left off…”

            For the past number of summers, Rabbi Dani Rapp and his wife Dr. Chaya Rapp, a

            professor of chemistry at Stern College, have come to Denver to teach Torah. Rabbi
            Rapp is a leading light at Yeshiva College and also a judge on the Beth Din of America.
            He graduated cum laude from Columbia Law School.
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