Rabbi Merrill Shapiro presents

“How the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism were heard at Mount Sinai” 

About our Service:

The Revelation at Mount Sinai, seven weeks after the Children of Israel achieved liberation from bondage in Egypt, was a formative experience for the Jewish people and foundational to the very existence of Judaism even to this very day. It was an awe-inspiring cacophony with great earth-shaking lightning and thundering out of which the “still small voice” of the Divine was heard. What did that voice say? Were the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism present at Sinai? Let’s study the description of this ongoing experience in search of familiar ground.

About our Speaker:
Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, the President of the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society, studied Electrical Engineering at Cornell University and New Jersey Institute of Technology.  He was a student in Jewish Studies and Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and The Ohio State University and served as a Graduate Research Assistant at Melton Research Centre for Jewish Education in the Diaspora at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has also been a Yad Vashem Scholar at Israel’s Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. He was an Instructor of Jewish History at the University of Central Florida and a frequent Road Scholar and currently an OLLI Educator at the University of North Florida. Shapiro served congregations in Columbus, Ohio, Orlando, Florida and Richmond, Virginia. Shapiro is the Immediate Past National President of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He and his wife Robyn live in Palm Coast, Florida and have two daughters and five grandchildren.

Worship Leader: Kris Kines
Accompanist: Sydney Crisp