It is one year short of 18, my favorite Jewish number. However, for this purpose, 17 will do.

Tomorrow Wednesday June 24 2026 I will attend my tenth CLP at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. The first time I walked into the Hartman campus was the summer of 2009. I was only 51 years old and eager to find an alternative discourse to the Jewish conversation back home in Montevideo, Uruguay. I certainly did.

Seventeen years later, my wife and I have attended CLP at Hartman together six times. Except for family reasons, a pandemic, and war, we always came. That discourse, that alternative Jewish conversation I was looking for initially, became our Jewish conversation at home.

We have gone even further: we have introduced, or at least tried to with relative success, the Hartman discourse into our congregation and our Jewish community at home. As Donniel Hartman........

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