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For You are the One who judges and decides, who knows and witnesses, who inscribes and seals, who recounts and counts, who remembers everything that has been forgotten. You open the Book of Memories, and read from it. And the signature of every person is sealed in it. I have always found comfort in Unetane
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Vaetchanan 5783 / Shabbat Nachamu / 29 July 2023 This past Thursday was Tisha b’Av, a holiday in which we commemorate the destruction of the Temple. And not only the Temple—many hold that there have been many atrocities that have fractured our people that have coincided around this date in our Hebrew calendar. On Tisha
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Shabbat Zakhor 5782 / 12 March 2022 Today is Shabbat Zakhor, the Shabbat of Remembrance, which is the Shabbat before Purim. We are commanded, on Shabbat Zakhor, to remember Amalek and to blot out his name. Why do the rabbis link Amalek with Purim? Because Haman (lift up hand if boos) was a decendent of
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Vayeira 5779 / 27 Oct 2018 What a world we are in. I know many of you, like me, are feeling the weight of the activities of our president this week. In particular, the memo leak that the Times reported on last Sunday, about Trump’s anticipated proposals to make policy changes that will drastically impact
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Hukat 5777 / Pride Shabbat / 23 June 2018 This week it feels especially impossible to stand up here and talk to you about something other than the terrors of this world—massive deportations, children forcibly separated from their parents and held in internment camps, and so much more. The state of the world is terrifying.
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Vayakhel-Pekudei 5777 / 25 March 2017 There is a tradition in Judaism to chant חזק חזק ונתחזק hazak hazak v’nithazek! at the end of each book of Torah. It doesn’t happen every week, just when we have come through one part of the five-book cycle. It means: be strong, be strong, and stronger still. It’s
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midrash and the centrality of love Vayechi 5778 / 13 January 2017 The following is adapted from a d’var Torah given at a gathering of congregational presidents and rabbis at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a Reconstructionist Synagogue in New York. Reconstructing Judaism “If I have found grace in your sight, don’t bury
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Va’etchanan 5776 / 20 August 2016 Written for T’ruah Jewish stars spray-painted by settlers onto the deserted shops left by Palestinians after they were expelled from Shuhada Street. Bullet holes shot by settlers into the water tanks of Palestinians, who get already have erratic and dramatically insufficient water supplies. The palimpsest of “Free Palestine” where
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