Sermon

I “Baruch She’amar V’Haya HaOlam.” Blessed is God who spoke and the world came to be.1 These words, composed by our rabbis, are part of our Shabbat morning liturgy. There’s a certain symmetry to that, isn’t there? How was our world created? For Jews… through speech. Through language, verbal wrestling, and healthy arguments. Through ideas, […]

Shabbat Shalom. A story: Many years ago, whenever a catastrophe threatened his community, the Chasidic Master known as the Ba’al Shem Tov would go into the woods and light a fire. He would say a special prayer and the catastrophe would be averted. In the next generation the Ba’al Shem Tov’s disciple, the Maggid of […]

On Rosh Hashanah Morning in the year 5732, a rabbi stood on the bimah of his synagogue and delivered a sermon describing his hopes and dreams for his 8- month old daughter. The sermon was called “A Letter To Rebecca.” Three years later, “A Letter to Elizabeth followed.” I always appreciated that these letters were […]

I Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David’s Tower. I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. “You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. Just right […]

Many years ago, a dear friend was spending her first autumn as a student rabbi in rural Illinois. A member of her new congregation asked if she would accompany her to a nursing home nearby, so that my friend might chant the Kol Nidre for her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer’s and wouldn’t be able […]

L’Shana Tovah. Where have you traveled from tonight? A few streets over? The next town perhaps? Across bridges… through tunnels? Where are you traveling from to begin again? That’s what we mean when we speak of teshuvah — the process that takes hold with us and in us — on Erev Rosh Hashanah. Teshuvah is likened to […]