Sermons

When will the Sabbath Day finally come for us as Jewish people? When will our day of rest truly arrive? These might seem like odd questions to ask on Shabbat, which is our designated day of holy rest. This week’s Torah portion, before delving into the detailed building of the Mishkan, or tabernacle in the […]

I was at home a couple of weeks ago with Lena, my four, almost five-year-old daughter. It was what Lena likes to call a “Daddy-Daughter Day,” and we were having fun just hanging out playing with her newly acquired Barbie Dream House. Lena suddenly stopped playing with her ballerina Barbie, looked directly at me, and […]

Our prayer service is sprinkled with so much mention of peace. Shalom Aleichem, Shalom Rav, Sim Shalom, Oseh Shalom, the list goes ever onward. An abundance of prayers for peace are directed toward, or include, Israel. The first word in Hebrew that mostly every Jewish child learns is the word for peace, shalom. With shalom […]

I will never forget my first lesson with Marko. Marko was my voice teacher when I was in my early 20’s in New York City. I have definitely mentioned him before; but this first experience is worth bringing up. I was walking hastily in the upper west side of Manhattan with a backpack full of […]

I was sitting at my desk in the temple during religious school this past week. I was thinking about the return of our Israeli hostages, and how it relates to the biblical demand to let all of our people go from Egypt. 3 here and 4 there is not enough. God made it clear in […]

God is an understanding and empathetic therapist this week. This might seem like an odd area of focus given the fact that this is the Torah portion that brings the first seven plagues on Egypt. In the current midst of Israeli hostages returning home after over 400 days in captivity at the hands of Hamas […]

I want to share two lines with you this evening, both from some very famous, but very different, sources: First, “I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother’s alive.”  This line comes to us from the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film, The Godfather: Part II. This film, which is the second part […]

I was recently at a full-service gas station in St. James. I pulled up next to the pump, and out of the small building emerged a young man, maybe 20 years old- and he began pumping gas into my car. He was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, it was early in the morning, rainy and […]

It was 11:03 PM, and I was still staring at chapter 38 of Genesis. I had spent hours poring over the text, looking through commentaries, even annoyingly nudging Meghan when Rashi or Rambam weren’t cutting it to get her opinion; all while she was trying to lesson-plan for the upcoming kindergarten week. I have to […]