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Shabbat Shalom! !שבת שלום
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 […]
We are all in the middle of a match. Parsha Vayishlach is probably most famous for its description of Jacob’s wrestling match. While Jacob is alone, fearing for his family as his angry brother approaches, one of the most famous encounters in all of Torah takes place. Jacob wrestles with an “ish,” or a man […]
This week’s Torah portion is called “Chayei Sarah,” or “The life of Sarah.” The strange thing about this title is that the portion begins with the death of Sarah at the age of 127 years old. We then hear of her husband Abraham’s purchase of a burial plot in the cave of Machpelah. Later, we […]
This week, we are introduced to parsha Vayeira, which contains the deeply troubling account of the Akeidah, or the Binding of Isaac. We read this section of Torah on Rosh Hashanah, and it is commonly a difficult bit of text to wrestle with for so many people. The idea of Abraham, our first patriarch, so […]
On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. Throughout our High Holy Days, our liturgy puts this phrase on repeat. On Rosh Hashanah this year, we talked about what happened in Israel on October 7th, 2023. We revisited and visited the collective trauma that much of the Jewish world is […]
