Follow the audio shiurim, lectures and speeches of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, global religious leader, philosopher, author of over 30 books and moral voice for our time. Rabbi Sacks served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth between September 1991 and September 2013. A full biography - together with an extensive online archive of Rabbi Sacks' work - is available at www.rabbisacks.org or you can follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @rabbisacks.
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محتوای ارائه شده توسط Rabbi Nadav Caine. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Rabbi Nadav Caine یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal
مشابه Judaism for the Thinking Person
Satguru Mata Sudiksha Ji Maharaj Discourses Podcast Channel
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Victory BGC is a church in Bonifacio Global City that exists to honor God and make disciples. It is a member of Victory Philippines and under Every Nation Churches and Ministries.
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Thought share about the application of Islamic belief and ethics in our modern pluralistic society. The “How”, for those who understand “Why”. And the “Why” for those who need to understand the reason.
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Love God, love people, and change the world. We believe the life and lessons of Jesus aren’t just good advice, but are Good News for us here and now. As a church, we are all about following Jesus and know there’s no end to that journey—we’re more about becoming than arriving. We are committed to becoming a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multiplying movement of Christ followers, equipping and empowering our kids and students to not only be the church of tomorrow, but the church of today.
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The Upaya Dharma Podcast features Wednesday evening Dharma Talks and recordings from Upaya’s diverse array of programs. Our podcasts exemplify Upaya’s focus on socially engaged Buddhism, including prison work, end-of-life care, serving the homeless, training in socially engaged practices, peace & nonviolence, compassionate care training, and delivering healthcare in the Himalayas.
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Welcome to the Your Move with Andy Stanley podcast, where we help you make better decisions and live with fewer regrets. Your Move provides practical content on life topics like personal development, relationships, work, leadership, faith, and more. It’s simple. We provide the content and recommend next steps; then it's Your Move! Visit www.yourmove.is for more content to watch, listen to, and read along with resources.
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CBCP is a disciple-making church based in Manila, Philippines. Learn more at https://cbcp.org
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Thank you for joining us for another great podcast today! Here you'll find many encouraging and challenging messages to help you build a life of significance! Keep coming back to listen to all the latest messages from Hillsong Church Africa. We would love for you to rate our podcast, subscribe, perhaps write a review and share the channel with all your friends to help us build a Church that Builds a nation and a continent.
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The Krishna Das Pilgrim Heart Hour features Krishna Das’ no-nonsense take on everyday struggles for finding balance on the spiritual path. Through the honesty, humility and humor of his own personal experiences, he points to the possibility of navigating life’s trials with a true inner yearning for truth. His own practice of kirtan or chant is the well stone of his ability to share from his spiritual heart. As KD says, “Love is a disease - we catch it from those who have it.”
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When a young Eva Kollisch arrives as a refugee in New York in 1940, she finds a community among socialists who share her values and idealism. She soon discovers ‘the cause’ isn’t as idyllic as it seems. Little does she know this is the beginning of a lifelong commitment to activism and her determination to create radical change in ways that include belonging, love and one's full self. In addition to Eva Kollisch’s memoirs Girl in Movement (2000) and The Ground Under My Feet (2014), LBI’s collections include an oral history interview with Eva conducted in 2014 and the papers of Eva’s mother, poet Margarete Kolllisch, which document Eva’s childhood experience on the Kindertransport. Learn more at www.lbi.org/kollisch . Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute , New York | Berlin and Antica Productions . It’s narrated by Mandy Patinkin. Executive Producers include Katrina Onstad, Stuart Coxe, and Bernie Blum. Senior Producer is Debbie Pacheco. Associate Producers are Hailey Choi and Emily Morantz. Research and translation by Isabella Kempf. Sound design and audio mix by Philip Wilson, with help from Cameron McIver. Theme music by Oliver Wickham. Voice acting by Natalia Bushnik. Special thanks to the Kollisch family for the use of Eva’s two memoirs, “Girl in Movement” and “The Ground Under My Feet”, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and their “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project”, and Soundtrack New York.…
Judaism for the Thinking Person
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محتوای ارائه شده توسط Rabbi Nadav Caine. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Rabbi Nadav Caine یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal
Scholarly, Compassionate, and Practical Jewish Teachings on God, Prayer, Torah and Kabbalah with Rabbi Nadav Caine (ravnadav)
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105 قسمت
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محتوای ارائه شده توسط Rabbi Nadav Caine. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Rabbi Nadav Caine یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal
Scholarly, Compassionate, and Practical Jewish Teachings on God, Prayer, Torah and Kabbalah with Rabbi Nadav Caine (ravnadav)
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If you want to understand the crisis in education, look no further than Natalie Wexler's "The Knowledge Gap," one of the most important books of the past ten years. Is reading a skill you apply to any text, like stretching a muscle, or playing a video game, or is it, as our tradition defines it, something entirely different, something based on knowledge of the world, of life, and of relating to a larger story?…
The plain sense of the brief Tower of Babel story is that dividing people up by their own languages is a curse that prevents cooperation (even if the Rabbis read the story differently). Using Coleman Hughes's essay on the Civil Rights hero Bayard Rustin, I wonder if the curse of our times is the identiy-based division of truths: is this modern paradigm a blessing of diversity or a curse for our much needed cooperation in solving our collective problems?…
Isaac's entire story arc suggests that he continually sees himself as the opposite of how folks see him. But is imposter syndrome a curse, or a blessing?
Using the text of Genesis chapter 24, Talmud Bavli Ketubot 82b, and the Conservative Movement responsum by Rabbi Pamela Barmash, I try to correct the pervasive misunderstings around the Jewish wedding ceremonies: Does arranged marriage (historically and today) exclude female consent? Is the Jewish wedding ceremony one of male acquisition of a female? Is the ketubah a wedding document or a prenuptial agreement that protects the bride and her property?…
How do the ideals of progressivism become the idols of antisemitism? As a rabbi in one of the most progressive cities in America, I try to understand this phenomenon through scapegoat theory and through my own heartbreaking experiences. So what do we tell our college students? How do we heal instead of hurt? How do we get to the Thou? (Sermon, Yom Kippur 2024/5785)…
As a Conservative rabbi in one of the most progressive cities in America, it's been an incredibly painful year of feeling unable to ask for empathy from my own fellow Jews, as I see this year's events as Good vs Evil, and so many of my congregants want me to be condemning Israel while declaring moral equivalencies. And I know they, too, need from me what I cannot give them: validation for their perspective. This sermon is my way of coming to terms with all of it.…
This dvar Torah uses the amazing article by Rabbi David Golinkin on the history of the halakhah and the practice. It can be found at: https://schechter.edu/must-gods-name-be-written-in-english-as-g-d/
It is commonplace to hear today's Israel-Arab Conflict portrayed as an example of Settler-Colonial European Jews settling in the nation-state of indigenous-dwelling Palestinians. This is a modern invention and is not how the conflict was understood by local Arabs a hundred years ago, who did so in rational terms that match the Biblical arguments between the Israelites (Gideonites) and local Ammonites in Judges chapters 10 and 11. Using the recent scholarly work of Jonathan Marc Gribetz as well as Alex Stein's Love of the Land substack, I show how the ancient outlaw leader Yiftach understood today's situation better than student demonstrators, colonial marxist professors, and Western Hamas apologists.…
As Purim became a holiday of tremendous festivities and lightheartedness, the Rabbis knew that the end of the Megillah in Chapter 9 has a dubious quality, that of a massacre on Haman's people. Is this a happy ending, a desirable ending, that of massacre, that of Jews finally (and really for its time, only possible in the Jewish imagination but not in practice) having power? So the Rabbis created a requirement that on the Shabbat morning before Purim, one must read about the Amalekites. In this podcast, I present traditional commentary and observations given the context of the fighting in Gaza.…
The most influential rabbi you've never heard of? Based on an episode of the RadioLab podcast ("Relative Genius") and a biography in the Jewish Encyclopedia -- https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12611-rebenstein-aaron -- I tell you about the extraordinary Rabbi Aaron David Bernstein who likely accomplished more in his lifetime by himself than your average Ivy League university!…
In the second verse of Parashat Beshalach (the flight from Egypt and the crossing of the Sea of Reeds), the Torah states that the Israelites fled fully armed. I explore the traditional commentaries on why, and connect this to the haftarah (story of Deborah and Yael) and to the intelligence failures in Israel caused by male chauvinism.…
The focus of the American and international conversation about the Hamas attack and its aftermath has been "Ceasefire or No Ceasefire" by which people mean (since there was a ceasefire prior to Hamas's breaking it) whether Israel should cease its counter offensive due to civilian casualties. Who gets to be a spokesperson for Israel at this time in our communities and in the world? Interestingly, the Torah portions of Vaera and Bo --where we are when the war stands at 100 days-- raises the classic ethical question: Why did God prosecute a full 10 plagues upon the Egyptian population when it seemed like Pharoah might yield earlier? Why does God intervene --it seems-- in the hardening of Pharoah's heart so that the full span of destruction continues? In this Dvar Torah, I note the context of this Torah discussion. This is the first time Am Yisrael --the nation of Israel-- ever has a spokesperson! That phrase, that this kinship-related tribe of Hebrews, or Bnei Yisrael, are actually a Nation, is spoken first in the Bible by Pharaoh. And God appoints Moshe as the spokesperson, and Moshe turns it down, so Aaron becomes a spokesperson. Why turn it down? Who today gets to speak for the nation when the antisemite demands a response? I note two important textual clues. First, Moshe is called by God to be a spokesperson for the "Sh'fatim Gedolom" --the "Great Judgments upon Egypt" (the plagues)-- and replies that his "S'fatayim" (lips) aren't up to it. (Though one is tav and the other tet, the words look strikingly alike in the Torah!) Midrashically, the trouble is not a speech impediment, it is an impediment to explaining the plagues to the hostile audience! When God doesn't accept that excuse, Moshe says he has "hardness of mouth" and "hardness of tongue/speech" -- the same word "hardness" that describes Pharaoh's heart! This surely tells us a lot of the deep meaning connecting the two.…
As a Dvar Torah for Vayigash (Joseph's revealing himself to his brothers following Judah's speech), I explore the mitzvah of redeeming our captives and the limitations on the law "for the sake of Tikkun Olam." The conversation among American Jews about Gaza centers around "Ceasefire or No Ceasefire? What kind of Jew am I if I don't support stopping the bombing?" while the conversation in Israel is "Exchange terrorists for hostages? What kind of Jew am I if I don't bring my sister/brother home at any cost to an Israel bereaved beyond measure?" In an amazing synchronicity with the Torah reading, the entire drama of all the parashiyot of the Joseph saga lead up to whether Judah will say for his brother Benjamin what he wouldn't say for Joseph, that he will do anything rather than fail to bring his brother home to his bereft father, an Israel who cannot bear further trauma. What kind of Judah/Jew am I if I don't bring my brother home to my heartbroken Israel? And there is Israel (Jacob), saying he will enter Sheol (the underworld) if he is forced to endure another son never coming home. The redemption of Jewish captives is one of the hightest mitzvot in Judaism. Why? And why does the Talmud and Jewish Legal codes say that one only refrains from doing so for the sake of Tikkun Olam?…
PART TWO of this Yom Kippur 2023 sermon, in which I share the result of my personal and rabbi experiences of the last 15 years: that the longer we live, the shorter our eulogy becomes; that life (like scripture) is a combination of halakhah (direct description of human behavior) and aggadah (our stories in which God is an invisible character); that the main point of Yom Kippur is to learn how to retell our stories so that the way God has been communicating to us through our experiences becomes center stage, with the intimation explicit, the aspiration articulated, the perpective holy, so we live wearing the garments of holiness, with the perspective of shrouds and Unetaneh Tokef, as God writes the books of Avinu Malkeinu from the way we are telling our stories.…
In this Yom Kippur 2023 sermon, I share the result of my personal and rabbi experiences of the last 15 years: that the longer we live, the shorter our eulogy becomes; that life (like scripture) is a combination of halakhah (direct description of action) and aggadah (our stories in which God is an invisible character); that the main point of Yom Kippur is to learn how to retell our stories so that the way God has been communicating to us through our experiences becomes center stage, the intimations explicit, the aspirations articulated, the perpective holy, so we live wearing the garments of holiness, with the perspective of shrouds and Unetaneh Tokef, as God writes the books of Avinu Malkeinu from the way we are telling our stories.…
Using the stories of Avraham, Sarah, and Hagar in Vayera, I voice what it's like to have utterly different experiences of the Gaza conflict with our coworkers, friends, and family members, some of whom seem to embody Dara Horn's prophecy that the world loves to pity the dead Jews of the past while finding the living Jews of today an inconvenience, an Other, and deserving of sanctimonious antisemitism.…
In Deuteronomy, we are commanded to keep Shabbat as restfulness. Many are unaware that this does not just involve practicing the Shabbat observances and restrictions --Biblical and Rabbinic-- but the highly unusual special-to-itself halakhic category of "Shevut," usually translated as proactively keeping "the spirit of Shabbat." The category of observing "the spirit of Shabbat" is inherently subjective, and it can vary from person to person. For one person, reading a newspaper on Shabbat is a violation of the spirit of Shabbat, while for another it enhances the spirit of Shabbat. Going someplace for Shabbat dinner or lunch might enhance the spirit for one, but for another take away from the Shabbat spirit of the sanctuary of home. The issue has come to the fore with the electric car. Since an EV has no fire within in, and electricity meets none of the halakhic prohibitions, its use on Shabbat largely comes down the category of shevut. This has produces two approved Responsa of the Conservative Movement, which are largely hostile to one another. In one, anybody considering the use of an EV on Shabbat should be considered in violation of the law, and shevut should not be considered subjective, but actually somehow defined by a small group of rabbinic authorities others in perpetuity! (It's like saying, How dare you read your psychology textbook on Shabbat! That's homework! Even though you are allowed to read on Shabbat and you love psychology.) The other group decries this attempt to take over and monopolize our one subjective category. I explore the issues.…
Drawing on the traditional meaning of the Kol Nidrei --"All Vows"-- prayer, plus the Mishnah and Talmudic tractates on the Nidrei (Nedarim: Vows), plus the philosophy of Ritual Drama and the recent psychological studies about Future Selves, Rabbi Caine constructs a vision of what the Yom Kippur experience is supposed to be, a drama of our envisioning our future selves and playing those parts through Tefillah, Tsedakah and Teshuvah that connect to the Nidrei, our New Year's Resolutions.…
My Second Day 5784/2023 Rosh Hashanah Sermon explores the New Year's resolution ("neder" as in "Kol Nidrei") in Biblical, Talmudic, and Contemporary Jewish spirituality. What is the one resolution in your life that is "If not now, when?" and what can the Talmud tell us about how to be successful at it?…
My Rosh Hashanah 5784/2023 (first day) sermon examines the understanding of God's image as multiple genders in Jewish theology, mysticism, and Rabbinic midrash. What are the implications for transgender, nonbinary, and queer identifications? And equally, what are the implications for the self-understandings of everyday cisgender folk? Using the work of Joy Ladin, Charlotte Fonrobert, and Elliot Wolfson, in addition to classical and mystical Rabbinic sources, Rabbi Caine lays out the urgency of radical inclusion both with each other and with ourselves.…
As we begin the journey to High Holidays, I look at Matot the end of the Book of Numbers, where God is fastidiously concerned that we get right our relationship with the God of Judaism and, even deeper, the true God of the Universe. When these fall short, we are asked through the Biblical spirituality of vows, do we even care about our own word and how we show up in this world? This is a teaching for approaching the journey of weeks to the High Holidays.…
Parashat Beha'alotkha begins with a memo to all the Israelites that doubles down on the top down hierarchy of Aharon and Moshe at the top, and then it continues with a series of amplified grumblings, complaints, and a continuation of the deterioration of the communal project and institution --now one year in-- that Exodus and Leviticus championed. The crux is that the top down structure operates through directives, orders, and job descriptions, and with each person now operating out of their tent-and-family --unlike before when slavery, Sinai, and mishkan construction were in person collective activities. It is an apropos description of the change from in-person to remote-work that we have experienced in the last four years, and the insoluble fractures it is causing are not only not resolved, but continue to tear apart the fabric of collective identity for the next several parashiyot in Numbers. How fitting we are reading this when the top tech companies, who created and sustain remote work, claim they can no longer function operating that way themselves.…
The longest parashah of the Torah's is Numbers' Naso, which begins with the theme of the tabernacle of roving ritual performance, like a traveling theater group, and then describes four ritual dramas that take publicly: the financial penitent, the jealous husband, the addict, and the arrogant prince. What do these have in common? Rather than seeing ritual function to impose comformity and social roles, I examine this through the theory of Victor Turner, who posited that rituals actually subvert conventional roles, and in a theatrical way, use fixed theater scrips and actions to subvert them, and you.…
The Rabbis are understandably preoccupied with why the Torah was given bemidbar Sinai, in the wilderness of Sinai, rather than in the Land of Israel. Entire commentary collections are devoted to this one profound fact. In fact, the fourth book of the Bible, Bemidbar, even means "In the wilderness" and often occurs just before the holiday of Shavuot, where we collectively re-experience the gift of Torah happening in the wilderness. A teaching developed that the meaning of the Torah being "a gift from the wilderness" means that in order to receive Torah and wisdom in your life you need to "make yourself a wilderness," meaning that you make yourself a holy receptive vessel through becoming a midbar , a wildnerness. I teach some traditional teachings of practicing that in your own life.…
In this teaching, I note how there are two sorts of social legislation that emerge out of the Holiness Code of Leviticus (as well as other places): the kind that is aspirational --invitations to become a holy people through holiness of giving, holiness of speech, holiness of conduct, holiness of caring-- and the kind that is deeply uncomfortable structural change -- i.e. so aspirational that you really want to just leave it "in heaven" as an unreachable ideal. An excellent example of the latter is the Jubilee Year, or Jubilee Reset, when not only does the Land receive extra ecological dispensation (terrifying for an agrarian culture), and not only are most debts forgiven (also terrifying to the economic system), but the Biblical basis of capital, the Land itself, is returned to an original apportionment. I compare the Jubilee Reset of capital once every 50 years to the Estate Tax, a way to prevent generational wealth from accumulating so far that the society cannot overcome the class divisions it creates of structural poor and structural privilege. In America, the Estate Tax is easy skirted with comically massive loopholes, while the generationally wealthy claim through propaganda that it should be eliminated because it is somehow targeted at farms, rather than the real problem of generational inherited wealth. Leviticus ends warning of societal collapse if we leave the Jubilee as an ideal rather than practical policy. What would society look like if we actually had a law that one cannot leave more than 50 million dollars to each child?…
In honor of Lag B'Omer, I succinctly recount the Jewish mystical practice of embodying God's attributes during the period of Counting the Omer. Specifically, in the transition to the week of Lag B'Omer, we transition from practicing in our lives the form of leadership that involves pushing people, and yourself, to get through tasks, the kind of action in which you feel you're carrying people to the finish line so the team gets there, to a different mode of leadership from God's attributes, the leader who says little at the team meeting, and then when they need to, utters just a few humble words (like "Isn't who we are really about X?") that change everything. Netzach (pushing through) and Hod (winning by stepping aside, like in martial arts) interplay.…
Hope you're not having an Ecclesiastes month....
Drawing on many articles, from the New Republic to Thomas Friedman, I use Nachmanides' commentary on a verse from the Golden Calf account, the verse that recounts Moshe's reaction to witnessing the events unfolding, with unflinching criticism of Aaron's (supposed) leadership, and using a rare Hebrew word to describe the scene, that sounds like the Nation is becoming Pharaoh. How apt. Text of some of the sermon is available here .…
Using Rabbi Jane Kanarek's 2019 CJLS (Conservative Movement) halakhic responsum, I explain the complex development of Jewish head covering for both men and for women. Though my conclusions from the sources are a bit different from Rabbi Kanarek's --who does not address issues of relative cultural gender standards-- I, like her, agree that the vast majority of Jews are uneducated to the halakhah of head coverings in awareness of God's presence and in representing the community before God -- a basis that is essentially independent of the familiar domains of female gender modesty and male Jewish identity. Interestingly, today there is a movement of Jewish women under 50 to wear Jewish scarves and headbands, apparently in recovery of Jewish gender price and identity, but I believe many who do so are unaware of the complex roots that separate principles of hair covering and head covering.…
I've always wondered why we repeatedly pray to God to be willing to grant us Shabbat, etc. What does it mean to be willing, or to be capable of exercising one's will? Free will and the exercise of will always comes up when trying to understand Pharoah's will and heart-hardening in Shemot, and so I use sources there to answer the question. The conclusion touches on how our relationship to God is different from our relationship to Torah. God, like Moshe, may not always be speaking or willing, but the Torah always is.…
There are virtually no references to grandparenting in the Torah, until, by sharp contrast, we are told in Genesis 50:23 that Joseph got not only to grandparent but great-grandparent as well. I reflect upon this startling exception using two articles from the New York Times, including a recent one that describes the recent increase of adult children in their 20's becoming roommates with their grandparents.…
Using the interpretations of the Rabbis (including Nachmanides and Sefer HaYashar) to understand Joseph's assimilation (in name, dress, etc.), I compare him to the American hero very recently in the news!
Yaakov's famous wrestling scene and renaming as Yisrael --one who wrestles with God and prevails-- is often understood as Yisrael wrestling with God as his opponent. The Rabbis point out how problematic this is, since the opponent is listed as a "man," not as God. Therefore some of the Rabbis see it this way: the wrestling opponent looks identical to Esav, being his guardian angel (Rashi) or his projection, and wrestling "with God" ( im elohim ) means wrestling with God as a supportive ally. Yaakov clearly is the Patriarch of Anxiety, and in this climax, we see a powerful message: one does not vanquish anxiety, but rather "one who prevails" is one who does what they love (say, acting, healing, teaching, parenting, etc.) while experiencing panic and anxiety at the same time. This is the powerful message which is both true according to science and according to Torah.…
Is it right to use arable land --often very expensive in populated areas -- for graves, then pollute the environment by keeping them "dignified" through maintenance and pesticides, with the hollow promise of "perpetual care," and say this is all required by Jewish Law, when Jewish Law itself is the source of the requirement for eco-decomposition and of prohibitions against costly burial? I explicate the sources using the Conservative Movement's oficial responsum, "Alternative Kevura Methods" by Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, which can be found at bit.ly/3tMa4RG…
In this ten minute teaching I used to begin the 10 Days of Awe, I connect several teachings. The first is the Rabbinic teaching that following a calamity upon a village, one should try to give the luxury rations to those who are used to luxury because being unaccostomed to hardship, their anguish might be even greater than others' though we are tempted to believe the opposite. The second is that during Yom Kippur, we approach ourselves and our relationships in a state of aninut, of affliction -- the same word used when one has suffered calamity, and the same word used when one is burying a loved one and then heading into the week of shivah grieving. The third is that it is forbidden to say, "How are you?" to someone who has just experienced aninut, and instead one must practice a special form of active listening. Following two years of calamitous pandemic, where many of us put on brave faces because we are scared to share our emotions due to our perceived privilege or we may not have suffered as much as others, we must acknowledge that our pain is nonetheless real, very real, and that the directives of actively telling our stories and actively listening are the imperative way forward.…
Is the Jewish concept of history that of linear progress, or that of Ecclesiastes' cyclical vanity? This teaching was delivered during a 12-Step friendly Serenity Shabbat.
The theology of the haftarot of the exile prophets like Deutero-Isaiah is hard for most people to relate to: "You are in exile, your life is full of tragedy, and I love you, I remember you as you were before, but I won't be getting you out of the situation you got yourself in, and which I warned you repeatedly about." This is the kind of "unloving" God that Christian theologians for millenia have accused Jews of having. Yet do those in Al-Anon understand it in a way they can teach us?…
For too long, Jews have associated the Recovery movement with Christianity, and we have seen those in recovery, or with addictions, as outsiders to Torah. This is far from reality. The main example of vows-of-change --the essence of High Holidays-- in the Torah itself is the vow to abstain from alcohol and other intoxicants, involving emulating priestly service and separating for a period from one's family and social triggers. The very process of High Holiday teshuvah is recognizing our wrong behavior, feeling bad about it, and then releasing that guilt feeling through doing a cheshbon nefesh --an accounting-- of exactly how we have harmed others and ourselves, then making amends, then embracing a different path, and then serving God and others. This is the teaching of 12 step. (Jewishly, the teshuvah steps are enumerated sometimes as 4, sometimes as 6, and sometimes as more steps, but they essentially mirror the 12 steps of recovery.) Whether the 12 Step Movement has roots in Christian founders is irrelevant: it embodies the sacred teachings of High Holidays. This sermon is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Twerski z"l, who died in 2021 from complications from COVID.…
My Yom Kippur sermon in 2022. Using Ethan Kross's book Chatter along with Jewish sources and my own observations about life, I challenge us to form our relationship to God through our relationship with our inner voice, which these days tends to be taken over by CHATTER, the stress brought on by the takeover of our inner God voice through the Satan voice. It's time we challenge it head on.…
I share Ilana Kurshan's teaching on rabbinic midrash seeing Moses as a mother in transition, as they question whether, at the promised land border, God's refusing his entry is frustrating his desire to mother the people more, or frustrating his desire to claim "his turn" to actually have a life now that the children are leaving the nest. I include my own glosses, but make no mistake that this is Ilana Kurshan's teaching.…
In this d'var Torah, I discuss how parashat Eikev is the section of Torah most frought with ambivalences, from the text itself through the Rabbinic commentaries: blessing as bounty and overextension, independence and dependence, hardship and privilege, closeness and distance. I relate this to our lives directly in the examples of the college experience and of our relationship with God.…
How do we relate to the Torah's insistence that the kohanim who do the major rituals be without blemish or disability? Isn't that grossly ableist? I suggest the following. First, the Torah is not an idealistic description of a utopia of saints -- it forces us to recognize truths about human nature, and then create a society for real people like us, so it forces us to recognize our own prejudices and ableism, which are also active today. Second, there is a serious issue at stake involving the Offerings of Damaged Goods, which is a massive problem in our society today --which tells us a lot about ourselves and how we give. And third, I use the commentator Bartenura's commentary to offer a way the tradition is accepting human nature but leading us to how to refine it into inclusivity.…
In this presentation, I present the Talmudic sources on Judaism's discussion of the status of the fetus, and I argue that what's been missing from the discussion --including the discussion of Jewish views -- is the fact that Judaism leaves open what the status of the fetus is between 40 days and full viability, but importantly assigns the process to the mother. Men have no say in it. In other words, the issue is not freedom of religion in the sense of one denomination versus another, but rather the freedom of the prospective mother to have her own relationship with God, as considers that in-between state of the fetus she carries, and what it means to her and to God as she makes her decision, and not let others tell her what it is or not. (One issue I wish I had made a bit clearer: around the 11 minute mark, I talk about the fact that Tractate Niddah specifies that between 40 and 80 days, the miscarriage is more than a normal period, and there is an ontological leap again starting at 80 days. The specifics here are that the woman at these two sections remains in a state of ritual impurity following the miscarriage, as she would for giving birth, because after 80 days there is even clear evidence of sexual organs. In other words, the Talmud is acknowledging that the embryo is developing into a fetus, and while a fetus is not a baby, it is still not a "nothing." In addition, many consider this stigmazing the woman to say she is in "ritual impurity," but recall the ritual impurity functioned as "maternity leave" and thus the Talmud is giving the woman maternity leave to recover from the miscarriage, it's not stigmatizing her.)…
One of my "standing on one foot while answering a humungous theological question" podcasts. "Rabbi, what do we mean by miracles? What is up with the Red Sea splitting?" I give my on-one-foot 5 minute answer, but we should all go and study (as Hillel famously said after answering his on-one-foot answer) afterward. By the way, I refer to seeing a red butterfly in the answer: at a funeral and shivah I officiated at, it came up repeatedly that a butterfly would show up in their lives just at the time of remembering the widow's husband, who had a very special connection to butterflies.…
1 Is the Wailing Wall an Orthodox Synagogue? The Kotel Agreement, Yuval Noah Harari and Anat Hoffman 21:29
At the same time as the Torah turns its pages to describe the creation and pattern of the Temple, with men, women, and children mixed together, and the haftarah describes the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem as the same, the Israeli government reneges on the Kotel Agreement to provide a separate space for mixed gender worship near the Wailing Wall, even while turning over the Wall officially to ultra extremist fundamentalist Jews who claim that the inclusion of women --or women leading prayer in the women's section-- is a fundamental affront to the original pattern (which is a lie). In this presentation, I quote extensively from three sources: the Haaretz article from 2020 called "What Yuval Noah Harari Thinks About Women’s Fight for Equal Rights at the Western Wall," David Golinkin's 2011 article "Is the Entire Kotel Plaza Really a Synagogue?" and Rabbinical Assembly's 2022 "Statement on Non-Implementation of Kotel Agreement."…
While Judaism demands that one does not judge oneself too harshly, nor live in a place of self-defeating criticism, nevertheless there's a vital role for self-judgment to play in our learning from the past to walk with God and expand our ability to channel holiness into the world. In fact, since God loves us as we are, and even provides a Shabbat that makes us feel that the world is made for us as we are, it is vital we judge ourselves, because that's not the job God wants, nor is it the job for others to do.…
The Talmud tells us that the first great act of God's love ( chesed , lovingkindness) was making clothing for Adam and his wife. Do we return the favor?
Joseph's dreams seem to predict the future and his role in it. So does God have a plan for us?
The source sheet I'm reading from is at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R0Txiy6QvQiHo40hKSsHyafLernFjS8tXp0tJo7gPWA/edit?usp=sharing This is a lecture to give the listener the Rabbinic sources that create distinctions and legal status for decisions around the criminalization of elective abortion, as discussed in the Supreme Court hearings.…
Here I tease out the following ideas of bell hooks: 1. Our society valuing power over others as the paramount value, and rooted in the psychology of men. 2. This value playing out in drama as "the protagonist" as the center around which others must revolve, and often the only one whose name counts. 3. Oppositional gaze: the one who owns their justice perspective is the one who has the power to gaze at injustice [like Moses having the privilege to "gaze" at the taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave]. 4. Intersectional identity: our society tries to have our identities of oppression divided up -- say, of black, immigrant, poor, and woman-- because that plays into the system rather than seeing them all at once, at the "intersectionality" of our identites. 5. Finding our voice as loving ourselves enough to feel that we are fully ready to put that full loved identify forward, rather than perpetuating the system by finding ourselves falling short. 6. When we love ourselves, we can love others --meaning holding their ability to change into their full self-love and changing selves-- rather than fall back into power contests. These are applied the first six chapters of Exodus as: 1) Pharoah's actions about power over men, so he declares genocide on male babies (since they are a threat to him); men beating each other and finding this normal, and even threatening Moses with turning him in to show their power over him since his superior power identity is what they see, not his trying to help them. 2) Who has a name besides Moses? Not Pharoah. Not the Pharoah's daughter. Not Moses' parents, nor his sister. Not the handmaidens. Chapter 3 is all about "What is God's name?" to teach us that rather than the protagonist structure (one is important not the others), we are all equal as characters in God's story, rather than ego driving our own story where others play their parts in relation to us. 3) Oppositional gaze: Moses first leaves the palace grounds as a bar-mitzvah age teen, and he GAZES at what is happening and sees injustice. He "looks this way and that" because, as the midrash tells us, he is wondering why others aren't gazing at the injustice as he is. 4) Intersectionality: Is Moses Hebrew or Egyptian? He's both, and splitting the two up allows others to deny his subjectivity and power. Are the midwives Hebrew or Egyptian? Is Pharaoh's daughter powerful (as nobility) or powerless (as a woman)? The parashah continually plays on these ambiguous and intersectional identities. 5) Finding one's voice: this is the parashah of Moshe claiming he is poor of speech so he cannot speak truth to power, and he overcomes it. 6) Are the signs, wonders, and plagues just another power contest --the value basis of patriarchal society-- or is God trying to give Pharaoh chances over and over again to change, the basis of love though one must leave the relationship if one is not being treated the same in exchange?…
Robert Bly, one of America's great poets and poetry translators, recently died. In this presentation, I apply Bly's books of social commentary to the end of Genesis. Iron John described the effects of fathers turning over parenting duties to others --like the wrong-headed "kids learn from interacting with other kids" rather than with parents. It also argued for the simultaneous absence of initiative rites in American society. In The Sibling Society , Bly argued that American society represents an adolescent stage of development, not true adulthood. I apply both books to the entire end of the Book of Genesis.…
These are my reflections upon Arnold Eisen's 2015 essay, "Joseph, Hanukkah, and the Dilemmas of Assimilation." Those who investigate the Hanukkah story quickly learn (simply by reading the Books of Maccabees in the apocrypha) that the events around the 186 BCE revolt of the Maccabees against the Hellenizing-Syrians do not involve a miracle of oil. Rather, following the decree by Antiochus IV that the Temple in Jerusalem be dedicated to Hellistic religion, the Maccabees first attack Hellenized Jews themselves, who show little to no resistance to the decree. (Josephus tells us, more or less, that the Greek sports stadium in Jerusalem was a far better draw to local Jews than the Temple.) The second part of the story involves the Maccabees attacking the Syrian-Greek forces themselves, and achieving victory. (Two hundred years later, living under the oppression of the Roman forces, and witnessing Roman massacres of Jews following rebellions, the Rabbis introduced the folktale of the oil to distract Jews from a story encouraging further rebellion against Hellenistic forces.) So, when we today read the original tale, it creates uncomfortable questions about assimilation. Aren't most American Jews going to sports games on Saturday rather than to temple? Aren't most American Jews unrecognizable from their peers, as Joseph was unrecognizable to his brothers? The simple narrative of assimilation states that American Jews were quick to assimilate for personal and social gain. In this presentation, I argue that this little-challenged narrative is oversimplified, wrong and damaging.…
[WARNING: The second half of the podcast discusses the rape of Dinah and I share an account of sexual harrassment from recent congressional testimony.] If the early chapters of Genesis are about where we come from, the second half of Genesis is about the experiences that change us, that make us who we are as adults, not through our own achievements but through what happens to us, from tragedy to transcendence, from rejection to love, from struggles with mental health, sexual harrasment, being cheated, to seeing God in a place. Little do we notice how in these chapters the experiences are incommunicable: the experience is the words of Torah --as in our lives they are experiences of the ineffable depths in which we are changed, in which we receive a new name-- but the figures don't speak of them to others, and certainly don't record their experiences in the self confessional blogs and interviews that dominate our media world today. And nowhere is this more poignant than the experience of sexual harrasment and rape, which I discuss using the reflections of Hadar's Rosh Yeshiva Aviva Richman.…
In this sermon -- playing on the Rabbinic commentary that the name of the Torah portion that mentions Sarah's death is called "The Life [or Lives] of Sarah" because we should celebrate the lives she lead rather than think of her death-- I discuss Dara Horn's new book People Love Dead Jews , which argues that the non-Jewish world loves books about Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel because the stories of these dead Jews teaches us something universal and moralistic about ourselves, rather than challenging us to think of what Jewish lives are like, how they are different, how they might challenge us. How is it that Wiesel's Night went from its original form, a scathing accusation against the Euopean bystanders who let the Holocaust happen to a book about God's hiding? Because God's hiding happens in each of our lives, like a universalistic lesson about life's tragedies, and allows us to avoid the deep questions of Jewish difference and anti-Semitism. In this teaching, I also ask whether we Jews are guilty of this: inviting in our own Romantic visions of our ancestors --which allows us to live a two dimensional moralizing vision of them-- rather than embracing their difference, and practicing our own.…
It hasn't been very long in human history (two or three generations) that we live our lives according to a clock rather than according to the processes of our lives (waking up, milking the cow, putting the hay in the barn, taking the goats for their grazing...). This has changed our relationship to God, to ourselves, and to each other. We judge ourselves by our productivity, how much we can get done using this resource of time, how much demand we can meet from others before our next appointments. We live outside of time, in a negative relationship, rather than in time, in a positive relationship. Using Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals , I reflect on how the pandemic first connected us to a positive relationship with time, vis a vis the Sabbatical Year, but then jerked us back to the negative relationship, as demands for productivity --now virtually impossible and harder than before-- were placed on our backs. How can we live in time, not through the standard of productivity, but through the invitation of presence?…
In this dvar Torah, I share Talmudic stories of rabbis trying to honor their mothers in ways that are both comical and also poignant in their alluding to our individual (and often lonely) struggles to honor God and them, especially as they age, with seemingly no yardstick to compare ourselves and manage expectations.…
The last sections of the book of Numbers deal with the local tribes, themselves fighting and displacing each other, refusing to grant the Israelite refugees safe passage through their lands. As a consequence of this moral failing, they lose the right to keep the land --an important message of Torah. In fact, coupled with their denials of safe passage, they hire the famous Near-Eastern Bilaam to magically curse the Israelites with fraught words justifying violence against them. It's like this entire section was relived in the years approaching 1948, when local Arab populations opposed Jewish refugees buying land and living peacefully in British Mandate Palestine, and instead attacked them. Ever since they resort to Bilaam curses, the use of factually incorrect curse words of "Genocide," "Apartheid," "Settler Colonialism," "Ethnic Cleansing," "Daily Massacres of Children," and "Not Indigenous" to scapegoat Jews and justify violence against them, not just in Israel but in intimidation and harrassment on the campuses in the U.S. In this Yom Kippur morning sermon, I name this reenactment of the end of Numbers and propose that Jews respond not with compaints about anti-Semitism, but with a campaign of history, along with a renewed consciousness that is not a victim consciousness but is a creator consciousness that is inclusive of Arabs, so we don't lose our moral authority in the Land.…
The creation stories of Genesis blend mythological motifs with reflections on the moral consequences of human evolution. When we understand the serpent voice to be the appearance of the human inner voice --the beginnings of evolutionary, human self-consciousness, a consequence of eating of the fruit of the garden-- then the hiding that Adam does, not because they have disobeyed God (as one presumes on a first read) but because for the first time they know they are naked, is crucial to notice. The possibilities of self-consciousness are immense --they include becoming like God by living in past, present, and future at once, they include radical intentionality and subjectivity-- but also include the dark side, a preoccupation with self-consciousness in its most mundane meaning, a preoccupation with wondering what people think of one, the feeling of being naked in front of others, the nightmare of showing up at school in one's underwear. What do people think of us? Do they like us? What about our physical appearance are they reacting to? How do they compare us to others, favorably or unfavorably? This is the serpent voice in our heads, of our inner "I," the one that nips at our heels and we try to clobber on the head but only goes away only temporarily but always returns. Research shows that this serpent voice is amplified to monstrous degrees by social media: Are my posts liked? Are others making fun of my appearance in the photo? Am I totally ignored? Am I left out? How can I cultivate a persona that garners "likes"? How can I grown that persona, maintain it, even as it detaches from any connection to my authentic self, so when God says, "Ayekah?" Where/who are you really? God knows the self I'm wearing is the product of the serpent voice, my cultivated and emotionally crushing phony self?…
Synagogues like mine have resorted to making virtual community over much of the pandemic. How do we do a heshbon nefesh of the experience: a reckoning of the pluses and minuses as we enter a new future of self-creation? What is the halakhah of it, what have we learned, what are the issues? In this Kol Nidrei sermon, I address these issues, as we consider who we wish to be as we enter the future.…
Our society is permeated with a victim mentality that presents itself as prophetic, but is punitive. Caught in the Victim Triangle, everyone must fit into a role of Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer --both in individual dramas and in societal theory. Change presents itself only in the options of shifting roles in the triangle: persecutors must become victims, victims will fix things by teaching them (and society) a lesson, someone gets stuck in rescuer role. Is teshuvah, repentance, about being forced to experience the karma of society's ills, or is that a blame game? In this sermon, I present an alternative framework, rooted in systems psychology and in Torah: teshuvah is an act of Creation, and when one transcends the triangle, one reaches true authenticity in one's walking with others, walking with oneself, and walking with God.…
How often do people say to me, "Rabbi, Rosh Hashanah is not about prayers, theology and sermons -- it's about getting together with family !" or "My grandfather was a model Jew because he was committed to his grandchildren " or "One does not know true awe until one has had children ." And how often have I as a rabbi said similar things at a bat mitzvah or baby naming from the bimah, or when explaining a prayer like the one that says "You shall love God...through diligently teaching your children..." How does this feel to the unmarried, the willingly child-free, and those whose lives are not geared around children or grandchilden? How do we treat them in our community: as souls committed to covenant (perhaps more than those with children), or as incomplete human beings watching from the outside? Why aren't we talking more about Miriam, who has no husband or children in the Torah? Or about the Mother of Israel, the historical creator of the Israelite nation, the prophetess and leader Deborah? It's time we stop and realize that L'Dor Vador, from generation to generation, does not refer just to one's own children, but to the future of the Jewish people, something the childless and child-free often understand in a way that we can learn from them as our teachers.…
In the parashah of "Shoftim" in Deuteronomy, we have the norms for shoftim v'shotrim, the judges and professional criminal justice system officials. We are commanded that tsedek tsedek tirdof , known as "justice, justice you shall pursue" though tsedek means "justice" in the sense of "righteousness," not in the sense of revenge. The parashah goes on to discuss capital crimes, an eye for an eye, and the death penalty. For many, they read it assuming that Judaism endorses the death penalty, with "eye for an eye" the "justice" principle underlying the norms. In this teaching, I show how "eye for an eye" and the death penalty have been understood in Judaism, how restorative justice is the underlying paradigm of Jewish law with the one exception being intentional murder. But in this special case of capital justice, the entire legal system is set on eliminating the death penalty so as not to risk killing even one innocent suspect. The famous Rabbinic dictum that "to save a life is to save an entire world" is used by the Rabbis in Mishnah Sanhedrin to argue for saving the life of the suspect in a capital case, for when we use the death penalty, and should we be wrong (common in America), we have done irretrievable harm to the fabric of the universe.…
After Moshe recounts the 10 Commandments --the 10 "word-statements"-- in Deuteronomy chapter 5, we get the Shema and the Ve-Ahavta, we must Hearken to "these words," incribe them in our hearts, and return God's love by loving through teaching these words. What are the words? Given the context of chapter 5, it would make sense these are the 10 Commandments, perhaps to be the text of the mezuzah and teaching the VeAhavta is exhorting. Of course, the Rabbis argue vociferously that this cannot be, and just gives unwarranted support to Karaites and others who deny the Torah by reducing it to the 10 Commandments. (The Rabbis have some justification for their argument.) So "these words which I command you this day" become the entire set of teachings of the written Torah and our own interpretations that all happen through the act of God's love and our Love for God, and therefore the Mezuzah includes this selection about Love. What does it mean to love Torah? Delivered on the day of Tu B'Av, the annual Jewish "Valentine's Day" that celebrates falling in love and romance, I share my experience of love and loving a Torah that goes beyond sentences.…
The oldest, continually used blessing in the world is the Torah's "Priestly Blessing." May God bless you [with bounty] and guard you. May God's face radiate grace (of getting your needs met) upon you. May God turn God's face to you [when you don't get what you need] so [you do not feel alone but meet God there and] God places peace within you. The Rabbis stress that the person blessing is merely a "window" to letting God in, but in this Dvar Torah I question whether this isn't exactly what we wish to avoid -- letting God in. We want to let us in! We spend our time building a world of domestic familiarity and home, and build our children up with their accomplishments. Transcendence runs absolutely against that: it puts you in the context of the Eternal drama, not your own: achievement, knowledge, and the cathedral of the self [we telling our hero stories] take a far second place in transcendence, where our ego is seen in its puniness, and we feel the calm of taking our place in the eternal dramas of humanity, nature, and experience. Transcendence teaches gratitude for participation in the human journey, calm, perspective, and the movement toward shalom (contentment) in one's lot, rather than protection. In this sermon, I ask how we lead our children to be prepared to encounter God, not us.…
How do we reopen the synagogue after over a year of being virtual? For some it's procedural: distance appropriately, follow guidelines, limit numbers, maybe wait on the food. But the Temple is not a gathering of bodies, it's a gathering of souls. How do we reopen appropriately to be a holy community, one that recognizes each other as souls? One of my favorite mishnayot speaks to this, and I was happy to be scooped by Professor Naomi Kalish in applying it to us today: https://www.jtsa.edu/struggling-to-celebrate There are four categories of people who went up the downstaircase at the Temple, and down the up staircase: the one in mourning, the one caring for a relative, the one who has been isolated, and the one who has lost a precious object. In this Dvar Torah on Emor, I apply these to our norms for a holy reopening. Helpful picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Huldah_Gates3344.JPG…
Leviticus ends with a long list of horrifying predictions (or curses) of the vicious suffering of the Israelites when they eventually enter the Land and break the covenant. Western Civilization has been shaped by European Christian intellectuals who created the unchallenged image (and therefore a Western bias) that the God of the Old Testament is a God who is disposed toward anger and punishment, who seems to enjoy punisment and retribution (and thus God had to be made flesh in the Son to introduce Love). In this podcast, I ask us to hear these verses as the words of the Mother, who, as in Wendell Berry's poem (which I read at the end) sees the Mother foreseeing one's sins, suffering in that foreknowledge with you, before you, with love and forgiveness already there symbolized by the made bed, the "you can always come home" that transcends the future into the past. Is the angry God we project, really the No-God of Jeremiah, the idol of our own making, which externalizes our own anger at climate change, social and racial inequality, rather than God the Mother who suffers along with us within the thorn bush of the Burning Bush but is not consumed?…
Is Leviticus's insistence that those with skin afflictions (as well as having buried the dead) not go to Temple an exclusionary punishment for being sick? Or is that our modern reading which presumes that religion is exclusionary and judgmental? In this presentation, I use Ross Douthat's essay "Can the Meritocracy Find God? The secularization of America probably won’t reverse unless the intelligentsia gets religion" as a way to talk about America's prejudices against religion, and my particular concern that even Jewish leaders like me are too silent in the face of the current hype that all the cool innovation (and funding) is happening outside of our legacy institutions [which actually is an unchallenged claim mainly by people who don't go to synagogue] and that our success as communities should be judged as to how easy we make it for unaffiliated Jews to get their needs met without having to attend the Temple as it exists in our day. Is that respectful of the Temple?…
As the percentage of Jews opting for cremation has risen from around 2% to over 20% in twenty years, how do we balance the mitzvah of burial of Jewish remains with the prohibition on cremation?
Inspired by the teachings of the great American ceramicist, Richard DeVore, I examine what the mishkan tells us about the nature of artistic composition, drawing a stark contrast between Golden Calves and Purposeful Composition, in Exodus, and especially in how we live our lives.
What were the Keruvim, the two hybrid beast angels 10 cubits high protecting the Ark of the Covenant, and from between whom God speaks? I rehearse all the theories, and end with a Maimonidean vision of what the angel as an extension of God's presence really is.
Given that some of the most influential narratives and Torah legislation are but a few verses long, why is so much of the book of Exodus chapters and chapters of detailed, repetitive descriptions of the instructions and building of the Tabernacle (Mishkan), the priestly uniforms, the utensils, the hundreds of curtain rods and hooks? I answer this question through my reflecting on the observations of Henry Louis Gates in his PBS Series (during Black History month) on the history of the Black Church in America.…
No statement by God seems more morally challenging than the prophet Samuel's demand for the complete annhilation of the Amalekites and their animals, followed by his condemnation of Saul for failing to kill King Agag and the choicest of the animals. The Amalekites are equated with the nature of evil itself, and so the resurgence of evil and especially genocidal anti-Semitism throughout the rest of time is somehow linked to the failure to "complete the job" of vanquishing them earlier on. In this very brief teaching, I try to learn a lesson we might otherwise resist from this troublesome piece of Tanakh: the tendency to fail to complete the job, often through unacknowledged selfish interest that hides beneath the seemingly noble action of "moving on."…
In this 5 minute teaching, I read a poem by Zbigniew Herbert and then share a seriously short spiritual practice that involves receiving the deepest of advice. In that, I connect the prayer Hashkiveinu to the Mourners Kaddish to my own experience of practicing it.
As America faces what to do and think about impeachment, I reflect on the dramatic difference between the book of Jonah and account of the final plagues in Exodus where God hardens Pharoah's heart. In the former, God is so anxious to accept an apology, move on, and look to the future that Jonah wants to refuse God's service, and in the other God prevents the moving on that Moshe is so anxious to get to.…
Parashah Bo repeatedly connects the memory of slavery to the establishment of Jewish rituals for all time, from the main features of the Passover seder to the First Fruit offerings in the Temple to ones we forget to associate with the memory of slavery like tefillin. (Later, even Shabbat will be firmly connected to the memory of slavery.) We in America have done the opposite by divorcing our institutions from the memory of slavery: case in point, the Filibuster which was not a patriotic institution of the founding fathers but rather an attempt to preserve slavery by Southern senators, and then to preserve Jim Crow laws. So should we destroy our American institutions because of these connections? Are we to be anarchists? No, the Torah tells us to connect the memory of slavery to taking action in this world to make God's dream for us come true. That's our imperative. Reconnect our institutions to their roots so we can be open to what it is God is dreaming for us, what God is dreaming for America.…
1 Geneivat Daat: The Theft of Subjectivity by Media and its Pull Upon Us in the name of Justice 16:36
I examine the sin of Geneivat Daat -- theft of another's consciousness through words that might be parse-able but lead another to think something is true which isn't-- as the prevalent sin in a world of fragmented media tailored to incite us, and I relate this to former Jewish Theological Seminar chancellor Arnold Eisen's insight that we readers cheer Moshe on in his riotous act in the name of justsice, only to wonder how we found ourselves in that dubious moral place.…
The saga of Yosef is about dreaming beginning to end, with the parashah of Miketz as itself operating according to dream logic. Are dreams special in the Torah, unlike ours, as some kind of prophecy? Or is much of Genesis calling our attention to the God world all around us, the one we only know through "knowledge by inacquaintance" (Abraham Joshua Heschel)? Is it telling us that our conventional "common denominator" way of processing and understanding the world is flawed, limited, one of not knowing God is in this place, that other souls are in this place? How do we get there? And how could we possibly when we deprive our teenagers, our children, ourselves of sufficient sleep to even align ourselves with the world our dreams teach us to enter in Torah consciousness?…
I relate Jacob's dream of the stairway to heaven and his dream of God-wrestling to the therapeutic uses of psilocybin to treat PTSD, depression, addiction, and end-of-life fear.
1 "It's Their Money!"- The Ketubah, Traditional Jewish Marriage, and the Defrauding of Rachel and Leah 19:14
The stories of Jacob being defrauded by Lavan are taken to be the plot of the famous period of Jacob working for Lavan for 20 years before fleeing in the middle of the night. In this teaching, I show that this is a misunderstanding. Jacob has worked for 20 years for Lavan without being paid, but only 6 of those years are for Jacob and his arrangements with Lavan! The first 7 years are to earn money that goes directly to Leah, and the next 7 years are for the money that goes to Rachel! The story is about THEIR being defrauded! Why does everyone miss this? The reason is that we misunderstand Jewish marriage: when we read a Ketubah, when we read the literal meanings of the Jewish ceremony, we presume this is an acquisition of the woman like she's property being transferred from father to husband. But that's a misreading: the dowry --which comes from the father or from the woman herself-- is added to the "bride price" (money paid by the man), and the sum of these are then given to the woman in a kind of "lockbox" that cannot be touched and belongs to her. When we understand this, the Biblical story, the nature of the ketubah, and the mutuality of the covenant of marriage (which is not a form of acquisition) are transformed into their proper perspective.…
Does our system -- oaths of office, public promises, judicial decisions-- depend on fear of punishment or a different kind of fear [a reverence for God]? Why do I not cheat on my taxes? Why do I make excuses for policies that benefit me, and even double down on them? The commentary on the lying of Isaac (and Avraham) written by Rabbi Yitzchak ben Moshe Arama, the "Aqedat Yitzchak," from late 1400's Spain, gives us a clue how to proceed forward in repairing out broken system.…
1 And Sarah was Stroking Avraham's Head: Rilke, Pandemic & The Intimacy of Caring for the Dead 16:06
Jewish law demands we bury our dead, yet human nature is to "protect the mourner in their grief" by distancing them from doing the act themselves. Jewish law follows suit by, over time, taking the demand to lovingly care for your dead and creating distance from that to "protect" the grieving. Rehearsing Rilke's opening from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rabban Gamliel's decrees on simple loving burial (despite our natural inclination to use "do whatever rich people do" as our definition of "honoring" our dead in burial customs), the reawakening to these truths during COVID's guidelines for not touching bodies, and the archaeology of burial caves and ossuaries, I synthesize a different approach.…
The Rabbis see Sarah's laugh (at the divine prophecy of a pregnancy) as thumbing her nose at God and at her husband, now that her "period" (or "sexual enjoyment" -- edna could be translated as either) has ended "in the way of women" at a certain age. I've always found the Rabbis overwrought in their interpretation of Sarah's laugh, but in this podcast I take it seriously. I use the article (I just discovered) of Sandra Tsing Loh from The Atlantic in October 2011 called: "The Bitch Is Back: Are menopausal women mad, bad, and dangerous? Yes—but they’re really just returning to normal." It's a review of Dr. Christiane Northrup's landmark book The Wisdom of Menopause. In that landmark book, the "thumb your nose at the expectations of your husband and of others" experiences of perimenopause are not looked at in their typical negative light, but rather as a "coming into your own" as a woman, knowing what matters for yourself, unwilling any longer to comply with the expectations of others. This is the way I see Sarah's laugh in this podcast: of course the Rabbis don't like it --spouses and kids don't like it either-- when a woman stops serving everyone but herself, but in a way it's a very serious liberation. And, interestingly, the Hagar story can be seen similarly. I explore the wisdom of menopause, of coming into your own, of being done with the office/home politics of all getting along and keeping in one's lanes, in Sarah's laugh.…
This is a full-on "sermon" (delivered on Rosh Hashanah, "the Birthday of the World," in 2020) in which I look frankly upon the Sarah and Hagar narratives -- mistress and slave/servant/mother-- through the lens of the issues of "privilege" we are processing today. Schleiermacher -- among the half dozen most influential theologians in Western thought-- correctly argued that a certain consciousness of the gift of life is the fundamental basis of all true religion, leading to humility, passion, grace, and a connection to God-- yet in the Genesis narratives it does not lead to all these great things, it instead leads to an unfeeling competition for resources, and deep division. Sound like America today? I take us through the intricacies of the narratives, of the interplay of power and powerlessness, of the nub of this country's divisions through one true story from my life, and to a potential spiritual resolutation through another true story from my life, ending with Hannah (the haftarah on Rosh Hashanah) breaking the pattern trapping us.…
Shemini Atzeret has the special distinction of being all of the following: 1) The only holiday that has no official traditional explanation. (Atzeret means some form of gathering, but we are left to speculate whether it's a special harvest ingathering, or a human gathering at the end of Sukkot, or a kind of makeup "extra day" of Sukkot for those who arrived late, but all these are speculative: no reason is given.) 2) It's still one of the four High Holidays (the others being Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot) and is a real holiday unto itself, and 3) It concluded the High Holiday period. One dwells in the sukkah but does not say a blessing for doing so. Shemini Atzeret is very special and odd. In this short podcast, I try to explain it as the confluence of different ways of experiencing time. Biblical scholars for decades have reflected on how the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) views time as circular while the Torah and Prophets view time as linear (leading to a Messianic horizon). In this podcast, I show how Sukkot is the ultimate "linear" experience of time, like traveling forward, and that Shemini Atzeret, with its signature chanting of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, is the ultimate experience of circular time, and eternal time. We go from living in the present moment to a very special eternal moment as the "finishing strong" of the entire High Holiday period. I use Louise Gluck's (whose name I mispronounce -- it should be pronounces as "glik") poem "The Denial of Death" to make my point.…
The pandemic has forced most of us into a "Shabbat," a ceasing, a forced limitation on our time and resources, and yet we are faced with demanding decisions that have no clear right and wrong, and lots of risk in all directions. How do we allow this year to give us the gift of getting 'comfortable with discomfort' (rather than the "discomfort with our comfort" that we usually have)? In my own life, I use Greg Mckeown book on practicing "Essentialism." I share how I do that, and how you can, too.…
Deuteronomy repeats that God tried to demonstrate how to walk with God when our clothes "did not wear out, nor your shoes" during the journey in the wilderness, as we learned that we "do not live on bread alone." During the pandemic, I've noticed that I wear three sets of clothes: Zoom clothes, non-Zoom clothes, and Shabbat clothes, and as we've slowed down our pace and we're not running around during this endurance stretch until a vaccine, we are --as Ibn Ezra interprets the "true" miracle-- realizing we walk with God in our slowing down, in our living the simple life, and we realize the craziness of an industry that has brainwashed us into a fashion industry of disposable clothes and environmental devastation. Can we go back to having just a few sets of clothes that you wear all the time?…
In the section of Deuteronomy customarily called "Shoftim" (which means both "Judges" and "Leaders"), we find the famous command that "Justice, Justice You Shall Pursue" but strangely without reference to the pursuit of social justice, community organizing, or even the personal awareness of victims. Instead it might mean that people in that position begin the process by focusing on the emoluments clause and their oath of office. What if our personal Torah, our personal scroll we carry around with us and occupy our minds with every day, was not the entire Torah but just our oath of office? What would this tell us about the Torah's message to healing ourselves and our society?…
The Rabbinic Commentators focus on the fact that Deuteronomy frequently and repeatedly uses the word ach, brother, to describe the needy person who isn't related to you. Whereas earlier in Torah, we are told not to oppress the "poor" or "afflicted" person, Deuteronomy modifies this language by insisting that we must loan to these people because they must be seen as our "brothers and sisters." I don't see any reading possible other than that the Torah is focusing on the problem of redlining, of consciously or unconsciously avoiding loaning money to people who look different from the family of the loan officer. In 2020, the Trump Administration has proposed changing the anti "redlining" guideliness in ways that bypass the Torah's concern, as I explain here.…
Recently Rabbi Andy Kahn and Comedian Seth Rogen broadcast loud statements that Jews have been lied to and that Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel. On the heels of these statements, the Jewish people in 2020 are going through the lengthy portion of Deuteronomy conveying both a demand of conquest and a moral framework. Can we learn from what the Torah is saying? Is the term "indigenous" just another progressive bludgeon that can mean whatever the twitterer wants it to mean? In this podcast, I explore a way forward.…
1 The Book of Numbers: The Dissolution of Community in the Breakdown of Face to Face Communication 15:17
The Book of Numbers is about the failure of "community" in the wilderness. After all the community building of the Exodus, of Mount Sinai, of familial and tribal ties, of building the Mishkan, of the inspiring blueprint for a new society in a land of milk and honey, of Moshe's leadership, of being in God's physical presence, of communal ritual feasting and celebration... none of it has worked, which, when you think about it, is absolutely amazing! In this dvar Torah, I give my answer as to why by looking at the common issue of the Miriam/Cushite incident, the 12 Spies catastrophe, and the Korach rebellion. The word "religion" is based on the word "religio" -- bonds. What is the bond that holds people together in community? It's not belief, it's a certain kind of emunah, a kind of faith that normally is translated as "trust." Trust is built through face to face communication, not shared experiences or shared beliefs. The lack of it is breaking apart society today, and we may not be able to turn back the clock. It's what's missing in the kind of "friendship" a new generation is experiencing. The Industrial Age is passing to the "No Face to Face Communication Age."…
1 Faith in God is Faith in One's Own Ability to Bring About God's Purposes: Psalm 23, The Spies, Langston Hughes, and the Positivity Bias 15:30
Psalm 23 is usually read as about a dead person getting to go through the valley of death and then live in God's house, but I read it, like the Mourner's Kaddish, as about a living person who goes through the experience of having a loved one die and transforms one's life from being in the depths to rising up to a life of living in this life in God's house, at the table in front of one's foes. I demonstrate this with two poems by Langston Hughes on how he, and all of us, will be part of a movement to change America so he sits at the table in God's house in front of those who would not let him sit there before. It's the positivity bias of Caleb and Joshua, of seeing a future that one makes happen. The key to it all is that faith in God, and faith in oneself in bringing about God's purposes, are practically indistinguishable according to Torah. You bring about living in God's house. We all need to do that with America.…
1 "Moses Married a Cushite Woman!" The Courage to Be Punished for Speaking Up for Black Lives Matter 17:07
The first verse of Numbers chapter 12 famously has Miriam "speaking against Moses on account of the Cushite woman he married." Though I most often hear people say that this means that Miriam was a racist who is complaining that Moses married a foreign black woman (either Tsipporah or a second wife), that is NOT the traditional understanding of the Rabbis. it's the opposite: Miriam is standing up on behalf of her black sister-in-law. Still, the commentaries are frustrating. I rehearse Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Rashbam, and the Bekhor Shor medieval interpretations as they could be read as full of enlightenment for us now, or as cringe-worthy -- just as Miriam's statement in the first place. And it's in that fact that we derive our lesson.…
1 My Response to the White House That We Should Reopen: "We Count Souls. What Are You Counting?" 10:54
On Erev Shabbat, May 22, 2020, the press was filled with the White House's call for people to go to church and synagogue right away, this Shabbat, the Shabbat when we Jews begin the book of Numbers, the parashah of counting. In this ten minute sermon, I reply to the president's call, using the wisdom of our Torah and our Sages as we consider what that would truly look like, and how we count in this time.…
1 Are Our Front Line "Heroes" Actually the New Servant Class? Leviticus Demands Redemption not Servitude 12:15
In his essay in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer proposes that our self-understanding of the social contract is revealed by the decision-making process about the pandemic, as he writes that “the pandemic has exposed the bitter terms of our racial contract, which deems certain lives of greater value than others.” I compare his views to that of the end of Leviticus and of The Book of Ruth, which both demand that shared resources are understood to come from God, and that we overcome our picture of earned inequality and instead the privileged share their blessings freely, not with strings attached that preserve serfdom and servitude. Honestly, hasn't the pandemic revealed that those in power view the economically deprived as needing to serve those able to telecommute? Aren't the terms of our social contract that their "liberty to work" and "be heroes" really is a self-serving rhetoric because we want them to serve us by putting their lives at risk? Leviticus would have us pay the nanny not to work, because she is an extension of family, rather than pay her a "bonus" to put herself at risk due to her "right" to work (which is really her need to feed her family). It's time to end the self-serving rhetoric that the poor should have the "freedom to work" and "they are our heroes" when what we should be doing is redeeming them by sharing our blessings with them and treating them as kinsmen.…
In this lecture from my series on "The 8 Most Misunderstood Things in the Bible," I tackle Leviticus's preoccupation with "uncleanness" and "impurity" that seems to stigmatize and isolate women, the sick, and others. It's one of those things that make people pick up a Hebrew Bible and say, "This stuff is barbaric and misogynistic." I argue that this is likely the parade example of misunderstanding Torah, based on misleading translation and the human being's inherent penchant for presuming metaphysics (invisible mechanisms that operate like they're physical but we just can't see, hear, or touch them?). Using the philosophical therapy of philosophical Pragmatism (found in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty), I present "tamei" not as "uncleanness" but rather as "time-out," a state in which one is required to take grief leave, maternity leave, medical leave, and, for one week a month, sexual leave. We can learn a lot from the Torah's insistence that these can only be norms that do not stigmatize individuals if they are required and not optional, and I apply that to our modern issues with people being presumed to return to work during grief, sickness, and maternity, and are stigmatized when they do not. At the end, I address two questions, one being that I am not dealing sufficiently with the bad-patriarchal bent of the Torah. You'll hear my answer at the end.…
In this lecture, I present one of my "Most Misunderstood Concepts in the Torah"... Revelation. What does it mean that God speaks to Moses? What is the revelation of Torah? I present the philosophical frame for this debate, beginning with Descartes and Kant and then the devastating critique of them by Nietzsche, and later Wittgenstein and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. How do we avoid the betwitchment of our language in such crucial areas as " I think means that I cause my thoughts" or "If I experience God , then God is an object of my experience?" How can we become closer to Torah through breaking out of our silly thinking and coming to a more subtle, meaningful, and common sensical identification with revelation? The quotes used may be viewed by clicking here.…
1 Aaron Coming Close To God by Suppressing His Grief? Our Hope During Pandemic Lies in Those Who Are Working So Hard At the Cost of Postponing their Emotions 15:52
When Aaron's sons Nadav and Avihu suddenly die by fire while offering the first sacrifices, we have an odd series of verses that seem to suggest --on the surface-- that God has glorified Godself by killing them and now God demands that Aaron show no grief for his own sons also for the greater glory of God. What? Do the verses really say this? A closer look (helped by the commentator Sforno), shows us what's really going on: there are times when we glorify God by choosing to do our jobs (when lives are at stake) over allowing ourselves to feel our feelings of grief, of anxiety, or fear. What seems so unfeeling of God, so self-glorifying and cruel, comes alive to us now: we are only told to postpone our fears, our emotions, our worry, our wailing, our mourning, when we find ourselves (even unbidden) in the chain of operations meant to save lives. God even bestows a personal word of loving care to Aaron: don't turn to the bottle, another message so important at this time.…
1 The Moral Dimension of Money Revealed: Seeing Ourselves as Experiencing the Exodus during Coronavirus 16:21
In this teaching immediately following the Seder(s), I follow through the commandment to see ourselves as if we experience(d) the Exodus story at this profound time. I explore how the food of Passover is restoring our humility, our connection to our humble (poor) roots, how the moral dimensions of money are now exposed to create, when we are at our most honest, a compassionate human interaction over returning or paying funds --just as God brings grace (at the exact moment of the 10th plague) to the interaction of money between Israelite and neighbor, and finally the fact that the text never says the plague only affects the guilty and Israelites are spared. Our overlapping Zoom shivah services belie that, and now we experience that the text never says that: we bring the bones of our dead with us until the future.…
We are experiencing synchronicities with the Torah: the locust plague, the sheltering in place of the 9th and 10th plagues, the 10th plague which is simply plague itself, the Torah telling the Nasi (president) to make expiation for his sin, now the Seder -- blood on the doorposts of the 10th plague so similar to the red cross painted on the doors of homes quarantined during centuries of European plague-- with mathematical models predicting infection and death during the Pesach holiday as the Seder commemorates sheltering in place. Are these signs? What is apocalypticism? Is it the dubious book of revelations, wars of Gog and Magog, the end of times, some infantile Nostradamus notion of Bible prophecy,? Or could it be something different, hinted at in the final Pesach-preparation (Shabbat Hagadol) haftarah of Malachi (predicting ruin if we aren't caring for those at or below the poverty line) and suggested by the Torah curses themselves: signs that the human societal structure we consider totally normal is off and therefore can crumble at a plague (which shows the weakness of our man-made social system)? Is what is happening "revealing" ("apocalypse") how broken and arrogant the system we take for granted truly is, and how it's the poor who end up suffering the most?…
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مشابه Judaism for the Thinking Person
Follow the audio shiurim, lectures and speeches of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, global religious leader, philosopher, author of over 30 books and moral voice for our time. Rabbi Sacks served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth between September 1991 and September 2013. A full biography - together with an extensive online archive of Rabbi Sacks' work - is available at www.rabbisacks.org or you can follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @rabbisacks.
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Satguru Mata Sudiksha Ji Maharaj Discourses Podcast Channel
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Victory BGC is a church in Bonifacio Global City that exists to honor God and make disciples. It is a member of Victory Philippines and under Every Nation Churches and Ministries.
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Thought share about the application of Islamic belief and ethics in our modern pluralistic society. The “How”, for those who understand “Why”. And the “Why” for those who need to understand the reason.
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Love God, love people, and change the world. We believe the life and lessons of Jesus aren’t just good advice, but are Good News for us here and now. As a church, we are all about following Jesus and know there’s no end to that journey—we’re more about becoming than arriving. We are committed to becoming a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multiplying movement of Christ followers, equipping and empowering our kids and students to not only be the church of tomorrow, but the church of today.
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The Upaya Dharma Podcast features Wednesday evening Dharma Talks and recordings from Upaya’s diverse array of programs. Our podcasts exemplify Upaya’s focus on socially engaged Buddhism, including prison work, end-of-life care, serving the homeless, training in socially engaged practices, peace & nonviolence, compassionate care training, and delivering healthcare in the Himalayas.
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Welcome to the Your Move with Andy Stanley podcast, where we help you make better decisions and live with fewer regrets. Your Move provides practical content on life topics like personal development, relationships, work, leadership, faith, and more. It’s simple. We provide the content and recommend next steps; then it's Your Move! Visit www.yourmove.is for more content to watch, listen to, and read along with resources.
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CBCP is a disciple-making church based in Manila, Philippines. Learn more at https://cbcp.org
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Thank you for joining us for another great podcast today! Here you'll find many encouraging and challenging messages to help you build a life of significance! Keep coming back to listen to all the latest messages from Hillsong Church Africa. We would love for you to rate our podcast, subscribe, perhaps write a review and share the channel with all your friends to help us build a Church that Builds a nation and a continent.
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The Krishna Das Pilgrim Heart Hour features Krishna Das’ no-nonsense take on everyday struggles for finding balance on the spiritual path. Through the honesty, humility and humor of his own personal experiences, he points to the possibility of navigating life’s trials with a true inner yearning for truth. His own practice of kirtan or chant is the well stone of his ability to share from his spiritual heart. As KD says, “Love is a disease - we catch it from those who have it.”
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