Judaism for the Thinking Person

In this long section of the Torah, where Miriam and Aaron are disciplined by God for challenging Moses, where Moses tries yet again to resign his leadership, where the 70 Elders to help Moshe go ahead and prophesy, but strangely nothing seems to come from it, I am struck by how much the parashah speaks to our time, where the strangest of leaders are getting elected. We learn from Torah that leadership is not just about being prophetic or charismatic or elected, leadership is relational.

Rabbi Irwin Kula reminds us that when we engage deeply with Torah, it can serve "as our mirror" which illuminates our inner complexities, strivings, horizon of significance, so we can better understand ourselves, others, and the world. In this presentation, I note how the Biblical story of Pinchas (who gets his own name on a parashah!) is a little different than most Biblical narratives in that most generate debates that quote textual evidence, but Pinchas usually just has the binary of "you either read it one way or the other." In that, it is our mirror in a more immediate way than usual. I compare the Rabbinic view and legend of Pinchas as the Biblical "Superman" with the recent James Gunn movie, quoting from, among other places, the excellent essay by Will Rahn.

We have grown accustomed to seeing Ethics and Holiness as virtually the same thing. I show that in order to properly understand Heschel's interlocking concepts of Blessing (berakhah), Faith (emunah), Awe (yirah), and Commandedness (Mitzvah), one needs to grasp that Ethics and Holiness are VERY different. This podcast has been edited to remove the Q&A, which sometimes found the material uncomfortable to their sensibilities.

The vast majority of work on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is academic:  summaries, clarification, footnotes and so on. In this series of classes, I'm here to show you how to live Heschel's religious philosophy, not understand it. In this first lecture, I show how one begins this process by first gathering three philosophies: 1) Schleiermacher, 2) Pragmatism, and 3) Phenomenology. With these basics, one is ready to identify what connecting to God looks like, whether you've ever done it yourself, and how it creates and informs Judaism.

There are two New Years on the Jewish calendar (in addition to the new years for trees and for flocks): Rosh Hashanah and First of Nissan (announced on Shabbat HaChodesh). The deep spiritual connection between the two is emphasized by reading the haftarah from Ezekiel, who sees the journey from the 1st of Nissan to Pesach as an equal mirror of the journey from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, and for whom Pesach is the real Yom Kippur. There is a deep and very practical message here: most of our Rosh Hashanah new years' resolutions may fall apart following Sukkot, but the best time to really enact those resolutions in a sustainable way is to use Pesach as the renewal of putting those resolutions into practice. Especially with the change and limitation on diet, the open discussion of what it means to serve God and your own soul during the Seder, THIS is the time to restart doing those resolutions. We're only halfway through the year: you've got six months of leaning into the homestretch, pulled by the gravity of the upcoming holidays. What are your new years' resolutions? How can you implement them during Pesach?

We often fail to appreciate the virtues of the Shepherd period of Judaism, which preceded the Israelite period. In this dvar Torah, I focus on the virtues of sustainability and repairability of the portable sanctuary (Mishkan) over the permanent version (Temple), and I apply it to legislation before state congresses today.

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?

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.