This weekend is Shabbat HaGadol, the final Shabbat before Pesach. In the midst of a frenzy of last-minute house cleaning, we gather this week to read the closing words of the prophet Malachi.
Read More
God does a lot of speaking in the Torah, both in visions and dreams and in an audible voice. He speaks so often that we might miss some revealing distinctions in how he speaks. And these distinctions have a lesson for us, as we seek to hear God amidst the noisy and chaotic days we’re living in.
Read More
God is a specific God. He loves details. He shares these details with his servants. His children hear his voice and they obey. This week’s parashah deals with many details of the building of the mishkan (tabernacle). It reminds me of building Legos as a kid.
Read More
The story of the Golden Calf is really the story of each of us. It is no accident that Aaron fashions the idol and Israel falls to it at the very moment God gives Israel the tablets of the covenant. In this respect it is the perfect fall.
Read More
This year, as I read Esther, I find myself asking the text what it has to say to us today. While it may be ancient, the problems it deals with are tragically current. What can Esther teach us about Jewish survival? How does its text point us toward the future?
Read More
This is a characteristic of the Almighty. Present everywhere, he yet deigns to make his Presence known in our time and space. Whereas we cannot reach, and certainly cannot comprehend, his exalted mind, his infinite space, his timeless space, he has chosen to enter ours.
Read More
We need hope today more than ever. But in what do we hope? Some think of our hope as going to “heaven" when we die. But this is not the biblical hope. The biblical hope, in short, is the future establishment of God’s Dwelling Place, God’s “tent,” on earth, on his holy mountain in Jerusalem.
Read More
Then that night, something crazy happened. The campsite was on a hill. My fellow campers and I had placed our tent on that hill, and we figured it was okay not to put our tent stakes in the ground because we were going to be inside it.
Read More
Healing is a deep and universal human need, and praying for the sick and afflicted has always been part of my ministry as a rabbi and teacher—never more so than in recent years, with the Covid pandemic and a good number of friends and colleagues beginning to decline in health and vitality.
Read More
On May 14, 1948, before signing Israel’s Declaration of Independence, David Ben Gurion looked back over 2000 years of our history and declared how the Jewish people had returned in a second exodus, “undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers.”
Read More