Yom Kippur 5779/2018: Sacred Fear – RBW
Today I’m going to talk to you about fear. (How’s that for taking the bull by the horns) In August, as part of my “let’s all stay for musaf” campaign,…
Kol Nidre 5779/2018: Zagreb and the Belly of the Whale – RBW
Tomorrow afternoon, according to custom, we’ll read my favorite volume of the Bible: the book of Jonah. Jonah is unique among the prophets. He’s the one who doesn’t say “here…
Rosh Hashanah Day Two 5779/2018 (5775 redux): Out into the Field or The Voice of the Angel – RBW
Vayehi ahar had’varim ha’eleh… (Genesis 22:1) And it was after these things that Efraim woke up from his nap one Sunday afternoon. I heard his voice through the monitor on the…
Rosh Hashanah Day One 5779/2018: The Horn of Abraham – RBW
One morning at breakfast, when we were all visiting together at my mother’s house this summer, my nephew Nathan, who will became bar mitzvah next year, told us about the…
D’var Torah 2/10/18: Parashat Mishpatim – Rabbi Devorah Jacobson
(With thanks to Margaret Mastrangelo, Rabbi Ben Weiner, and Zvi Rozen) Like some of you here today, I spent many years of my childhood going to Hebrew school. I know…
D’var Torah 1/13/18: Jewish Foster Care – Dane Kuttler
For several years in my early twenties, I worked at a residential group home. The children who lived there – some for years at a time – were between the…
Yom Kippur Morning 5778/2017: The Wandering Goat – RBW
About a hundred years ago today, on September 30th, 1919, a large group of black sharecroppers had gathered in a church in Hoop Spur, three miles north of Elaine, Arkansas,…
Kol Nidre 5778/2017: To Vow or Not to Vow – RBW
One of the primary techniques within the Jewish art of words, when seeking to establish the precise interpretation of a Hebrew term, is to examine the different ways it is…
Rosh Hashanah Day Two 5778/2017: The Missing Pieces – RBW
There are a few things missing from the Torah portion we read today, the Akedah, the story of the binding and near sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham, but…
Rosh Hashanah Day One 5778/2017: Moses and Polytheism – RBW
My son, Efraim, seldom strikes me as more Jewish than when he says the following words: “I don’t want to go to Hebrew School.” This past Sunday, I took him…