Devarim (Words)

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,…

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…

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…

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…

(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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…