Sermons

I want to tell you a story of two temples in two cities: one ancient Jerusalem, one right here in South Burlington.

The Talmud asks: Why was the Temple in Jerusalem destroyed by the Romans and the nation exiled? The Talmud answers because of fighting between us and because of too much self-righteousness…

TZEDAKAH AND JUSTICE

In a few minutes, we will recite the Yom Kippur Amidah. This Amidah, more than anything else in our tradition has been the focus of great attention, intention, musical and poetic effort. For many of us, it reaches its climax in the Unetaneh Tokef Prayer. Written in the midst of the Crusades in which Jewish villages were massacred, the words ‘who by fire and who by sword, were very real to them, as was ‘who by pestilence’. And now it is to us…

THE TESHUVAH OF BEAUTY

Tim and I, as many of you know, love opera. To be sure, we are low-key provincial opera queens, but it is one of our great loves. Yes, the stories are melodramatic, and somehow the woman always seems to die at the end, but as we know, life too often ends unfairly, unjustly, and goodness is often not rewarded…

Genesis 1 tells that God created us, all of us, all genders, all types in God’s image. And that is actually kind of trippy since we are also taught that God has no image. So what might it mean? With consciousness, with free will, with curiosity, with the ability to choose right from wrong. With the flame of God not on a mountaintop somewhere, but within each of us.

Tonight, on this eve of our New Year, I’m not going to deliver a formal sermon in robes. Without any of you here listening, in this year of pandemic, it just doesn’t seem fitting, and anyway, that sort of formality just doesn’t work very well on ZOOM. Instead of making us feel the grandeur and gravity of the day, formal robes on a bimah on a screen in a room where you aren’t with me only highlights the distance and separation, and I want to feel as connected as is possible through this medium…

My parents were the type of parents who when they would get really made at us as adults, they would cut us out of the will. It was usually about who we were marrying, or some perceived insult that we weren’t even aware of. At different times, all three of us were out of the […]

SHAKE OFF YOUR DUST – WAKE UP! When we talk about Lecha Dodi, the center of the Friday Night Kabbalat Shabbat, we usually talk about love, about greeting the bride, and about the peace of Shabbat when our divided selves come together. That is all true, but there is another aspect to the poetry of […]

QUARANTINE, SOCIAL DISTANCING AND THE ETHICS OF CONTAGION IN THE TORAH

This week’s Torah portion, Tazria-Metzorah is all about contagion, epidemics, social distancing, and quarantine. It is focused on what to do about a mysterious outbreak of an illness called “Tzara’a’t.” It is often translated as “leprousy” but is not what we today call leprosy or Hansen’s Disease. It starts on the skin, but can also infect the walls of a house, and even old stones. The portion is focused on how to prevent the disease from spreading. It is eerily familiar to us now…

This time we are living in has come to be called “The Great Pause.” It reminds me of times I’ve been at yoga or meditation retreats and was asked to pay attention to the space between inhaling and exhaling, the rest, the time between what was and what will be.

It is not like America to pause, or the global economy to pause, and we’ve already noticed some interesting things.

First of all, we’ve found out that we can actually stop. That is profound in itself.

We’ve seen the canals in Venice turn clear, and the skies over China clear. The “Great Pause,” as writer Julio Vincent Gambuto calls it, is producing the following: “A carless Los Angeles has clear blue skies as pollution has simply stopped. In a quiet New York, you can hear the birds chirp in the middle of Madison Avenue. Coyotes have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge. These are the postcard images of what the world might be like if we could find a way to have a less deadly daily effect on the planet.”

On Sinai, Moses and God are having another serious meeting; let’s think of it as a Zoom meeting on Sinai between two beings who can’t really be in the same space safely. They are discussing important business matters, like who is going to lead us out of the wilderness. Moses says, ‘you have to do it,’ but God is hedging, so Moses convinces God to say, “OK, enough with this, I’ll go in front.”