Sermons

This week’s Torah portion, Toledot, tells us about the conception and early lives of Jacob and Esau. It also tells us a great deal about Isaac and Rebecca’s relationship with each other and with their sons. It begins like this…

Tonight, I would love to do a beautifully crafted sermon, in which all the threads and ideas weave into a single message that inspires. Sadly, this has been a broken week, when we are feeling broken, and my sermon is also broken. So I want to offer some thoughts on Pittsburgh, on anti-Semitism, on resistance, and on resilience.

This week’s Torah Portion is Chayei Sara, the life of Sarah, but the portion actually begins not with Sarah’s life, but with her death…

Leave everything you know and go, but you’re not going to know where you are going until later. Ever felt like this?
Somehow this very ancient text managed in very few words to express the human condition of human beings in the modern world. We are every day, it seems, leaving what we knew, what…

While the concept that human activities and industry can cause climate change and global warming seems shockingly new to so many people, Judaism has held a belief that our actions impact our environment since the very beginning. 

The second paragraph of the Shema, a key part of a traditional service and…

Few people have been as maligned as the Bible’s Eve. She has been blamed for every vice known to…