Holy Disruption

You could imagine the look on people’s faces when a group of rabbis, donned in kippot and talitot, walked into their Publix Supermarket in Florida this past December. On a delegation to support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in their fight for dignity and human rights for Florida tomato farmers, we went to the...
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Interest Free

It was not what one might call a typical Jewish family. She was a single mother with three children. One was a teenager and two were under five years old. Each child had a different father and the woman was living on SSI. The teenager had gone through our religious school and was now attending...
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Opening the Narrow Straits with Advance Care Planning

We have come to the end of Genesis, and with it the conclusion of the stories of our matriarchs and patriarchs. For the last several weeks we have been engaged with the stories of the children of Jacob, focusing mainly on his favored son, Joseph. Now Joseph is on his deathbed. We are privy to...
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Hearts and Mines

There is a delightful tale from Afghanistan of a Jew who went out into the world in order to fulfill the commandment, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” The man was certain that somewhere justice must exist, so he spent his life searching for it. He visited faraway villages, great cities, fields and farms, but still...
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On Power, Hope, and Change

A Sermon for Rosh Hashanah, 5772 Rabbi Barbara Penzner   I’d like to start by talking about the movies. Who here has seen “Moneyball”? Who is planning to see it? Good, that means that you may have some idea about the movie. It’s the story of Billy Beane, general manager of the 2002 Oakland Athletics....
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Slavery, Then and Now

In this moving sermon, Rabbi Gordon Tucker discusses the problem of modern slavery and describes his experience visiting sites from the African slave trade. SLAVERY THEN AND NOW Rabbi Gordon Tucker   The Torah, in Leviticus 25:55, has God saying “The children of Israel are My servants”, and the rabbinic tradition afterwards added the following...
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Fighting For Fair Food At the Trader Joe’s Headquarters

Note from T'ruah: Thanks to the pressure from CIW, T'ruah, and tens of thousands of allies, Trader Joe's joined the Fair Food Program in February, 2012. We include this d'var torah on our website as a reminder of how taking action on a campaign for justice can bring about lasting change.
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A Prayer for Ferguson

Help us to lie down, Dear Lord our God, in peace, and let us rise again, to life… This summer, I heard that a young black man had been killed by a police officer. The sad thing is that I tuned the story out. I was too caught up in whatever I was doing to...
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Rosh Pinna: Keystone of Justice

I am standing by a pristine mountain stream at 10,000 ft. in the Wind River Range in Wyoming and sobbing. My hiking partner Ed, whose family has been here for hundreds of years, has just said to me that the land belongs to me as much as it does to him. That was nearly 40...
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Finding Refuge in Makom

A few weeks ago, Hurricane Sandy blasted through the Caribbean, the United States and Canada. In her wake, more than 100 people have died along with untold damage to public infrastructure and personal property. For days the images poured in of families evacuating their homes in search of higher altitudes, of empty streets overflowing with...
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