Good Tents Help You Really See

Commentary on Parshat Balak For the past 10 years, I’ve been leading my synagogue’s children’s school team, yearly, in a 5k walk that likely none of you have ever heard of. The Save Our Homes Walk Somerville is indeed a very small local effort. Its purpose is to raise cash for keeping people on the verge of...
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Spreading a Sukkah of Peace Over a Person in Sanctuary

My community in Boston, Nehar Shalom Community Synagogue, is part of a sanctuary cluster of six houses of worship—three Christian, three Jewish—supporting a man lacking immigration status who is currently a guest in one of the churches. I had the privilege to speak at a Sanctuary press conference during the deeply reflective days of turning...
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A Flood of Unsafe Water

On August 31st, 2005, I sat waiting for a connection in Brussels, coming back from a summer studying in Israel. I was about to begin rabbinical school in just a few weeks. TVs streamed footage of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina; it was the first I knew of it, having been cut off from most...
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Real Leadership

Rabbi David Ackerman on Pinchas' two distinct visions of leadership, and two sharply divergent paradigms of proper behavior on the part of a leader.
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The Weeping Mother Speaks: On Tisha B’Av, Remembering the Pain of Separation

Tisha B’Av reminds us: You know what this awful pain feels like. First, every year, we are supposed to practice feeling the excruciating dissonance between the way things are and the way they should be. We have to feel the deep outrage and pain of the crying mother. But we must also be Rachel, weeping not only for her children, but naming the more compassionate way of being that we know, that we remember is possible.
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