Rabbi Jill Jacobs headshot

Taking Time: A Resource for Shabbat by Rabbi Jill Jacobs

God, according to the Torah, created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh. This doesn’t mean that the world was perfect at the end of the sixth day of creation. Rather, God models the necessity of taking just one day to experience the world as it is, while acknowledging our own limitations in perfecting it.
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Rabbi Adir Yolkut

Yitro: The Jewish Case for Protecting Voting Rights in 2024

As inheritors of a multi-vocal Jewish tradition that welcomes dissent and minority opinions, allowing people the chance to freely, legally, and openly participate in the democratic process strikes me as very Jewish. So to look at some of these harsh policies that stifle the voices of the downtrodden contradicts so much of what we hold dear in Judaism.
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Headshot of Rabbi Andrea Goldstein

Ki Tisa: Democracies and Holiness Require Open Space

Only from an open and spacious heart can I experience a connection to what is holy. When I am focused on what I want and need, or when I am filled up with my own sense of righteousness, then what I have created within is actually a Golden Calf instead of my own small sanctuary.
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The Heel, the Heart and the Binary

What does Moses’ closing address to the Children of Israel have to do with gender? It’s no secret that Torah is gender specific. The Hebrew language assumes a gender binary. Rabbinic Judaism accorded the greatest amount of esteem and religious status to those whom we often refer to today as cis-gendered men – individuals who...
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Leadership Lessons at the Foot of the Mountain

In today’s world, rabbis face the challenge of balancing multiple roles in their communal leadership; a rabbi seeks to “comfort the afflicted,” by being a strong pastoral presence to those in need, while at the same time to “afflict the comfortable,” challenge those who are complacent in their lives to awaken to their broader responsibilities...
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Holding Onto the Image in Every Human Being, Even One’s Adversary

In the militia headquarters in Odessa decades ago, I was surrounded by harsh interrogators who castigated my friend and me for visiting Russian Jews, who were aliens in their eyes. I felt anger and even hatred at these leaders and their many followers who had made Jewish life impossible for a large segment of our...
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Protesting Leshem Shamayim

The old Yiddish proverb laments, “It is not easy to be a Jew.” Moshe might add, “How much the more so to be a Jewish leader.” Parashat Korach appears in what Everett Fox refers to as “the rebellion narratives” in the Book of Bamidbar. Was Moshe Rabbenu blessed with the congregation from hell? After their...
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How can a grasshopper change the world?

In the struggle for human rights, it is hard not to feel like a tiny grasshopper scratching at the massive walls of injustice we face all around us. There are so many people who are suffering, so many systems that are deeply broken; there is so much work to do. In parshat Shlach Lecha, God...
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Parashat Bamidbar: The Imperative to Provide Refuge

My father’s family were refugees from Vienna, who fled just before World War II broke out, but not before my grandfather had been deported to Dachau. He remained incarcerated there from November 13, 1938, until January 19, 1939. He knew he had to leave Austria with his family. But leaving wasn’t easy. First, it meant...
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